Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel Problems

stratechery.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 431 posts

Re: Intel Problems

#261

Post by mountainb »

TheOperator wrote: post #241
mountainb wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US decided that it didn't like all the political disorder that came with managing a large proletariat. Instead, it decided to outsource the management of that proletariat to Asia and the 'global south.' Our proletariat instead was mostly liquidated and shifted itself into the service industry (not that amenable to labor organization) and the welfare/workfare rolls. There are so many things that the US would have…

An IP based economy just on its face seems like such a laughable house of cards. So your economy is based on government enforced imaginary rights to ideas? The proliferation of tax havens should be a sign that the system is bullshit - it exposes how little is actually keeping the profits of IP endeavors within a nation. There is incredibly little respect for the society owning the means of production in a tangible re…

Yes, the IP economy rests on a bunch of fragile international treaties the US has with its partner states. The government provides the court system that enforces IP claims, but the costs of litigation are mostly carried by rights holders. So when you are sued for patent infringement, the court's costs are fairly minimal and paid by both sides -- but the court's power is just an externality of state power.

Re: Intel Problems

#262

Post by setpatchaddress »

kllrnohj wrote: post #192
skohan wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is kind of what should happen right? I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that one of the takeaways from the M1 success has been the weaknesses of x86 and CISC in general. It seems as if there is a performance ceiling which exists for x86 due to things like memory ordering requirements, and complexity of legacy instructions, which just don't exist for other instruction sets. My impression is that we have b…

> weaknesses of x86 and CISC in general "RISC" and "CISC" distinctions are murky, but modern ARM is really a CISC design these days. ARM is not at all in a "an instruction only does one simple thing, period" mode of operation anymore. It's grown instructions like "FJCVTZS", "AESE", and "SHA256H" If anything CISC has overwhelmingly and clearly won the debate. RISC is dead & buried, at least in any high-performance pro…

Most RISCs would fail the "instruction only does one thing" test. ISTR there were instructions substantially more complex than FJCVTZS in the PowerPC ISA.

I think it's time for a Mashey CISC vs RISC repost:

https://www.yarchive.net/comp/risc_definition.html

Re: Intel Problems

#263

Post by rauhl »

ashtonkem wrote: post #10

I think one day we’re going to wake up and discover that AWS mostly runs on Graviton (ARM) and not x86. And on that day intel’s troubles will go from future to present. My standing theory is that the m1 will accelerate it. Obviously all the wholly managed AWS services (Dynamo, Kinesis, S3, etc.) can change over silently, but the issue is EC2. I have a MBP, as do all of my engineers. Within a few years all of these ma…

> I have a MBP, as do all of my engineers. Within a few years all of these machines will age out and be replaced with m1 powered machines. At that point the idea of developing on ARM and deploying on x86 will be unpleasant

Is it not at least somewhat possible that at least some of those Apple laptops will age out and be replaced with GNU/Linux laptops? Agreed that developing on ARM and deploying on x86 is unpleasant, but so too is developing on macOS and deploying on Linux. Apple’s GNU userland is pretty ancient, and while the BSD parts are at least updated, they are also very austere. Given that friction is already there, is it likelier that folks will try to alleviate it with macOS in the cloud or GNU/Linux locally?

Mac OS X was a godsend in 2001: it put a great Unix underneath a fine UI atop good hardware. It dragged an awful lot of folks three-quarters of the way to a free system. But frankly I believe Apple have lost ground UI-wise over the intervening decades, while free alternatives have gained it (they are still not at parity, granted). Meanwhile, the negatives of using a proprietary OS are worse, not better.

Re: Intel Problems

#264

Post by ksec »

spideymans wrote: post #248
ksec wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I commented [1] on something similar a few days ago, >Cloud (Intel) isn’t really challenged yet.... AWS are estimated to be ~50% of HyperScalers. HyperScalers are estimated to be 50% of Server and Cloud Business. HyperScalers are expanding at a rate faster than other market. HyperScaler expanding trend are not projected to be slowing down anytime soon. AWS intends to have all of their own workload and SaaS product ru…

>Which is why I was extremely worried about Intel. (Half of) The lucrative Server market is basically gone. Right. I suspect in time we'll look back to this time, and realize that it was already too late for Intel to right the ship, despite ARM having a tiny share of PC and server sales. Their PC business is in grave danger as well. Within a few years, we're going to see ARM-powered Windows PCs that are competitive w…

As long as Intel is willing to accept margin will never be as good they once were. I think there are lots of things they could still do.

The previous two CEO choose profits margin. And hopefully we have enough evidence today that was the wrong choice for the companies long term survival.

It is very rare CEO do anything radical. It is something I learned and observe the difference between a founder and a CEO. But Patrick Gelsinger is the closest thing to that.

Re: Intel Problems

#265

Post by ndesaulniers »

cozzyd wrote: post #222
oblio wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real question is, can you compile for ARM and move the binary around as easily as you can for x86? I'm reasonably sure that you can take a binary compiled with GCC on a P4 back in the day and run it on the latest Zen 3 CPU.

it will probably be a similar situation to x86, with various vendors implementing various instructions in some processors that won't be supported by all. I guess the difference is that there may be many more variants than in x86, but performance-critical code can always use runtime dispatch mechanisms to adapt.

That doesn't mean compilers will emit such instructions; maybe hand written assembler will become less portable if such code is making use of extensions...but that should be obvious to the authors...and probably they should have a fallback path.

Re: Intel Problems

#266

Post by MangoCoffee »

esclerofilo wrote: post #256
MangoCoffee wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Not unless they catch up with TSMC in process technology 1. Intel doesn't have to catch up. Intel's 14nm is more than enough for a lot of fabless. Not every chip needs cutting edge node 2. split up Intel foundry into a pure play allowed Intel to build up an ecosystem like TSMC. 3. Intel's 10nm is much denser than TSMC's 7nm. Intel is not too far behind. they just needs to solve the yield problem. split up Intel's de…

The ARM business model isn't that profitable. Intel's market cap right now is about 240 billion, 6 times the amount Nvidia is paying for ARM.

>Intel's market cap right now is about 240 billion, 6 times the amount Nvidia is paying for ARM

so what? yahoo was a giant in its heyday. blackberry was the king with its phone. no empire stay on top forever.

Apple/Amazon created its own cpu. ARM killing it in mobile space.

intel is the king right now but with more and more its customers design their own cpu. how long before intel fall?

Re: Intel Problems

#267

Post by pjmlp »

Const-me wrote: post #92
ashtonkem wrote: post #10

I think one day we’re going to wake up and discover that AWS mostly runs on Graviton (ARM) and not x86. And on that day intel’s troubles will go from future to present. My standing theory is that the m1 will accelerate it. Obviously all the wholly managed AWS services (Dynamo, Kinesis, S3, etc.) can change over silently, but the issue is EC2. I have a MBP, as do all of my engineers. Within a few years all of these ma…

Building server software on Graviton ARM creates a vendor lock-in to Amazon, with very high costs of switching elsewhere. Despite using A64 ISA and ARM’s cores, they are Amazon’s proprietary chips no one else has access to. Migrating elsewhere gonna be very expensive. I wouldn’t be surprised if they sponsor their Graviton offering taking profits elsewhere. This might make it seem like a good deal for customers, but I…

My Java and .NET applications don't care most of the time in what hardware they are running, and many of other languages managed languages I use also do not, even if AOT compiled to native code.

That is the beauty of having proper defined numeric types and memory model, instead of the C and derived approaches of whatever the CPU gives, with whatever memory model.

Re: Intel Problems

#268

Post by echelon »

PKop wrote: post #211
ineedasername wrote: post #152

I found the geopolitical portion to be the most important aspect here. China has shown a willingness to flex its muscles on enforcing its values beyond their borders. China is smart, and plays a long game. We don't want to wake up one day and find they've flexed their muscles on their regional neighbors similar to their rare earths strong-arming from 2010-2014 and not have fab capabilities to fall back on in the West…

>I'm astounded Our political system and over financialized economy seem to suffer from same hyper short term focus that many corporations chasing quarterly returns run in to. No long term planning or focus, and perpetual "election season" thrashing one way or another while nothing is followed through with. Plus, in 2, 4 or 8 years many of the leaders are gone and making money in lobbying or corporate positions. No po…

It appears the Republicans are all-in on the anti-China bandwagon. Now you just have to convince the Democrats.

I don't think this will be hard. Anyone with a brain looking at the situation realizes we're setting ourselves up for a bleak future by continuing the present course.

The globalists can focus on elevating our international partners to distribute manufacturing: Vietnam, Mexico, Africa.

The nationalists can focus on domestic jobs programs and factories. Eventually it will become clear that we're going to staff them up with immigrant workers and provide a path to citizenship. We need a larger population of workers anyway.

Re: Intel Problems

#269

Post by ksec »

cbozeman wrote: post #166
chaorace wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not know that! Though, that answer raises its own questions... If the two are entirely unlinked, what's stopping Intel from slapping "Now 3nm!" on their next gen processors? Surely some components must be at the advertised size, even if it's no longer a clear cut all-or-nothing descriptor, right? What's actually being sized down and why is it seemingly posing so many challenges for Intel's supply chain?

I think it'll be a good thing when people stop worrying about process node technology and start worrying about performance and power usage. Intel's 14nm chips are already competitive with AMD's (TSMC's, really) 7nm chips. The i7-11700 or whatever the newest one coming out soon is called, is going to be pretty much exactly on parity with AMD's Ryzen 5000 series. So if node shrinkage is such a dramatic increase in perf…

>Intel's 14nm chips are already competitive with AMD's (TSMC's, really) 7nm chips.

The only metric that Intel's 14nm is better than TSMC's 7nm is clock speed ceiling. Other than that there is nothing competitive from an Intel 14nm chip compares to AMD ( TSMC ) 7nm chip from a processing perspective.

And that is not a fault of TSMC or AMD. They just decide not to pursuit that route.

Re: Intel Problems

#270

Post by old-gregg »

rauhl wrote: post #263
ashtonkem wrote: post #10

I think one day we’re going to wake up and discover that AWS mostly runs on Graviton (ARM) and not x86. And on that day intel’s troubles will go from future to present. My standing theory is that the m1 will accelerate it. Obviously all the wholly managed AWS services (Dynamo, Kinesis, S3, etc.) can change over silently, but the issue is EC2. I have a MBP, as do all of my engineers. Within a few years all of these ma…

> I have a MBP, as do all of my engineers. Within a few years all of these machines will age out and be replaced with m1 powered machines. At that point the idea of developing on ARM and deploying on x86 will be unpleasant Is it not at least somewhat possible that at least some of those Apple laptops will age out and be replaced with GNU/Linux laptops? Agreed that developing on ARM and deploying on x86 is unpleasant,…

> Is it not at least somewhat possible that at least some of those Apple laptops will age out and be replaced with GNU/Linux laptops?

And I personally hope that by then, GNU/Linux will have an M1-like processor available to happily run on. The possibilities demonstrated by this chip (performance+silence+battery) are so compelling that it's inevitable we'll see them in non-Apple designs.

Also, as it usually happens with Apple hardware advancements, Linux experience will be gradually getting better on M1 Macbooks as well.

Post reply on HN