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Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him

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Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him

#281

Post by p1necone »

tw04 wrote: post #97
terafo wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it isn't a selling point to my mom or her friends Gargantuan battery life isn't a selling point? For laptop? In what universe?

For who? My mom uses her laptop at home 99% of the time, if the battery gets low she plugs it in. She needs a battery that will last 1-2 hours for the 3 times a year she flies. You can find a place to plug in at basically any coffee shop or library you go to. My mom isn't spending 10 hours in a datacenter, so it doesn't really matter to her if the battery life is 3 hours or 12. For the average consumer, battery life…

This resonates with me too - anywhere it would be comfortable to work with my laptop is going to have somewhere to plug it in to charge.

Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him

#282

Post by glandium »

ethbr0 wrote: post #22
ghaff wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was also Intel's whole pursuit of frequency--they demoed I think it was a 10GHz chip at IDF at one point (and Itanium was essentially an ILP-oriented design)--and resistance to multi-core. Some of it was doubtless Intel convincing themselves they could make it work. But they were also under a lot of pressure from Microsoft who didn't have confidence that they could do SMP effectively--at least that's what a cer…

From my personal memory at the time, early NUMA multicore on Windows wasn't the smoothest sailing.

It seems it's not great now either, seeing how the first iteration of AMD's Threadripper performed badly on Windows.

Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him

#283

Post by BatteryMountain »

LogicX wrote: post #265
ChuckMcM wrote: post #211

Here's a fun fact (and I suspect shows what a loser I am :-)) Pat Gelsinger and I were colleagues at Intel in the early 80's. We both worked in what was called "MIPO" (Microprocessor Operation) but I was in Systems Validation and he was on the customer facing side with field engineering. My career went off through a variety of engineering roles, his went into management and up. When he joined EMC, I told him I had al…

Pat went to my high school and computer science program. It’s in a small rural, Pennsylvania farming town - pop 2000. Somehow we got an amazing math teacher turned CompSci and he turned out world class students - we always ranked high enough each year to compete internationally in ACSL. A few years back when the teacher retired, we all gathered together to thank him, including Pat! World-class guy, and makes us proud…

A single good teacher can make all the difference in the world.

Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him

#284

Post by arminiusreturns »

Was Pat the one responsible for the near complete degredation of VMWare support over the last X years? I had enough interactions with it to finally get that they were funneling the low paying support contracts to a completely different set of crappy support people, but if you payed the premium you got something much better. Maybe it was prior to him and things have gotten better though.

Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him

#285

Post by ChrisIsTaken »

Leherenn wrote: post #171
danpalmer wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get your point, but I think the M1 is more significant as proof of what is possible than because I think everyone will buy a Mac. I can absolutely see Qualcomm offering laptop chips off the back of the M1's success. They may not be as good, but they might be much cheaper. I can also see Microsoft pushing Windows on ARM harder, and rolling out their own chips at some point. Also once the market gets "used to" multi-…

Maybe. Apple has solved the chicken and egg problem regarding software compatibility by forcing everyone to move on to ARM in the near future. Microsoft will not abandon x64 though, so there are far less incentives to port things. Also Microsoft cares far more about compatibility (e.g. 32-bit software). That means means a lot of things will run under a Rosetta 2 like system (probably less efficient if you need to sup…

Large parts of Windows 10 are still Win32 not UWP.

They can't even remove decades old legacy code from their own products, so good luck everyone else.

Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him

#287

Post by ece »

dogma1138 wrote: post #263
ghaff wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was also Intel's whole pursuit of frequency--they demoed I think it was a 10GHz chip at IDF at one point (and Itanium was essentially an ILP-oriented design)--and resistance to multi-core. Some of it was doubtless Intel convincing themselves they could make it work. But they were also under a lot of pressure from Microsoft who didn't have confidence that they could do SMP effectively--at least that's what a cer…

I’m not sure Itanium was a technical failure, to me it always was a business model failure as that CPU was co-developed with HP and essentially became a dedicated HP-Oracle box and by the time the ecosystem was opened up it was too late. The heavy reliance on the compiler for ILP was an “odd-choice” but not something that was unsound in principle. If the ecosystem was more open from the get go and more vendors were i…

They do have Xe-graphics now. It's the closed Intel has come to a competitive non-x86 part in recent memory. It feels kind of forced though, everyone else has their own CPU+GPU now including Apple/Nvidia in addition to AMD/QC, so why wouldn't Intel? They also have OneAPI.

It would be interesting to see an explicitly JIT-based approach to ILP.

Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him

#288

Post by jillesvangurp »

xwdv wrote: post #6

This won’t change anything, by the time Intel gets back on it’s feet, big techs will be building their own silicon and AMD will have eaten up whatever is left of Intel’s lunch.

They might both be in trouble. AMD is certainly part of Intel's headaches but their loss of relevance also has to do with an overall move away in the market from X86. They never mattered on phones or tablets and Apple just replaced them on their laptops with an in house ARM based design and is apparently outperforming them. That's something that others are likely to emulate. ARM was something for cheap under-powered hardware in the past decade. Not any more. It's now a high end option.

I'd say there's a great opportunity for Nvidia to step up and cut out the middleman (Intel and AMD) and put together some great ARM based hardware running Windows on consumer oriented hardware and Linux in data centers. Given that they just bought ARM, that probably is something they are actively planning to do. Apple just showed us all that the M1 can run circles around Intel and AMD. That's a trick others can pull off too. Certainly Nvidia.

I'd say both Intel and AMD need to make a move away from X86 soon or risk being marginalized. In AMD's case, RISC-V might be a nice lateral move to make. That paired with their GPU as an SOC might be attractive for a wide range of devices. The alternative would be having to license chip designs from their main competitor and making them richer in the process. Sticking with X86 is long term a losing game. People care less than ever about binary backwards compatibility.

Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him

#289

Post by baybal2 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #211

Here's a fun fact (and I suspect shows what a loser I am :-)) Pat Gelsinger and I were colleagues at Intel in the early 80's. We both worked in what was called "MIPO" (Microprocessor Operation) but I was in Systems Validation and he was on the customer facing side with field engineering. My career went off through a variety of engineering roles, his went into management and up. When he joined EMC, I told him I had al…

> There are a lot of things you can say about Silicon Valley, but one of the more interesting aspects of it for me has been how "small" it is in terms of people have an oversized impact. I have never been one of those people of course, just a part of the entourage. But it has been interesting to watch and learn from folks who are good (and bad) role models.

I believe this is what you feel when you come to the industry when it is just starting in a given locality, and then it explodes. Senior workers who join in the earliest days tend to drift from company to company, but they rarely leave the place entirely, or change industries.

Re: Intel CEO Bob Swan to step down, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger to replace him

#290

Post by thu2111 »

caycep wrote: post #268
somethoughts wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similarly some (many?) thought Microsoft was a lost cause due to Ballmer (sales/business development background), but they seem to be doing okay under Nadella (engineering background). That said, only time will tell.

I think the telling thing is would you see a Nadella (and indeed, a Jobs)-like pivot when he takes over. i.e. axe old design/business models that don't work and fully embrace new ones.

Intel's problem isn't really that they're involved in too many businesses that don't make sense or they aren't good at. Their core businesses are still their core competencies. The problem has been a catastrophic set of execution misfires.
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