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What Arm's CEO makes of the Intel debacle

theverge.com

31–40 of 58 posts

Re: What Arm's CEO makes of the Intel debacle

#31
This article says a lot more about Arm than it does about Intel. A couple of sentences stood out:

> Arm is also rumored to be eyeing an expansion into building its own chips and not just licensing its designs

> if you’re a vertically integrated company and the power of your strategy is in the fact that you have a product and you have fabs, inherently, you have a potential huge advantage in terms of cost versus the competition

I don't get this strategy at all. Why is vertical integration of the designs and the fabs any advantage? Sure, there are probably small savings here and there from changing the design to suit the process. But like Intel you'd get fat and lazy and end up with weird tooling that only your one company uses. And you can't concentrate on being the best at one thing with huge volumes like TSMC.

Arm is way overvalued as it is, and now the CEO is going to try something stupid.

Re: What Arm's CEO makes of the Intel debacle

#32
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a nutshell, Intel's board was focused on extracting value from the company instead of innovating. While this was going on, compute was undergoing a transformation as everything transitioned to cloud solutions. By the time they realized, it was too late and the rot had set in. Now the company is full of mediocre middle managers and principles who spend all day playing politics instead of working on real problems.

board was focused on extracting value from the company From the company? Extract to where?

Dividends and share buybacks, to shareholders.

Re: What Arm's CEO makes of the Intel debacle

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "service" of writing down things people have said out loud is pretty low margin. So your choices are to put a paywall up and hope people pay a flat rate for whatever you happen to offer each month or to increase your distribution as much as you can while embedding relevant static advertisements. Since delivery is exceedingly cheap it seems obvious which strategy to use.

> The "service" of writing down things people have said out loud is Unclear why "service" is in quotes. Not many people get to be in the room where it happens. The people that do get to be in the room, absolutely do provide a real service to the rest of us who don't.

> Unclear why "service" is in quotes. Not many people get to be in the room where it happens.

You answer your own question. There's no reason at this point in history the "room size" needs to be artificially limited. Was the Arm CEO paid for their time? If not, why not?

> absolutely do provide a real service to the rest of us who don't.

It's service for Arm not you. If you wanted unbiased analysis of Intel's position you might seek someone other than a direct competitor. Which makes paywalling this all the more baffling.

Re: What Arm's CEO makes of the Intel debacle

#34
post #31

This article says a lot more about Arm than it does about Intel. A couple of sentences stood out: > Arm is also rumored to be eyeing an expansion into building its own chips and not just licensing its designs > if you’re a vertically integrated company and the power of your strategy is in the fact that you have a product and you have fabs, inherently, you have a potential huge advantage in terms of cost versus the co…

Having visibility across the value chain should be very helpful - you can avoid committing to undeliverable products and at the same time anticipate demand from your customers. Overall you should be able to run the same thing on much lower margins and be in a position to out compete anyone who doesn't have the same advantage.

Unfortunately I think that the temptation is to give in to the "faster horse that eats less" requests and to accept "we just can't do that boz" on the other end. China seems to be moving to a model that couples integration with bouts of intimidatory violence and so far that seems to be working well, but it does have costs.

Re: What Arm's CEO makes of the Intel debacle

#35
post #11

I have not watched Intel closely for a long time. Seeing that its market cap is down 30% over the last decade is crazy. Considering how IT in general grew so much over the same time period. What happened? To see how the Intel CEO is thinking, I now scrolled through a few interviews with him. In this interview, Intel's CEO is asked to describe the difference of a CPU and a GPU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d07wy5AK…

In a nutshell, Intel's board was focused on extracting value from the company instead of innovating. While this was going on, compute was undergoing a transformation as everything transitioned to cloud solutions. By the time they realized, it was too late and the rot had set in. Now the company is full of mediocre middle managers and principles who spend all day playing politics instead of working on real problems.

> Intel's board was focused on extracting value from the company instead of innovating

But then they failed at that as well. Their share price almost never increased after 2000s. Currently they are valued lesser than their 1996's valuation, even if you exclude inflation. Highest they went was $263B valuation in 2021, which is nowhere close to tech giants.

Re: What Arm's CEO makes of the Intel debacle

#36

I have not watched Intel closely for a long time. Seeing that its market cap is down 30% over the last decade is crazy. Considering how IT in general grew so much over the same time period. What happened? To see how the Intel CEO is thinking, I now scrolled through a few interviews with him. In this interview, Intel's CEO is asked to describe the difference of a CPU and a GPU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d07wy5AK…

I think you are right about CPU vs. GPU. It’s complex independent cores vs. simple array cores. The largest part of that “overhead” is the need for much higher memory bandwidth and caching due to having many more cores to feed. And the added complexity of programming is managing groups of cores (and multiple groups of cores) so they are all as active as possible without blocking each other algorithmically or due to m…

The CPU for complex stuff and GPU for simple number crushing is a really popular narrative. It's true in one sense and nonsense in another, determined solely on the software it's running.

If your program has one or two threads and spends all its time doing branchy control flow, a CPU will run it adequately and a GPU very poorly. If the program has millions of mostly independent tasks, a GPU will run it adequately and a CPU very poorly. That's the two limiting cases though and quite a lot of software sits somewhere in the middle.

The most concise distinction to draw between the hardware architectures is what they do about memory latency. We want lots of memory, that means it ends up far from the cores, so you have to do something while you wait for accesses to it. Fast CPUs use branch predictors and deep pipelines to keep the cores busy, fast GPUs keep a queue of coroutines ready to go and pick a different one to step along when waiting for memory. That's roughly why CPUs have a few threads - all the predictor and wind back logic is expensive. It's also why GPUs have many - no predictor or wind back logic, but you need to have a lot of coroutines ready to go to keep the latency hidden.

Beyond that, there's nothing either CPU or GPU can do that the other cannot. They're both finite approximations to Turing machines. There are some apparent distinctions from the hosted OS abstraction where the CPU threads get "syscall" and the GPU threads need to DIY their equivalent but the application doesn't care. Threads on either can call fprintf just fine. It makes a bit of a mess in libc but that's alright (and done in LLVM already).

Re: What Arm's CEO makes of the Intel debacle

#37

For me, Intel needs to buy Oxide or Sidero. And commit to building a simple, powerful, enthusiast/startup friendly platform for running mini-clouds at home/on-premise. And start bringing tech like Optane, Tofino etc to developers so they can get better price/performance than the soon to be ARM dominated cloud.

Didn't 'Gelsinger era' Intel abandon Optane and Tofino?

And listening to the most recent Oxide podcast [1] I can't think the Oxide team would want to stay long at Intel unless the new CEO took radical action.

[1] https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/2218242

Re: What Arm's CEO makes of the Intel debacle

#39
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/3/24306571/verge-subscripti... > Our original reporting, reviews, and features will be behind a dynamic metered paywall — many of you will never hit the paywall, but if you read us a lot, we’ll ask you to pay.

This is the second verge article I opened this month and I already hit the paywall

I didn't count, but if i ever open a verge article it's from being linked to on here. And the title has to be non click baity.

So... pretty sure i don't read verge a lot either. And I get the paywall.

Re: What Arm's CEO makes of the Intel debacle

#40

Article is paywalled.

The verge has seemingly been doing this a lot recently and it's been very annoying. It's not obvious that any given article will be paywalled or not. It would be nice if they at least marked them.

As per last tweets from them, it seem nowadays all of them, they are now subscription based.

I understand the change, eventually there won't be any publications left, if people keep refusing to pay for them, and use ad blockers as well.

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