Intel's disruption is now complete • Hacker News Board

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#341

Post by cma » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 8:53 PM UTC

joeryscript wrote: post #19

dboreham wrote: post #2

What's the real reason Apple can design a higher performance device? Better fab process? ARM ISA is fundamentally faster? Graph conveniently omits AMD who now beat Intel using the same ISA but different process.

Honestly? A lot of it has to do with the fact that they booked TSMC's entire 5nm production capability for some time. So they are working on a smaller process node than their competitors, and they used their market position to ensure that they will be the only ones using it for a little while. That gives them a significant leg up.

Yep, like when Apple got an exclusivity deal with Toshiba on its tiny-sized harddrives for use in music players.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#342

Post by chorsestudios » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 8:54 PM UTC

wmf wrote: post #282

systemvoltage wrote: post #189

The entire world has their eggs in one basket - Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. Say whatever about Intel, I am hoping that they get back on their feet in next few years with 5nm manufacturing. Since when is competition and choice a bad thing? If you're a chip design firm and you have a 8-month backlog to get your masks made at TSMC, what do you do then? TSMC can be world's best fab but we need to address…

Samsung is not that bad. They just announced a 5nm chip; it's not as good as TSMC but it's not as far behind as Intel either.

Right, don't underestimate Samsung - they have top tier fabs and manufacture a lot of chips. If the world has all their eggs in the basket of one company that company is ASML.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#343

Post by izacus » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 8:57 PM UTC

sanderjd wrote: post #337

notSupplied wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a theory about why turf wars like this happens: the more successful and wealthy an entity, the greater opportunity there is for a manager to take wealth instead of make it. When you’re scrappy and broke, the only path to success is to make the company successful. When the company is rich and multitudinous, an individual can gain more from politics and turf wars rather than actually trying to push an already hi…

This seems true, but I guess I also have more empathy for decision-makers: to me it seems like it is far from obvious who should take on which projects. Pretty much by definition, the organization is structured so that its current projects have sensible homes, but when a totally new project comes up, it is unlikely to fit perfectly anywhere in that structure. If it did, it wouldn't be totally new! None of the options…

The problem I've observed is also that (for performance / reward purposes), managers lie as hell when it comes to their team performance. The bigger the company, the less actual signal is received by upper managers because everyone doctors the hell out of this numbers. It might be impossible to even KNOW who the best team in your company is.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#344

Post by jodrellblank » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 8:59 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #205

jodrellblank wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the greater opportunity there is for a manager to take wealth Pieter Hintjens (creator of ZeroMQ) wrote a lot about this, and how organizations from big companies to small charities to software projects ought to design their internal structures of roles, titles, voting, auditing, to defend themselves against this kind of attack. Particularly if there's any kind of treasury, an opportunist will become tempted to tak…

That sounds very interesting. Has there been any update on how successful or not his ideas are in practice?

I'm not sure. In his article on "Building Online Communities" (http://hintjens.com/blog:117) he says he experimented with building online communities for three years and gathering results, and that ZeroMQ is his biggest success (at being organised to defend to both vendor capture, or takeover by a single powerful/competent/rude contributor). For background of why that was his focus, he wrote this (http://hintjens.com/blog:125#toc15) about his experiences with working on OpenAMQ:

"""In late 2009, the Chair and Red Hat sat down and decided, in a secret meeting, to rewrite the spec. [...] From scratch. By himself. After years and years of committee work. After years of investment by others in working code. Without asking anyone except Red Hat. And then, to force this spec through the working group using his usual tactics: bullying and lobbying. [...]

One of my spin-off projects was the Digital Standards Organization, and I came to understand what was needed to protect a standard from predatory hijack. I summarized the definition of a "Free and Open Standard" as "a published specification that is immune to vendor capture at all stages in its life-cycle." What the "free" part means is, if someone hijacks your working group and starts to push the standard in hostile directions (as Red Hat did), can you fork the standard and continue? Does the license allow forking, yes or no? And secondly, does the license prohibit "dark forks," namely private versions of the standard?

If either answer is "no," then you are at the mercy of others. And when there is money on the table, or even the promise of money, the predators will move in. The AMQP experience gave me a lot of material for my later book on psychopaths. [...]

If we'd managed to build a thriving community around OpenAMQ, it would have survived. So the lesson here is simple: community before code. Today this is obvious to me. Eight years ago, it wasn't."""

And reference this (http://hintjens.com/blog:120) Social Architecture FAQ which talks about rude but highly skilled people contributing to projects (read that with "community before code" and the quote "if you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far go together" in mind).

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#345

Post by Baeocystin » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 9:00 PM UTC

simonh wrote: post #261

djmips wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you and a lot of the things people who are responding are saying but the one thing that keeps popping in my head is that Apple who is disrupting in this case isn't exactly the lightweight scrappy contender as put forth in the parables and anecdotes. If the hypothesis is true for Intel why is giant Apple not suffering from the same mercenary middle management / toxic political BS?

Apple is very differently organised from most big corporations, it has whats known as a functional organisational structure. Marketing, operations, software engineering, hardware engineering, etc. Most corporations are organised around product groups, but what happens when the mobile products group comes up with a new device and wants to sell it to corporate clients? The enterprise products division might not like th…

To be fair, I think many of their Mac-related problems over the past few years are a result of no one being able to defend the line internally, too. Management is a difficult problem.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#346

Post by drevil-v2 » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 9:01 PM UTC

tuatoru wrote: post #293

texasbigdata wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn’t meaning to be cheeky. Have been thinking about this for a few years and those are observations that took a while. There’s analogies to building institutions in developing countries. See the constitution in the Ukraine (I think) or South Africa. Ginsberg commented publicly and Brayer agreed with (at a talk I attended) from a “source code” perspective those constitutions are superior to the American one. Sort of…

As well as the formal, visible institutions like constitutions or legal frameworks there are a lot of invisible ones like cultural norms. In a lot of countries the most powerful institution is "family first" (sometimes extending that to ethnic or religious in-group second). The (currently) successful countries got that way with a different norm, "same rules for everyone". I'm viewing the emphasis on family first in r…

You have any concrete examples of both type of countries?

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#347

Post by bosswipe » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 9:05 PM UTC

osipov wrote: post #208

paganel wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An exception might be SpaceX where you have a strong dictator at the top I think a similar thing is happening at Amazon (the strong dictator stuff, I mean), and it's my hunch that Google has started following Intel's trajectory, they just haven't realised it just yet.

The more perceptive ones at Google have realized that and quit in mass over the past few years. Since Sundar and the rest of the McKinsey gang took over, it has been just death to Google by a thousand cuts.

Sundar's complete destruction of Google's massive goodwill has been spectacular. And sad.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#348

Post by pjmlp » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 9:05 PM UTC

tjoff wrote: post #263

pjmlp wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the point of view of IBM, most likely yes, otherwise there wouldn't have been PS/2 and MCA architecture. Hence why laptops and 2-1 hybrids are basically back to the days of vertical integration of 16 bit computers, whose the PC was the only exception.

So let's all make sure, for apples sake, that is fixed then. Not really, PC laptops and hybrids are pretty standardized. A slim case doesn't really make it vertical integration.

Try to use anything other than Windows or ChromeOS on such laptops, with 100% support of underlying hardware.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#349

Post by nickik » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 9:06 PM UTC

samsonradu wrote: post #335

vagrantJin wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Countries with lots of minerals in Africa/ South America can tell you stories about the resource curse.

The 'resource curse' might have the causality wrong though in many circumstances. Maybe those countries would find themselves in a similarly bad state (or worse) without those resources. Maybe their bad state is due to historical reasons - being former colonies with very little power on the world stage - and resources just couldn't help much.

The resources curse really is about staying bad, not turning bad. We must realize that all countries 300-400 years ago were 'bad' by out perspective.

Countries with a dominant resources that only found them when they were already developed don't suffer from the 'resource curse'.

In such cases not having resources doesn't mean you turn into Switzerland or Canada rather it means that it will be harder for one dominant dictator to hold on to power. In some African countries that are now proto-democracies, dictators simply couldn't hold on to power without easily available resource base.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita work in 'The Logic of Political Survival' and ' The Dictator's Handbook' is quite interesting.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#350

Post by pclmulqdq » Sat, Nov 14, 2020, 9:06 PM UTC

robocat wrote: post #276

dash2 wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think scale might matter too. Companies are partly public goods problems. Each individual's hard work benefits the whole company. As a result they will undersupply hard work. If the company is size N, they only share 1/N of the total benefit they provide. So, the public goods problem bites harder when companies get big - even holding the level of competition in the market constant.

> If the company is size N, they only share 1/N The graph of the distribution for value per person must be wierd, and definitely not flat. Maybe based on a power law, but I am unsure how to model the people that provide negative value, for example bad managers.

Supposedly, in knowledge work like programming, the distribution follows a pareto distribution: for n people, sqrt(n) produce half the productive output.