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Intel's disruption is now complete

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Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#351

Post by lijf »

texasbigdata wrote: post #272
alisonkisk wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's obvious but doesn't explain why some organizations are vulnerable to it while others aren't.

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…

Part of this comment made me think of Albert Hirschman's 'Exit, Voice, and Loyalty' [1] - at least as I have understood the argument, comparing the 'standby passive observer' to the 'loyalty' standpoint, and the commenters as having chosen the 'exit' option. Hirschman's book is still on my reading list though, together with his 'The Passions and the Interests' - my impression of his work is mostly based on the episodes of Alphachat where they discussed his life and work [2,3,4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

[2] https://www.ft.com/content/d1f5d43e-9cef-41d2-a651-f59a40e47...

[3] https://www.ft.com/content/798e6641-ecf9-480e-906e-8ee756296...

[4] https://www.ft.com/content/33809fbc-c999-41c5-97f6-a5d1f33d0...

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#352

Post by jodrellblank »

hitekker wrote: post #317
phkahler wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They're unsuccessful. His book on Psychopathy was panned on Reddit, as well as on Goodreads: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4c27ss/im_pieter_hint... Likewise, the wikipedia article for Social Architecture has been listed "not notable" for the past four years, and hasn't seen any meaningful edits since 2016. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_architecture With respect to the author, I'm not surprised. Nerds…

I'm not seeing his book being panned on your Reddit link, I'm seeing ad-hom attacks on him because of his lack of credentials or some unrelated behaviour they don't like.

Is there any actual panning of his book by someone who read his book, in your link? Or anyone who engaged in good faith - e.g. it's a book about his experiences of problem behaviour patterns that hurt others?

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#353

Post by cesarb »

DeRock wrote: post #65
frogblast wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple’s core is very wide. But wide usually means very high power consumption. M1 apparently has much lower power consumption. So something else is going on other than “Apple is willing to spend more to make cores wider”.

That, in part, comes from x86 vs arm. x86, with its variable length instructions, means your logic gets increasingly complex as you widen. Meanwhile with arm, you have constant instruction size (other than thumb, but that’s more straightforward than variable size), that lets Apple do things like an 8-bit wide decode block (vs. 4-bit for Intel) and a humongous 630 OOB (almost double Intel’s deepest cores).

> Meanwhile with arm, you have constant instruction size (other than thumb, but that’s more straightforward than variable size),

That's only for 32-bit ARM; for 64-bit ARM, the instruction size is always constant (there's no Thumb/Thumb2/ThumbEE/etc). It won't surprise me at all if Apple's new ARM processor is 64-bit only (being 64-bit only is allowed for ARM, unlike x86), which means that not only the decoder does not have to worry about the 2-byte instructions from Thumb, but also the decoder does not have to worry about the older 32-bit ARM instructions (including the quirky ones like LDM/STM).

That would also explains why Apple can have wide decoders while their competitors can't: these competitors want to keep compatibility with 32-bit ARM, while Apple doesn't care.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#354

Post by raziel2701 »

systemvoltage wrote: post #231
hapless wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fabrication is where Intel is falling down. They have fresh new chip designs that would be perfectly adequate, but they are still hobbled by 14nm. They have now released three? four? iterations of x86 design on the same 14 nm process, because 10nm is that troubled If you spun off the fabrication, as AMD did, you would have a much smaller, but more-competitive fabless business, and the fabricator would implode. (Which…

I am afraid, they're going to be using US gov as their wheelchair to survive a few more decades: https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-wins-us-government-adv...

So it's gonna be another too big to fail thing again.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#355

Post by nickik »

imhoguy wrote: post #185
supernova87a wrote: post #127

Maybe this is a bit of a side topic, and I'm a layman, but I'm interested to know why the M1 chip is able to perform so surprisingly better? And why Intel or others can't just come up with a similar design, if it's clear from the specs/die images what's being done? Is it years of work to figure out the placement of CPU/GPU/memory units on the die, routings, and come up with new instruction sets? I imagine this wasn't…

I would quote Orwell here: "Who Controls the Past Controls the Future". It is about lack of control over legacy killing the progress. The power of Intel is "proven" legacy, but building completely new architecture is expensive and prone to adoption failure (Itanium?) when Intel has no control over OS (Windows), apps or virtualization software. Then Apple has control over all that: they can make hardware (scaled up mo…

This is not really the case. Most Intel servers run linux, Intel has nearly complete control over linux in a practical sense. They can put developers in it and update the OS and unless its a very user hostile feature it will go into the mainline kernel and be everywhere. The same goes for compiler and so on.

Intel could easily open up their boot and make the store there much better.

The don't quite have the vertical control of Apple, but to say they are fundamentally hindered by their legacy is quite questionable.

The fucked up improving their manufacturing.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#356

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

golergka wrote: post #314
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't seem to understand the history of corporations at all. They don't exist and were not created to sell potentially risky products to eager consumers. They were created to engage in capital-requiring efforts (notably expeditions, but also large scale resource extraction and industrial projects) that would not happen without the personal liability release. They would not happen because the potential for liabili…

I know history of corporations pretty well, from hundred years war and british and dutch maritime corporation's, thank you. But history is not ethics: what is and what ought to be are two very different things, not to be confused. Explaining how and why something hapenned historically has only tangential relation to how it should happen and how should we view it from an ethical standpoint, and I was talking about the…

So you're in the camp of "we'll do without silicon fabrication plants entirely, thank you very much", because I can pretty much guarantee you that the liability that creating the initial versions of this technology would have ensured insufficient capital to proceed.

As another comments notes, corporate limited liability is not just, or even primarily, about liability towards your business partners. Build a factory, pollute the water, and without limited liability, you are ruined (which some would argue is the way things ought to be).

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#357

Post by dash2 »

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.

Well, the question is how much of the output they get :-)

Though actually note that the classic Mancur Olson result is "the exploitation of the strong by the weak". That is, the person who has the largest share of output contributes disproportionately much to the public good.

Simple proof: write individual i's marginal benefit from the company's total effort X as

s_i f(X) - x_i

where s_i is i's share of the output f(X), and x_i is i's own effort. Taking everyone else's effort as given, i will equate marginal benefit of own effort to marginal cost, so that total effort solves

s_i f'(X) = 1

equivalently

f'(X) = 1/s_i

Now suppose the person with the largest share satisfies the above. Then everyone with a smaller share must have

f'(X) and therefore, if they are contributing more than the minimum possible, they have an incentive to reduce their contribution. So, this extreme version has that only the largest "shareholder" does any work. (A more realistic model has a convex cost of effort, so smaller shareholders do something, but they still contribute less than their output share.)

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#358

Post by jeffbee »

Miraste wrote: post #332
jeffbee wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tiger Lake is objectively the fastest thing in any laptop you can buy, regardless of whether its TDP is as high as others. You're right about the lack of desktop parts, though.

It's not faster than the M1, is it?

Maybe but I won’t give it credit for existing until it lands in public hands. You can buy tiger lake laptops off literal shelves, today.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#359

Post by simonh »

Baeocystin wrote: post #345
simonh wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think this is a misunderstanding. The problems with the Mac have not been due to neglect, but due to very aggressive forward looking and innovative advancements of the platform some of which just failed.

You don’t develop all new low profile keyboard technology, an original touch sensitive display interface system, a new hinge mechanism, a custom integrated security and image processing chip (T2), and a unique 5k display system through neglect. The problem is some of these advancements were simply misconceived. It wasn’t lack of interest or investment, it was poor execution of some of the new developments.

Steve Jobs used to say that being better necessarily meant being different, but being different means taking risks and sometimes they don’t pay off.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#360

Post by klelatti »

trepetti wrote: post #288
hyperpallium2 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apart from cache, anandtech notes https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de... What really defines Apple’s Firestorm CPU core from other designs in the industry is just the sheer width of the microarchitecture. "Width" enables greater parallel execution of instructions.

One of the interesting comments in that article was how they pinned limited width of x86 decode implementations on variable instruction length. There are obvious code density benefits to the x86 variable length approach (especially in immediate encoding), but I guess the need for realignment creates long critical paths on the frontend. I wonder if the more constrained variable instruction length of RV64GC (32- and 16…

Interesting point. I guess as cache sizes go up instruction density becomes less important. Also Arm abandoned Thumb - which was relatively easy to decode - for AArch64 and I guess they must have done quite a lot of analysis before doing so.
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