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

351–360 of 431 posts

Re: Intel Problems

#351

Post by giantrobot »

Stevvo wrote: post #280
adrian_b wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since AMD has introduced its first 7 nm chip, Intel's 14-nm chips have never been competitive. Intel's 14-nm process has only 1 advantage over any other process node, including Intel's own 10 nm: the highest achievable clock frequency, of up to 5.3 GHz. This advantage is very important for games, but not for most other purposes. Since the first 7-nm chip of AMD, their CPUs consume much less power at a given clock fre…

"This advantage is very important for games, but not for most other purposes." I disagree. The majority of desktop applications are only lightly threaded e.g. Adobe products, office suites, Electron apps, anything mostly written before 2008.

Save for heavy lifting in Adobe products those other apps don't meaningfully benefit from higher clock speeds as their operations aren't CPU bound. The high speed Intel chips see an advantage when there's a single CPU bound process maxing out a core. Office and Slack don't tend to do that (well maybe Slack...). Also if you've got multiple processes running full tilt Intel's clock speed advantage goes away because the chip clocks down so as to not melt.

So with a heavy desktop workload with multiple processes or threads the Intel chips aren't doing any better than AMD. It's only in the single heavy worker process situation where Intel's got the advantage and that advantage is only tens of percentage points better than AMD.

So Intel's maximum clock speed isn't the huge advantage it might seem.

Re: Intel Problems

#352

Post by fomine3 »

geogra4 wrote: post #313
davish wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we can look to mobile to see how feasible this might be: consistently over the past decade, iPhones have matched or exceeded Android performance with noticeably smaller capacity batteries. A-series chips and Qualcomm chips are both ARM. Apple's tight integration comes with a cost when it comes to flexibility, and, you can argue, developer experience, but it's clearly not just the silicon itself that leads to…

I think there are serious concerns about Qualcomm's commitment to competitive performance instead of just being a patent troll. I think if AWS Graviton is followed by Microsoft[0] and Google[1] also having their own custom ARM chips it will force Qualcomm to either innovate or die. And will make the ARM landscape quite competitive. M1 has shown what's possible. MS and Google (and Amazon) certainly have the $$ to matc…

That's why they acquired Nuvia.

Re: Intel Problems

#353

Post by ineedasername »

echelon wrote: post #268
PKop wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 f…

My impression was that Republicans were only half-hearted about China as that issue made it's way through President Trump's administration. The general tone I felt was that things like tariffs were tolerated in support of their party's leader, not the tariffs themselves. And the backtracking on sanctions on specific Chinese firms indicated there was little/no significant GOP support pushing President Trump to follow through. The requirement that TikTok sell off its US operations was watered down into a nice lucrative contract for Oracle, though all that's in limbo and the whole issue has lost steam, its fate possibly resting in the courts, or with a new administration that will be dealing with many larger issues.

The molehill -> mountain issue of Hunter Biden's association with a Chinese private equity fund will raise lots of loud rhetoric, but more for partisan in-fighting than action against China.

Meanwhile the US, the West, Corporations will pay lip service to decrying human rights violations and labor conditions. China will accept this as the need to save face, while any stronger action will be avoided to prevent China from flexing its economic muscles against the corporations or countries that rely on their exports. No company wants to be the next hotel chain forced to temporarily take down their website & issue an embarrassing apology. No country wants to be the next Japan, cut off from rare earth exports.

Just look at Hong Kong: Sure the US has receded from such issues in the last 4 years, but it's not like any other country did anything more than express their displeasure in various diplomatically acceptable ways.

Re: Intel Problems

#354

Post by ineedasername »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #221
ineedasername wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

National security doesn't just extend to direct military applications. Pretty much every industry and piece of critical infrastructure comes into play here. It won't matter if western fabs can produce something "good enough" if every piece of technological infrastructure from the past 5 years was built with something better. As for moves again at Taiwan, China hasn't given up that prize. Brain drain would be moot if…

>As for moves again at Taiwan, China hasn't given up that prize. CCP hasn't give up since KMT high-tailed to Taiwan. for more than 40+ yrs American cozy up with the Chinese govrt and doing business with China. American told Taiwan govrt not to "make trouble" but we all know China is the one who make all the troubles with military threat and flying aircraft over Taiwan, day in and day out. Taiwan have build up a impre…

Taiwan's defenses can hold up against minor probing from China, nothing truly sustained.

The true deterrent to China isn't any treaty agreement to protect Taiwan, which doesn't exist. It's the realpolitik of 30,000 US troops in Taiwan.

Any significant & sustained attack against Taiwan would harm US troops. They'd be little more than a speedbump for China if China acted quickly & in force, but that speedbump would require a significant-- and perhaps disproportionate-- response from the US.

Re: Intel Problems

#355

Post by ineedasername »

bee_rider wrote: post #250
okl wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [...] and not have fab capabilities to fall back on in the West. I'm not too concerned: - There are still a number of foundries in western countries that produce chips which are good enough for "military equipment". - Companies like TSMC are reliant on imports of specialized chemicals and tools mostly from Japan/USA/Europe. - Any move from China against Taiwan would likely be followed by significant emigration/"bra…

Yeah, for some reason, I assumed that military equipment mostly used, like, low performance but reliable stuff. In-order processors, real time operating systems, EM-hardening. Probably made by some company like Texas Instruments, who will happily keep selling you the same chip for 30 years.

Well, I doubt the US military is too concerned with chasing the transistor density per cm^2, but there are cutting edge areas of military tech in the form of weapons guidance, fighter jet avionics & weapons systems, etc. that may require more advanced capabilities in components-- I don't know.

(As an aside, when we sell things like fighter jets to other countries, they do not get the same avionics & weapons/targeting systems that we use)

Re: Intel Problems

#356

Post by amluto »

stefan_ wrote: post #72
klelatti wrote: post #12

Feel this piece ducks one of the most important questions - what is the future and value of x86 to Intel? For a long time x86 was one half of the moat but it feels like that moat is close to crumbling. Once that happens the value of the design part of the business will be much, much lower - especially if they have to compete with an on form AMD. Can they innovate their way out of this? Doesn't look entirely promising…

Why are people so hung up about the x86 thing? ARM continues to be sold on because everyone has now understood they don't really matter; they are not driving the innovations, they were simply the springboard for the Apples, Qualcomms and Amazons to drive their own processor designs, and they are not setup to profit from that. ARMs reference design isn't competitive, the M1 is. Instruction set architecture at this poi…

I would argue that ISA does matter. Beyond the decode width issue, x86 has some material warts compared to ARM64:

The x86 atomic operations are fundamentally expensive. ARM’s new LSE extensions are more flexible and can be faster. I don’t know how much this matters in practice, but there are certainly workloads for which it’s a big deal.

x86 cannot context-switch or handle interrupts efficiently. ARM64 can. This completely rules x86 out for some workloads.

ARM64 has TrustZone. x86 has SMM. One can debate the merits of TrustZone. SMM has no merits.

Finally, x86 is more than an ISA - it’s an ecosystem, and the x86 ecosystem is full of legacy baggage. If you want an Intel x86 solution, you basically have to also use Intel’s chipset, Intel’s firmware blobs, Intel’s SMM ecosystem, all of the platform garbage built around SMM, Intel’s legacy-on-top-of-legacy poorly secured SPI flash boot system, etc. This is tolerable if you are building a regular computer and can live with slow boot and with SMM. But for more embedded uses, it’s pretty bad. ARM64 has much less baggage. (Yes, Intel can fix this, but I don’t expect them to.)

Re: Intel Problems

#357

Post by jadedtuna »

freeone3000 wrote: post #325
Koshkin wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try a Raspberry Pi. It just works.

Except for when the wifi fails or your SD card that you boot off of gets corrupted or you try to do something that requires a bit more power than 1.2GHz and 1GB RAM can handle.

Raspberry Pi 4 has up to 8GB of RAM and a 1.5GHz CPU, but your point still stands. Even with those specs it won't provide a fully smooth desktop experience.

Re: Intel Problems

#358

Post by Daho0n »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #221
ineedasername wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

National security doesn't just extend to direct military applications. Pretty much every industry and piece of critical infrastructure comes into play here. It won't matter if western fabs can produce something "good enough" if every piece of technological infrastructure from the past 5 years was built with something better. As for moves again at Taiwan, China hasn't given up that prize. Brain drain would be moot if…

>As for moves again at Taiwan, China hasn't given up that prize. CCP hasn't give up since KMT high-tailed to Taiwan. for more than 40+ yrs American cozy up with the Chinese govrt and doing business with China. American told Taiwan govrt not to "make trouble" but we all know China is the one who make all the troubles with military threat and flying aircraft over Taiwan, day in and day out. Taiwan have build up a impre…

>we all know China is the one who make all the troubles with military threat and flying aircraft over Taiwan, day in and day out.

As they are fully well allowed to as Taiwan is their own territory. You and I might disagree but out of the 195 countries on earth the only ones who recognize Taiwan is a country are these few:

Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Paraguay, Nicaragua, Belize, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent And The Grenadines, Marshall Islands, Saint Kitts And Nevis, Palau, Tuvalu, Nauru, Vatican City.

Comparing that to the 139 countries that recognise the State of Palestine (where Israel can still do as they damn well please!) and it is quite easy to see that while some might pretend to care about Taiwan (like the US) all they really care about in the end is the money to be made from trading with/in PRC.

>China will think twice about invading.

PRC doesn't invade. It isn't the US. It gains influence in much more subtle and intelligent ways than bombing people but if they wanted to they could do to Taiwan what Israel does to Palestine and no one would do anything but talk talk talk.

Re: Intel Problems

#359

Post by ashtonkem »

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,…

There is literally no chance of that. IT would find this an intolerable burden for them to manage, and I doubt the devs would like it either. Most of them seem pretty enthused to get their hands on a m1.

I’ve known colleagues that tried to run Linux professionally using well reviewed Linux laptops, and their experience has been universally awful. Like “I never managed to get the wifi to work, ever” bad. The idea of gambling every developer on that is a non-starter even at my level, let alone across the org.

Re: Intel Problems

#360

Post by scarface74 »

echelon wrote: post #268
PKop wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 f…

Trump was all in on the anti-China bandwagon. The traditional Republicans were just tolerating Trump long enough to get their agenda passed - conservative judges and tax cuts. Republicans traditionally have been about free trade.
Post reply on HN