If they can get Horse Creek out the door, I'm interested, if not, I'm not.
Intel's Humbling
381–390 of 414 posts
Re: Intel's Humbling
#382Earlier quoted context omitted.
(I'm curious about this story, as I am unfamiliar with it.) Why did that generation of core (Bulldozer) suck? What was it that AMD needed to do to fix the problem? (Links to relevant stories would be sufficient for me!)
Chips and Cheese has probably the most in depth publicly available dive for the tech reasons why Bulldozer was the way it was: https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/01/22/bulldozer-amds-crash-m... https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/01/24/bulldozer-amds-crash-m... --- From a consumer perspective, Bulldozer and revisions as compared to Skylake and revisions were: + comparable on highly multi-threaded loads + cheaper - significa…
Bulldozer was contemporary with Sandy Bridge, not Skylake. Piledriver competed with Ivy Bridge and Haswell. The next Construction cores (Steamroller and Excavator) were only found in APUs, and not in desktop FX parts. Around the time of Skylake, AMD didn't have a meaningful presence in the desktop space. All they were selling was quad-core APUs based on minor revisions of Bulldozer, and the highly outdated FX-x3xx Piledrivers.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#383>>> Notice what is happening here: TSMC, unlike its historical pattern, is not keeping (all of its) 5nm capacity to make low-cost high-margin chips in fully-depreciated fabs; rather, it is going to repurpose some amount of equipment — probably as much as it can manage — to 3nm, which will allow it to expand its capacity without a commensurate increase in capital costs. This will both increase the profitability of 3nm…
5nm is good yield at the moment. It's even fully automotive qualified, which is a testament to its yield. But performance advantage vs cost doesn't justify to move from 7nm for a lot of designs. So tech adoption is getting stickier. For hogh performance designs like Apple CPUs going to the cutting edge is a given. So since 3nm is available 5nm lost its appeal. This is a new territory for TSMC but I think they handled…
> some is going back to 7nm and 6nm (shrunk 7nm) I think
You can also see the lasting popularity of 7nm-class nodes in consumer products. For example, RDNA3 uses 5nm for the core parts (GCD), but the peripheral parts (the memory chiplets/MCDs) are built on 6nm, and the monolithic low-end parts (RX 7600) are even fully built on 6nm.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's definitely a lot that can be critiqued about that period. Famously they divested their ARM-based mobile processor division just before smartphones took off. The new CEO, as the article mentions, seems to have a lot more of a clue. We just hope he hasn't arrived too late.
It's really sort of been downhill since they decided to play the speed number game over all else with the Pentium IV. Even the core i7/i9 lines that were good for a long time have gone absolutely crazy lately with heat and power consumption.
That's overly reductionist. Conroe topped out at around 3 GHz, compared to its predecessor Presler achieving 3.6 GHz.
I think Netburst mostly came from a misguided place where Intel thought that clock frequency was in fact the holy grail (and would scale far beyond what actually ended up happening), and that all the IPC issues such as costly mispredicts could be solved by e.g. improving branch prediction.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
How much is that elite independent of Xi? A relatively independent elite is probably a more stable system. But a completely subservient elite to the fearless leader is however much more dangerous.
I don’t think Xi is as independent as you believe, but that’s a matter of personal opinion. I just don’t think it’s very likely for just about any leader putting themselves into the position you are describing. This is a reoccurring narrative in western media, and I’m not here to defend dictators, but i feel like reality is less black and white than that. Many of the "crazed leaders" we are told are acting irrational…
I'm skeptical of you claims about Hussein but I will admit less familiarity with it. Your claim about Russia's motives are bunk
> Russia "irrationally" invading the Ukraine may seem that way to us, but let’s see.
Invading one of their largest neighbors and ruining their relationship with a nation they had significant cultural exchange and trade with (including many of their weapons factories) is irrational.
But Russia's leaders didn't want a positive neighborly relationship they wanted to conquer Ukraine and restore the empire. Putin has given speeches on this comparing himself to the old conquering czars.
> Russias economy is just about entirely dependent on their petrochem industry. Without, their are broke.
True enough
> The reason why they still can compete in this market is their asset of soviet infrastructure and industry.
Much of the equipment is western and installed in the post Soviet period.
> A good majority of USSR pipelines run through the Ukraine.
Then they probably shouldn't have invaded in 2014? Almost seems like they made a bad irrational choice. They had other pipelines that bypassed Ukraine like NS1 and NS2 which didn't enter service due to the war
> I’m not saying it’s okay for them to invade, but i can see what they seek to gain
Please explain what they tried to gain. Ukraine wouldn't have objected to exports of gas through Ukraine if not for the Russian invasion and they already had pipelines that bypassed Ukraine.
> and why exactly they fear NATO expansion all that much.
They don't fear NATO expansion, they disliked it because it prevented them from conquering or bullying countries with threats of invasion. They've taken troops of the NATO border with Finland (and didn't even invade Finland when Finland joined NATO). Russia acknowledged the right of eastern European nations to join NATO and promised to respect Ukraine's sovereignty and borders.
> I personally don’t see a similar gain to be had from China invading Taiwan, at least right now. They have lots to lose and little to gain. Taiwans semiconductor industry is useless without western IP, lithography equipment and customers. There are even emergency plans to destroy taiwans fabs in case of invasion. And that’s beside the damage done to mainland China itself.
The fabs are a red herring, they're largely irrelevant. If China invades (which I hope doesn't happen) it will not be because of any economic gains. There are no possible economic gains that would justify the costs of a war. If they invade it will be for the same reason that Russia did, because of extreme nationalism/revanchism and trying to use that extreme nationalism to maintain popularity among the population.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
I appreciate the deep cut. I definitely do not follow companies internally closely enough to see this coming. > (samsung or tsmc) both within a 500 mile radius circle in the south china sea. Within 500 mile radius of great power competitor, perhaps. The closest points on mainland Taiwan and Korea are 700 miles apart. Fabs about 1000 miles, by my loose reckoning.
A 500 mile radius circle has a diameter of 1000 miles, so you're both correct.
Ha, silly of me, quite right. Not exactly what comes to mind when drawing circles to include a city 2/3 south down Taiwan, and 2/3 north up RoK, but fair point.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
Have you read chip war? It will challenge your concerns
Yeah. Too much the cold war angle. I think he overstates the role of government/military and underestimates how much the consumer market has driven the process innovations that has made computing cheap and ubiquitous,
If you think the concern over China and Taiwan is understated I think you'd do well to look at how both the US and China are putting insane amounts of resources behind this.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#388I'm kind of bullish on Intel right now. They've moved up so many process nodes so quickly and have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab. Let's ignore the elephant in the room which is taiwan and it's sovereignty, and only focus on the core r&d. Intel flopped so hard on process nodes for 4 years up until Gelsinger took the reigns... it was honestly unprecedented levels of R&D failure. What happened over th…
>have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab In the terms of end product - not really. Last 3-4 gens are indistinguishable to the end user. It's a combined effect of marketing failure and really underwhelming gains - when marketing screams "breakthrough gen", but what you get is +2%/ST perf for another *Lake, you can't sell it. They might've built a foundation and that might be a deliberate tactics to get b…
Intel is still behind TSMC at this point in terms of raw process efficiency, but that rate of change is moving quickly and I posit that the products released later this year will have a process efficiency advantage over AMD's offerings for the first time since AMD abandoned global foundry.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#389I'm kind of bullish on Intel right now. They've moved up so many process nodes so quickly and have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab. Let's ignore the elephant in the room which is taiwan and it's sovereignty, and only focus on the core r&d. Intel flopped so hard on process nodes for 4 years up until Gelsinger took the reigns... it was honestly unprecedented levels of R&D failure. What happened over th…
> They've moved up so many process nodes so quickly and have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab. I'd buy this if they'd actually built a fab, but right now this seems too-little, too-late for a producer's economy. The rest frankly doesn't matter much. Intel processors are only notable in small sections of the market. And frankly—as counter-intuitive as this may seem to such an investor-bullish forum—the…
Licking County (next-gen, post-18A) has already broken ground and is in assembly, Magdeburg and Ireland (18A) also well underway and in production. Arizona's 20A facility (Fab 52 and Fab 62) have been done for half a year and are already in tape out. Not sure what is up for debate here, you can't really hide a $5BN infrastructure project from the public.
I think it's safe to say that 80BN+ in subsidies are already well in the process of being deployed. Intel, along with Samsung and TSMC, are heavily subsidized and have been so for a very long time. Any government with modest intelligence understands the gravity of having microchip manufacturing secured.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#390I'm kind of bullish on Intel right now. They've moved up so many process nodes so quickly and have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab. Let's ignore the elephant in the room which is taiwan and it's sovereignty, and only focus on the core r&d. Intel flopped so hard on process nodes for 4 years up until Gelsinger took the reigns... it was honestly unprecedented levels of R&D failure. What happened over th…
> This sudden shock of "we're going to invest everything in R&D and catch back up" was news that a lot of intel shareholders didn't want to hear. They dumped the stock and the price adjusted in kind. Why the fuck are shareholders often so short-sighted? Or do they just genuinely think the R&D investment won't pay off?
They bought the stock on the principle that it was going to pay a consistent 5% dividend every year and weren't looking for moonshots at the cost of that consistent revenue.