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Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

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Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#441

Post by KerrAvon »

saltminer wrote: post #270
seabass-labrax wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was only just today looking for low-power x86 machines to run FreePBX, which does not yet have an ARM64 port. Whilst the consumer computing space is now perfectly served by ARM and will soon be joined by RISC-V, if a widely-used piece of free and open source server software is still x86-only, you can bet that there are thousands of bespoke business solutions that are locked to the ISA. A monopoly would hasten migra…

The fact that C++ development has been effectively hijacked by the "no ABI breakage, ever"/backwards compatibility at all costs crowd certainly speaks to this. https://herecomesthemoon.net/2024/11/two-factions-of-cpp/ There are a lot of pre-compiled binaries floating about that are depended on by lots of enterprise software whose source code is long gone, and these are effectively locked to x86_64 chips until the cos…

C++ language spec doesn't specify and doesn't care about ABI (infamously so; it's kept the language from being used in many places, and where people ignored ABI compat initially but absolutely needed it in the future, as with BeOS's Application Kit and Mac kexts, it's much harder to maintain than it should be.

"two factions" is only discussing source compatibility.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#442

Post by sitkack »

throw0101a wrote: post #324
Octoth0rpe wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now. I think you're off by 20 years on this. In the 80s and early 90s we had reasonable competition from 68k, powerpc, and arm on desktops; and tons of competition in the server space (mips, sparc, power, alpha, pa-risc, edit: and vax!). It wasn't till the early 2000s that both the desktop/server space coalesced around x86.

> It wasn't till the early 2000s that both the desktop/server space coalesced around x86. A lot of companies killed off their in-house architectures and hopped on the Itanium bandwagon. The main two exceptions were Sun and IBM.

The bandwagon was actually an Ice Cream truck run by the old lady from the Sponge Bob movie.

Intel had just wiped the floor with x86 servers, all the old guard Unix vendors with their own chips were hurting. Then Intel makes the rounds with a glorious plan of how they were going to own the server landscape for a decade or more. So in various states of defeat and grief much of the industry followed them. Planned or not, the resulting rug pull really screwed them over. The organs that operated those lines of businesses were fully removed. It worked too well, I am going to say it was on accident.

Intel should have broken up its internal x86 hegemony a long time ago, which they have been trying since the day it was invented. Like the 6502, it was just too successful for its own good. Only x86 also built up the Vatican around itself.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#443

Post by KerrAvon »

zarzavat wrote: post #264
etempleton wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True CEO retirements are announced in advance and do not lead to a strange co-interim CEO situation.

It's possible he's sick. Who could know?

That sort of transition would be managed unambiguously. This is a firing.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#444

Post by heisenbit »

etempleton wrote: post #64

I feel like this is a mistake. Pat's strategy is aggressive but what the company needs. Intel's stock is jumping at this announcement, but I look at it as a bad signal for Intel 18a. If 18a was looking to be a smash hit then I don't think Pat gets retired. If 18a is a success then it is an even more short-sighted decision by the board. What this likely means is two-fold: 1. Intel 18a is being delayed further and/or t…

The problem is that this transition is very capital intensive and all the money was spent on share buybacks the past decades. The stock market looks at CPUs and GPUs and likes the latter a lot more so no fresh money from there. At the moment the only stakeholder with a vital interest in Intel semiconductor capabilities is the US government and even that may change as a result of Trump.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#445

Post by hunglee2 »

eigenvalue wrote: post #194
hunglee2 wrote: post #54

Gelsinger got screwed by the CHIPS Act. The promise of state backing for a US champion SC fab was taken seriously by Gelsinger, who went all-in in trying to remake Intel as TSMC 2.0. But the money turned out to be way too late and far more conditional than Gelsinger thought. This is bad news for Intel, bad news for US industrial policy

It was a big mistake to rely on Government handouts to save the company then. You never want to rely on something you have almost no control over.

yeah true. Also the govt prob not used to state intervention in this way - learning a lot of new lessons on how to do it, on the fly

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#446

Post by dagmx »

kllrnohj wrote: post #384
dagmx wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a very clear bias and idolization in this comment of yours which is based on a misunderstanding of the case at hand. ARM aren’t trying to force Qualcomm to use ARMs cores. They’re trying to force them to update the licensing royalties to make up for the (as ARM sees it) licensing term violations of Nuvia who had a design license for specific use cases. The part you reference (using ARM designs) is the fallbac…

Qualcomm already had a design license prior to the acquisition of Nuvia. They were doing custom cores back in the original Kryo days which were an in-house custom ARMv8.0-A design.

Their design license doesn’t extend to Nuvia’s IP however according to ARM.

That is the entire crux of the issue. ARM gave Nuvia a specific license, and then Nuvia was acquired which transferred the IP to a license that ARM did not extend it to.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#447

Post by paxys »

7speter wrote: post #440
paxys wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and the company is only now starting to turn the wheel How is it starting to turn the wheel?

It takes something like 5 or 6 years to go from the drawing board for a chip design, and many years to create a process node. Gelsinger hasn't really even had the chance to execute on designs that were started during his tenure. My understanding is that would've started with Intel 18A.

That doesn't really answer the question. Yes he has started initiatives that will take 5-6 years to pan out. Is there an early indication that they aren't all duds? How can anyone state with any certainty that Intel is on a better path today than it was 4 years ago when every single measurable metric is continuing to decline?

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#448

Post by AnthonyMouse »

etempleton wrote: post #224
xbar wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to address the aside for completeness' sake. An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now. Today, there are sufficient competitive chip architectures with cross-compatible operating systems and virtualization that x86 does not represent control of the computing market in a manner that should prevent such a merger: ARM licensees, including the special case of Apple Silicon, Snapdragon, NVIDIA SOCs…

This is all very true and why I think a merger between AMD and Intel is even possible. Nvidia and Intel is also a possible merger, but I actually think there is more regulatory concern with NVIDIA and how big and dominant they are becoming.

Intel and Samsung could be interesting, especially if it would get Samsung to open up more. Samsung would get better GPUs and x86, Intel gets access to the phone market and then you end up with things like x86 Samsung tablets that can run both Windows or Android.

Could also be Intel and Micron. Then you end up with full stack devices with Intel CPUs and Micron RAM and storage, and the companies have partnered in the past.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#450

Post by pclmulqdq »

jpalawaga wrote: post #341
mastax wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD has a big wafer supply agreement with GlobalFoundries, and has since the spinoff. It was exclusive until the seventh WSA in 2019 which allowed AMD to purchase 7nm and beyond from other suppliers (without paying penalties) which was the only reasonable resolution after GloFo cancelled their 7nm fab (which may have been the best thing to happen to AMD). But AMD increased their GloFo orders in May and December 2021…

right. so glofo couldn't keep up abandoned the bleeding edge. what's the evidence that intel foundaries, divorced from design, wouldn't suffer the same fate?

With the design side, Intel foundries have struggled to keep up with TSMC. It's not clear that the design side helps. My guess is that it's actually a question of corporate culture, and that AMD's ambitious, driven people stuck with AMD.
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