The article mostly focuses on the 2008-2014 era.
Yes. It is part of a series in which I cover Shockley -> Fairchild -> Intel, up to last month.
Intel: Winning and Losing
51–60 of 110 posts
Re: Intel: Winning and Losing
#52The core problem at Intel is they promoted the myth that ISA has no impact on performance to such a degree they started fully believing it while also somehow believing their process advantage was unassailable. By that time they'd accumulated so many worthless departments that turning it around at any time after 2010 was an impossibility. You could be the greatest business leader in history but you cannot save Intel w…
https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter
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Re: Intel: Winning and Losing
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
At some point organizations get taken over by the 9-5 crowd who just want to collect a paycheck and live a nice life. This also leads to the hard-driving talent to leave for more aggressive organizations, leaving behind a more average team. What leaders remain will come up with not so great ideas, and the rank and file will follow along because there won't be a critical mass of passionate thought leaders to find a be…
Disagree. 9-5 working is fine, and probably more efficient long term than permanent crunches. Organisations fail when the ‘business’ people take over. People who let short term money-thinking make the decisions, instead good taste, vision or judgement. Think Intel when they turned down making the iPhone chips because they didn’t think it’d be profitable enough, or Google’s head of advertising (same guy who killed yah…
Nah I’ve been on both sides of the fence. 9-5ers may reliably accomplish tasks through superior discipline, but they don’t do the heroics that really move individual teams forward.
Re: Intel: Winning and Losing
#54The site’s domain name is the best use of a .fail tld ever.
OT from TFA, so high jacking your thread … I don’t recall if there was ever a difference between “abort” and “fail.” I could choose to abort the operation, or tell it … to fail? That this is a failure? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Take reading a file from disk.
Abort would cancel the entire file read.
Retry would attempt that sector again.
Fail would fail that sector, but the program might decide to keep trying to read the rest of the file.
In practice abort and fail were often the same.
Re: Intel: Winning and Losing
#55Mr. Magoo-ism galore. Intel had constantly try to bring in visionaries, but failed over and over. With the exception of Jim Keller, Intel was duped into believing in incompetent people. At a critical juncture during the smart-phone revolution it was Mike Bell, a full-on Mr. Magoo. He never did anything after his stint with Intel worth mentioning - he was exposed as a pretender. Eric Kim would be another. Murthy Rendu…
Interesting to me is that Intel was constantly shedding people in 2008 and 2009 with high revenues, high market share, tech leads, etc.
Smacks of financialization and wall-street centric managerial groupthink, rather than having the talented engineers to fight the coming mobile wars which were already very very apparent (thus the Atom), or even the current war of failure in discrete graphics.
Once the MBAs gain control of a dynamic technology company (I saw it at Medtronic personally), the technology and talent soul of the company is on a ticking timer of death. Medtronic turned into a acquire-tech-and-products-via buyout/acquisition rather than in-house, and Intel was also a treadmill of acquire-destroy (at least from my perspective Medtronic sometimes acquired companies and they became successful product lines, but Intel always seemed clueless in executing their acquisitions.
I look at all the 2000s acquisitions of Intel: sure shows they were "trying" at mobile, in the "signal wall street we are trying by acquiring companies so we keep our executive positions" but zero about actually chasing what mobile needed: low power, high performance.
Re: Intel: Winning and Losing
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
I could tell they were cooked when they bought McAfee.
They what??
Oh I forgot that one. That's hilarious.
> McAfee Corp. ... Intel Security Group from 2014 to 2017
Re: Intel: Winning and Losing
#57I'll give a viewpoint that the article reads like a listing of spec sheets and process improvements for CPUs of that era and not much else. Not really worth reading imho. I'd love some discussion on why Intel left XScale and went to Atom and i think Itanium is worthy of discussion in this era too. I don't really want a raw listing of [In year X Intel launched Y with SPEC_SHEET_LISTING features].
>Itanium IMO, Intel took us from common, affordable CPUs to high-priced, "Intel-only" CPUs. It was originally designed to use Rambus RAM, and it turned out Intel had a stake in that company. Intel got greedy and tried to force the market to go the way it wanted. Honestly, AMD saved the x86 market for us common folks. Their approach of extending x86 to 64-bit and adopting DDR RAM allowed for the continuation of afford…
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Re: Intel: Winning and Losing
#58Mr. Magoo-ism galore. Intel had constantly try to bring in visionaries, but failed over and over. With the exception of Jim Keller, Intel was duped into believing in incompetent people. At a critical juncture during the smart-phone revolution it was Mike Bell, a full-on Mr. Magoo. He never did anything after his stint with Intel worth mentioning - he was exposed as a pretender. Eric Kim would be another. Murthy Rendu…
Interesting to me is that Intel was constantly shedding people in 2008 and 2009 with high revenues, high market share, tech leads, etc. Smacks of financialization and wall-street centric managerial groupthink, rather than having the talented engineers to fight the coming mobile wars which were already very very apparent (thus the Atom), or even the current war of failure in discrete graphics. Once the MBAs gain contr…
shedding ppl in the USA, yes. bringing on hordes of cheap engineers from India and Malaysia at the same time though. labor arbitrage was probably MBA-think as well, to your point. (also, Intel was sued along with other big wheels for collusion, i.e. agreeing not to hire from one another in the US to keep salaries down - they settled this class action suit). managed demolition of a once great company.
Re: Intel: Winning and Losing
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disagree. 9-5 working is fine, and probably more efficient long term than permanent crunches. Organisations fail when the ‘business’ people take over. People who let short term money-thinking make the decisions, instead good taste, vision or judgement. Think Intel when they turned down making the iPhone chips because they didn’t think it’d be profitable enough, or Google’s head of advertising (same guy who killed yah…
Nah I’ve been on both sides of the fence. 9-5ers may reliably accomplish tasks through superior discipline, but they don’t do the heroics that really move individual teams forward.
Once the MBAs take over there is less incentive provided to staff to innovate and disrupt internal products and services.
The innovators in the company are likely correlated with doing more than 9-5. These people get frustrated that their ideas no longer get traction and leave the company.
Eventually what's left are the people happy to just deliver what their told without much extra thought. These people are probably more likely to just clock in the hours. Any remaining innovators now have another reason to become even more frustrated and leave.
Re: Intel: Winning and Losing
#60Intel is a failed monopolist, unlike Apple! So is IBM with MCA, micro-channel-architecture
I would argue that IBM failed with the BIOS, since they assumed nobody could make a compatible machine without their authorization since they controlled the BIOS and the idea of a clean room reimplementation never dawned on them. It did dawn on Compaq. MCA came afterward.