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Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

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Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#501
post #295
post #115

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Being a customer shouldn’t protect a company from lawsuits. ARM feels they have merit here , just like Qualcomm did when they sued Apple. It’s not that rare in the corporate setting to have suits between companies with otherwise amicable relationships.

The optics can still be terrible. Qualcomm (or more accurately, Nuvia, the company they acquired) produced some stunning chips with almost unheard of battery life for a laptop, and Arm are suing them to use their own inferior designs. They even tried to have end user laptops recalled and destroyed! There's no world where this looks good for Arm.

Hypothetically, if Qualcomm have broken their Arm licenses in a way that damages Arm’s business do you think Arm are supposed to just let them carry on? Should Arm say ‘legal action won’t look good so we’ll just let it pass’?

And the fact that Qualcomm got just about everyone to endorse the acquisition ahead of announcing it but didn’t even tell Arm is a bit of a tell.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#502
post #471

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Wars involving the US in the 21st century: War in Afghanistan (2001–2021) US intervention in Yemen (2002–present) Iraq War (2003–2011) US intervention in the War in North-West Pakistan (2004–2018) Second US Intervention in the Somali Civil War (2007–present) Operation Ocean Shield (2009–2016) Intervention in Libya (2011) Operation Observant Compass (2011–2017) US military intervention in Niger (2013–2024) US-led inte…

I don’t know what you are trying to say. If you have a point to make, at least be honest about it. Also, I am not American and not an I conditional supporter of their foreign policy. And considering the trajectory of American politics it is obvious that any foreign multinational developing in the US should have contingency plans.

My point was that great powers are always in some kind of military conflict, so it's not really a deciding factor when choosing where to build an R&D.

Putin's concentration of power has been alarming, but only since around 2012, to be honest. It was relatively stable between 2000 and 2012 in general (minus isolated cases of mysterious deaths and imprisonments). Russia was business-friendly back then, open to foreign investors, and most of Putin's authoritarian laws were yet to be issued. Most of the conflicts Russia was involved in were viewed as local conflicts in border areas (Chechen separatism, disputed Georgian territories, frozen East Ukrainian conflict, etc.). Only in 2022 did the Ukraine war escalate to its current scale, and few people really saw it coming (see: thousands of European/American businesses operating in Russia by 2022 without any issue)

So I kind of see why Intel didn't do much about it until 2022. In fact, they even built a second R&D center in 2020... (20 years after the first one).

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#503

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…

Reuters has some inside information: https://www.reuters.com/business/intel-ceo-pat-gelsinger-ret...

>Gelsinger, who resigned on Dec. 1, left after a board meeting last week during which directors felt Gelsinger's costly and ambitious plan to turn Intel around was not working and the progress of change was not fast enough, according to a person familiar with the matter. The board told Gelsinger he could retire or be removed, and he chose to step down, according to the source.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#504

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What a frankly weird oversimplification? GPUs don't exist because CPUs aren't fast enough. GPUs exist because CPUs aren't parallel enough. And to achieve that parallelism, they sacrifice massive amounts of performance to get it. A GPU-only computer would be absolutely horrendous to use. It'd be incredibly slow and unresponsive as GPUs just absolutely suck at running single-threaded code or branchy code.

I mean you can splits hairs about the difference between CPU and GPUs all you want. The overall point is that work is being increasingly done _not_ on the CPU. If your business is CPUs-only then you're going to have rough times as the world moves away from a CPU-centric world. You don't need to predict AI; you just need to see that alternatives are being looked at by competitors and you'll lose an edge if you don't a…

> The overall point is that work is being increasingly done _not_ on the CPU.

Eh? GPGPU has been a thing for decades and yet barely made a dent in the demand for CPUs. Heck, CUDA is 17 years old!

The world has not budged from being CPU-centric and it isn't showing any signs of doing so. GPUs remain an accelerator for specialized workloads and are going to continue to be just that.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#505

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A lot of people on this thread are underestimating how much of a hold Intel has on the chips industry. In my experience, Intel is synonymous with computer chip for the average person. Most people wouldn't be able to tell you what AMD does differently, they'd just say they're a knockoff Intel. Technologically, both companies are neck and neck. But for the average person, it's not even close.

People miss this. A lot of people will only buy Intel. Businesses and IT departments rarely buy AMD, not just out of brand loyalty, but because of the software and hardware features Intel deploys that are catered to the business market.

>A lot of people will only buy Intel. Businesses and IT departments rarely buy AMD

That's because Intel bribed OEMs to use only Intel chips

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#506
post #493

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Intel GFX held back the industry 10 years. If people thought Windows Vista sucked it was because Intel "supported" it by releasing integrated GPUs which could almost handle Windows Vista but not quite. The best they could do with the GFX business is a public execution. We've been hearing about terrible Intel GFX for 15 years and how they are just on the cusp of making one that is bad (not terrible). Most people who'v…

> If people thought Windows Vista sucked it was because Intel "supported" it by releasing integrated GPUs which could almost handle Windows Vista but not quite. What does an OS need a GPU for? My current laptop only has integrated Intel GPU. I'm not missing Nvidia, with its proprietary drivers, high power consumption, and corresponding extra heat and shorter battery life...

Composiors are generally switching to being gpu accelerated, not to mention apps will do their own gpu accelerated UIs just because the OS ui systems are all junk at the moment

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#507

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One argument I've hard in favor of the split is this: If you are AMD/NVDA/other top player, do you want to send your IP to an Intel owned fab for production? At least in theory, a fully independent, split/spun out standalone fab removes this concern. That said - what does Intel have to offer the top players here? Their fabs are being state of the art. And what's the standalone value of post-spin fabless Intel if thei…

Eh, firewalls can be made strong enough, at least for some things. A software parallel is: you are Apple / Facebook, do you use Azure and/or AWS? I wouldn't, if it were me, but they do.

Maybe but I think AWS arguably is a different scale of automation. There’s no Amazon human in the loop looking at your source. Sure a human SRE could peak into your system but that’s something of an exception.

I can’t imagine fabs have that level of automation. It’s not like sending a file to your printer. It’s a multi month or year project in some cases to get your design produced. There’s many humans involved surely.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#508
post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If people thought Windows Vista sucked it was because Intel "supported" it by releasing integrated GPUs which could almost handle Windows Vista but not quite. What does an OS need a GPU for? My current laptop only has integrated Intel GPU. I'm not missing Nvidia, with its proprietary drivers, high power consumption, and corresponding extra heat and shorter battery life...

> What does an OS need a GPU for? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero

The modern paradigm of "application blasts out a rectangle of pixels" and "the desktop manager composes those into another rectangle of pixels and blasts them out to the screen".

It actually separates the OS from the GPU. Before WDDM your GFX device driver was the only software that could use GFX acceleration. After WDDM the GPU is another "processor" in your computer that can read and write to RAM and the application can use the GPU in user space any way it wants, and then the compositor can to the same (in user space) and in the end all the OS is managing communication with the GPU.

For that approach to work you need to have enough fill rate that you can redraw the screen several times per frame. Microsoft wanted to have enough they could afford some visual bling, but Intel didn't give to them.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#509

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Intel doesn't have to open source anything. People will build everything needed to run intel cards efficiently as there is currently zero options for affordable video cards with high memory. It's either old slow Tesla cards with 48GB or $2000 nvidia cards with 24GB.

> People will build everything needed to run intel cards efficiently as there is currently zero options for affordable video cards with high memory. I think you're overestimating what people can and will do. Nvidia didn't succeed because it just launchend cards and let people write CUDA for them. Nvidia is where it is because it has an army of researchers and SW engineers developing the full stack from research paper…

>Nvidia is where it is because it has an army of researchers and SW engineers developing

The current local model/open source model community is literally an army of SWE's and researchers. They already make tons of tooling too.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#510
post #142

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> The moat of the two companies together would give the new combined company plenty of time to ramp up their fabs. I'm not convinced of this. Fabs are incredibly expensive businesses. Intel has failed to keep up and AMD spun off their fabs to use TSMC. There is also ARM knocking at the door for general computing. It's already gaining traction in previously x86 dominated markets. The model for US based fabbing has to…

Honestly, I wouldn't put it behind IBM to turn it around with POWER revival. They'd been doing some cool stuff recently with their NorthPole accelerator[1], and using 12nm process while at it, indicating there's much room for improvement. It could eventually become a relatively open, if not super affordable platform. There's precedent with OpenPOWER! And not to mention RISC-V, of course, championed by Jim Keller et a…

IBM did lay an egg with Power10, though. They cut corners and used proprietary IP and as a result there are few (are there any?) non-IBM Power10 systems because the other vendors stayed away. Raptor workstations and servers are a small-ish part of the market but they're comparatively highly visible - and they're still on POWER9 (no S1 yet).

They did realize the tactical error, so I'm hoping Power11 will reverse the damage.

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