Feels like the wrong move. Turning a chip company around has timescales of a decade. Getting rid of a CEO 3 years in simply means no turnaround is going to happen.
Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
521–530 of 777 posts
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple Silicon was designed to be efficient at emulating x86-64. If you take that away, it becomes irrelevant (like many other ARM-based processors that struggle to be a good product because of compatibility). Apple has a promising path for x86 liberation, but it is not there yet.
> One of the key reasons why Rosetta 2 provides such a high level of translation efficiency is the support of x86-64 memory ordering in the Apple M1 SOC. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138376212...
TSO might be slower than ARM’s memory ordering, but implementing it in hardware is considered faster than implementing it in software.
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
A Broadcom/Apple takeover of Intel sounds much more reasonable. Out of curiosity, what would make Intel interesting to Apple? Apple already acquired Intel's modem business and they have their own CPU and GPU.
I think Apple has the cash, culture and management to make the fabs work. But I'm just speculating.
Apple is really good in making OTHER PEOPLE'S fabs work for their purposes. Running their own manufacturing was never particularly a forté.
Apple currently really enjoys being on the very latest process node. It's not a given that they could match or improve on that with their own fab (Sure, there is a lot of VLSI design and materials experience, but that does not automatically translate into a state of the art process, and is unlikely to contain the magic ingredient to get Intel back on top).
And in the unlikely case it SHOULD work, that will only invite further regulatory headaches.
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#524Earlier quoted context omitted.
Marketing campaigns only go so far. They’ve been riding the “Intel Inside” slogan for 25 years. In the mean time, AMD/ARM already won phones, table and game consoles. Server purchasing decisions aren’t made by everyday people. Intel’s roadmap in that space slipped year for year for at least 10 of the last 15 years. That leaves Intel with the fraction of the non-mac laptop market that’s made up of people that haven’t…
>In the mean time, AMD/ARM already won phones, table and game consoles. Don't forget laptops. Intel has been terrible on laptops due to their lack of efficiency. AMD has been wiping the floor with them for years now. 2024 is the first year that Intel has released a laptop chip that can compete in efficiency. I hope Intel continues to invest in this category and remain neck and neck with AMD if we have any hope of hav…
I doubt most people actually care about efficiency in a laptop. My wife is my anecdotal example. She's had a mac for years but refuses to give Apple one more penny because they've been awful - had to replace her previous laptop motherboard 7 times until we finally had to sue Apple in a class action which resulted in them sending her current 2015 MBP, which has now aged-out of MacOS updates. Sucks that this computer is now basically a paperweight.
Anyway, in my questions for her about what she really cares about in a new laptop, power efficiency was not a concern of hers. She does not care about efficiency at all. All she cared about was a good enough screen (2560x1440 or better), and a fast CPU to run the new Photoshop features, and the ability to move it from one location to another (hence the need for a laptop instead of a desktop). I'd wager that for most people, the fact that it's a portable computer has nothing to do with how long the battery lasts away from an outlet. She can transport the computer to another location and plug it in. There are very few situations that require extended use away from an outlet, and even in an airplane, we often see 120V outlets at the seats. There's really no use case for her that puts her away from an outlet for longer than an hour or two, so efficiency is the least of her concerns in buying a new laptop.
So we went with a new Dell laptop with the Intel i9-13900HX, which beats the Apple M4 Max 16 Core in terms of overall performance in CPU benchmarks. I would have looked at an AMD based laptop, but the price on this Dell and the performance of the i9 were great, it was $999 on sale. It's got a decent enough screen, and we can easily upgrade the RAM and storage on this laptop.
I doubt she'd even care if the new laptop didn't have a battery at all, so long as she can easily stuff it in a bag and carry it to another location and plug it in. I feel the exact same way, and I recently bought a new (AMD based) laptop, and power efficiency was not a thing in my decision making process at all. The battery lasts a few hours, and that's plenty. I don't get a hard-on for battery life, and I'm not really sure who does. Are these people dancing around with their laptops and simply can't sit still and plug it in?
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#525Sad to see Gelsinger go, but despite the churn, I don't think Intel is doomed. At worst, per their most recent Q3 results, I see $150Bn in assets and $4Bn in outstanding stock, and I see the US Gov (both incoming and outgoing) gearing up for a long war against China where Intel would be an asset of national importance. My back of envelope calculation says Intel should be about $35 a share (150/4). If they stumble whe…
Interested in your opinion, since TSMC has fabs in the US now, are Intel still relevant even in the context of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan?
Taiwanese law forbids TSMC manufacturing chips abroad using their latest process, so no 2nm in the US fabs,this leaves Intel's 18A as the mist advanced one in US soil.
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
They aren't divesting from discrete GPUs. The Battlemage launch is tomorrow.
With the B770 16GB gone and the idea for the B580 to be cheaper than current 7600 XT @ 16 GB by cutting 4 GB makes Battlemage DOA. A gamer making an investment on a card for ~3 years cares less about spending ~$30 more vs being unable to run high resolution texture packs on a gimped GPU. The XMX cores are superior for AI for a month until Blackwell with smaller 2 and 4FP units, but a month is too little lead to overc…
Maybe you are right and Battlemage is DOA. Perhaps intel know that and just want to dump inventory before announcing they will get out of the GPU business.
On the other hand, maybe not.
My point is that although you might think they are going to divest the GPU business in future, we don't know that for sure and it's kind of weird to present it as having already happened.
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple saw the writing on the wall and bailed years ago, built their own chips and denied them a large customer. It’s a really bad sign when a customer decides it can out innovate you by internally copying your entire business and production line.
> It’s a really bad sign when a customer decides it can out innovate you by internally copying your entire business and production line. Not necessarily, at scale, especially Apple's scale, vertical integration can make a ton of sense - for control, innovation, price, risk hedging.
It is not apple's decision that is the bad sign. There can be plenty of reasons for that as you mention and wouldn't be of note if their chips were poorer or even similar to intel in performance
It is the fact they can build a much better chip in almost any metric so far ahead of Intel is the red flag.
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#528Earlier 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?
No evidence, intel doesn't have the resources to be fighting tsmc, and, arm and nvidia, apple and samsung in different technologies at the same time.( foundry, gpus, cpus, NAND ,SSD etc)
They already sold the NAND memory business to SK hynix in 2021.
They will have to focus, that means getting out lines of business which may likely die.
That would be better than going bankrupt and your competitors picking the pieces
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#529Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
We are at the perfect moment to re-embrace software rasterizers because CPU manufacturers are starting to add HBM and v-cache. An 8K 32bpp framebuffer is ... omg 126MB for a single copy. I was going to argue that a software rasterizer running on vcache would be doable, but not for 8k. For 4k, with 32MB per display buffer, it could be possible but heavy compositing will require going out to main memory. 1440p would be…
Does 4k matter?
I was doing a11y work for an application a few months back and got interested into the question of desktop screen sizes. I see all these ads for 4k and bigger monitors but they don't show up here
https://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/desktop/w...
And on the steam hardware survey I am seeing a little more than 5% with a big screen.
Myself I am swimming in old monitors and TV to the point where I am going to start putting Pepper's ghost machines in my windows. I think I want to buy a new TV, but I get a free old TV. I pick up monitors that are in the hallway and people are tripping on them and I take them home. Hypothetically I want a state-of-the-art monitor with HDR and wide gamut and all that but the way things are going I might never buy a TV or monitor again.
Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
And by "are generally switching" you're really trying to say "generally switched a decade ago".
'cept for Linux.