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Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

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Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#551

Post by layer8 »

hn3er1q wrote: post #468
michaelt wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PCIe is great, yes. Sadly with the rise of laptops with soldered-in-everything, and the popularity of android/iphone/tablet devices, I share some of layer8's worries about the future of the relatively open PC architecture and hardware ecosystem.

On the one hand I do get the concern, on the other there’s never been a better time to be a hardware hacker. Cheap microcontrollers abound, raspberry pi etc, cheap fpgas, one can even make their own asic. So I just can’t get that worked up over pc architectures getting closed.

Hacking on that level is very different from building and upgrading PCs, being able to mix and match components from a wide range of different manufacturers. You won’t or can’t build a serious NAS, Proxmox homelab, gaming PC, workstation, or GPU/compute farm from Raspberry Pis or FPGAs.

We are really lucky that such a diverse and interoperable hardware platform like the PC exists. We should not discount it, and instead appreciate how important it is, and how unlikely for such a varied and high-performance platform to emerge again, should the PC platform die.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#552

Post by klelatti »

rwmj wrote: post #533
klelatti wrote: post #501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Arm's major competition is RISC-V. Qualcomm engineers have been joining the important RISC-V committees recently. If Arm beats Qualcomm in the courts, Qualcomm will switch to RISC-V, and then Arm will have won the battle but lost the war.

If Qualcomm loses to Arm in the courts then they have a big problem in 2025 which switching to RISC-V at some point in the future will not solve for them.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#553

Post by amaranth »

PaulHoule wrote: post #481
phkahler wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> If 18a is not ready I think the best case scenario for Intel is a merger with AMD. Aside from the x86 monopoly that would create, I don't think Intel has much of value to AMD at this point other than the fabs (which aren't delivering). IMHO if Intel is failing, let them fail and others will buy the pieces in bankruptcy. This would probably benefit several other companies that could use 22nm and up fab capacity and…

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…

My understanding is that most of the complaints about Vista being unstable came from the nvidia driver being rather awful [1]. You were likely to either have a system that couldn't actually run Vista or have one that crashed all the time, unless you were lucky enough to have an ATI GPU.

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2008-03-27-nvidia-drivers-responsib...

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#554

Post by AdrianB1 »

MPSFounder wrote: post #499

I worked for 3 months for Intel. I can genuinely say that there is no saving that company. Recently, they are hiring many PhDs from various US universities (particularly Indians) to try to compensate (they offer generous stocks and are hiring like crazy right now). There are two major problems I saw: lack of genuine interest in fabs (most people are there for the Intel name and then leave or in the case of Indians, t…

A few years ago a CEO of Intel (not Gelsinger) said something like "our CPU architecture is so well-known every college student can work on it". A friend working at Intel at that time translated it to me: "we will hire cheap students to work on chips and we will let the expensive engineers leave". At least in his department the senior engineers left, they were replaced by fresh graduates. It did not work, that department closed. I have no idea how widespread this was inside Intel, but I saw it in other big companies, in some with my own eyes.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#555

Post by osnium123 »

patrickmoo wrote: post #309
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…

Friends that work at intel said gelsinger and the board have done EVERYTHING wrong in the past four years. From blowing key customer accounts to borderline malfeasance with payouts. It’s also the board that needs to go too for enabling. The merger with amd sounds like the right path.

Are your friends on the fab/foundry side of things?

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#557

Post by atq2119 »

grecy wrote: post #299
etempleton wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would have at least 5 years to figure it out before ARM becomes viable on desktop assuming there continues to be movement in that direction. There is so little incentive to move away from x86 right now. The latest Intel mobile processors address the efficiency issues and prove that x86 can be efficient enough for laptops. IT departments are not going to stop buying x86 processors until they absolutely are forced…

> There is so little incentive to move away from x86 right now Massively lower power consumption and way less waste heat to dispose of. Literally the two biggest concerns of every data centre on earth.

ARM does not inherently have "massively lower power consumption and waste heat", though.

Market forces have traditionally pushed Intel and AMD to design their chips for a less efficient part of the frequency/power curve than ARM vendors. That changed a few years ago, and you can already see the results in x86 chips becoming more efficient.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#558

Post by tpm »

colejohnson66 wrote: post #226
tpm wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AMD AM5 are also not great at having enough PCIe lanes, hence at most one connected PCIe5 x16 GPU, if you need more it's x8 for 2 GPUs and so on, and that's before we connect fast M2 storage, fast USB4 slots etc. If you need more PCIe lanes, you have to buy a Threadripper or Epyc and that's easily 10 times the price for the whole system.

PCIe lanes and DDR channels take up the most pins on a CPU connector (ignoring power). The common solution (for desktops) is to have a newest generation protocol (5) at the CPU level, then use the chipset to fan out more lanes at a lower generation (4).

I understand the tradeoff, but it left a segment of the market between pure consumer solutions and pure productivity/server solutions in no mans land.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#559

Post by burnte »

bluGill wrote: post #541
burnte wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some were straight second sources but they all had the license to do what NEC, AMD, and OKI did, which is alter the design and sell these variants. They all started doing that with the 8086. There were variants of the 8086, 8088, and 80186, I'm unaware of variants of the 80188, or 80286 although there were still multiple manufacturers, I had a Harris 286 at 20MHz myself. Then with the 386 there were more custom varia…

At what point do we call a tweak to an original design different enough to count it... K5 and K6 where clearly new designs. The others were mostly intel with some changes. I'm going to count the rest as minor tweaks and not worth counting otherwise - but this is a case where you can argue there the line is and so others need to decide where they stand (if they care)

I called the K5 and 6 new designs, I said they were only ISA and pin compatible, but not the same design.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#560

Post by gautamcgoel »

kjellsbells wrote: post #78

Sad 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…

Nitpick: they don't have $4B in public stock, they have about 4B shares outstanding, each of which is currently trading at about $25.
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