Intel has truly been on a remarkable spree of extremely poor strategic decisions for the last 20 years or so. Missed the boat on mobile, missed the boat on GPUs and AI, focused too much on desktop, and now AMD and ARM-based chips are eating their lunch in the data centre area.
Intel's Humbling
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Re: Intel's Humbling
#62Everyone acts as though Intel should have seen everything coming. Where was AMD? Was AMD really competitive before Ryzen? Nope. Core 2 series blew them out of the water. Was ARM really competitive until recently? Nope. Intel crushed them. The problem for Intel is the inertia of laziness due to a lack of competition. I wouldn’t count them out just yet, however. The company’s first true swing at modern GPU was actually…
Pretty certainly, Intel is improving, and of course should not be written off. But they did get themselves into a hole to dig out from, and not just because the 5nm process was really hard to get working.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#63As someone that doesn’t really understand the space and stuff that the article is talking about, I was surprised that “Apple Silicon” didn’t appear here since from my perspective having used both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, it’s a huge “wow” change. Was Apple leaving and Apple Silicon Macs being so incredibly better than Intel ones not actually a big deal for Intel?
Apple had been sandbagging the Intel chips for several generations of macbook with anemic cooling solutions, poor thermal throttling curves, and fans that wait until the last moment to turn on. To the extent that the fastest CPUs available in Macbook Pros did not outperform lower models, because both became thermally saturated. When properly cooled, the Intel silicon tends to perform a lot better. Additionally, both…
Re: Intel's Humbling
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
At those envelopes they are nowhere near as good as what Apple makes. Even if Intel makes a thing that doesn't mean it's actually any good. I had some of those Intel ULV parts back in the day. They sucked.
I'm not sure what you had back in the day, but even Intel's E cores these days are spritely. Gone are the days of slow Atom cores. Pretty sure an equivalently clocked Intel E core of today beats the fastest Intel core ever shipped in an Apple product.
Apple switched to their own silicon, and life for their customers has radically improved.
Maybe Intel has a great E Core now. Good for them if they do.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#65Intel has truly been on a remarkable spree of extremely poor strategic decisions for the last 20 years or so. Missed the boat on mobile, missed the boat on GPUs and AI, focused too much on desktop, and now AMD and ARM-based chips are eating their lunch in the data centre area.
Datacenters were and still are full of monstrous Xeons, and for a good reason.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#66Re: Intel's Humbling
#67Intel has truly been on a remarkable spree of extremely poor strategic decisions for the last 20 years or so. Missed the boat on mobile, missed the boat on GPUs and AI, focused too much on desktop, and now AMD and ARM-based chips are eating their lunch in the data centre area.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple had been sandbagging the Intel chips for several generations of macbook with anemic cooling solutions, poor thermal throttling curves, and fans that wait until the last moment to turn on. To the extent that the fastest CPUs available in Macbook Pros did not outperform lower models, because both became thermally saturated. When properly cooled, the Intel silicon tends to perform a lot better. Additionally, both…
Intel stopped making good chips for the things Apple cared about: efficient, cool designs that can run well with great battery life in attractive consumer products. Apple "sandbagging" was them desperately trying to get a poor Intel product to work in laptops they wanted to be thin and light. Even today though their designs haven't really changed all that much--in fact the MacBook Air is actually just as thin and now…
Re: Intel's Humbling
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple had been sandbagging the Intel chips for several generations of macbook with anemic cooling solutions, poor thermal throttling curves, and fans that wait until the last moment to turn on. To the extent that the fastest CPUs available in Macbook Pros did not outperform lower models, because both became thermally saturated. When properly cooled, the Intel silicon tends to perform a lot better. Additionally, both…
Absolutely ridiculous. No, Apple did not juice the M1 by giving it better cooling than x86. Quite the opposite, they took a big chunk of their design+process wins to the bank and exchanged them for even cooler and quieter operation because that's what they wanted all along. Cool and quiet was a deliverable . It's absurd to point out that apple could have gotten higher perf from x86 at higher power as if it's some kin…
This is such an uncharitable and adversarial interpretation of parent. Sandbagging intel =/= juicing M1.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#70Everyone acts as though Intel should have seen everything coming. Where was AMD? Was AMD really competitive before Ryzen? Nope. Core 2 series blew them out of the water. Was ARM really competitive until recently? Nope. Intel crushed them. The problem for Intel is the inertia of laziness due to a lack of competition. I wouldn’t count them out just yet, however. The company’s first true swing at modern GPU was actually…