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Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

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Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#641

Post by sterlind »

seabass-labrax wrote: post #190
xbar wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to address the aside for completeness' sake. An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now. Today, there are sufficient competitive chip architectures with cross-compatible operating systems and virtualization that x86 does not represent control of the computing market in a manner that should prevent such a merger: ARM licensees, including the special case of Apple Silicon, Snapdragon, NVIDIA SOCs…

I was only just today looking for low-power x86 machines to run FreePBX, which does not yet have an ARM64 port. Whilst the consumer computing space is now perfectly served by ARM and will soon be joined by RISC-V, if a widely-used piece of free and open source server software is still x86-only, you can bet that there are thousands of bespoke business solutions that are locked to the ISA. A monopoly would hasten migra…

Surely there must be an emulator you could use?

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#642

Post by FullyFunctional »

nabla9 wrote: post #503
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…

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…

Thanks, finally a signal in this thread of noise. I found it unbelievable that all media presented it as if it was his decision. Of course it wasn't.

I "predicted" this three months ago (really, it was inevitable), but gave it 1-6 months.

Now for the what-happens-next popcorn. In a normal world, they would go bankrupt, but this is very much not a normal world.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#643

Post by lotsofpulp »

shiroiushi wrote: post #623
lotsofpulp wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would bet 95%+ of people who use Excel are not affected by any difference between Excel for macOS versus Windows.

95% of people who use Photoshop would probably be served just fine by Krita, or even GIMP if they learned the somewhat wonky UI, and would save a ton of money in the process. However, people usually want to use the "standard" because of some vague fear that the alternative isn't 100.00% compatible, or that it won't have some obscure feature that they don't even know about yet, etc. I think Excel is exactly like this…

I was disputing this claim:

> If you need to use Excel at work, you need x86 since Excel for Mac is a gutted toy

The nominal cost of Excel was not the topic being discussed. It was the cost of using Excel for MacOS rather than Excel for Windows.

Almost no one needs the Windows specific features of Excel, so almost no one needs to give up using macOS just because of Excel.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#645

Post by shiroiushi »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #643
shiroiushi wrote: post #623

Earlier quoted context omitted.

95% of people who use Photoshop would probably be served just fine by Krita, or even GIMP if they learned the somewhat wonky UI, and would save a ton of money in the process. However, people usually want to use the "standard" because of some vague fear that the alternative isn't 100.00% compatible, or that it won't have some obscure feature that they don't even know about yet, etc. I think Excel is exactly like this…

I was disputing this claim: > If you need to use Excel at work, you need x86 since Excel for Mac is a gutted toy The nominal cost of Excel was not the topic being discussed. It was the cost of using Excel for MacOS rather than Excel for Windows. Almost no one needs the Windows specific features of Excel, so almost no one needs to give up using macOS just because of Excel.

I agree, and I think my post supports that, in a way. I'm just saying 95% of people probably could work just fine with GSheets or LibreOffice or whatever, but the very same is true for MacExcel (even more true, in fact, because it's closer to WinExcel than the alternatives).

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#646

Post by kjreact »

epolanski wrote: post #457
microtonal wrote: post #401

Earlier 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.

How well is Apple doing with the modem team they purchased from Intel? I have yet to see Apple release their own in-house 5G modem. I don’t think Apple can magically turn things around for Intel and such an acquisition would be a waste of money.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#647

Post by MPSFounder »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #636
MPSFounder wrote: post #631

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The senior engineers I saw there are talented. And Intel has benefits and stock packages that rival those of big tech. I think I can expand on your point by saying the more senior engineers were risk averse and on the verge of retirement, and the young engineers were just there for the Intel name or some other reason. There is surprisingly very few middle-aged long-term people down there. This would be expected in so…

> And Intel has benefits and stock packages that rival those of big tech. Given Intel’s stock returns over the past 15 years, Intel would have to offer insane cash compensation to rival big tech. Levels.fyi indicates Intel heavily underpays, which is what I would expect. https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Intel,Apple,Google&track=Sof...

Should have mentioned Hardware. I remember Intel pays more than Apple hardware when adjusted for COL (Intel in Oregon/New Mexico vs Cupertino). It has been a while since I looked into the salaries though. I agree they do not pay well relative to big tech on the software side of things though

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#648

Post by lotsofpulp »

MPSFounder wrote: post #647
lotsofpulp wrote: post #636

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And Intel has benefits and stock packages that rival those of big tech. Given Intel’s stock returns over the past 15 years, Intel would have to offer insane cash compensation to rival big tech. Levels.fyi indicates Intel heavily underpays, which is what I would expect. https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Intel,Apple,Google&track=Sof...

Should have mentioned Hardware. I remember Intel pays more than Apple hardware when adjusted for COL (Intel in Oregon/New Mexico vs Cupertino). It has been a while since I looked into the salaries though. I agree they do not pay well relative to big tech on the software side of things though

Top talent who can shop around for more pay is going to demand higher pay in exchange for the opportunity costs for having to live in Oregon/New Mexico compared to Cupertino.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#649

Post by roenxi »

cogman10 wrote: post #515
roenxi wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This meme comes up from time to time but I'm not sure what the real evidence for it is or whether the people repeating it have that much experience actually trying to make compute work on AMD cards. Every time I've seen anyone try the problem isn't that the card lacks a library, but rather that calling the function that does what is needed causes a kernel panic. Very different issues - if CUDA allegedly "ran" on AMD…

> Every time I've seen anyone try the problem isn't that the card lacks a library, but rather that calling the function that does what is needed causes a kernel panic. Do you have experience with SYCL? My experience with OpenCL was that it's really a PITA to work with. The thing that CUDA makes nice is the direct and minimal exercise to start running GPGPU kernels. write the code, compile with nvcc, cudaed. OpenCL ha…

> Do you have experience with SYCL?

No, I bought a Nvidia card and just use CUDA.

> OpenCL had just a weird dance to perform to get a kernel running...

Yeah but that entire list, if you step back and think big picture, probably isn't the problem. Programmers have a predictable response to that sort of silliness. Build a library over it & abstract it away. The sheer number of frameworks out there is awe-inspiring.

I gave up on OpenCL on AMD cards. It wasn't the long complex process that got me, it was the unavoidable crashes along the way. I suspect that is a more significant issue than I realised at the time (when I assumed it was just me) because it goes a long way to explain AMD's pariah-like status in the machine learning world. The situation is more one-sided than can be explained by just a well-optimised library. I've personally seen more success implementing machine learning frameworks on AMD CPUs than on AMD's GPUs, and that is a remarkable thing. Although I assume in 2024 the state of the game has changed a lot from when I was investigating the situation actively.

I don't think CUDA is the problem here, math libraries are commodity software that give a relatively marginal edge. The lack of CUDA is probably a symptom of deeper hardware problems once people stray off an explicitly graphical workflow. If the hardware worked to spec I expect someone would just build a non-optimised CUDA clone and we'd all move on. But AMD did build a CUDA clone and it didn't work for me at least - and the buzz suggests something is still going wrong for AMD's GPGPU efforts.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#650

Post by snvzz »

seabass-labrax wrote: post #190
xbar wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd like to address the aside for completeness' sake. An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now. Today, there are sufficient competitive chip architectures with cross-compatible operating systems and virtualization that x86 does not represent control of the computing market in a manner that should prevent such a merger: ARM licensees, including the special case of Apple Silicon, Snapdragon, NVIDIA SOCs…

I was only just today looking for low-power x86 machines to run FreePBX, which does not yet have an ARM64 port. Whilst the consumer computing space is now perfectly served by ARM and will soon be joined by RISC-V, if a widely-used piece of free and open source server software is still x86-only, you can bet that there are thousands of bespoke business solutions that are locked to the ISA. A monopoly would hasten migra…

Microsoft (and other parties) already demonstrated quite effective x86 emulation, opening the migration path away from this anachronistic ISA.
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