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Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

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Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#721

Post by amluto »

AdrianB1 wrote: post #554
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 depart…

I know some people who understand x86 [0] very well. Most of them do not work at Intel. Those that do tend to be on the OSS side and don’t really have any sway in the parts of Intel that design new hardware.

And this is a problem! Most of Intel’s recent major architectural changes over the last decade or so have been flops. [1] Quite a few have been reverted, often even after they ship. I presume that Intel does not actually have many people who are really qualified to work on the architecture.

[0] I’m talking about how it interacts with an OS and how you put it together into a working system. Understand stuff like SIMD is a different thing.

[1] AVX and its successors are notable exceptions, but they still have issues, and Intel did not really rock the early implementations.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#722

Post by majewsky »

PaulHoule wrote: post #529
sitkack wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 w…

> Does 4k matter?

The PC I'm typing this on has two 27in 4k screens. I'm sitting so that I look at them from about 75cm away (that's 2.5 feet in weird units).

I archive most of my video files in 720p, because I genuinely don't see that big of a difference between even 720p and 1080p. It is definitely visible, but usually, it does not add much to the experience, considering that most videos today are produced to be watchable on smartphones and tablets just as much as cinema screens or huge TVs. I only make an exception here for "cinematic" content that was intended for the very big screen. That does not necessarily mean movies, but also certain YouTube videos, like "Timelapse of the Future": https://youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA - This one hits differently for me in 4K vs. just 1080p. Having to watch this in just 720p would be tragic, because its cinematography relies on 4K's ability to resolve very fine lines.

So why would I make a point to have both my screens be 4K? Because where else do you look at fine lines a lot? You're looking at it right now: Text. For any occupation that requires reading a lot of text (like programming!), 4K absolutely makes a difference. Even if I don't decrease the font size to get more text on screen at once, just having the outlines of the glyphs be sharper reduces eye strain in my experience.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#723

Post by znpy »

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…

> 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.

not sure about it. i had friends with discrete GPUs at the time and they told me that vista was essentially a gpu-stress program rather than an OS.

at the same time, compiz/beryl on linux worked beautifully on intel integrated gpus, and were doing way cooler things than vista was doing at the time (cube desktops? windows bursting into flames when closed?).

I'm a bit sad that compiz/beryl is not as popular anymore (with all the crazy things it could do).

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#724

Post by amluto »

jiggawatts wrote: post #571
alecco wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue there were many good things but not well delivered. The Optane persistent memory should've been revolutionary for databases but Intel just put it out and expected people to do all the software. I'm seeing the same thing now with Intel QAT / IAA / DSA. Only niche software support. Only AWS seems to have it and those "bare metal" machines don't even have local NVMe. About 10 years ago Intel Research was p…

When I read the Intel QAT / IAA / DSA whitepaper I knew it was the beginning of the end for Intel. Every aspect of that document was just dripping in corporate dinosaur / MBA practices. For example, they include 4 cores of these accelerators in most of their Xeons, but soft fuse them off unless you buy a license. Nobody is going to buy that license. Okay, maybe one or two hyperscalers, but nobody else for certain. It…

It’s worse than just the licensing. They’re exposed as PCI devices, so they don’t automatically show up in VMs, they don’t access user memory in a particularly pleasant manner, they aren’t automatically usable in unprivileged programs, etc.

And this destroys 99% (maybe 99.99%) of the actual economic value for Intel! What Intel needs is for people to integrate these accelerators into software the way that AVX is integrated into software. Then software and libraries can advertise things like “decompression is 7x faster on Intel CPUs that support such-and-such”, and then customers will ask for Intel CPUs. And customers will ask their providers to please make sure they support such-and-such feature, etc.

But instead we have utterly inscrutable feature matrices, weird licensing conditions, and a near-complete lack of these features on development machines, and it’s no wonder that no one uses the features.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#725

Post by cogman10 »

maeil wrote: post #666
cogman10 wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course these days more and more of that is moving the the cloud and all IT needs to a web browser that works. Thus making their job easier. This was the point I was going to make. While not completely dead, the days of desktop applications are quickly coming to a close. Almost everything is SAAS now or just electron apps which are highly portable. Even if it's not saas or electron, the only two languages I'd do…

The big problem is Excel. Microsoft will make sure never to give that one up. Browser version isn't enough. I'm sure Apple has their reasons for not financing a full-fledged, compatible version, but if they would it would massively increase market share. I'm guessing it's strategic - e.g. not incurring the wrath of Microsoft or a different non-technical, non-marketshare reason. The world outside of the SV tech bubble…

2 things.

1. Excel now-a-days is mostly just an electron app. That's what the office 365 conversion was effectively.

2. MS has supported ARM platforms for quite some time now. [1]

[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/office-windows-11-arm-starts-...

[2] http://www.emulators.com/docs/abc_arm64ec_explained.htm

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#726

Post by alternatex »

leptons wrote: post #524
alternatex wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 i…

Efficiency and performance are heavily correlated in portable devices. You only have a certain TDP that you can utilize before the device throttles due to a lack of heat dissipation. The more efficient a CPU you have, the more you can accomplish before you hit temps that will affect performance.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#727

Post by alganet »

astrange wrote: post #568
alganet wrote: post #316

Earlier 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.

It was designed to be efficient (performance/watt) for everything. Most users aren't using Rosetta. It's not the only ARM CPU with TSO support though, some server platforms also do it.

"efficient for everything": that is a bold claim, can you elaborate more on it?

Also, can you name these other platforms?

Also, can you back up the information about most users not leveraging Rosetta?

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#728

Post by jart »

bcantrill wrote: post #345

I am amazed -- stunned -- how many people here seem to think that Gelsinger was the right person for the job, but wronged by the people who pre-dated him (BK?!) or the CHIPS act (?!) or other conditions somehow out of his control. Gelsinger was -- emphatically -- the wrong person for the job: someone who had been at Intel during its glory days and who obviously believed in his heart that he -- and he alone! -- could…

Yeah but it was the return to the wrong engineer. While Pat allegedly architecting i486 is major respect, it was ultimately an iteration of i386 which is where the alpha is at. Guy who architected i386 (John Crawford) is too old. So that leaves Intel Core which was architected by Uri Frank. Now get this. Two weeks after Pat Gelsinger is appointed CEO of Intel in February 2021, Uri Frank announces he's going to be joining Google to lead the development of their cloud chips. That guy is probably Intel's natural leader. So it'd be interesting to know if there's more to this story.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#730

Post by astrange »

alganet wrote: post #727
astrange wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was designed to be efficient (performance/watt) for everything. Most users aren't using Rosetta. It's not the only ARM CPU with TSO support though, some server platforms also do it.

"efficient for everything": that is a bold claim, can you elaborate more on it? Also, can you name these other platforms? Also, can you back up the information about most users not leveraging Rosetta?

> "efficient for everything": that is a bold claim, can you elaborate more on it?

https://share.transistor.fm/s/124f8bc4

> Also, can you name these other platforms?

Fujitsu A64FX, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver

> Also, can you back up the information about most users not leveraging Rosetta?

Well I couldn't tell you that, but most people just use web browsers.

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