Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

intel.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

741–750 of 777 posts

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#741

Post by stolsvik »

UltraSane wrote: post #737
majewsky wrote: post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wa…

A unit based on the average size of the human foot is not "weird".

Correct. It is insane. Bonkers. Absurd. How the hell can you live with that-stupid.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#742

Post by astrange »

alganet wrote: post #732
astrange wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

Sorry, I'm not gonna hear some podcast PR by Apple. I heard their PR already. If most people just use web browsers, why so much effort has been put on Rosetta 2? Sounds very wasteful. Also, A64FX seems to agree with my statement that an ARM with some x86 spice makes a better product than just an ARM. And, if we're talking about making ARM mainstream, Raspberry Pi did more for the platform than Apple and deserves to g…

Dunno, who says a lot of effort was put into Rosetta 2?

It's mostly something that was needed in the first few years so you could run Chrome and Photoshop, but those have been ported now. It's mostly useful for running WINE but that's not super common outside games.

That said, a binary recompiler has a lot of uses once you have one: https://valgrind.org

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#743

Post by AnthonyMouse »

positr0n wrote: post #634
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel and Samsung could be interesting, especially if it would get Samsung to open up more. Samsung would get better GPUs and x86, Intel gets access to the phone market and then you end up with things like x86 Samsung tablets that can run both Windows or Android. Could also be Intel and Micron. Then you end up with full stack devices with Intel CPUs and Micron RAM and storage, and the companies have partnered in the…

What part of a Samsung merger do you think would help them enter the phone market? My layman's understanding of history is that Intel tried and failed several times to build x86 chips for phones and they failed for power consumption reasons, not for lack of access to a phone maker willing to try their chips or anything like that.

They failed primarily for pricing reasons. They could make a low power CPU competitive with ARM (especially back then when Intel had the state of the art process), but then they wanted to charge a premium for it being x86 and the OEMs turned up their nose at that.

Samsung still has a fairly competitive process and could make x86 CPUs to put in their own tablets and laptops without having the OEM and Intel get into a fight about margins if they're the same company. And with the largest maker of Android devices putting x86 CPUs into them, you get an ecosystem built around it that you wouldn't when nobody is using them to begin with because Intel refuses to price competitively with ARM.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#744

Post by lmm »

immibis wrote: post #473
cogman10 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But will IT departments buy them if they are 100, 200, or $400 cheaper than a competing x86 machine? That's the question that remains to be seen.

If Microsoft insists on treating them like phones with locked-down software stacks, still no.

Back when I worked for an F500 company, my development workstation was every bit as locked-down as a phone. Complete with having to select any software I wanted to use from the company's internal "app store" rather than installing it directly.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#745

Post by lmm »

ctvo wrote: post #703
csdreamer7 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What the EU gonna do then? Seize or terminate their patents and copyrights. Issue arrest warrants for criminal evasion. Compulsory licensing of x86 to a European design firm immunized by EU law. > Perform rapid continental ARM transition Yes. Windows is on ARM. Apple is on ARM. AWS and Ampere make decent ARM servers. You have decent x86 user-space compatibility on ARM laptops. That is all users want. I doubt it wil…

> Seize or terminate their patents and copyrights. Issue arrest warrants for criminal evasion. Compulsory licensing of x86 to a European design firm immunized by EU law. My eyes rolled so far back I hurt myself. Please provide some examples of where the EU has been able to do a fraction of what you listed to large, US based firms in the past. Looking at the future, if you want a trade war and an excuse for the new US…

> Please provide some examples of where the EU has been able to do a fraction of what you listed to large, US based firms in the past.

Provide an example of where a large firm decided to ignore EU law and go ahead with a merger that the EU objected to.

No-one wants the nuclear option, on either side. But if anyone ever tries to call the EU's bluff, they may find out the EU wasn't bluffing at all.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#746

Post by lmm »

FredPret wrote: post #136
adventured wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China and the EU would never allow an Nvidia Intel merger, not under any scenario the US would find acceptable. They'll barely allow Nvidia to acquire anybody at this point, no matter how small. See recent EU response to Run:ai. Intel would be considered 100x worse.

Why would China and the EU have input on a US merger?

They wouldn't, but companies at this scale are global, regardless of where their nominal headquarters or stock listing is.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#747

Post by jiggawatts »

amluto wrote: post #724
jiggawatts wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 integ…

Then I guarantee you that there is an MBA in Intel somewhere crunching the numbers and calculating that "only 0.001% of our customers are utilising this feature", hence he's going to cut that team and stop offering the product in future Xeons.

Which means that any fool that did utilise this feature has tied their cart to a horse that's going to be put down.

Smarter people can see this coming a mile off and not bother investing any effort into support.

It's so predictable that it's just depressing.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#748

Post by UltraSane »

stolsvik wrote: post #741
UltraSane wrote: post #737

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A unit based on the average size of the human foot is not "weird".

Correct. It is insane. Bonkers. Absurd. How the hell can you live with that-stupid.

No. It is in fact completely normal and has been repeated many times in human history. A unit based on an arbitrary fraction of the distance from the north pole to the equator is quite a bit more odd when you think about it.

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#749

Post by lmm »

gondo wrote: post #479
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…

> Nvidia and their amazing software stack and support for their hardware. Linus seems to disagree https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tQIdxbWhHSM

Torvalds wants open drivers, and NVidia doesn't do that. NVidia's drivers are better than their competitors by enough to make it worth buying NVidia even when their hardware is objectively worse, so much as I would prefer open-source in principle, I can understand why they don't want to give away the crown jewels.

(I can't watch videos)

Re: Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger

#750

Post by astrange »

noahbp wrote: post #417
cedws wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

TSMC's US fabs cannot produce enough to replace all that they produce in Taiwan, nor are the US fabs producing a leading-edge node.

The next step companies (for packaging etc) are also still in Taiwan iirc, but they're more replaceable.
Post reply on HN