[HN Gopher] Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
___________________________________________________________________
Intel announces retirement of Pat Gelsinger
Author : tybulewicz
Score : 696 points
Date : 2024-12-02 13:37 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.intel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.intel.com)
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Stock jumps 5%+ initially.
| timschmidt wrote:
| Vultures
| blitzar wrote:
| Presumably in the hopes of a more "shareholder friendly" CEO
| being appointed.
|
| "shareholder friendly" and "good for the company" are not at
| all the same things.
| baq wrote:
| Cover the news event.
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| I've heard rumors he was viewed as a lightweight, or at least not
| as much of a serious engineer as Morris Chang was in his 60s, but
| even still his tenure was surprisingly short...
| hbfdhfdhadfhnfa wrote:
| This is not good. We already know what happened when CFO took
| over. It was a time when Intel totaly lost control. They are gona
| get bought for penies. OMG
|
| Instead of saying to AMD they will be in the rearview mirror,
| they should have been paranoid. Not do stupid GPUs. and destroy
| others where it mattered
| merpkz wrote:
| Are those GPUs really stupid? They seem like a great price for
| performance devices when ultra high level gaming is not the
| priority.
|
| EDIT: I personally always liked intel iGPUs because they were
| always zero bullshit on Linux minus some screen tearing issues
| and mumbo-jumbo fixes required in X11.
| egeozcan wrote:
| They can encode AV1 even. Really amazing, amazing chips for
| the price.
|
| The "stupid" thing with them (maybe) is that they cannot do
| anything exceptionally good, and that while having
| compatibility problems. They are cheap yes, but there are
| many other chips for the same price, and while they are less
| capable, they are more compatible.
|
| Make A380 cost 30% less or invest way more to the drivers and
| IMHO it'd been completely different.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Another nice thing--it looked like Intel was lagging AMD in
| PCIe lane counts, until somewhat recently. I suspect selling
| GPUs has put them in the headspace of thinking of PCIe lanes
| as a real figure of merit.
| tpm wrote:
| 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.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| 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).
| tpm wrote:
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Yeah. Theadripper/Epyc is what I'm thinking of--it isn't
| obvious (to me at least) if it was just a coincidence of
| the chiplet strategy or what, if so it is an odd
| coincidence. The company that makes both CPUs and GPUs
| has ended up with data center CPUs that are a great match
| for the era where we really want data center CPUs that
| can host a ton of GPUs, haha.
| leeman2016 wrote:
| I am basically biased towards discrete GPU = asking for
| trouble in Linux.
|
| Driver stability, less heat and fan noise, battery life is
| almost assured in the Intel iGPU.
| riskable wrote:
| Nah. AMD discreet GPUs are fantastic in Linux these days.
| You don't need to install a proprietary driver! They _just
| work_. It 's really nice not having to think about the
| GPU's drivers or configuration at all.
|
| The only area where AMD's discreet GPUs are lagging behind
| is AI stuff. You get a lot more performance with Nvidia
| GPUs for the same price. For gaming, though AMD is the
| clear winner in the price/performance space.
|
| Of course, Nvidia is still a bit of a pain but it's of
| their own making. You still need to install their
| proprietary driver (which IMHO isn't _that_ big a deal) but
| the _real_ issue is that if you upgrade your driver from
| say, 550 to 555 you have to rebuild all your CUDA stuff.
| _In theory_ you shouldn 't have to do that but in reality I
| had to blow away my venv and reinstall everything in order
| to get torch working again.
| ryao wrote:
| Nvidia's GPUs work well on Linux. A friend and I use them
| and they are fairly problem free. In the past, when I did
| have some issues (mainly involving freesync), I contacted
| Nvidia and they fixed them. More specifically, I found that
| they needed to add sddm to their exclusion list, told them
| and they added it to the list after a few driver releases.
| They have also fixed documentation on request too.
| ripe wrote:
| On the question of integrated versus discrete GPUs, what are
| the practical differences?
|
| I am trying to learn this but having difficulty finding good
| explanations. I know the Wikipedia-level overview, but need
| more details.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| The GPUs are elemental for a shift to APUs - the future as
| Apple has shown for performance and energy efficiency. Strix
| Halo will be a game changer, without a GPU Intel has no future
| on the laptop (and later desktop).
| keyringlight wrote:
| One of the things I was wondering about a few years ago is
| whether intel would attempt to bid on the Sony/MS console
| contracts which AMD has had tied up for a long time now and
| would be a dependable income along with reduced software
| compatibility concerns compared to the breadth and history of
| windows games. I don't think they got to the point of having
| a big iGPU integrated to the extent that AMD has had for
| years though.
|
| Apparently AMD has at least the Sony PS6 contract now.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| _> Not do stupid GPUs_
|
| Hard disagree here x100. Investing in GPUs in the time when
| Nvidia and AMD started to gouge the market is actually the best
| decision Intel did in recent times. It's the piece of
| semiconductor with some of the highest margins in the business
| and they already own a lot of the patents and IP building
| blocks to make it happen.
|
| The only stupid thing they did was not getting into GPUs
| earlier so they would already be on the market during the
| pandemic GPU shortage and AI boom.
| bhouston wrote:
| I think the issue is that Intel has a culture and focus. It
| is cpus. It is a large company and this is where the revenue
| comes from and it has momentum.
|
| There are a lot of strategic shifts Intel could do but their
| timeline to paying off at the scale Intel needs is very long.
|
| What I see is a bunch of endeavours that get killed off too
| quickly because they were not paying off fast enough and this
| creates mistrust in the community around Intel's new
| initiatives that are not core that make them harder to
| succeed going forward. It is a bit of a death spiral.
|
| Basically big companies find it hard to learn new tricks when
| their core offering starts to fail. The time to learn new
| tricks was a while ago, now it is too late.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| _> I think the issue is that Intel has a culture and focus.
| It is cpus. It is a large company and this is where the
| revenue comes from and it has momentum._
|
| With this logic, Apple should have also stayed with making
| Macs when it had financial troubles in in 1999, since
| that's its focus, not venture into making stupid stuff like
| Mp3 players and phones, everyone knows that's the core
| focus of Sony and Nokia who will rules those markets
| forever.
| bhouston wrote:
| Apple under Steve Jobs is exceptional and not the rule.
|
| Trying to use that the fact Einstein or Muhammad Ali or
| any other genius in his area could do something or did
| something is not a counterpoint.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Yes, Apple succeeded. But the number of companies that
| attempt such branching out and succeed are few compared
| to how many try.
|
| The CEO of company X may think that he's as talented as
| Steve Jobs, but is he really?
| kergonath wrote:
| > With this logic, Apple should have also stayed with
| making Macs when it had financial troubles in in 1999,
| since that's its focus, not venture into making stupid
| stuff like Mp3 players and phones, everyone knows that's
| the core focus of Sony and Nokia who will rules those
| markets forever.
|
| You're off by a few years. Jobs axed any project not
| related to the Mac when he came back in 1997, so they
| actually did what you say they did not. The iPod project
| started around 1999-2000 when Apple was in a massive
| growth phase after the iMac and the G3 and then G4
| desktops.
|
| Also, in the alternate reality where the iPod did not
| massively succeed, it would very likely have been killed
| or remain as a hobby like the Apple TV. Apple might not
| be as huge as they are now, but the Mac was doing great
| at the time.
| brokencode wrote:
| I'd argue that focus is what Intel fundamentally lacks. Or
| any kind of real vision.
|
| If they had focused more on mobile CPUs, GPUs, or
| especially GPGPUs a decade ago, they could have more
| product diversity now to hold them over.
|
| Instead, they dipped their toes into a new market every few
| years and then ran away screaming when they realized how
| difficult and it would be to gain market share.
|
| If they had any actual vision, they could have a line of
| ARM CPUs now to compete with the onslaught in all major CPU
| markets.
|
| They should have listened to their customers and market
| forces instead of trying to force x86 down everyone's
| throats.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| _> they could have a line of ARM CPUs now to compete with
| the onslaught in all major CPU markets._
|
| Disagree. Selling ARM chips with high profit margins is
| tough. There's too much competition from the likes of
| Samsung, MediaTek and until the US ban, Hi
| Silicon(Huawei). ARM chips are a race to the bottom in
| terms of price with a market dominated by companies from
| Asia. There's no guarantee Intel could have had a
| competitive ARM design that could beat Apple's or
| Qualcom's.
| everfrustrated wrote:
| Intel did have an ARM license at one point. The margins
| would have never been acceptable to Intel. Annapurna Labs
| / P. A Semi probably sold to Amazon / Apple respectively
| for the same reason.
| bhouston wrote:
| > There's too much competition from the likes of Samsung,
| MediaTek and until the US ban, Hi Silicon(Huawei). ARM
| chips are a race to the bottom in terms of price with a
| market dominated by companies from Asia
|
| Yes, without proprietary technology, margins are slim.
|
| But Qualcomm has somewhat succeeded in this area anyhow.
| I guess they took the ARM base but innovated on top of it
| in order to command higher margins.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| _> But Qualcomm has somewhat succeeded in this area
| anyhow_
|
| It's wasn't just anyhow. Qualcomm succeed in the mobile
| SoC space because they also had the best modems in the
| industry (name comes form Quality Communications after
| all). And also the best mobile GPU IP they bought from
| ATI.
| brokencode wrote:
| Well they have to try something and actually invest in
| it. Every year, it looks more and more like x86 is a
| sinking ship.
|
| Intel and AMD can dominate the x86 market all they want.
| But x86 has been steadily losing ground every year to
| cheaper and more power efficient ARM processors. It's
| still a big market now, but I don't think it's going to
| be a great business in a decade or two.
|
| ARM was just an example. If Intel spent a decade
| strengthening their Larrabee GPGPU platform and building
| AI and crypto ecosystems on it, they may have been well
| positioned to benefit immensely like Nvidia has over the
| last 5 years.
| NotYourLawyer wrote:
| Yeah that was so stupid of them to not see into the future
| and predict AI.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| You don't need the AI boom. Gaming GPUs were already a
| decent money maker, then add the GPGPU boom.
| rob74 wrote:
| Yes, gaming GPUs are a decent money maker - but Intel
| GPUs can currently only compete in the midrange segment,
| where there is a lot less money to be made. And to change
| that, they need to invest a lot more money (with
| uncertain outcome). And for AI it's basically the same
| story - with the added difficulty of Nvidias CUDA moat,
| which even AMD is having trouble with.
| lesuorac wrote:
| I'm not sure you needed to predict AI.
|
| GPUs exist because CPUs just aren't fast enough. Whether or
| not people are going to start making GPU-only computers is
| debatable (although there has clearly been a lot of CPU+GPU
| single chips).
| kllrnohj wrote:
| What a frankly weird oversimplification? GPUs don't exist
| because CPUs aren't fast enough. GPUs exist because CPUs
| aren't _parallel_ enough. And to achieve that
| parallelism, they sacrifice massive amounts of
| performance to get it.
|
| A GPU-only computer would be absolutely horrendous to
| use. It'd be incredibly slow and unresponsive as GPUs
| just absolutely suck at running single-threaded code or
| branchy code.
| lesuorac wrote:
| I mean you can splits hairs about the difference between
| CPU and GPUs all you want.
|
| The overall point is that work is being increasingly done
| _not_ on the CPU. If your business is CPUs-only then
| you're going to have rough times as the world moves away
| from a CPU-centric world. You don't need to predict AI;
| you just need to see that alternatives are being looked
| at by competitors and you'll lose an edge if you don't
| also look at them.
|
| It's not going to matter much if you have a crappy CPU if
| most of the work is done on the GPU. Its like how iPhones
| don't advertise themselves as surround sound; phones
| aren't about calling people anymore so no reason to
| advertise legacy features.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > The overall point is that work is being increasingly
| done _not_ on the CPU.
|
| Eh? GPGPU has been a thing for decades and yet barely
| made a dent in the demand for CPUs. Heck, CUDA is 17
| years old!
|
| The world has not budged from being CPU-centric and it
| isn't showing any signs of doing so. GPUs remain an
| accelerator for specialized workloads and are going to
| continue to be just that.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Intel just has to make a decent/mediocre GPU with 64GB+
| memory at a $500 price point and they will instantly become
| the defacto local transformer leader. It's a true "build it
| and they will come" situation.
|
| Undercut the big boys with affordable on-prem AI.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| _> Intel just has to make a decent/mediocre GPU with 64GB+
| memory at a $500 price point and they will instantly become
| the defacto local LLM leader_
|
| Intel should have appointed people form the HN comment
| section as their CEO, as they clearly know more about
| running a giant chip design and fabrication company than
| the guy who worked there for 10+ years.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| You are jesting, but there is some wisdom to that post.
| No reasonable person is suggesting global company changes
| direction on the basis of one post on the internet, but
| the advice provided is not without merit. Surely, a
| company of that size can do some research to see if it is
| a viable path. In fact, if it does anything right, it
| should have people like that ready to do appropriate
| analysis.
|
| I have my thoughts on the matter and cautiously welcomed
| their move to GPUs ( though admittedly on the basis that
| we -- consumers -- need more than amd/nvidia duopoly in
| that space; so I am not exactly unbiased ).
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| _> but there is some wisdom to that post._
|
| That's just speculation. There's no guarantee that would
| have happened. Nobody has a crystal ball to guarantee
| that as the outcome.
|
| It's like saying if someone would have killed Hitler as a
| baby, that would have prevented WW2.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| I think you may be either misinterpreting my post or
| misunderstanding the sequence of events.
|
| What do you think has happened so far?
|
| Your mental model of the world may help me understanding
| the point you are trying to make.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| I'm saying nobody can guarantee the claim of the GP I've
| replied to, that if Intel would have produced mediocre
| GPUs with 64+ GB of RAM that would have magically help
| them rise to the top of ML HW sales and save them.
|
| That's just speculations from people online. I don't see
| any wisdom in that like you do, all I see is just a
| guessing game from people who think they know an industry
| when they don't (armchair experts to put it politely).
|
| What made Nvidia dominant was not weak GPUs with a lot of
| RAM. The puzzle of their success had way more pieces that
| made the whole package appealing over many years, and a
| great timing of the market also helped. Intel making
| underperforming GPUs with a lot of RAM would not
| guarantee the same outcome at a later time in the market
| with an already entrenched Nvidia and a completely
| different landscape.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Your comments that nobody knows anything for sure are
| generically applicable to any discussion of anything.
|
| But since they obviously apply just as well to Intel
| itself, it is a poor reason to dismiss other's ideas.
|
| --
|
| > What made Nvidia dominant was not weak GPUs with a lot
| of RAM.
|
| Intel doesn't have the luxury of repeating NVidia's path
| in GPUs. NVidia didn't have to compete with an already
| existing NVidia-like incumbent.
|
| That requires no speculation.
|
| --
|
| Competing with an incumbent via an underserved low end,
| then moving up market, is called _disruption_.
|
| It is a very effective strategy since (1) underserved
| markets may be small but are are immediately profitable,
| and (2) subsequent upward growth is very hard for the
| incumbent to defend against. The incumbent would have to
| lower their margins, and hammer their own market value.
|
| And it would fit with Intel's need to grow their foundry
| business from the low end up too.
|
| They should take every low-end underserved market they
| can find. Those are good cards to play for ambitious
| startups and comebacks.
|
| And the insane demand for both GPUs and chip making is
| increasing the number of such markets.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| << That's just speculations from people online. I don't
| see any wisdom in that like you do, all I see is just a
| guessing game from people who think they know an industry
| when they don't (armchair experts to put it politely).
|
| True, it is just speculation. 'Any' seems to be a strong
| qualifier. One of the reasons I troll landscape of HN is
| that some of the thoughts and recommendations expressed
| here ended up being useful in my life. One still has to
| apply reason and common sense, but I would not dream of
| saying it has no ( any ) wisdom.
|
| << What made Nvidia dominant was not weak GPUs with a lot
| of RAM.
|
| I assume you mean: 'not in isolation'. If so, that
| statement is true. AMD cards at the very least had parity
| with nvidia, so it clearly wasn't just a question of ram.
|
| << The puzzle of their success had way more pieces that
| made the whole package appealing over many years, and a
| great timing of the market also helped.
|
| I will be honest. I am biased against nvidia so take the
| next paragraph for the hate speech that it is.
|
| Nvidia got lucky. CUDA was a big bet that paid off first
| on crypto and now on ai. Now, we can argue how much of
| that bet was luck meets preparation, because the bet
| itself was admittedly a well educated guess.
|
| To your point, without those two waves, nvidia would
| still likely be battling amd in incremental improvements
| so the great market timing accounts for majority of its
| success. I will go as far as to say that we would likely
| not see a rush to buy 'a100s' and 'AI accellerators' with
| exception of very niche applications.
|
| << Intel making underperforming GPUs with a lot of RAM
| would not guarantee the same outcome at a later time in
| the market with an already entrenched Nvidia and a
| completely different landscape.
|
| Underperforming may be the key word here and it is a very
| broad brush. In what sense are they underperforming and
| which segment are they intended for? As for ram, it would
| be kinda silly in current environment to put a new card
| out with 8gb; I think we can agree on that at least.
|
| << I'm saying nobody can guarantee the claim of the GP
| I've replied to,
|
| True, but it is true for just about every aspect of life
| so as statements go, so it is virtually meaningless as an
| argument. Best one can do is argue possibilities based on
| what we do know about the world and the models it tends
| to follow.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| There's no doubt that the statement is true. Some use
| cases would absolutely benefit from GPUs with a boatload
| of VRAM, even if it's relatively slow (~500 GB/s).
|
| The market for that is just not that large, it wouldn't
| move the needle on Intels revenue, but then again it
| could get the enthusiasts onboard and get Intels CUDA
| alternative moving.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Disrupting a market from the bottom always looks like a
| small market opportunity. Initially.
|
| But then you move up, and the incumbents have to choose
| to keep ceding more of their lower end or lower their
| margins. And it is very hard and costly for a company
| succeeding at the high end to do the later.
|
| That would have been a fantastic sign Intel was getting
| more nimble and strategic.
|
| And been a good fit with a come back in the low end of
| fabs too.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| I actually did email Deepak Patil (head of Intel Graphics
| division) about this around a year ago, haha. Never did
| get a response though.
|
| It is something that is easy to miss if you are just
| looking at typical business strategy and finances. A high
| memory consumer GPU would undercut their server GPUs,
| which are presumably higher margin intended golden geese.
| It's easy to see them chasing server markets and "gamers"
| being an afterthought.
|
| However there is huge demand right now for a modern, even
| a crappy modern, GPU with gobs of memory. Make the card
| and the open source AI tooling for it will start
| sprouting in days after it's release.
|
| It's an extremely powerful position to have every at-home
| AI geek's setup to be bound to using intel cards and
| intel focused tooling. Nvidia and AMD won't do it because
| they want to protect their server cards.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| > It's an extremely powerful position to have every at-
| home AI geek's setup to be bound to using intel cards
|
| So, incredibly small market share while your competitors
| already have the first-mover advantage and nailed down
| the ecosystem? With no data backing it up, I think,
| graphics cards for local LLM needs is not really on
| demand. Even for gaming it's probably more attractive,
| but then again, that's not even where the real money is.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| _> So, incredibly small market share while your
| competitors already have the first-mover advantage and
| nailed down the ecosystem?_
|
| Exactly. This x100. It was easy for Nvidia to succed in
| the LLM market by winging it, in the days when there was
| no LLM market, so they had the greenfield and first mover
| advantages.
|
| But today, when Nvidia dominates the mature LLM market,
| Intel winging it the same way Nvidia did, won't provide
| nearly the same success as Nvidia had.
|
| Ferruccio Lamborghini also built a successful sports car
| company by building tractors and cars in his garage.
| Today you won't be able to create a Lamborghini
| competitor with something you can build in your garage.
| The market has changed unrecognizably in the mean time.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The market share is incredibly small but also incredibly
| well aimed.
|
| The people learning how to do local LLMs will be the
| people directing build out of on-prem transformers for
| small-midsize companies. The size of the market is
| irrelevant here, it's who is in that market and the power
| they will have that is extremely relevant.
| mnau wrote:
| > ..open source AI tooling for it will start sprouting...
|
| AMD has tried this for many of its technologies and I
| don't think it is working. Granted, they suck at open
| sourcing, but a shitload of it was open sourced. See
| TinyGrad voyage into the Red Box driver (streams on
| youtube).
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Intel doesn't have to open source anything. People will
| build everything needed to run intel cards efficiently as
| there is currently zero options for affordable video
| cards with high memory.
|
| It's either old slow Tesla cards with 48GB or $2000
| nvidia cards with 24GB.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| _> People will build everything needed to run intel cards
| efficiently as there is currently zero options for
| affordable video cards with high memory._
|
| I think you're overestimating what people can and will
| do.
|
| Nvidia didn't succeed because it just launchend cards and
| let people write CUDA for them. Nvidia is where it is
| because it has an army of researchers and SW engineers
| developing the full stack from research papers, to
| frameworks, to proofs of concepts, showing customers the
| value of paying for their pricey HW + SW, most of it
| proprietary, not community developed.
|
| "People" alone won't be able to get even 10% there. And
| that's ignoring the fact that Nvidia HW is not FOSS so
| they'd be working blind.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| >Nvidia is where it is because it has an army of
| researchers and SW engineers developing
|
| The current local model/open source model community is
| literally an army of SWE's and researchers. They already
| make tons of tooling too.
| lucianbr wrote:
| Who knows. The same reply could have been written to
| someone opining that Kodak should pivot to digital
| cameras.
|
| We can't see the future, but neither can CEOs, no matter
| how well paid and respected they are.
|
| After all the current CEO is being ousted, so obviously
| he didn't do the right things despite being a CEO.
| blibble wrote:
| looking at their sept 2024 p&l: the rando probably
| couldn't have done much worse
| rvba wrote:
| Many people here are very knowledgeable: they have
| Putnams, they are CEOs smurfing, run 300 people teams,
| made some software that all know (e.g. we have the Diablo
| 2 guy), people from hardare side, VCs..
|
| Some are probably multi millionaires smurfing (and I dont
| mean cryptobros).
|
| Do you even have a Putnam award?
| bubblethink wrote:
| >The only stupid thing they did was not getting into GPUs
| earlier
|
| Intel has been "getting into" GPUs for two decades now going
| back to Larrabee. They are just not good at it.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| What is holding Intel back, there?
|
| Engineering chops?
|
| AMD and nVidia already patented too much of the good stuff?
|
| Too much existing code optimized for AMD and nVidia quirks?
| mewse-hn wrote:
| Extreme outsider perspective but they seemed like
| dilettantes. They'd dip their toe into doing GPUs and
| then cancel the project every couple years.
|
| A few weeks ago Gelsinger even commented he saw "less
| need for discrete graphics in the market going forward" -
| just seemed like a very Intel thing to say
| timschmidt wrote:
| The GPUs seemed smart. Too late, and timid, but smart. What
| continually blew my mind was Intel's chiplet strategy. While
| AMD was making scads of a single chiplet and binning the best
| for Epyc and recovering cost at the low end with Ryzen, Intel
| designed and fabricated a dizzying number of single-purpose
| chiplets. In some cases, just the mirror image of another
| otherwise identical chiplet. The mind boggles. What phenomenal
| inattention to opportunity.
| washadjeffmad wrote:
| Same with the general preparedness for the AGI Cambrian
| explosion. Give their position, they should have been able to
| keep pace with Nvidia beyond the data center, and they
| fumbled it.
|
| Their purported VRAM offerings for Battlemage are also lower
| than hoped for, which is going to be a turnoff to many buying
| for local inference.
|
| I think we have too many decision-makers gunshy from crypto
| mining that haven't yet realized that compute isn't just a
| phase.
| HelloNurse wrote:
| What you describe is mad inattention to costs, not only to
| opportunities: maybe a symptom of widespread misaligned
| incentives (e.g. delivering a design with mirrored chiplets
| quickly could be more "useful" for an engineer than saving a
| few millions for the company by taking one more week to
| design a more complex assembly of identical chiplets) and
| toxic priorities (e.g. theoretical quality over market value
| and profits, risk aversion, risk/cost externalization towards
| departments you want to be axed instead of your own).
| timschmidt wrote:
| Couldn't agree more.
|
| To me, AMD's approach demonstrates planning and buy-in
| across multiple teams (CPU die, Ryzen IO die, Epyc IO die,
| etc), and that suggests a high degree of management
| involvement in these engineering decisions.
|
| Intel's activities seem comparatively chaotic. Which I
| agree smells of disincentives and disinterested middle
| management hyperfixated on KPIs.
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| The AI revolution runs on GPUs. Intel needs every last bit of
| GPU experience and prowess it can get, otherwise it will
| continue to be left behind.
| baq wrote:
| Intel without GPUs will be an ARM competitor. Maybe. With some
| luck. GPUs are existential for them. They've got 2 years.
| tw04 wrote:
| >They are gona get bought for penies.
|
| No they aren't - much like Boeing, at this point they are
| considered a national security asset.
| riskable wrote:
| > Not do stupid GPUs.
|
| "Gelsinger said the market will have less demand for dedicated
| graphics cards in the future."
|
| (from: https://www.techspot.com/news/105407-intel-not-repeat-
| lunar-...)
|
| Gelsinger apparently agreed with you. However, the market _very
| clearly_ has enormous demand for discreet GPUs. Specifically
| for AI workloads (not PC gaming).
|
| If I was on Intel's board I would've fired him for this
| statement. The demand for GPUs (parallel matrix processors with
| super fast local memory) is NOT going to go down. Certainly not
| in the next five to ten years!
|
| I know Intel makes a lot of things, has a lot of IP, and is
| involved in many different markets but the fact that they're
| NOT a major player in the GPU/AI space is their biggest failure
| (in recent times). It's one of those things that should've been
| _painfully_ obvious at some point in 2022 and here we have
| Gelsinger saying just a few months ago that somehow demand for
| AI stuff is just going to disappear (somehow).
|
| It's magic hand waving like this that got him fired.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| I disagree. They need to have a dedicated GPU and iGPU they had
| needs to be improved or they will absolutely fail. The current
| path forward is an APU or more of a system on a chip with CPU,
| GPU, and I guess, NPU.
|
| Their dGPU is also pretty promising, I have it on my list to
| get - even if not for gaming, its possibly the best media
| encoding / decoding card for the money to get today. The only
| thing holding it back for entry level or mid level gaming is
| the drivers - for some games, it wont matter it seems, but for
| others it has some growing pains but they seem to be diligently
| working on them with every driver release.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| The GPUs aren't a stupid idea. Right now Nvidia basically
| controls the market and has totally abandoned the lower/mid
| range end.
|
| Intel has made vast improvements even within their first
| generation of dedicated desktop cards. They will likely never
| compete with cards like a 4080/4090, but they may be great
| options for people on a budget. Helps put pressure on AMD to be
| better as well.
| htrp wrote:
| Joined Feb 2021 and out within 4 years.
| sebastianbk wrote:
| He's been with Intel since 1979 (only interrupted by a stint as
| CEO of EMC/VMware).
| htrp wrote:
| That stint at EMC/VMWare started in 2009...
| Bilal_io wrote:
| They wanted to preserve his dignity, so he was retired instead of
| being fired.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| His dignity is fully intact imo. A great captain can't always
| right a ship that's already sinking.
| paxys wrote:
| > Intel Corporation (NASDAQ: INTC) today announced that CEO Pat
| Gelsinger retired from the company after a distinguished 40-plus-
| year career and has stepped down from the board of directors,
| effective Dec. 1, 2024
|
| Is it a "he retired" or a "we retired him"?
| raverbashing wrote:
| Sounds like the latter to be honest
| baq wrote:
| Rhetorical question.
|
| Brian's affair with an underling was also surprisingly
| conveniently timed back then.
| alexey-salmin wrote:
| With Brian it was damn too late if you ask me.
| perlgeek wrote:
| If it were a planned, age-related retirement, it would've been
| announced half a year to a year ahead, no?
| bluGill wrote:
| Maybe. Sometimes it would be, but sometimes such things are
| not announced for various reasons.
| stevenAthompson wrote:
| Why does it matter? Let him have his dignity either way.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| _> Is it a "he retired" or a "we retired him"?_
|
| Does it matter?
| echelon wrote:
| The latter implies the government money comes with strings
| attached and that the forces eager to see a turnaround will
| be active participants. It's good to see.
| Seanambers wrote:
| Anyone got the inside scoop?
| pasttense01 wrote:
| Time to split off Intel's foundry operations?
| mepian wrote:
| I remembered Andy Grove's quote: "If we got kicked out and the
| board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?"
|
| Pat didn't do that, I guess.
| phonon wrote:
| Not really.
|
| https://www.reuters.com/technology/intels-786-billion-subsid...
| LittleTimothy wrote:
| They've already been headed that way for a long time, the
| problem is that they need huge amounts of capital to complete
| their foundry road map and that is _meant_ to be cross-
| subsidized by the other part of their business, but now it 's
| looking shakey that they'll even have the capital to execute
| the plan - setting aside whether it would even work if they
| could.
| BirAdam wrote:
| Intel can't split due to the CHIPS Act.
| LittleTimothy wrote:
| Difficult to see how this is anything other than a failure. I had
| high hopes when Gelsinger returned, but it seems that BK had done
| too much damage and Gelsinger didn't really get a grip on things.
| One of the things I heard that really highlighted the failure of
| this recovery was that BK had let Intel balloon in all sorts of
| ways that needed to be pared back and refocused, but head count
| under Gelsinger didn't just stay static but continued to
| significantly grow. It's no good giving the same politically
| poisonous, under-delivering middle management more and more
| resources to fail at the same job. They really need to clear
| house in a spectacular way but I'm not sure who could even do
| that at this point.
| this_user wrote:
| They have made too many bad choices, and everyone else has been
| eating their lunch for the last few years. They are a non-
| factor in the mobile space where ARM architectures dominate.
| They are a non-factor in the GPU market where NVDA dominates
| ahead of AMD. They were focused heavily on data centres and
| desktop/laptop CPUs where ARM is also increasingly making
| inroads with more efficient designs that deliver comparable
| performance. They are still struggling with their fab
| processes, and even they don't have enough money to make the
| investment needed to catch back up to TSMC. There is a good
| reason that even Global Foundries has given up on the bleeding
| edge some time ago.
|
| They are in a deep hole, and it is difficult to see a future
| where they can restore their former glory in the foreseeable
| future.
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| The US government wants then making SOTA semiconductors.
| Biden wanted it and I highly suspect Trump will want it too.
| leoc wrote:
| I have to wonder if part of this is Intel wanting a
| Trumpier CEO so it can retain the favour of the US
| government, while Trump associates Gelsinger with the CHIPS
| act which he reflexively hates as a Biden thing.
| phkahler wrote:
| Traditionally if you wanted SOTA semiconductors you'd go to
| IBM for the technology and then build your own fab. I'm not
| sure how true that is today but I wouldn't be surprised if
| it is.
| my123 wrote:
| That's what Rapidus is doing
| kllrnohj wrote:
| > where ARM is also increasingly making inroads with more
| efficient designs that deliver comparable performance.
|
| ARM isn't doing any such thing. Apple & Qualcomm are, though.
| ARM itself if anything looks weak. Their mobile cores have
| stagnated, their laptop attempts complete failures, and while
| there's hints of life in data center it also seems mediocre
| overall.
| rwmj wrote:
| Don't forget their "brilliant" strategy of suing their own
| customers.
| dagmx wrote:
| Being a customer shouldn't protect a company from
| lawsuits. ARM feels they have merit here , just like
| Qualcomm did when they sued Apple. It's not that rare in
| the corporate setting to have suits between companies
| with otherwise amicable relationships.
| rwmj wrote:
| The optics can still be terrible. Qualcomm (or more
| accurately, Nuvia, the company they acquired) produced
| some stunning chips with almost unheard of battery life
| for a laptop, and Arm are suing them to use their own
| inferior designs. They even tried to have end user
| laptops recalled and destroyed! There's no world where
| this looks good for Arm.
| dagmx wrote:
| There's a very clear bias and idolization in this comment
| of yours which is based on a misunderstanding of the case
| at hand.
|
| ARM aren't trying to force Qualcomm to use ARMs cores.
| They're trying to force them to update the licensing
| royalties to make up for the (as ARM sees it) licensing
| term violations of Nuvia who had a design license for
| specific use cases.
|
| The part you reference (using ARM designs) is the
| fallback if Qualcomm lose their design license.
|
| The destruction of the chips is standard practice to
| request in cases of license and IP infringement .
| kllrnohj wrote:
| Qualcomm already had a design license prior to the
| acquisition of Nuvia. They were doing custom cores back
| in the original Kryo days which were an in-house custom
| ARMv8.0-A design.
| bluGill wrote:
| The terms of that license was specific to what they can
| do. ARM is claiming it doesn't cover some of the things
| they are doing.
|
| I'm not enough of a lawyer to figure out who is right.
| dagmx wrote:
| Their design license doesn't extend to Nuvia's IP however
| according to ARM.
|
| That is the entire crux of the issue. ARM gave Nuvia a
| specific license, and then Nuvia was acquired which
| transferred the IP to a license that ARM did not extend
| it to.
| klelatti wrote:
| 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.
| rwmj wrote:
| 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.
| klelatti wrote:
| 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.
| mort96 wrote:
| This feels a bit pedantic. ARM-the-CPU-architecture is
| increasingly making inroads with more efficient designs
| that deliver comparable performance to Intel's x86 chips,
| thanks to Apple and Qualcomm. ARM-the-holding-company is
| not doing that, they just make mediocre designs and own IP.
| kllrnohj wrote:
| The post I was replying to had 3 other companies
| mentioned or referred to (INTC, AMD, and NVDA), it seems
| odd that they'd suddenly have meant ARM-the-ISA instead
| of ARM-the-company when ISA wasn't otherwise being
| discussed at all.
|
| But even if they meant ARM-the-ISA, that'd still put it
| in a fragile position when the 2 clear market leaders in
| the ARM-the-ISA space have no particular allegiance to
| ARM-the-ISA (Apple having changed ISAs several times
| already, and QCOM both being active in RISC-V and also
| being sued by ARM-the-company)
| kranke155 wrote:
| Apple saw the writing on the wall and bailed years ago, built
| their own chips and denied them a large customer.
|
| It's a really bad sign when a customer decides it can out
| innovate you by internally copying your entire business and
| production line.
| sofixa wrote:
| > It's a really bad sign when a customer decides it can out
| innovate you by internally copying your entire business and
| production line.
|
| Not necessarily, at scale, especially Apple's scale,
| vertical integration can make a ton of sense - for control,
| innovation, price, risk hedging.
| manquer wrote:
| It is not apple's decision that is the bad sign. There
| can be plenty of reasons for that as you mention and
| wouldn't be of note if their chips were poorer or even
| similar to intel in performance
|
| It is the fact they can build a much better chip in
| almost any metric so far ahead of Intel is the red flag.
| jayd16 wrote:
| They haven't made their own fabs. Not yet, anyway.
|
| And historically, wasn't this juts an extension of their
| fight with Samsung in the mobile space more than a
| rejection of Intel?
| tiahura wrote:
| _last few years._
|
| It's pretty much two decades at this point.
| rwmj wrote:
| Intel needed to be split in two as well, which Gelsinger only
| half-heartedly did. He split the company into two functions -
| foundry and design, but didn't take that to its logical
| conclusion and split up the company completely.
| BirAdam wrote:
| They legally cannot split due to the CHIPS Act.
| rwmj wrote:
| No idea if that's true or not, but the CHIPS Act didn't
| exist when he started as CEO.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Not entirely true. It just requires that Intel retain a 51%
| stake in any split foundry company.
| CoastalCoder wrote:
| I wonder about the details of this.
|
| For example, could "Intel A" continue to own the
| foundries, split off "Intel B" as the owner of the
| product lines, and then do some rebranding shenanigans so
| that the CPUs are still _branded_ as "Intel"?
| __d wrote:
| eg. HP and HPE.
|
| I don't know if it's legally possible, but HP shows the
| branding bit can kinda work.
| paulpan wrote:
| Agree with OP that Intel was probably too deep into its
| downward spiral. While it seems Pat tried to make changes,
| including expanding into GPUs, it either wasn't enough or too
| much for the Intel board.
|
| Splitting Intel is necessary but probably infeasible at this
| point in the game. Simple fact is that Intel Foundry Services
| has nothing to offer against the likes of TSMC and Samsung -
| perhaps only cheaper prices and even then it's unproven to
| fab any non-Intel chips. So the only way to keep it afloat is
| by continuing to fab Intel's own designs, until 18A node
| becomes viable/ready.
| mnau wrote:
| He failed on GPU. The product was substandard.
|
| That means either he knew and allowed it to happen, which
| is bad, or he didn't know and allowed GPU division to
| squander the resources, which is even worse. Either way, it
| was an adventure Intel couldn't afford.
|
| There is a similar story in other areas.
| dralley wrote:
| It's worth mentioning that IIRC the team responsible for
| the Arc GPU drivers was located in Russia, and after the
| invasion of Ukraine they had to deal with relocating the
| entire team to the EU and lost several engineers in the
| process. The drivers were the primary reason for the
| absolute failure of Arc.
|
| Intel deserves a lot of blame but they also got hit by
| some really shit circumstances outside of their control.
| mnau wrote:
| He was CEO. Chief _executing_ officer. It 's literally
| his job to execute, i.e. fix that stuff/ensure it doesn't
| happen. Get them out of Russia, poach new devs, have a
| backup team, delay the product (i.e. no HVM until good
| drivers are in sight). That's literally his job.
|
| This only reinforces my previous point. He had good
| ideas, but couldn't execute.
| rvba wrote:
| Executive, not executing.
|
| On a side note getting people in russia write your
| drivers sounds a bit insane. Yea lower cost and probably
| ok quality, but the risks...
| jpadkins wrote:
| CEO stands for Chief Executive Officer.
|
| a chief executive officer, the highest-ranking person in
| a company or other institution, ultimately responsible
| for making managerial decisions.
|
| Maybe you mean COO?
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > shit circumstances outside of their control.
|
| They chose to outsource the development of their core
| products to a country like Russia to save costs. How was
| that outside of their control? It's not like it was the
| most stable or reliable country to do business in even
| before 2022...
| kgeist wrote:
| Russia is reliable when it comes to software engineering.
| I've met a few guys from Intel Russia, bright folks. The
| politics, though...
| Wytwwww wrote:
| Individual Russian software developers might be reliable
| but that's hardly the point. They should've just moved
| them to US or even Germany or something like that if they
| were serious about entering the GPU market, though...
|
| e.g. There are plenty of talented engineers in China as
| well but it would be severely idiotic for any western
| company to move their core R&D there. Same applied to
| Russia.
| kgeist wrote:
| Well, Intel Russia opened in 2000 back when USA and
| Russia were on good terms, and Putin was relatively
| unknown. Sure it was a mistake in hindsight...
| Wytwwww wrote:
| I doubt they began working on ARC/XE drivers back in
| 2000. If the entire driver team being in Russia (i.e.
| Intel trying to save money) was truly the main reason why
| ARC failed on launch they really only have themselves to
| blame...
| lucianbr wrote:
| I think if you're CEO of Intel, some foresight might be
| in order. Or else the ability to find a solution fast
| when things turn impredictibly sour. What did he get a
| $16mil salary for?
| kergonath wrote:
| It had been obvious for quite a while even before 2022.
| There were the Chechen wars, and Georgia in 2008, and
| Crimea in 2014. All the journalists and opposition
| politicians killed over the years, and the constant
| concentration of power in the hands of Putin. The Ukraine
| invasion was difficult to predict, but Russia was a
| dangerous place long before that. It's a CEO's job to
| have a strategic vision, there must have been contingency
| plans.
| kgeist wrote:
| Wars involving the US in the 21st century:
| War in Afghanistan (2001-2021) US intervention in
| Yemen (2002-present) Iraq War (2003-2011) US
| intervention in the War in North-West Pakistan
| (2004-2018) Second US Intervention in the Somali
| Civil War (2007-present) Operation Ocean Shield
| (2009-2016) Intervention in Libya (2011)
| Operation Observant Compass (2011-2017) US military
| intervention in Niger (2013-2024) US-led
| intervention in Iraq (2014-2021) US intervention in
| the Syrian civil war (2014-present) US intervention
| in Libya (2015-2019) Operation Prosperity Guardian
| (2023-present)
|
| Wars involving Russia in the 21st century:
| Second Chechen War (1999-2009) Russo-Georgian War
| (2008) Russo-Ukrainian War (2014-present)
| Russian military intervention in the Syrian Civil War
| (2015-present) Central African Republic Civil War
| (2018-present) Mali War (2021-present)
| Jihadist insurgency in Burkina Faso (2024-present)
| kergonath wrote:
| I don't know what you are trying to say. If you have a
| point to make, at least be honest about it.
|
| Also, I am not American and not an I conditional
| supporter of their foreign policy. And considering the
| trajectory of American politics it is obvious that any
| foreign multinational developing in the US should have
| contingency plans.
| kgeist wrote:
| My point was that great powers are always in some kind of
| military conflict, so it's not really a deciding factor
| when choosing where to build an R&D.
|
| Putin's concentration of power has been alarming, but
| only since around 2012, to be honest. It was relatively
| stable between 2000 and 2012 in general (minus isolated
| cases of mysterious deaths and imprisonments). Russia was
| business-friendly back then, open to foreign investors,
| and most of Putin's authoritarian laws were yet to be
| issued. Most of the conflicts Russia was involved in were
| viewed as local conflicts in border areas (Chechen
| separatism, disputed Georgian territories, frozen East
| Ukrainian conflict, etc.). Only in 2022 did the Ukraine
| war escalate to its current scale, and few people really
| saw it coming (see: thousands of European/American
| businesses operating in Russia by 2022 without any issue)
|
| So I kind of see why Intel didn't do much about it until
| 2022. In fact, they even built a second R&D center in
| 2020... (20 years after the first one).
| echoangle wrote:
| Yeah, so if you're a Russian company, you shouldn't
| outsource to the US. Or what are you trying to tell us?
| aguaviva wrote:
| Not just in hindsight -- but by 2011 it was clear to
| anyone paying attention where Russia was heading (if not
| to war, then certainly to a long-term dictatorship).
| Anyone who failed to see the signs, or chose to
| intellectualize past them - did so willingly.
| timschmidt wrote:
| > He failed on GPU. The product was substandard.
|
| I will never understand this line of reasoning. Why would
| anyone expect an initial offering to match or best
| similar offerings from the industry leader? Isn't it
| understood that leadership requires several revisions to
| get right?
| mnau wrote:
| Oh, poor multi billion company. We should buy its product
| with poor value, just to make it feel better.
|
| Intel had money and decades of integrated GPU experience.
| Any new entrant to the market must justify the value to
| the buyer. Intel didn't. He could sell them cheap to try
| to make a position in the market, though I think that
| would be a poor strategy (didn't have financials to make
| it work).
| timschmidt wrote:
| I think you misunderstood me. I wasn't calling for people
| to purchase a sub-par product, rather for management and
| investors to be less fickle and ADHD when it comes to
| engineering efforts one should reasonably expect to take
| several product cycles.
|
| Honestly, even with their iGPU experience, Arc was a
| pretty impressive first dGPU since the i740. The pace of
| their driver improvement and their linux support have
| both been impressive. They've offered some niche features
| like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Graphics_Technol
| ogy#Grap... which Nvidia limits to their professional
| series.
|
| I don't care if they have to do the development at a loss
| for half a dozen cycles, having a quality GPU is a
| requirement for any top-tier chip supplier these days.
| They should bite the bullet, attempt to recoup what they
| can in sales, but keep iterating toward larger wins.
|
| I'm still upset with them for cancelling the larrabee
| uarch, as I think it would be ideal for many ML
| workloads. Who needs CUDA when it's just a few thousand
| x86 threads? I'm sure it looked unfavorable on some
| balance sheet, but it enabled unique workloads.
| mnau wrote:
| > I don't care if they have to do the development at a
| loss for half a dozen cycles,
|
| And here is the problem. You are discussing a dream
| scenario with unlimited money. This thread is about how
| CEO of Intel has retired/was kicked out (far more likely)
| for business failures.
|
| In real world, Intel was in a bad shape (see margins,
| stock price ect) and couldn't afford to squander
| resources. Intel couldn't commit and thus it should
| adjust strategy. It didn't. Money was wasted that Intel
| couldn't afford to waste.
| timschmidt wrote:
| Well, seeing as GPU is important across all client
| segments, in workstation and datacenter, in console where
| AMD has been dominant, and in emerging markets like
| automotive self-driving, not having one means exiting the
| industry in a different way.
|
| I brought up Intel's insane chiplet [non-]strategy
| elsewhere in the thread as an example where it's clear to
| me that Intel screwed up. AMD made one chiplet and binned
| it across their entire product spectrum. Intel made
| dozens of chiplets, sometimes mirror images of otherwise
| identical chiplets, which provides none of the yield and
| binning benefits of AMD's strategy. Having a GPU in house
| is a no-brainer, whatever the cost. Many other decisions
| going on at Intel were not. I don't know of another chip
| manufacturer that makes as many unique dies as Intel, or
| has as many SKUs. A dGPU is only two or three of those
| and opens up worlds of possibility across the product
| line.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > He failed on GPU. The product was substandard.
|
| Weren't they pretty good (price/performance) after Intel
| fixed the drivers during the first year or so after
| release? The real failure was taking so long to ship the
| next gen..
| paulpan wrote:
| Disagree on "failed on GPU" as it depends on the goal.
|
| Sure Intel GPUs are inferior to both Nvidia and AMD
| flagship offerings, but they're competitive at a price-
| to-performance ratio. I'd argue for a 1st gen product, it
| was quite successful at opening up the market and
| enabling for cross-selling opportunities with its CPUs.
|
| That all said, I suspect the original intent was to
| fabricate the GPUs on IFS instead of TSMC in order to
| soak up idle capacity. But plans changed along the way
| (for likely performance reasons) and added to the IFS's
| poor perception.
| 7speter wrote:
| The issue with the GPUs is that their transistor to
| performance ratio is poor. The A770 has as many
| transistors as about a 3070ti but only performs as well
| as a 3060 (3060ti on a good day).
|
| So with that, they are outsourcing production of these
| chips to TSMC and using nearly cutting edge processes
| (battlemage is being announced tomorrow and will use
| either TSMC 5 or 4), and the dies are pretty large. That
| means they are paying for dies the size of 3080s and
| retaling them at prices of 3060s.
| ryao wrote:
| The A770 actually has more transistors than the RTX 3070
| Ti:
|
| RTX 3070 Ti: 17,400 million transistors
|
| A770: 21,700 million transistors
|
| https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-
| rtx-3070-ti.c3...
|
| https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/arc-a770.c3914
|
| It has taken Nvidia decades to figure out how to use
| transistors as efficiently as it does. It was unlikely
| for Intel to come close with their first discrete GPU in
| decades.
|
| That said, it is possible that better drivers would
| increase A770 performance, although I suspect that
| reaching parity with the RTX 3070 Ti would be a fantasy.
| The RTX 3070 Ti has both more compute and more memory
| bandwidth. The only advantage the A770 has on its side is
| triple the L2 cache.
|
| To make matters worse for Intel, I am told that games
| tend to use vendor specific extensions to improve shader
| performance and those extensions are of course not going
| to be available to Intel GPUs running the same game. I am
| under the impression that this is one of the reasons why
| DXVK cannot outperform the Direct3D native stack on
| Nvidia GPUs. The situation is basically what Intel did to
| AMD with its compiler and the MKL in reverse.
|
| In specific, information in these extensions is here:
|
| https://gpuopen.com/amd-gpu-services-ags-library/
| https://developer.nvidia.com/rtx/path-tracing/nvapi/get-
| star...
|
| Also, I vaguely recall that Doom Eternal used some AMD
| extension that was later incorporated into vulkan 1.1,
| but unless ID Software updated it, only AMD GPUs will be
| using that. I remember seeing AMD advertising the
| extension years ago, but I cannot find a reference when I
| search for it now. I believe the DXVK developers would
| know what it is if asked, as they are the ones that told
| me about it (as per my recollection).
|
| Anyway, Intel entered the market with the cards stacked
| against it because of these extensions. On the bright
| side, it is possible for Intel to level the playing field
| by implementing the Vulkan extensions that its
| competitors use to get an edge, but that will not help it
| in Direct3D performance. I am not sure if it is possible
| for Intel to implement those as they are tied much more
| closely with their competitors' drivers. That said, this
| is far from my area of expertise.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > Intel needed to be split in two as well
|
| Wouldn't that just pretty much guarantee that the foundry
| business would fail since Intel wouldn't have any incentives
| to shift most of their manufacturing to TSMC? The same thing
| happened with AMD/Global Foundries..
| mastax wrote:
| AMD has a big wafer supply agreement with GlobalFoundries,
| and has since the spinoff. It was exclusive until the
| seventh WSA in 2019 which allowed AMD to purchase 7nm and
| beyond from other suppliers (without paying penalties)
| which was the only reasonable resolution after GloFo
| cancelled their 7nm fab (which may have been the best thing
| to happen to AMD). But AMD increased their GloFo orders in
| May and December 2021 during the chip crunch to $2.1B total
| through 2025. If you look at the first WSA amendment from
| March 2011 it includes AMD agreeing to pay an additional
| $430M if they get some (redacted) node in production in
| time.
|
| Anyway, whatever woes GloFo is facing you can't blame them
| on AMD. They had an exclusivity deal for a decade which
| only got broken when it was no longer tenable and AMD still
| buys a ton of their wafers. I suppose AMD may have bought
| more wafers if their products didn't suck for most of that
| time but it had nothing to do with shifting production to
| TSMC which only happened after GloFo gave up.
| jpalawaga wrote:
| right. so glofo couldn't keep up abandoned the bleeding
| edge. what's the evidence that intel foundaries, divorced
| from design, wouldn't suffer the same fate?
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| With the design side, Intel foundries have struggled to
| keep up with TSMC. It's not clear that the design side
| helps. My guess is that it's actually a question of
| corporate culture, and that AMD's ambitious, driven
| people stuck with AMD.
| manquer wrote:
| No evidence, intel doesn't have the resources to be
| fighting tsmc, and, arm and nvidia, apple and samsung in
| different technologies at the same time.( foundry, gpus,
| cpus, NAND ,SSD etc) They already sold the NAND memory
| business to SK hynix in 2021.
|
| They will have to focus, that means getting out lines of
| business which may likely die.
|
| That would be better than going bankrupt and your
| competitors picking the pieces
| bell-cot wrote:
| Oh, yes. They spent too many years as the obvious #1, with a
| license to print money...when, longer-term, staying there
| required that Intel remain top-of-league in two _profoundly_
| difficult and fast-moving technologies (10e9+-transistor CPU
| design, and manufacturing such chips). Meanwhile, the natural
| rot of any large org - people getting promoted for their
| ladder-climbing skills, and making decisions for their own
| short-term benefit - were slow eating away at Intel 's ability
| to stay at the top of those leagues.
| tonetegeatinst wrote:
| Who/what is BK? Are they the previous person who held Pat
| Gelsingers position?
| _huayra_ wrote:
| Brian Krzanich, the CEO before Pat
| davidczech wrote:
| Don't forget Bob Swan
| twoodfin wrote:
| _They really need to clear house in a spectacular way but I 'm
| not sure who could even do that at this point._
|
| An alien from Vega looking at our constellation of tech
| companies and their leadership might point at an obvious
| answer...
| alecco wrote:
| 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 publishing a lot of great
| research but no software for the users.
|
| Contrast it with Nvidia and their amazing software stack and
| support for their hardware.
| gondo wrote:
| > Nvidia and their amazing software stack and support for
| their hardware.
|
| Linus seems to disagree
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tQIdxbWhHSM
| mnau wrote:
| His comment has nothing to do with quality of software or
| quality of support, but is about dealing with NVidia.
| Trying to work with NVidia (as a hardware manufacturer)
| must have been frustrating, but that has nothing to do with
| quality of the software.
|
| The video is 12 years old. A lot changed in the meantime.
|
| AMD has open source drivers and crashes often. NVidia has
| (or more precisely _had_ ) closed source drivers that
| nearly always work.
| alecco wrote:
| That was about drivers and in 2012. At the time Linux was
| not interesting for them as clients. But now with AI,
| Nvidia has open source drivers.
|
| https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-Transitions-OSS-KMD
| jiggawatts wrote:
| 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's ultra-important with a feature like this to make it
| _available_ to everybody, so that software is written to
| utilise it. This includes the starving university student
| contributing to Postgres, _not just_ some big-enterprise
| customer that merely _buys_ their software!
|
| They're doing the same stupid "gating" with AVX-512 as well,
| where it's physically included in desktop chips, but it is
| fused off so that server parts can be "differentiated".
|
| Meanwhile AMD just makes _one_ compute tile that has a
| uniform programming API across both desktop and server chips.
| This means that geeks tuning their software to run on their
| own PCs are inadvertently optimising them for AMD 's server
| chips as well!
|
| PS: Microsoft figured this out a while ago and they fixed
| some of their products like SQL Server. It now enables
| practically all features in all SKUs. Previously when only
| Enterprise Edition has certain programmability features
| _nobody would use them_ because software vendors couldn 't
| write software that customers couldn't install because they
| only had Standard Edition!
| alecco wrote:
| Preach. I gave up hoping on Intel after getting burned. I
| feel sorry for the good talent there and I hope they find a
| home somewhere better.
| mythz wrote:
| Well their stock is already in the dumps, they can't do much
| worse than they already have been.
|
| Divesting from their discrete GPUs just as they were starting to
| become a viable value option was one of their most recent asinine
| decisions. No idea why they didn't try test the market with a
| high RAM 64GB+ card before bowing out to see how well they'd do.
| Nvidia's too busy printing money to add more RAM to their
| consumer GPUs, they'd have the cheap GPU VRAM market all to
| themselves.
| NKosmatos wrote:
| Exactly, I was discussing this with a friend the other day. I'm
| sure there must be a market for high RAM GPUs, even if they're
| not as fast as NVIDIA GPUs.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Definitely is. That's what the various LLMs are running
| inference on.
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| They aren't divesting from discrete GPUs. The Battlemage launch
| is tomorrow.
| riskable wrote:
| Gelsinger doesn't think there will be any demand at all for
| GPUs in the near future!
|
| > "Gelsinger said the market will have less demand for
| dedicated graphics cards in the future."
|
| From: https://www.techspot.com/news/105407-intel-not-repeat-
| lunar-...
|
| He _may_ have been talking about something like, "all GPU
| stuff will just be integrated into the CPU" but I _highly_
| doubt that 's realistic. Nvidia's latest chip die size is
| _enormous_! Their new 5090 die is reportedly 744mm _squared_
| : https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/the-
| rtx-5090...
|
| There's _no way_ you 're going to be getting an equivalent
| level of performance from a CPU with integrated GPU when the
| GPU part of the die needs to be _that_ big.
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| He said less demand. He didn't say there would be no
| demand. Importantly he didn't say intel was divesting
| discrete GPUs. Perhaps even more importantly they
| demonstrably aren't divesting.
| downvotetruth wrote:
| With the B770 16GB gone and the idea for the B580 to be
| cheaper than current 7600 XT @ 16 GB by cutting 4 GB makes
| Battlemage DOA. A gamer making an investment on a card for ~3
| years cares less about spending ~$30 more vs being unable to
| run high resolution texture packs on a gimped GPU. The XMX
| cores are superior for AI for a month until Blackwell with
| smaller 2 and 4FP units, but a month is too little lead to
| overcome the CUDA software inertia. The next beancounter CEO
| gets the gift of terrible sales numbers and the excuse to
| drop the prices to move them out before RTX 5000 & RX 8000
| competition hits.
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| Maybe you are right and Battlemage is DOA. Perhaps intel
| know that and just want to dump inventory before announcing
| they will get out of the GPU business.
|
| On the other hand, maybe not.
|
| My point is that although you might think they are going to
| divest the GPU business in future, we don't know that for
| sure and it's kind of weird to present it as having already
| happened.
| downvotetruth wrote:
| Intel won't divest the GPU business. Xe2 is well
| architectured as an efficient iGPU and has market fit
| there. The problem is taking it the other way to discrete
| high end and data center rather than the opposite as
| NVidia has done with GPUs and AMD with CPUs. Using the
| low end consumer loss leader to experiment on
| architecture and new nodes that then scales to the high
| end has been Intel's strategy, which is logical from a
| foundry perspective for monolithic chips, but failing to
| flip it to the new chiplet and data center investment
| reality is killing the company.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| It still has a market cap over over $100b. Trust me, things can
| absolutely get worse from here. The default state of big
| companies that have been deeply mismanaged for 10+ years is
| that they go bust and end up getting bought out for a pittance.
| If the fabs can't be made to work in a reasonable timeframe
| when they are still competitive in the marketplace, then they
| turn out to be giant write-offs and malinvestment only good for
| shielding future income from taxes.
| jarbus wrote:
| Not an insider, but this doesn't seem good. I more or less agreed
| with every call Intel's made over the past few years, and was
| bullish on 18A. I liked that Pat was an engineer. His interim
| replacements don't seem to have that expertise.
|
| Intel wasn't doing great to start, but Pat put it on the path,
| potentially, towards greatness. Now even that is in major
| jeopardy.
| mepian wrote:
| >His interim replacements don't seem to have that expertise.
|
| MJ has a pretty good reputation inside the company.
| ridruejo wrote:
| I got to meet and interact with Pat a few times while he was the
| CEO of VMware. I really liked him and his approach to things. He
| has done the best he could with the hand that was dealt to him.
| acheong08 wrote:
| Is this not a bit too short a time for results to show yet?
| Turning a ship too many times would just result in it spinning in
| circles around the same position
| n144q wrote:
| Part of me is wondering if in an imaginary world, these same
| people are on AMD's board, would Lisu Su have already been
| fired a few years ago?
| mrandish wrote:
| >Is this not a bit too short a time for results to show yet?
|
| Pat so suddenly getting "retired" like this isn't based on the
| success or failure of the new foundry nodes. You're correct
| that they weren't supposed to ship yet anyway. With this news
| most are expecting they'll be (further) delayed soon, but the
| real cause of today's action is strategic.
|
| Things at Intel are so far gone that there's now no choice but
| to look at splitting up the company and/or selling/merging key
| parts off. Pat didn't want to preside over breaking up Intel,
| he wanted to save the company by shipping the new nodes. This
| was always a long shot plan which would require the existing
| businesses to do well and new things like GPUs to contribute
| while massively cutting costs in other areas.
|
| Those things didn't work out. The GPUs were late and under
| performed forcing them to be sold near break even. The market
| for desktop and laptop CPUs was much softer than expected for
| macro economic reasons and, worse, there were massive, delayed
| death field failures of the last two gens of desktop CPUs.
| Competitors like AMD generally took more share from Intel
| faster than expected in other markets like data center. The big
| layoffs announced last Summer should have been done in 2021.
| Those things combined caused time and money to run out sooner
| than the new nodes could show up to save the day. This is
| reality finally being acknowledged. Frankly, this should have
| happened last Summer or even earlier. Now the value has eroded
| further making it even harder to save what's left.
| osnium123 wrote:
| This is very bad news for any hopes of establishing a homegrown
| foundry in the US.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| At this point I eagerly await DOGE and the incoming Congress to
| slash and repeal CHIPS and other such funds going to Intel and
| let the market figure this out, because neither Intel nor the US
| government can.
| mepian wrote:
| The market already figured out that it doesn't want leading
| edge manufacturing in the US.
| bluGill wrote:
| Politicians and the military disagree though. They can place
| plenty of pressure on the market to change the market's mind
| if they care to.
| tokioyoyo wrote:
| They'll need to dump a lot more money than $8B to Intel to
| compete in all fronts of manufacturing with China, and
| focus on it for a decade. Those time horizons are
| politically impossible, since next elections are less than
| 4 years away. That being said, competition is good.
| bluGill wrote:
| There are a number of things they are doing other than
| direct money. Buy American acts, sanctions (and other
| taxes/deductions). Even the threat to do something that
| isn't done is a powerful tool.
| tivert wrote:
| > The market already figured out that it doesn't want leading
| edge manufacturing in the US.
|
| Exactly. The market figured out there's a lot of _short-term_
| profit to be made for shareholders in selling off the nation
| 's industry, and moving it down the value chain. They're
| running the country like a legacy business they're winding
| down.
|
| Give Wall Street a few more decades, and the US will have an
| agriculture and resource extraction economy.
| Eumenes wrote:
| Politicians love giving mega industries blank checks.
| blitzar wrote:
| I have a sizeable bet that government spending will be higher
| after the term is up. I am not at all worried about losing the
| bet.
| not_your_vase wrote:
| Unfortunately not surprising, looking at the past year or so.
|
| When he took over, I remember the enthusiasm and optimism, not
| only in business, but in hacker circles also. It's a pity it
| didn't work out. I wonder if it is even possible to save Intel
| (not trying to imply that "if Gelsinger can't do it, than no one
| can", just wondering if Intel is just doomed, regardless of what
| their management does).
| highwaylights wrote:
| The market seems to think this is great news. I disagree strongly
| here, but I can see why traders and potentially the board thought
| this was the right move.
|
| A lot of hate for Pat Gelsinger on Reddit and YouTube from
| armchair experts who don't really grasp the situation Intel were
| in or what was needed to turn the ship around, so if he was
| pushed it seems like it might be to pacify the (not particularly
| informed) YouTube/gamer community and bump the share price.
| That's all speculation, though.
|
| I'd be interested to see who Intel intends to get to run the
| company in his place, as that would signal which audience they're
| trying to keep happy here (if any).
| rsanek wrote:
| why would the board care about "pacifying the YouTube/gamer
| community"? seems like a very unlikely reason for a CEO to be
| fired.
| dragontamer wrote:
| If anything, the streams are reversed.
|
| I'd expect Intel marketing and Public Relations to be paying
| YouTube Influencers to have a particular opinion, the one
| most favorable to the board.
| etempleton wrote:
| Both of the Co-CEOs have a finance background. I think that is
| rather telling. They are trying to appeal to Wallstreet and
| potentially have people that are equipped to manage an M&A
| deal.
| bee_rider wrote:
| The guy that got them into this situation started as an
| engineer. Swan was a money guy, but he did better than
| Krzanich. So, I think it is just hard to guess based on
| somebody's background how they'll do.
|
| However, IMO: they need somebody like Lisa Su, somebody with
| more of an R&D-engineering background. Gelsinger was a step
| in the right direction, but he got a masters degree in the
| 80's and did technically hardcore stuff in the late 80's,
| early 90's. That was when stuff just started to explode.
|
| Su finished her PhD in the 90's, and did technically
| interesting stuff through the computer revolution. It appears
| to have made a world of difference.
| Aromasin wrote:
| Agreed. My career at Intel coincided with Pat's, although I
| jumped ship a little earlier. Admittedly this means I probably
| have a little bias, but based on my hundreds of conversations
| with Intel vets I do think his business strategy was the right
| decision. He came on board a company years behind on process,
| packaging, and architecture technology after years of
| mismanagement by a largely nontechnical staff, which favoured
| buybacks and acquisitions over core business practice.
|
| He had two routes with the capital available following a cash
| injection from COVID-19 and the rapid digitization of the
| workplace - compete with AMD/NVIDIA, or compete with
| TSMC/Samsung. The only sensible option that would capture the
| kind of capital needed to turn the ship around would be to
| become a company critical to the national security of the US,
| during a time of geopolitical stability, onshoring chip
| manufacture and receiving support from the government in doing
| so. He could either compete with competitors at home or those
| abroad, but not both simultaneously. The thesis makes sense;
| you've lost the advantage to NVIDIA/AMD, so pivot to become a
| partner rather than a rival.
|
| I don't think it's a coincidence that just a week after Intel
| finally received the grant from the government, he announced
| his departure. The CHIPS act was a seminal moment in his
| career. It makes sense he'd want to see that through till
| completion. He's 63; now is as good a time as ever to hand over
| the reins, in this case to a very capable duo of MJ and Zisner
| (who were always two of the most impressive EVPs of the bunch
| in my book).
| paulpan wrote:
| Pat was seemed to understand the criticality of fabrication
| process lead in today's day and age. Hence his push and
| decision to invest in IFS, plus to win over the government
| funding to sustain the effort.
|
| In short, a bad or subpar chip design/architecture can be
| masked by having the chip fabricated on a leading edge node
| but not the inverse. Hence everyone is vying for capacity on
| TSMC's newest nodes - especially Apple in trying to secure
| all capacity for themselves.
| 7speter wrote:
| I'm not in the industry but from what I gather, i agree with
| you 100%. Bloomberg published an article on the matter
| though, but it seems they are reporting that Gelsinger was
| pushed out by a frustrated board because of "slow progress."
| This is a real head scratcher to me, even as someone looking
| in:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-12-02/intel-
| ceo...
| mrweasel wrote:
| The market isn't really the greatest indicator of anything.
| Gelsinger has spend three years trying to turn Intel around and
| the company is only now starting to turn the wheel. It will be
| at least another three years before we see any results. The
| market doesn't have a three year patience, three months maybe.
|
| I hold no opinion on Pat Gelsinger, but changing the CEO in the
| middle of ensuring that Intel remains relevant in the long
| term, seems like a bad move. Probably his plan for "fixing"
| Intel is to slow for the market and the board. Let's see who
| takes over, if it's not an engineer, then things just became
| more dangerous for Intel. The interim people are an
| administrator and a sales person, that does not bode well.
| moh_maya wrote:
| IIRC, Lisa Su and her team took nearly decade to orchestrate
| the turn-around at AMD, and they are still a distant second
| player in GPUs. Expecting Pat Gelsinger to turn around Intel
| (or any company in an industry with such long development and
| tech lead times), and replacing him in 3 years - given that
| he is an engineer with extensive domain and leadership
| experience - seems - reactive, as opposed to thoughtful and
| directed.
|
| Wonder if they will approach Lisa Su to take the job now :D
| paxys wrote:
| > and the company is only now starting to turn the wheel
|
| How is it starting to turn the wheel?
| 7speter wrote:
| It takes something like 5 or 6 years to go from the drawing
| board for a chip design, and many years to create a process
| node. Gelsinger hasn't really even had the chance to
| execute on designs that were started during his tenure. My
| understanding is that would've started with Intel 18A.
| paxys wrote:
| That doesn't really answer the question. Yes he has
| started initiatives that will take 5-6 years to pan out.
| Is there an early indication that they aren't all duds?
| How can anyone state with any certainty that Intel is on
| a better path today than it was 4 years ago when every
| single measurable metric is continuing to decline?
| hunglee2 wrote:
| Gelsinger got screwed by the CHIPS Act.
|
| The promise of state backing for a US champion SC fab was taken
| seriously by Gelsinger, who went all-in in trying to remake Intel
| as TSMC 2.0. But the money turned out to be way too late and far
| more conditional than Gelsinger thought. This is bad news for
| Intel, bad news for US industrial policy
| eigenvalue wrote:
| It was a big mistake to rely on Government handouts to save the
| company then. You never want to rely on something you have
| almost no control over.
| hunglee2 wrote:
| yeah true. Also the govt prob not used to state intervention
| in this way - learning a lot of new lessons on how to do it,
| on the fly
| jordanmorgan10 wrote:
| Enjoy retirement Pat! His book "The Juggling Act" was very
| formative for me in my early years in tech, I really enjoyed it.
| 627467 wrote:
| These large troubled incumbents seems to have infinite lives to
| linger on towards a slow death path destroying value in their
| journey. Like Boeing, why does intel hangs around taking up
| space, opportunities, resources, one failed attempt after another
| failed attempt instead of making space for newer ideas,
| organizations? at this point is so clear these public companies
| are just milking the moat their predecessors built around them
| and the good will (or is it naive will) of their new investors
| who continue to pour money buying out the ones jumping ship
| chang1 wrote:
| Reminds me of Jobs quoting Gil Amelio at D5[1]:
|
| > Gil was a nice guy, but he had a saying. He said, 'Apple is
| like a ship with a hole in the bottom, leaking water, and my
| job is to get the ship pointed in the right direction.'
|
| [1]: https://youtu.be/wvhW8cp15tk?t=1263
| etempleton wrote:
| 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 there are
| significant issues that will hamstring performance.
|
| 2. Pat is/was unwilling to split the foundry and design business
| / be part of a M&A but the board wants to do one or the other.
|
| If 18a is not ready I think the best case scenario for Intel is a
| merger with AMD. The US Govt would probably co-sign on it for
| national security concerns overriding the fact that it creates an
| absolute monopoly on x86 processors. The moat of the two
| companies together would give the new combined company plenty of
| time to ramp up their fabs.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| Why would the US govt allow a merge with AMD?
|
| Sure they won't allow Intel to be bought by a foreign company,
| but surely everyone would much rather see Intel being bought by
| literally any other company than AMD and Nvidia.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| Maybe they'll sell Intel to Northrop Grumman /hj
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| Boeing should buy Intel the way they bought McDonald
| Douglass. It's gonna be a success, trust me.
| jacoblambda wrote:
| Hey I mean two negatives make a positive right? Can't
| possibly go any worse than it already is.
| hedora wrote:
| Probably should add GMC in there.
|
| I heard they're building a iOS / android replacement. Think
| of the vertical integration!
|
| I'm picturing a boot-looping cargo plane full of hummers
| dropping like a stone -- doesn't get much more vertically
| integrated than that. Think of all the layers they can
| eliminate.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| "Vertical velocity" is the new buzzword in professional
| businessing
| bee_rider wrote:
| Nvidia makes a lot more sense than AMD; it is better for the
| market (preserving some competition in x86), and at least
| Intel does something Nvidia doesn't.
| adventured wrote:
| 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.
| FredPret wrote:
| Why would China and the EU have input on a US merger?
| tiahura wrote:
| Do they want to sell pentiums in China or EU?
| maeil wrote:
| If this is a rhetorical question, just make your point
| instead.
|
| If not, look up e.g. Microsoft 's purchase of Activision,
| both US companies.
| Cumpiler69 wrote:
| Because Intel, AMD, etc have offices in EU and China, for
| sales, distribution and also R&D. If you intend to
| operate in those markets you need to comply with local
| regulations.
| adra wrote:
| The same reason as anything else. If the merger goes
| ahead with opposition from foreign markets, those markets
| can impose import tariffs or outright bans. Smaller
| markets may be ones these combined companies are willing
| to piss off, but not Europe. Their opposition is defacto
| a deal killer.
| corimaith wrote:
| They literally don't any serious homegrown alternative
| though, they'd be effectively forfeiting the AI race
| mnau wrote:
| China doesn't care. They are banned from buying western
| HW or making their own at TSMC/Samsung. They are pouring
| hundreds of billions to the semiconductor ecosystem.
|
| Huawei is trying to make establish domestic
| Ascend/MindSpore ecosystem, but they are limited by the
| SMIC process (~7nm). Amount of defects is allegedly
| rather high, but they are the only "official" game in
| town (other than smuggled NVIDIA cards or outsources
| datacenters in Middle East).
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > Why
|
| Well they obviously would..
|
| Also EU has promised various significant subsidies to
| Intel. They obviously has fabs in Ireland and building
| one in Germany and perhaps even Poland..
| jacoblambda wrote:
| What do they do that Nvidia doesn't (and that Nvidia would
| care about)?
|
| They already do networking, photonics, GPUs, high speed
| interconnects, and CPUs. They are planning on selling their
| FPGAs (the Altera acquisition) to Lattice.
|
| The only things left are their fab ops, thunderbolt/usbc,
| wifi, and ble.
|
| Their fab ops would take over a decade of heavy investment
| to catch up to TSMC or Samsung and idk if even Nvidia is
| ambitious enough to take that on.
|
| Wifi and BLE could be good additions if they wanted to
| branch out their mellanox portfolio to wireless.
| Thunderbolt/USB C also might be worthwhile.
|
| But that IP is probably going to be cheaper to buy
| piecemeal so idk if it's worth it to buy the whole company
| outright.
| TheBigSalad wrote:
| x86 CPUs.
| mort96 wrote:
| Yeah I wonder if maybe the x86 license is the most
| valuable art of Intel at this point...
| bee_rider wrote:
| X86 cores remain pretty good at branchy, lightly threaded
| codes, right?
| jacoblambda wrote:
| Unfortunately rights to the x86_64 license expire on the
| event of transfer of either company to a new owner.
| bee_rider wrote:
| I mean, ARM designs have had some wins lately, but x86
| still does quite well in single-thread performance,
| right? Excluding Apple, because they are magic--Amazon,
| Ampere, these ARM CPUs make a reasonable pitch for
| applications that use lots of cores well, but that isn't
| every application.
| etempleton wrote:
| What other US companies are equipped and interested in
| running a giant chip design/fab? NVIDIA and AMD are likely
| the only two candidates.
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| There are also options like Texas Instruments or Microchip.
| Of course far more unlikely than either nvidia or amd, but
| definitely options.
| esskay wrote:
| I do not at all think it will happen, nor does it make any
| sense at all but the rumours of Apple seemingly being
| interested in buying out Intel dont seem to be going away.
|
| I can see them wanting certain parts of the business (GPU
| mainly) but on a whole it doesn't make a lot of sense.
|
| I don't see Intel as a single entity being valuable to any
| US business really. You're essentially buying last years
| fall line, theres very little use for Intel's fabs without
| a huge amount being spent on them to get them up to modern
| standards.
|
| It'll all come down to IP and people that'll be the true
| value.
| etempleton wrote:
| Apple is interesting. They certainly have the money and I
| think the idea of fabricating their own chips appeals to
| Apple, but at then end of the day I don't really think it
| makes sense. Apple won't want to fab for others or design
| chips for others.
|
| The only way it happens is if it is kept separate kind of
| like the Beats acquisition. Apple lends some chip designs
| to Intel and Apple starts fabricating their chips on
| Intel fabs, but otherwise the companies operate
| independently.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Apple is the obvious one. Essentially the only place with
| both the capital to do it and the extreme vertical
| integration enthusiasm. AMD hopefully still remembers
| running a fab.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| The only thing that Apple might find even remotely useful
| are Intel's fabs. The rest of the business would have to
| be sold ton someone else or closed down (which would
| never be approved by the government).
|
| Even then there is zero indication that Apple would ever
| want to do their own manufacturing.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| The government desperately wants US fabs because the
| military requires tech and it's increasingly dangerous to
| rely on globalization when the globe is going nuts -- the
| rest of it doesn't really matter.
| hypercube33 wrote:
| Micron Technology is the only one that comes to mind, but
| they are more on the memory side of things - the last time
| they were on level with Intel was in the 90s when they both
| made DRAM but intel pivoted to processors and networking
| bluGill wrote:
| Ford, GM... The big automakers got burned with the chip
| shortage after COVID (this is their fault, but still they
| got burned)
| raverbashing wrote:
| That would be a hard call
|
| One of the reasons where Intel "let" AMD compete in the x86
| space is US Gov requirements for being able to source chips
| from two vendors at least
| ckozlowski wrote:
| Given the push of ARM designs into the desktop and server
| space, that monopoly doesn't seem to me as much of a danger as
| it might have a decade ago. I imagine any anti-competitive
| behavior in x86 would only accelerate that trend. Not that
| monopolies shouldn't be a concern at all, but my thought is
| that it's not quite that large of a danger.
| phkahler wrote:
| >> 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 someone could even pick up the x86
| and graphics businesses.
|
| BTW I think at this point the graphics business is more
| valuable. Even though Intel is in 3rd place there are many
| players in the SoC world that can use a good GPU. You can build
| a SoC with Intel, ARM, or RISC-V but they all need a GPU.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Yeah, what both companies would need to be competitive in the
| GPU sector is a cuda killer. That's perhaps the one benefit
| of merging Antel can more easily standardize something.
| physicsguy wrote:
| You don't get a CUDA killer without the software
| infrastructure.
|
| Intel finally seem to have got their act together a bit
| with OneAPI but they've languished for years in this area.
| gpapilion wrote:
| They weren't interested in creating an open solution.
| Both intel and AMD have been somewhat short sighted and
| looked to recreate their own cuda, and the mistrust of
| each other has prevented them from a solution for both of
| them.
| pbalcer wrote:
| Disclaimer: I work on this stuff for Intel
|
| At least for Intel, that is just not true. Intel's DPC++
| is as open as it gets. It implements a Khronos standard
| (SYCL), most of the development is happening in public on
| GitHub, it's permissively licensed, it has a viable
| backend infrastructure (with implementations for both
| CUDA and HIP). There's also now a UXL foundation with the
| goal of creating an "open standard accelerator software
| ecosystem".
| J_Shelby_J wrote:
| Neat. Now release 48gb GPUs to the hobbyist devs and
| we'll use intel for LLMs!
| redandblack wrote:
| Apple is your savior if you are looking at it as a
| CPU/GPU/NPU package for consumer/hobbyists.
|
| I decided that I have to start looking at Apple's AI docs
| ur-whale wrote:
| Actual links to the github would be much appreciated, as
| well a half-page tuto on how to get this up an running on
| a simple Linux+Intel setup.
| mepian wrote:
| This link should cover everything: https://www.intel.com/
| content/www/us/en/developer/tools/onea...
| stonogo wrote:
| This is all great, but how can we trust this will be
| supported next year? After Xeon Phi, Omnipath, and a host
| of other killed projects, Intel is approaching Google
| levels of mean time to deprecation.
| bn-l wrote:
| What's happening with intel wino? That seemed like their
| cuda ish effort.
| wyldfire wrote:
| OpenCL was born as a cuda-alike that could be apply to
| GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA, and general purpose CPUs.
| NVIDIA briefly embraced it (in order to woo Apple?) and
| then just about abandoned it to focus more on cuda.
| NVIDIA abandoning OpenCL meant that it just didn't
| thrive. Intel and AMD both embraced OpenCL. Though
| admittedly I don't know the more recent history of
| OpenCL.
| izacus wrote:
| Why would you want this kind of increased monopolization?
| That is, CPU companies also owning the GPU market?
| nemomarx wrote:
| is it a lot more competitive for Nvidia to just keep
| winning? I feel like you want two roughly good choices
| for GPU compute and AMD needs a shot in the arm for that
| somewhere.
| bionhoward wrote:
| WGSL seems like a nice standard everyone could get behind
| quotemstr wrote:
| There are _already_ packages that let people run CUDA
| programs unmodified on other GPUs: see
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970560
|
| For whatever reason, people just delete these tools from
| their minds, then claim Nvidia still has a monopoly on
| CUDA.
| jcranmer wrote:
| There's already a panoply of CUDA alternatives, and even
| several CUDA-to-non-Nvidia-GPU alternatives (which aren't
| supported by the hardware vendors and are in some sense
| riskier). To my knowledge (this isn't really my space),
| many of the higher-level frameworks already support these
| CUDA alternatives.
|
| And yet _still_ the popcorn gallery says "there no
| [realistic] alternative to CUDA." Methinks the real issue
| is that CUDA is the best software solution for Nvidia
| GPUs, and the alternative hardware vendors aren't seen as
| viable competitor for hardware reasons, and people
| attribute the failure to software failures.
| quotemstr wrote:
| > alternative hardware vendors aren't seen as viable
| competitor for hardware reasons, and people attribute the
| failure to software failures.
|
| It certainly seems like there's a "nobody ever got fired
| for buying nvidia" dynamic going on. We've seen this
| mentality repeatedly in other areas of the industry:
| that's why the phrase is a snowclone.
|
| Eventually, someone is going to use non-nvidia GPU
| accelerators and get a big enough cost or performance win
| that industry attitudes will change.
| jdewerd wrote:
| > There's already a panoply of CUDA alternatives
|
| Is there?
|
| 10 years ago, I burned about 6 months of project time
| slogging through AMD / OpenCL bugs before realizing that
| I was being an absolute idiot and that the green tax was
| far cheaper than the time I was wasting. If you asked
| AMD, they would tell you that OpenCL was ready for new
| applications and support was right around the corner for
| old applications. This was incorrect on both counts.
| Disastrously so, if you trusted them. I learned not to
| trust them. Over the years, they kept making the same
| false promises and failing to deliver, year after year,
| generation after generation of grad students and HPC
| experts, filling the industry with once-burned-twice-shy
| received wisdom.
|
| When NVDA pumped and AMD didn't, presumably AMD could no
| longer deny the inadequacy of their offerings and
| launched an effort to fix their shit. Eventually I am
| sure it will bear fruit. But is their shit actually
| fixed? Keeping in mind that they have proven time and
| time and time and time again that they cannot be trusted
| to answer this question themselves?
|
| 80% margins won't last forever, but the trust deficit
| that needs to be crossed first shouldn't be understated.
| bn-l wrote:
| This is absolutely it. You pay the premium not to have to
| deal with the BS.
| stonogo wrote:
| Those packages only really perform with low-precision
| work. For scientific computing, using anything but CUDA
| is a painful workflow. DOE has been deploying AMD and
| Intel alternatives in their leadership class machines and
| it's been a pretty bad speedbump.
| dzdt wrote:
| And which of these have the level of support that would
| let a company put a multi-million dollar project on top
| of?
| equestria wrote:
| We have trillions of dollars riding on one-person open-
| source projects. This is not the barrier for "serious
| businesses" that it used to be.
| roenxi wrote:
| 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 cards that still wouldn't save them because
| the bugs would be too problematic.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > 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 had just a weird dance to perform to get a kernel
| running. Find the OpenCL device using a magic filesystem
| token. Ask the device politely if it wants to OpenCL.
| Send over the kernel string blob to compile. Run the
| kernel. A ton of ceremony and then you couldn't be
| guarenteed it'd work because the likes of AMD, Intel, or
| nVidia were all spotty on how well they'd support it.
|
| SYCL seems promising but the ecosystem is a little
| intimidating. It does not seem (and I could be wrong
| here) that there is a defacto SYCL compiler. The goals of
| SYCL compilers are also fairly diverse.
| xbar wrote:
| 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, RISC-V...
|
| Windows, MacOS and Linux all run competitively on multiple
| non-x86 architectures.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| > An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now.
|
| I think you're off by 20 years on this. In the 80s and
| early 90s we had reasonable competition from 68k, powerpc,
| and arm on desktops; and tons of competition in the server
| space (mips, sparc, power, alpha, pa-risc, edit: and vax!).
| It wasn't till the early 2000s that both the desktop/server
| space coalesced around x86.
| bane wrote:
| Thank you for saying this. It's clear that processors are
| going through something really interesting right now
| after an extended dwindling and choke point onto x86.
| This x86 dominance has lasted entire careers, but from a
| longer perspective we're simply seeing another cycle in
| ecosystem diversity, specialized functions spinning out
| of and back into unified packages, and a continued
| downward push from commoditization forces that are
| affecting the entire product chain from fab to ISA
| licensing. We're not quite at the wild-west of the late
| 80s and 90s, but something's in the air.
|
| It seems almost like the forces that are pushing against
| these long-term trends are focused more on trying to
| figure out how to saturate existing compute on the high-
| end, and using that to justify drives away from diversity
| and vertical integrated cost/price reduction. But there
| are, long-term, not as many users who need to host this
| technology as there are users of things like phones and
| computers who need the benefits the long-term trends
| provide.
|
| Intel has acted somewhat as a rock in a river, and the
| rest of the world is finding ways around them after
| having been dammed up for a bit.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| I remember when I was a senior in undergrad (1993) the
| profs were quite excited about the price/performance of
| 486 computers which thoroughly trashed the SPARC-based
| Sun work stations that we'd transitioned to because
| Motorola rug-pulled the 68k. Sure we were impressed by
| the generation of RISC machines that came out around that
| time like SPARC, PA RISC, POWER PC and such but in
| retrospect it was not those RISC machines that were fast
| it was 68k that was dying, but x86 was keeping up.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _It wasn 't till the early 2000s that both the
| desktop/server space coalesced around x86._
|
| A lot of companies killed off their in-house
| architectures and hopped on the Itanium bandwagon. The
| main two exceptions were Sun and IBM.
| sitkack wrote:
| The bandwagon was actually an Ice Cream truck run by the
| old lady from the Sponge Bob movie.
|
| Intel had just wiped the floor with x86 servers, all the
| old guard Unix vendors with their own chips were hurting.
| Then Intel makes the rounds with a glorious plan of how
| they were going to own the server landscape for a decade
| or more. So in various states of defeat and grief much of
| the industry followed them. Planned or not, the resulting
| rug pull really screwed them over. The organs that
| operated those lines of businesses were fully removed. It
| worked too well, I am going to say it was on accident.
|
| Intel should have broken up its internal x86 hegemony a
| long time ago, which they have been trying since the day
| it was invented. Like the 6502, it was just too
| successful for its own good. Only x86 also built up the
| Vatican around itself.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| 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 migration away from these programs, but would
| nonetheless be a lucrative situation for Intel-AMD in the
| meantime.
| saltminer wrote:
| The fact that C++ development has been effectively
| hijacked by the "no ABI breakage, ever"/backwards
| compatibility at all costs crowd certainly speaks to
| this.
|
| https://herecomesthemoon.net/2024/11/two-factions-of-cpp/
|
| There are a lot of pre-compiled binaries floating about
| that are depended on by lots of enterprise software whose
| source code is long gone, and these are effectively
| locked to x86_64 chips until the cost of interoperability
| becomes greater than reverse engineering their non-
| trivial functionality.
| ryao wrote:
| They had ABI breakage when C++11 support was implemented
| in GCC 5 and that was extremely painful. Honestly, I
| still wish that they had avoided it.
| glandium wrote:
| You can still use the old ABI with
| -D_GLIBCXX_USE_CXX11_ABI=0
| KerrAvon wrote:
| C++ language spec doesn't specify and doesn't care about
| ABI (infamously so; it's kept the language from being
| used in many places, and where people ignored ABI compat
| initially but absolutely needed it in the future, as with
| BeOS's Application Kit and Mac kexts, it's much harder to
| maintain than it should be.
|
| "two factions" is only discussing source compatibility.
| burnte wrote:
| > An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now.
|
| Incorrect, we have an even greater lack of x86 vendors now
| than we did in the 80s. In the 80s you had Intel, and they
| licensed to AMD, Harris, NEC, TI, Chips & Technologies, and
| in the 90s we had IBM, Cyrix, VIA, National Semi, NexGen,
| and for a hot minute Transmeta. Even more smaller vendors.
|
| Today making mass market x86 chips we have: Intel, AMD, and
| a handful of small embedded vendors selling designs from
| the Pentium days.
|
| I believe what you meant was that x86 is not a monopoly
| thanks to other ISAs, but x86 itself is even more of a
| monopoly than ever.
| bluGill wrote:
| I believe in the 80s all those vendors were making the
| same intel design in their own fab. I don't think any of
| them did the design on their own. In the 90s some of them
| had their own designs.
| burnte wrote:
| 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 variants of the 386
| and 486. In the Pentium days Intel wouldn't license the
| Pentium design, but there were compatible competitors as
| AMD also began 100% custom designs that were only ISA
| compatible and pin compatible with the K5 and K6 lines.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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)
| burnte wrote:
| I called the K5 and 6 new designs, I said they were only
| ISA and pin compatible, but not the same design.
| etempleton wrote:
| This is all very true and why I think a merger between AMD
| and Intel is even possible. Nvidia and Intel is also a
| possible merger, but I actually think there is more
| regulatory concern with NVIDIA and how big and dominant
| they are becoming.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| 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 past.
| ryao wrote:
| Samsung has its own leading edge fabrication plants.
| Merging the two would drop the number of leading edge
| foundries from 3 to 2.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Isn't Intel's main problem that they've ceased to be a
| leading edge foundry?
|
| Maybe they should follow AMD's lead and spin off the
| foundry business.
| mort96 wrote:
| I believe the "x86 monopoly" was meant to refere to how
| only Intel and AMD are legally allowed to make x86 chips
| due to patents. X86 is currently a duopoly, and if Intel
| and AMD were to merge, that would become a monopoly.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| Didn't AMD start making x86 chips in 1982?
| mort96 wrote:
| That seems correct from some quick Wikipedia reading, but
| I don't understand what it has to do with anything?
| Wytwwww wrote:
| The existence of an imaginary x86 monopoly in the 80s?
| mort96 wrote:
| Oh, but xbar's interpretation of the phrase "x86
| monopoly" is clearly the x86 architecture having a
| monopoly in the instruction set market. Under that
| interpretation, I don't really think it's relevant how
| many companies made x86 chips. I don't think xbar is
| necessarily wrong, I just think they're interpreting
| words to mean something they weren't intended so they're
| not making an effective argument
| Wytwwww wrote:
| Did x86 have a monopoly in the 80s to begin with? If
| there is any period when that was true it would be the
| 2000s or early 2010s.
|
| > intended so they're not making an effective argument
|
| To be fair I'm really struggling to somehow connect the
| "x86 monopoly in the late 80s" with the remainder of
| their comment (which certainly makes sense).
| bluGill wrote:
| x86 didn't have a monopoly, but IBM PC clones were
| clearly what everyone was talking about and there the
| monopoly existed. There are lots of different also ran
| processors, some with good market share in some niche,
| but overall x86 was clearly on the volume winners track
| by 1985.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > but overall x86 was clearly on the volume winners track
| by 1985.
|
| By that standard if we exclude mobile x86 has a much
| stronger monopoly these days than in 1985. Unless we
| exclude low end PCs like Apple II and Commodore 64.
|
| In 1990 x86 had ~80%, Apple ~7%, Amiga ~4% (with the
| remainder going to lowend or niche PCs) so again not that
| different than today.
| chillpenguin wrote:
| This is how I interpreted it as well. The others seem to
| be arguing due to a misunderstanding of what was
| said/meant.
| layer8 wrote:
| X86 is more than just the ISA. What's at stake is the
| relatively open PC architecture and hardware ecosystem. It
| was a fluke of history that made it happen, and it would be
| sad to lose it.
| tadfisher wrote:
| PCI-e is the culmination of that ecosystem, and like PCI
| before it, is available on all architectures to anyone
| who pays PCI-SIG.
| michaelt wrote:
| 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.
| hn3er1q wrote:
| 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.
| jamesy0ung wrote:
| You can't really build a PC with parts other than x86.
| The only other platform you can really build from parts
| is Arm, with the high end Ampere server chips. Most other
| platforms are usually pretty highly integrated, you can't
| just swap parts or work on it.
| layer8 wrote:
| 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.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now
|
| And then in the 2000s after AMD64 pretty much destroyed all
| competing architectures and then in the 2010s Intel itself
| effectively was almost a monopoly (outside of mobile) with
| AMD being on the verge of bankruptcy.
| ryao wrote:
| Itanium's hype killed the competing architectures. AMD64
| then took over since it was cost effective and fast.
| paulpan wrote:
| Certainly feels like preempting news that Intel 18A is
| delayed.
|
| Restoring Intel's foundry lead starting with 18A was central
| to Pat's vision and he essentially staked his job on it. 18A
| is supposed to enter production next year but recent rumors
| is that it's broken.
| DebtDeflation wrote:
| The original "5 Nodes in 4 Years" roadmap released in mid
| 2021 had 18A entering production 2H 2024. So it's already
| "delayed". The updated roadmap has it coming in Q3 2025 but
| I don't think anyone ever believed that. This after 20A was
| canceled, Intel 4 is only used for the Compute Tile in
| Meteor Lake, Intel 3 only ever made it into a couple of
| server chips, and Intel 7 was just renamed 10nm.
| Lammy wrote:
| https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/opinion/
| con...
|
| I have next to zero knowledge of semiconductor
| fabrication, but "Continued Momentum" does sound like the
| kind of corporate PR-speak that means "people haven't
| heard from us in a while and there's not much to show".
|
| I also would never have realized the 20A process was
| canceled were it not for your comment since this press
| release has one of the most generous euphemisms I've ever
| heard for canceling a project:
|
| "One of the benefits of our early success on Intel 18A is
| that it enables us to shift engineering resources from
| Intel 20A earlier than expected as we near completion of
| our five-nodes-in-four-years plan."
| lstodd wrote:
| > Certainly feels like preempting news that Intel 18A is
| delayed.
|
| I think at this point no one believes Intel can deliver. So
| news or not..
| sitkack wrote:
| I could see Broadcom picking up x86.
| xxpor wrote:
| This is great "write a horror story in 7 words" content.
| sitkack wrote:
| Ok, I'd like to pitch a Treehouse of Horror episode.
|
| Part 1, combine branch predictor with the instruction
| trace cache to be able to detect workloads, have specific
| licenses for say Renderman, Oracle or CFD software.
|
| Part 2, add a mesh network directly to the CPU, require
| time based signing keys to operate. Maybe every chip just
| has starlink included.
|
| Part 3, In an BWM rent your seats move, the base CPU is
| just barely able to boot the OS, specific features can be
| unlocked with signed payloads. Using Shamir secrets so
| that Broadcom AND the cloud provider are both required
| for signing the feature request. One can rent AVX512,
| more last level cache, ECC, overclocking, underclocking.
|
| The nice part about including radios in the CPUs directly
| means that updates can be applied without network
| connectivity and you can geofence your feature keys.
|
| This last part we can petition the government to require
| as the grounds of being able to produce EAR regulated
| CPUs globally.
|
| I think I'll just sell these patents to Myhrvold.
| baq wrote:
| sir there are children reading this site.
| zymhan wrote:
| I'm not sure I've ever laughed this much at a HN comment
| chain
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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've been following
| hardware think Intel and GFX is just an oxymoron. Wall Street
| might see some value in it, but the rest of us, no.
| tasuki wrote:
| > 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.
|
| What does an OS need a GPU for?
|
| My current laptop only has integrated Intel GPU. I'm not
| missing Nvidia, with its proprietary drivers, high power
| consumption, and corresponding extra heat and shorter
| battery life...
| marxisttemp wrote:
| > What does an OS need a GPU for?
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The modern paradigm of "application blasts out a
| rectangle of pixels" and "the desktop manager composes
| those into another rectangle of pixels and blasts them
| out to the screen".
|
| It actually separates the OS from the GPU. Before WDDM
| your GFX device driver was the only software that could
| use GFX acceleration. After WDDM the GPU is another
| "processor" in your computer that can read and write to
| RAM and the _application_ can use the GPU in user space
| any way it wants, and then the compositor can to the same
| (in _user space_ ) and in the end all the OS is managing
| communication with the GPU.
|
| For that approach to work you _need_ to have enough fill
| rate that you can redraw the screen several times per
| frame. Microsoft wanted to have enough they could afford
| some visual bling, but Intel didn 't give to them.
| vinyl7 wrote:
| Composiors are generally switching to being gpu
| accelerated, not to mention apps will do their own gpu
| accelerated UIs just because the OS ui systems are all
| junk at the moment
| atq2119 wrote:
| And by "are generally switching" you're really trying to
| say "generally switched a decade ago".
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 'cept for Linux.
| amaranth wrote:
| GNOME 3 had a hardware accelerated compositor on release
| in 2011.
| sitkack wrote:
| 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 even better at only 15MB per
| display buffer.
|
| For 1440p at 144Hz and 2TB/s (vcache max), best case is
| an overdraw of 984 frames/frame
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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
| where I am going to start putting Pepper's ghost machines
| in my windows. I think I want to buy a new TV, but I get
| a free old TV. I pick up monitors that are in the hallway
| and people are tripping on them and I take them home.
| Hypothetically I want a state-of-the-art monitor with HDR
| and wide gamut and all that but the way things are going
| I might never buy a TV or monitor again.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Curious to hear more about the a11y work.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| If I recall correctly, Vista was hard depending on
| DirectX 9a for Aero. Intel GPU parts embedded in mobile
| CPUs were almost, but not fully DX 9a capable, but Intel
| convinced Microsoft to accept it as "compatible". That
| created lots of problems to everyone.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| There's a fancy terminal emulator written in Rust that
| uses GPU acceleration. I mean, it is emulating a
| needlepoint printer...
| amaranth wrote:
| 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...
| zamadatix wrote:
| I wonder how big a downside an x86 monopoly would actually be
| these days (an M4 MacBook being the best perf/watt way to run
| x86 Windows apps today as it is) and how that compares to the
| downsides of not allowing x86 to consolidate efforts against
| rising competition from ARM CPUs.
|
| The problem with the "use the GPU in a SoC" proposition is
| everyone that makes the rest of a SoC also already has a GPU
| for it. Often better than what Intel can offer in terms of
| perf/die space or perf/watt. These SoC solutions tend to
| coalesce around tile based designs which keep memory
| bandwidth and power needs down compared to the traditional
| desktop IMR designs Intel has.
| h_tbob wrote:
| That's actually a pretty good pint, honestly
| bell-cot wrote:
| > ...the best case scenario for Intel is a merger with AMD...
|
| Why would AMD want a merger? They aren't a charity, and
| certainly don't need the distraction.
| etempleton wrote:
| Well, for at least a time they would have the entire x86
| market. That is not nothing. Also AMD may want to get back
| into the fab business. Without competition in x86 why not use
| Intel's fabs?
| KeplerBoy wrote:
| And everyone would rush to migrate away from x86.
|
| Having a sole supplier for CPUs is a bad strategy.
| KETHERCORTEX wrote:
| Yet everyone is okay with a de-facto single supplier of
| CUDA capable AI GPUs.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| Perhaps not. But (unlike in this hypothetical situation)
| nobody besides AMD and Intel can do much about that...
| bell-cot wrote:
| Outside of Nvidia, nobody is okay with that.
| hedora wrote:
| This is only true if "everyone" excludes all of the
| hyperscalers and the client device manufacturers.
| esskay wrote:
| They dont need to merge with intel to get the entire x86
| market, they'll be getting that anyway if Intel folds.
|
| Even if Intel gets bought out, it'll be in pieces. Nobody
| wants to enter the x86 market, but there may be smaller
| segmenrs of the business that can help an ARM based
| business, or someone looking to get into GPU's.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > they'll be getting that anyway if Intel folds.
|
| Why would Intel "fold"? Their revenue is still 2x higher
| than AMDs... I mean obviously they are not doing great
| but its silly to say something like that at this point.
| toast0 wrote:
| > Nobody wants to enter the x86 market
|
| If the ISA patent licenses opened up, that might not be
| the case. When the topic comes up, it's more about Intel
| shutting down license transfers, so naturally companies
| have avoided x86.
| tadfisher wrote:
| They would technically have no market, because the Intel-
| AMD X86 license is non-transferable and expires if one
| party goes out of business.
| bell-cot wrote:
| IANAL, however:
|
| - A token legal remnant of Intel, with 0 employees or
| properties, might suffice to keep that license ticking.
|
| - If the stakes appeared to be "or America will lose it's
| ability to make computers", then the government might
| find a judge willing to sign off on just about any sort
| of counterfactual, "because national security".
| csdreamer7 wrote:
| Pretty much fair game for speculation. The only way this is not
| bad for the tech industry was if he resigned due to medical or
| age reasons. That would not be unexpected.
|
| Doubtful that is the issue with Intel's track record. Curious
| when we will know if 18A is competitive or not.
|
| > If 18a is not ready I think the best case scenario for Intel
| is a merger with AMD. The US Govt would probably co-sign on it
| for national security concerns overriding the fact that it
| creates an absolute monopoly on x86 processors. The moat of the
| two companies together would give the new combined company
| plenty of time to ramp up their fabs.
|
| No way other countries would allow that. If A-tel (Amd-inTEL)
| can not sell to the EU the merger will not happen.
| ghaff wrote:
| People who are presumably very well-off financially can
| retire a tad on the early side for all sorts of reasons or a
| combination thereof. Certainly he has made some significant
| course corrections at Intel but the most charitable thing one
| can say is that they will take a long time to play out. As
| you say, a merger with AMD seems like a non-starter for a
| variety of reasons.
| KETHERCORTEX wrote:
| > If A-tel (Amd-inTEL) can not sell to the EU the merger will
| not happen.
|
| What the EU gonna do then? Stop buying computers? Perform
| rapid continental ARM transition for mythical amount of
| money?
| Wytwwww wrote:
| Hard to imagine it ever coming to that but presumably
| massive fines?
|
| > Perform rapid continental ARM transition for mythical
| amount of money?
|
| And what is Intel + AMD going to do? Not sell CPUs in
| Europe?
| mattlondon wrote:
| Just stop buying new intel chips, and continue buying Arm
| chips. Its not like every single existing x86 CPU would
| need to be taken away and destroyed.
|
| Apple has made it fairly obvious, even if it was not
| already with smartphones and chromebooks, that Arm is a
| viable, realistic, and battle-tested alternative for
| general purpose computing. Windows 11 even runs on Arm
| already.
|
| It would not happen "tomorrow" - this would be years in
| court if nothing else. This would give
| Dell/HP/Lenovo/whoever plenty of time to start building Arm
| laptops & servers etc for the European market.
|
| And who knows what RISC-V will look like in a few more
| years?
|
| The EU has done a bunch of stupid anti-consumer shit in
| tech already (hello cookie warnings that everyone now
| ignores), so I would not be surprised if this happened.
| csdreamer7 wrote:
| > 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 will cost 'mythical amounts of money'. Most
| users use a web browser and an office suite. I doubt they
| will know a difference for a while.
| sokoloff wrote:
| This does not seem orderly/planned enough to be simple age-
| related.
| ghaff wrote:
| I tend to agree. He's not outside the window where someone
| might choose to retire. But no named permanent successor?
| Retiring immediately? Tend to speak to a fairly sudden
| decision.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > The moat of the two companies together would give the new
| combined company plenty of time to ramp up their fabs.
|
| I'm not convinced of this. Fabs are incredibly expensive
| businesses. Intel has failed to keep up and AMD spun off their
| fabs to use TSMC.
|
| There is also ARM knocking at the door for general computing.
| It's already gaining traction in previously x86 dominated
| markets.
|
| The model for US based fabbing has to include selling large
| portions of capacity to third party ASIC manufacturers,
| otherwise I see it as doomed to failure.
| etempleton wrote:
| 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 to. Gamers are not going to
| switch unless performance is actually better. There just
| isn't the incentive to switch.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > There is so little incentive to move away from x86 right
| now.
|
| > IT departments are not going to stop buying x86
| processors until they absolutely are forced to.
|
| IT departments are buying arm laptops, Apple's.
|
| And there is an incentive to switch, cost. If you are in
| AWS, you can save a pretty penny by adopting graviton
| processors.
|
| Further, the only thing stopping handhelds from being arm
| machines is poor x86 emulation. A solvable problem with a
| small bit of hardware. (Only non-existent because current
| ARM vendors can't be bothered to add it and ARM hasn't
| standardized it).
|
| Really the only reason arm is lagging is because the likes
| of Qualcomm have tunnel vision on what markets they want to
| address.
| n144q wrote:
| Looks like your post is talking about two things --
| corporate purchased laptops and AWS instances, which are
| quite different.
|
| About corporate laptops, do you have evidence to show
| that companies are switching to Macbooks from
| HP/Dell/ThinkPads?
| cogman10 wrote:
| > corporate purchased laptops and AWS instances, which
| are quite different.
|
| They are similar. Particularly because developing on a
| corporate hardware with an ARM processor is a surefire
| way to figure out if the software you write will have
| issues with ARM in AWS.
|
| That's pretty much the entire reason x86 took off in the
| server market in the first place.
|
| > About corporate laptops, do you have evidence to show
| that companies are switching to Macbooks from
| HP/Dell/ThinkPads?
|
| Nope. Mostly just anecdotal. My company offers devs the
| option of either an x86 machine or a mac.
| n144q wrote:
| Lots of companies do that, and I wouldn't call it an
| x86/ARM choice but rather the same old Windows/Mac
| choice. For Windows, only x86 makes sense for companies
| with lots of legacy software, and the only choice for Mac
| is ARM.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > handhelds from being arm machines is poor x86 emulation
|
| Also Qualcomm's GPUs are pretty shit (compared to Intel's
| and AMDs or Apple's)
| maeil wrote:
| > IT departments are not going to stop buying x86
| processors until they absolutely are forced to.
|
| Plenty of them are buying Macbooks. It's definitely a small
| percentage of the worldwide market, but not entirely
| insignificant either.
| etempleton wrote:
| Yes, but that is because users demand it. And they do so
| begrudgingly. Users are not going to demand an ARM
| Windows laptop.
| cogman10 wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| Can those users get all the software they need? Many
| users who want a mac are told no because some weird
| software they need doesn't run on it. Others only get a
| mac because some executive demanded IT port that software
| to mac. So long as companies have any x86 only software
| they won't let people switch. Often "art" departments get
| a specific exception and they get to avoid all the jobs
| that require x86 only software just to run their mac.
|
| 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.
| cogman10 wrote:
| > 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 a desktop app in now-a-days is C# or Java. Both of
| which are fairly portable.
| immibis wrote:
| If Microsoft insists on treating them like phones with
| locked-down software stacks, still no.
| rvba wrote:
| If you need to use Excel at work, you need x86 since
| Excel for Mac is a gutted toy (MS wants your company yo
| buy / subscribe to windows too).
|
| And google sheets in my opinion is not good for
| complicated stuff - the constant lag..
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I would bet 95%+ of people who use Excel are not affected
| by any difference between Excel for macOS versus Windows.
| anthonyskipper wrote:
| I work in a large enterprise company, have both windows
| and mac machines, and excel works equally great in both,
| but more and more excel runs in a browser.
|
| We mostly email links to spreadsheets running in cloud.
| So it really doesn't matter what your OS is any more from
| an excel perspective, as long as your computer can run a
| modern browser you are good.
| mcintyre1994 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| What's this based on? Surely the proportion of desktops
| that need to be more powerful than anything Apple is doing
| on ARM is very small. And surely Apple isn't 5 years ahead?
| etempleton wrote:
| It is less about the development of ARM on desktop and
| more about software support. Most apps on Windows are
| still emulated. Some will not work at all. Games are kind
| of a mess on ARM. A ton of security software that IT
| departments require are only going to work x86.
| Businesses run legacy custom applications designed for
| x86. Some major applications still run on emulation only
| and are therefore slower on ARM.
|
| Apple can force the transition. It is not so
| straightforward on Windows/Linux.
| grecy wrote:
| > _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.
| atq2119 wrote:
| 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.
| tucnak wrote:
| Honestly, I wouldn't put it behind IBM to turn it around with
| POWER revival. They'd been doing some cool stuff recently
| with their NorthPole accelerator[1], and using 12nm process
| while at it, indicating there's much room for improvement. It
| could eventually become a relatively open, if not super
| affordable platform. There's precedent with OpenPOWER! And
| not to mention RISC-V, of course, championed by Jim Keller et
| al (Tenstorrent) but it's yet to blossom, all the while
| pppc64el is already there where it matters.
|
| I say, diversity rules!
|
| [1]: https://research.ibm.com/blog/northpole-llm-inference-
| result...
| __d wrote:
| PPC's likely last hope died when Google didn't go ahead
| with OpenPower.
|
| Talos is the exception that proves the rule, sadly.
| classichasclass wrote:
| IBM did lay an egg with Power10, though. They cut corners
| and used proprietary IP and as a result there are few (are
| there any?) non-IBM Power10 systems because the other
| vendors stayed away. Raptor workstations and servers are a
| small-ish part of the market but they're comparatively
| highly visible - and they're still on POWER9 (no S1 yet).
|
| They did realize the tactical error, so I'm hoping Power11
| will reverse the damage.
| JamesLeonis wrote:
| > There is also ARM knocking at the door for general
| computing. It's already gaining traction in previously x86
| dominated markets.
|
| I know anecdotes aren't data, but I was talking with a
| colleague about chips recently and he noticed that converting
| all of his cloud JVM deployments to ARM machines both
| improved performance and lowered costs. The costs might not
| even be the chips themselves, but less power and thermal
| requirements that lowers the OpEx spend.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Yeah, my company is gearing up to do the same. We primarily
| use the JVM so doing the arm switcharoo only makes sense.
| solarkraft wrote:
| > I think the best case scenario for Intel is a merger with AMD
| (...) it creates an absolute monopoly on x86 processors
|
| If this happens, couldn't they force them giving out licenses
| as a condition? The licensing thing has been such an impediment
| to competition that it seems like it's about time anyway.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| It's a good point, and yes, afaik any redress can be
| requested as a condition for blessing a merger.
| MPSimmons wrote:
| >the best case scenario for Intel is a merger with AMD
|
| Oh man, the risk in that is extreme. We are moving away from
| x86 in general, but wow, that's... a big jump in risk.
| chasil wrote:
| And really, AMD spun off Global Foundries. AMD doesn't want
| to run a fab.
|
| Does this mean that Intel's fabs should split for Global
| Foundries, and the Intel design team should go to AMD?
| MPSimmons wrote:
| I seem to recall that Intel was talking about the same kind
| of split. Maybe the Intel child company and AMDs would
| merge, or maybe they'll stay separate and the parents will
| merge?
| alganet wrote:
| Sure, let's create a monopoly around one of the most valuable
| commodities in the world.
|
| What could go wrong?
| steelframe wrote:
| I think Apple Silicon has shown us that x86 doesn't have the
| monopoly potential it once had.
| alganet wrote:
| 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.
| alganet wrote:
| > One of the key reasons why Rosetta 2 provides such a
| high level of translation efficiency is the support of
| x86-64 memory ordering in the Apple M1 SOC.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138376
| 212...
| ryao wrote:
| TSO might be slower than ARM's memory ordering, but
| implementing it in hardware is considered faster than
| implementing it in software.
| astrange wrote:
| 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.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Hell no, I don't want the Intel management structures coming
| over here. Qualcomm is welcome to them.
| Grazester wrote:
| Is Intel really in such a dire situation that they need to
| merge with AMD? AMD has been in troubling situation in the
| past(some thanks to Intel illegal dealings) yet they managed to
| survive and they were nowhere near Intel's size.
| izacus wrote:
| More importantly, AMD troubles made them refocus and improve
| their products to the levels we're seeing today.
|
| Giving life support to dinosaurs isn't how you create a
| competitive economy.
| orenlindsey wrote:
| A lot of people on this thread are underestimating how much of
| a hold Intel has on the chips industry. In my experience, Intel
| is synonymous with computer chip for the average person. Most
| people wouldn't be able to tell you what AMD does differently,
| they'd just say they're a knockoff Intel. Technologically, both
| companies are neck and neck. But for the average person, it's
| not even close.
| menaerus wrote:
| Last report I read it was ~80% (Intel) vs ~20% (AMD) for PC
| market. And ~75% (Intel) vs ~25% (AMD) for data center
| servers.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > And ~75% (Intel) vs ~25% (AMD) for data center servers.
|
| IIRC their data center CPU revenue was about even this
| quarter so this is a bit deceptive (i.e. you can buy 1
| large CPU instead of several cheaper ones).
| hedora wrote:
| Market share is often measured in install base.
| tsunamifury wrote:
| Of a market that is dying between two growing at the
| edges. Mobile and server clear trump personal compute.
| This the markets devaluing intel.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| To be fair it's not like there is that much profits in
| mobile either. ARM CPUs are almost a commodity and the
| margins aren't that great.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| Sure, but if the point is showing how Intel isn't really
| in such a bad spot as one might think just looking at the
| install base would be pretty deceiving and semi-
| meaningless.
| wtallis wrote:
| Those two terms are related but definitely are never
| interchangeable. Market share is the portion of new sales
| a company is getting. Install base is the portion of
| existing in-use products that were from that company.
| Install base is essentially market share integrated over
| time, less systems that are discarded or otherwise taken
| out of service. If market share never changes, install
| base will approach the same proportions but it's a
| lagging indicator.
| menaerus wrote:
| From https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-
| components/cpus/amds-desktop...
|
| "When it comes to servers, AMD's share totaled 24.2%"
|
| and
|
| "Intel, of course, retained its volume lead with a 75.8%
| unit market share."
| mandevil wrote:
| I think data center revenue was in AMD's favor because
| AMD is second (obviously far behind NVidia) and Intel is
| third in AI accelerators, which both companies include in
| their data center numbers. So that pushes things in AMD's
| favor. I think on data center CPU's alone Intel is still
| ahead.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Data center revenue is not just CPU. It includes MI300 et
| al. So that's why data center revenue can be roughly
| equivalent between AMD & Intel while CPU revenue is still
| predominantly Intel.
| hedora wrote:
| For PC's that can't be right. For overall consumer, Windows
| is at 25.75%, Linux is 1.43% and MacOS is at 5.53%.
|
| Ignoring ChromeOS, and assuming 100% of windows and linux
| is x86 (decreasingly true - the only win11 I've ever seen
| is an arm VM on my mac) and 100% of Mac is arm (it will be
| moving forward), that puts arm at 20% of the PC market.
|
| Interpolation from your numbers puts intel at 64% (with a
| ceiling of 80% of PC; 25% of consumer computing devices
| unless windows makes a comeback).
|
| https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share
| layer8 wrote:
| There is a common usage of "PC" that excludes Macs,
| Chromebooks, and the like. It means the x86-based PC
| platform descendant from IBM PC compatibles, with BIOS
| and all.
| hedora wrote:
| Marketing campaigns only go so far. They've been riding the
| "Intel Inside" slogan for 25 years.
|
| In the mean time, AMD/ARM already won phones, table and game
| consoles.
|
| Server purchasing decisions aren't made by everyday people.
| Intel's roadmap in that space slipped year for year for at
| least 10 of the last 15 years.
|
| That leaves Intel with the fraction of the non-mac laptop
| market that's made up of people that haven't been paying
| attention for the last ten years, and don't ask anyone who
| has.
| alternatex wrote:
| >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 having Windows laptops with
| decent battery lide.
| leptons wrote:
| 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 is now basically a
| paperweight.
|
| Anyway, in my questions for her about what she really
| cares about in a new laptop, power efficiency was not a
| concern of hers. She does not care about efficiency at
| all. All she cared about was a good enough screen
| (2560x1440 or better), and a fast CPU to run the new
| Photoshop features, and the ability to move it from one
| location to another (hence the need for a laptop instead
| of a desktop). I'd wager that for most people, the fact
| that it's a portable computer has nothing to do with how
| long the battery lasts away from an outlet. She can
| transport the computer to another location and plug it
| in. There are very few situations that require extended
| use away from an outlet, and even in an airplane, we
| often see 120V outlets at the seats. There's really no
| use case for her that puts her away from an outlet for
| longer than an hour or two, so efficiency is the least of
| her concerns in buying a new laptop.
|
| So we went with a new Dell laptop with the Intel
| i9-13900HX, which beats the Apple M4 Max 16 Core in terms
| of overall performance in CPU benchmarks. I would have
| looked at an AMD based laptop, but the price on this Dell
| and the performance of the i9 were great, it was $999 on
| sale. It's got a decent enough screen, and we can easily
| upgrade the RAM and storage on this laptop.
|
| I doubt she'd even care if the new laptop _didn 't have a
| battery at all_, so long as she can easily stuff it in a
| bag and carry it to another location and plug it in. I
| feel the exact same way, and I recently bought a new (AMD
| based) laptop, and power efficiency was not a thing in my
| decision making process at all. The battery lasts a few
| hours, and that's plenty. I don't get a hard-on for
| battery life, and I'm not really sure who does. Are these
| people dancing around with their laptops and simply can't
| sit still and plug it in?
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| There is another angle at power efficiency: my work
| laptop is so bad, moderate load makes the fan spin and
| higher load creates a very annoying noise due to the
| cooling needs. All these while performance is far from
| stellar (compared to my desktop).
| orenlindsey wrote:
| Remember, most people don't care as much as you or I. If
| they're going to buy a laptop to do taxes or web browsing
| or something, they will probably be mentally biased towards
| an Intel-based chip. Because it's been marketed for so
| long, AMD comparatively seems like a super new brand.
| ghaff wrote:
| If they don't buy a Mac, they'll be biased to whatever
| BestBuy sells them.
| kbelder wrote:
| >That leaves Intel with the fraction of the non-mac laptop
| market that's made up of people that haven't been paying
| attention for the last ten years, and don't ask anyone who
| has.
|
| Evidently, that leaves Intel the majority of the market.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| I work in video games and I think it is still sometimes a
| problem to use computers that are not based on x86
| processors, both in the tool chains and software /engines.
| People here say that Intel has lost out on consoles and
| laptops, but in gaming that is because of x86 compatible
| AMD chips. Apple laptops were good for gaming when they had
| x86 and could duel boot. I see bugs people report on games
| made for Macs with x86 that don't work quite right with an
| Mx chip (though not a huge number).
|
| A friend who worked in film post production was telling me
| about similar rare but annoying problems with Mx Apple
| computers. I feel like their are verticals where people
| will favor x86 chips for a while yet.
|
| I am not as close to this as I was when I actually
| programmed games (oh so long ago!) so I wonder if this is
| just the point of view of a person who has lost touch with
| trends in tech.
| astrange wrote:
| That's because the GPU is very different on a Mac. The
| x86 emulation is perfect.
| etempleton wrote:
| People miss this. A lot of people will only buy Intel.
| Businesses and IT departments rarely buy AMD, not just out of
| brand loyalty, but because of the software and hardware
| features Intel deploys that are catered to the business
| market.
| twoodfin wrote:
| Intel's board is (or should be!) in exactly the right
| position to assess whether this dam is springing leaks. (It
| is.)
| gdwatson wrote:
| This is in large part an OEM issue. Dell or HP will
| definitely have an Intel version of the machine you are
| looking for, but AMD versions are hit and miss.
|
| I think this is partly because big OEMs doubt (used to
| doubt?) AMD's ability to consistently deliver product in
| the kind of volume they need. Partly it's because of
| Intel's historically anticompetitive business practices.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| >A lot of people will only buy Intel. Businesses and IT
| departments rarely buy AMD
|
| That's because Intel bribed OEMs to use only Intel chips
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| US government wouldn't let intel down, this is matter of
| national security (only grown semiconductor fabs left on US
| soil) and edge of US tech dominance
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| That's the bet I made after the crash last summer. I think
| the USG only _really_ cares about the fabs, as we 've shown
| the ability to design better chips than intel's here. Time
| will tell if I'm right.
| badsandwitch wrote:
| When that happens typically the company starts optimizing for
| sucking money from the government. From the point of view of
| the consumer Intel would be finished.
| hn3er1q wrote:
| > only grown semiconductor fabs left on US soil
|
| not sure what a "grown" semiconductor fab is but follow this
| link and sort by location https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_
| of_semiconductor_fabricat... The number of homegrown
| companies with fabs is greater than 1
| tonyhart7 wrote:
| okay, I forgot about texas instruments but lets not kidding
| ourselves here Intel is literally run pretty much (consumer
| and bussiness) the most here
|
| it would create so much loses not just by security but also
| effect on economy would be so high
| osnium123 wrote:
| The mistake Pat Gelsinger made was that he put his faith in the
| American manufacturing workforce. Very sad.
| trhway wrote:
| Nope. From what i heard from VMWare he was just a bad
| manager. He seems to be just a person skillfully playing org
| game, yet when it came to deliver he just flopped.
|
| The struggling companies with totally rotten management like
| to bring such "stars" (pretty shrewd people who built
| themselves a cute public image of supposedly talented
| engineers who got promoted into higher management on their
| merits) - Yahoo/Meyers come to mind as another example - who
| de-facto complete the destruction of the company while the
| management rides the gravy train.
| vlan0 wrote:
| >I feel like this is a mistake. Pat's strategy is aggressive
| but what the company needs.
|
| He's also 63. Has plenty of money to survive the rest of his
| life. Has eight grandchildren. There's so much more to life
| than business. What's to say he doesn't want to simply enjoy
| life with more connection and community to loved ones around
| him?
| etempleton wrote:
| True CEO retirements are announced in advance and do not lead
| to a strange co-interim CEO situation.
| zarzavat wrote:
| It's possible he's sick. Who could know?
| KerrAvon wrote:
| That sort of transition would be managed unambiguously.
| This is a firing.
| shermantanktop wrote:
| That would be a healthy, balanced and long-term-oriented
| approach. But those who get to the level of CEO are subjected
| to intense forces that select against those traits.
|
| I don't know much about this guy but it's reasonable to
| assume that any C-level exec will hold on to the position for
| dear life until they are forced out.
| steelframe wrote:
| > any C-level exec will hold on to the position for dear
| life until they are forced out
|
| I don't know. Frank Slootman's retirement from Snowflake
| earlier this year was certainly not celebrated by any
| significant stakeholders. I'd imagine at some point someone
| like Frank realizes that they are worth more than Tim Cook,
| they consider that they're in their mid-60s, and they
| decide the remaining time they have on earth might be
| better spent in other ways.
|
| Every person in the workforce, no matter how ambitious or
| how senior, is forced into the calculus of money and power
| vs. good years remaining. I expect the rational ones will
| select the balance point for themselves.
| ghaff wrote:
| There are certainly some indications this was something
| that was not long in the planning. On the other hand,
| when (solid) financial security is not a subject on the
| table, it's a _lot_ easier for many folks to let go--
| especially given that they can probably do as many board
| or advisor gigs in the industry as they have an appetite
| for. Or just go on to a new chapter.
| vlan0 wrote:
| Here's more info on Pat. He is not your average CEO. He
| wrote this book almost 20 years ago. Why do you resort to
| conversation about assumptions?
|
| The Juggling Act: Bringing Balance to Your Faith, Family,
| and Work
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Juggling-Act-Bringing-Balance-
| Family/...
| grahamj wrote:
| > What's to say he doesn't want to simply enjoy life
|
| News: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/02/intel-ceo-pat-
| gelsinger-is-o...
|
| Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger ousted by board
| patrickmoo wrote:
| 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.
| nelsoch wrote:
| My friends at Intel are essentially saying the same thing.
| This includes the ones that got laid off- and those that got
| 'transitioned' to Solidigm.
| osnium123 wrote:
| Are your friends on the fab/foundry side of things?
| dv_dt wrote:
| If a breakup is in the works for Intel, merger of the foundry
| side with Global Foundries would make more sense than AMD.
| Intel's foundries, even in the state they're in would likely be
| a step up for GF. And given the political sensitiveness, GF
| already has DoD contracts for producing chips.
| 7speter wrote:
| Didn't the US government just give Intel $7b on the condition
| they don't spin off the foundry business?
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/intels-7-86-billion-
| subsidy-0...
| monooso wrote:
| > ...then I don't think Pat gets retired.
|
| This implies that he was pushed out, rather than chose to
| retire. I can't see anything in the article to suggest this, do
| you have another source?
| windexh8er wrote:
| Nope.
|
| Look at what Pat did to VMware. He's doing the exact same thing
| at Intel. He came in, muddied the waters by hiring way too many
| people to do way too many things and none of them got done
| appropriately. Pat _is_ a huge part of the problem.
|
| I had the unfortunate pleasure of watching him not understand,
| at all, VMware's core competency. It was a nightmare of
| misunderstanding and waste in that company under his
| leadership.
|
| Intel turned into even more of a laughing stock under
| Gelsinger. I say: good riddance. He burned time, capital and
| people at both VMware and Intel. He's a cancer as a CEO.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| When he came back to Intel I was saying that all this
| 'finally an engineer' in charge stuff was misunderstanding
| Pat Gelsinger and VMWare was front and center in my thinking
| that.
| thomasjudge wrote:
| Do you have more details or a reference for the VMware
| activity? The wikipedia VMware article is pretty brief
| epolanski wrote:
| > The moat of the two companies together would give the new
| combined company plenty of time to ramp up their fabs.
|
| Doubt.
|
| Neither of the companies is particularly competitive on either
| processor or GPU architecture nor fabrication.
|
| A merger of those entities looks like nothing but a recipe for
| further x86 stagnation and an even quicker death for the
| entities involved imho.
|
| In particular I cannot see what's good in it for AMD. The fabs
| have no use/clear path forward. Their processors/gpu either
| match our outmatch the Intel offering.
|
| A Broadcom/Apple takeover of Intel sounds much more reasonable.
| danieldk wrote:
| _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.
| mylies43 wrote:
| Maybe for the fabs? It might be attractive for Apple to
| move production state side via Intels fabs but on the other
| hand I don't think Intels fabs can do what Apple wants
| hn3er1q wrote:
| Depends on what Apple wants...
|
| Yes Congressman, we agree to take over Intel fabs if you
| agree to drop this antitrust nonsense. And we would like
| our $20B from Google back too.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| That would work if the fabs were competitive. For Apple,
| they are technologically behind.
| epolanski wrote:
| I think Apple has the cash, culture and management to make
| the fabs work.
|
| But I'm just speculating.
| microtherion wrote:
| Apple is really good in making OTHER PEOPLE'S fabs work
| for their purposes. Running their own manufacturing was
| never particularly a forte.
|
| Apple currently really enjoys being on the very latest
| process node. It's not a given that they could match or
| improve on that with their own fab (Sure, there is a lot
| of VLSI design and materials experience, but that does
| not automatically translate into a state of the art
| process, and is unlikely to contain the magic ingredient
| to get Intel back on top).
|
| And in the unlikely case it SHOULD work, that will only
| invite further regulatory headaches.
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| > I think the best case scenario for Intel is a merger with AMD
|
| I think a merger with Nvidia would be more likely given the
| antitrust issues that a merger with AMD would bring up.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| That assumes a functional antitrust mechanism. We don't know
| what the next admin will do yet other than attempt
| technically illegal revenge on people they hate.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| One argument I've hard in favor of the split is this: If you
| are AMD/NVDA/other top player, do you want to send your IP to
| an Intel owned fab for production?
|
| At least in theory, a fully independent, split/spun out
| standalone fab removes this concern.
|
| That said - what does Intel have to offer the top players here?
| Their fabs are being state of the art. And what's the
| standalone value of post-spin fabless Intel if their chip
| designs are as behind as their fabs?
|
| This certainly presents a conundrum for US policy since we need
| fabs domestically for national security reasons, but the
| domestically owned ones are behind.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Eh, firewalls can be made strong enough, at least for some
| things. A software parallel is: you are Apple / Facebook, do
| you use Azure and/or AWS? I wouldn't, if it were me, but they
| do.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Maybe but I think AWS arguably is a different scale of
| automation. There's no Amazon human in the loop looking at
| your source. Sure a human SRE could peak into your system
| but that's something of an exception.
|
| I can't imagine fabs have that level of automation. It's
| not like sending a file to your printer. It's a multi month
| or year project in some cases to get your design produced.
| There's many humans involved surely.
| mnau wrote:
| Azure/AWS is cloud/B2B, AAPL/FB are B2C consumer
| goods/services. Different customers, different industries.
| There is some overlap, but moat is in other places.
|
| AMD/NVIDIA are in same business as Intel and have same pool
| of customers.
| heisenbit wrote:
| The problem is that this transition is very capital intensive
| and all the money was spent on share buybacks the past decades.
| The stock market looks at CPUs and GPUs and likes the latter a
| lot more so no fresh money from there. At the moment the only
| stakeholder with a vital interest in Intel semiconductor
| capabilities is the US government and even that may change as a
| result of Trump.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| Merger with AMD is very unlikely for competitive reasons but
| I've read some rumors that 1) Apple will push some production
| to Intel from TSMC and 2) Apple (and Samsung) are considering
| buying Intel.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| >I think the best case scenario for Intel is a merger with AMD
|
| Oh no no no no. Oh hell no. For now, we need competition in the
| x86 market, and that would kill it dead. Imagine Intel re-
| releasing the Core 2 Quad, forever.
| nabla9 wrote:
| 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 removed, and he chose to step down, according to
| the source.
| genmud wrote:
| I think that Pats strategy is what the _fab_ needs to do to be
| successful.
|
| However, I think the fab and design should be separate
| companies, with separate accountability and goals/objectives.
| There is just too much baggage by keeping them coupled. It
| doesn't let either part of the company spread their wings and
| reach their full potential when they are attached at the hip.
| From the outside perspective, that is the thing that Pat has
| seemingly been focused on, keeping it together, and its why
| people have lost faith in his leadership.
|
| I also don't think that from a investment / stock standpoint
| that accelerating the depreciation / losses related to
| restructuring on the most recent quarter was a wise decision,
| since what Intel really needed was a huge win right now.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > the best case scenario for Intel
|
| That's the best exit case for the shareholders. It's the worst
| case for Intel's employees, customers and partners.
|
| > would probably co-sign on it for national security concerns
|
| This is equally laughable and detestable at this point in
| history. My personal security is not impacted by this at all.
| Weapons manufacturers honestly should not have a seat at this
| discussion.
|
| > overriding the fact that it creates an absolute monopoly on
| x86 processors.
|
| Yet this isn't a problem for "national security?" This is why I
| find these sentiments completely ridiculous fabianesque
| nonsense.
| age1mlclg6 wrote:
| Text book CEO.
|
| He came, he did all these things, he left (likely with golden
| parachutes): https://kevinkruse.com/the-ceo-and-the-three-
| envelopes/
| leeman2016 wrote:
| Is it just me or the latest chips from Intel look relatively
| better? I meant the Ultra Core 1 and 2.
| guardian5x wrote:
| Better than what they previously had: Yes, with a but. Better
| than the competition: Overall no.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| More power efficient, yes. "Better" no. They're objectively
| slower than the 14th gen, which is pretty pathetic for a new
| CPU release.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| 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 when they report Q4, I think the
| US Gov will twist some arms to make sure that fresh ideas make it
| onto the board of directors, and perhaps even make Qualcomm buy
| them.
|
| I do think that Intel need to ditch some of their experiments
| like Mobileye. Its great (essential) to try and "rebalance their
| portfolio" away from server/pc chips by trying new businesses,
| but Mobileye hasnt grown very much.
| cedws wrote:
| 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?
| nxobject wrote:
| I imagine it takes a lot behind the scenes - especially
| priceless professional experience concentrated at HQ - to
| know how to set up new sites, set the future direction at all
| levels of the organization/timeframes, etc. etc. etc. What
| happens to the fabs long-term if leadership from Taiwan is
| decapitated?
| noahbp wrote:
| 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.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| I would say yes. Speculation follows: If the unthinkable
| happens, and assuming it devolves into a cold rather than a
| hot war (eg the Trump administration decide not to send
| soldiers and weapons to Taiwan but let the Chinese have the
| island), then US TSMC is appropriated, Intel or AMD or
| Qualcomm are told to run it, and all three are instructed to
| ramp up manufacturing capacity as aggressively as possible.
| If it's more like the status quo saber rattling, then I think
| USG would still want a 100% domestic supplier to be acting as
| a second source for the local economy and a primary source
| for anything the defense-industrial complex needs.
| Anarch157a wrote:
| Taiwanese law forbids TSMC manufacturing chips abroad using
| their latest process, so no 2nm in the US fabs,this leaves
| Intel's 18A as the mist advanced one in US soil.
| Hilift wrote:
| TSMC Arizona 4 nm fabs are a contingency. TSMC received $6+
| billion in the CHIPS and Science Act, and the fab opening is
| delayed until 2025 due to they don't have the local talent
| yet.
| gautamcgoel wrote:
| Nitpick: they don't have $4B in public stock, they have about
| 4B shares outstanding, each of which is currently trading at
| about $25.
| chvid wrote:
| Gelsinger seemed well connected to Washington / the democratic
| administration in particular and the CHIPS act seemed to be
| designed to save/bail out Intel.
|
| Perhaps this is a fall out from the election.
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| IMO Intel is far more of a strategic asset to allow such short-
| sighted policy from whatever administration. The upcoming
| administration surely knows that, and as far as I know Intel
| has never made strong steps that would alienate the coming
| administration from them. Also getting it back on its feet is
| actually inline with the narrative, it is easy to give it such
| spin, even if some personal differences are at play, this is
| more important than that.
| chvid wrote:
| It is strategically important for the US to be ahead in
| technology; however Intel is no longer ahead and is not
| really the strategic asset it used to be.
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| It is still strategically important to be able to supply
| domestic civilian, industrial, and military computation
| needs with good enough chips. If you are not ahead, but
| still good enough, than you have sovereignty, and have a
| good chance to get back to the top eventually (in the
| sort/mid term).
|
| China is not ahead. Still they are capable of mass-
| producing somewhat capable chips, with good enough yields
| for strategic projects.
|
| Also they can mass produce now outdated designs, which are
| still good enough for "office use" to provide continuity of
| the government bureaucracy's operation.
|
| China has less advanced nodes where it can produce for
| industrial applications.
|
| They have the potential to eventually get ahead, but now a
| total embargo you only slow them down, but not cripple
| them. This situation is acceptable for any state as a
| temporary measure until reorganizing efforts.
|
| Also Intel is still producing better stuff then the
| chineese can. It is still ahead. And as I detailed above, I
| think it would need to fall behind way more to loose its
| strategic nature.
|
| Also capacities in Taiwan and in South-Korea are very
| fragile from a strategic perspective, even if they are/were
| more advanced than what Intel has.
| nabla9 wrote:
| Gelsinger retires before Intel Foundry spin is ready. This means
| trouble.
|
| Intel invested tens of billions into A20 and A18 nodes, but it
| has not paid off yet. News about yield seemed promising. Massive
| investments have been made. If somebody buys Intel foundries now,
| they pay one dollar and take debt + subsidies. Intel can write
| off the debt but don't get potential rewards.
|
| Foundry is the most interesting part of Intel. It's where
| everything is happening despite all the risk.
| consp wrote:
| > Massive investments have been made. If somebody buys Intel
| foundries now, they pay one dollar and take debt + subsidies.
| Intel can write off the debt but don't get potential rewards.
|
| You are describing the start of the Vulture capitalist playbook
| for short term profits and dividents right there, take
| subsidies and loans and sell everything to pay dividents (or
| rent back to yourself via a shell company) then let the
| remaining stuff die and sell of for an aditional small profit.
| Don't know how it works here but it sure sounds like it.
| nabla9 wrote:
| I'm describing massive investment to fundamental
| manufacturing infrastructure. Deprecating that capital
| expenditure takes long time. Exact opposite of vulture
| capitalism and short determinism.
|
| > Don't know how it works here but it sure sounds like it.
|
| Thank you for being honest and saying that you are describing
| how things you don't understand sound for you.
| BadHumans wrote:
| Pat returned as CEO in 2021. I don't think that 3 years is enough
| time to clean out the internal rot that has led Intel to where it
| is today and a lot of problems have been in motion for a while.
| Short-term this might be better for Intel but this move lacks
| long term vision. Intel also just got a big hand-out from the
| government that would've kept them moving in the right direction
| regardless of what CEO is leading the pack.
| tiahura wrote:
| How long would you give him to run it into the ground?
| BadHumans wrote:
| I'm not sure but from the outside it seems his biggest sin
| was not clearing out the executives that let the rot get to
| this point to begin with.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| How is 3 years not enough time to dump some mediocre middle
| management?
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Some of these people have strong contracts with clauses
| against being fired. It is also very difficult to replace
| them if capable people left the company. Especially if
| they are the majority of middle management.
| phkahler wrote:
| Has Intel ever made a production chip using their own EUV
| process? They keep moving the goal post so they'll be state of
| the art when they get there - currently aiming for "18A" with
| high NA using the absolute latest equipment from ASML. But I
| don't think they've demonstrated mastery of EUV at any node yet.
| scrlk wrote:
| Yes, Intel 4 is in HVM and used for Meteor Lake:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meteor_Lake#Process_technology
| 654wak654 wrote:
| 18A isn't going to use high NA yet, it's just EUV. Intel is
| hoping to start using high-NA with their 14A process in 2026.
| Obviously with their current state that 2026 deadline might get
| pushed further.
|
| [1]: https://wccftech.com/intel-adds-14a-process-node-to-its-
| road...
| ksec wrote:
| I am perhaps one of Pat's biggest fan. Was in tears when I knew
| he is back at Intel [1];
|
| > _" Notable absent from that list is he fired Pat Gelsinger.
| Please just bring him back as CEO." - 2012 on HN, when Paul
| Otellini Retired._
|
| > _" The only one who may have a slim chance to completely
| transform Intel is Pat Gelsinger, if Andy Grove saved Intel last
| time, it will be his apprentice to save Intel again.
| Unfortunately given what Intel has done to Pat during his last
| tenure, I am not sure if he is willing to pick up the job,
| especially the board's Chairman is Bryant, not sure how well they
| go together. But we know Pat still loves Intel, and I know a lot
| of us miss Pat." [2] - June, 2018_
|
| I am sad to read this. As I wrote [2] only a few hours ago about
| how the $8B from Chip ACT is barely anything if US / Intel wants
| to compete with TSMC.
|
| Unfortunately there were lot of things that didn't go to plan. Or
| from my reading of it was out of his control. Cutting Dividends
| was a No No from Board until late. Big Cut of headcount wasn't
| allowed until too late. Basically he was tasked to turn the ship
| around rapidly, not allow to rock the ship too much all while it
| has leaky water at the bottom. And I will again, like I have
| already wrote in [1], point the finger at the board.
|
| My reading of this is that it is a little too late to save Intel,
| both as foundry and chip making. Having Pat " _retired_ " would
| likely mean the board is now planning to sell Intel off since Pat
| would likely be the biggest opponents to this idea.
|
| At less than $100B I am sure there are plenty of interested
| buyers for various part of Intel. Broadcomm could be one.
| Qualcomm or may be even AMD. I am just not sure who will take the
| Foundry or if the Foundry will be a separate entity.
|
| I dont want Pat and Intel to end like this. But the world is
| unforgiving and cruel. I have been watching TSMC grow and cheer
| leading them in 2010 before 99.99% of the internet even heard of
| its name and I know their game far too well. So I know competing
| against TSMC is a task that is borderline impossible in many
| aspect. But I would still wanted to see Pat bring Intel back to
| leading edge again. The once almightily Intel.....
|
| Farewell and Goodbye Pat. Thank You for everything you have done.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25765443
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42293541
| crowcroft wrote:
| I hope they sell off some more distracting/minor parts of the
| business, and then work with a fund to take the company
| private.
|
| Similar to Yahoo a number of years ago, there's some real
| business still there, they just need to remove the expectation
| of constant quarterly calls and expectations and make long
| term, consistent investments again.
| crowcroft wrote:
| Stock moving up slightly? In the context of the last week even it
| seems like Wall Street mostly doesn't care either way.
|
| At this stage in Intel's life I think having a financier
| overseeing the company might actually be a good move. Engineering
| leadership is of course critical across the business, but they
| company has historically paid large dividends and is now moving
| into a stage where it's removing those pay outs, taking on debt
| and managing large long-term investments across multiple parts of
| the business.
|
| Someone needs to be able to manage those investments and
| communicate that to Wall Street/Investors in a way that makes
| sense and doesn't cause any surprises.
|
| Pat's error isn't that Intel revenues are slowing or that things
| are struggling, it's the fact he continued to pay dividends and
| pretend it wasn't a huge issue... until it was.
| neverartful wrote:
| Intel has had some big failures (or missed opportunities) over
| the years. Just going from memory - Pentium 4 architecture, not
| recognizing market opportunities with ARM, Itanium, AMD beating
| them to 64 bits on x86, AMD beating them to chiplets and high
| number of PCIe lanes with EPYC, poor battery life (generally) on
| laptops. The innovations from Apple with Apple Silicon (ARM) and
| AMD with EPYC make Intel look like they're completely lost.
| That's before we even touch on what RISC-V might do to them. It
| seems like the company has a long history of complacency and
| hubris.
| guardian5x wrote:
| Pretty much missing out on AI completely was and is a problem for
| Intel.
| ZeroCool2u wrote:
| Full disclosure, the day Bob Swan announced his exit was the day
| I purchased Intel stock.
|
| Pat had the mandate from both the board and the market to do
| whatever he deemed necessary to bring Intel back to the forefront
| of semiconductor manufacturing and a leading edge node. Frankly,
| I don't think he used that mandate the way he should have.
| Hindsight is 20/20 and all, but he probably could have used that
| mandate to eliminate a lot of the middle management layer in the
| company and refocus on pure engineering. From the outside it
| seems like there's something rotten in that layer as the ship
| hasn't been particularly responsive to his steering, even with
| the knowledge of the roughly 4-5 year lead time that a company
| like Intel has to deal with. Having been there for so long
| though, a lot of his friends were probably in that layer and I
| can empathize with him being a bit over confident and believing
| he could turn it around while letting everyone keep their jobs.
|
| The market reaction really does highlight how what's good for
| Intel long term as a business is not necessarily what the market
| views as good.
|
| Folks in this thread are talking about a merger with AMD or
| splitting the foundry/design business. I doubt AMD wants this.
| They're relatively lean and efficient at this point and turning
| Intel around is a huge project that doesn't seem worth the effort
| when they're firing on all cylinders. Splitting the business is
| probably great for M&A bankers, but it's hard to see how that
| would actually help the US keep a leading semi-conductor
| manufacturer on shore. That business would likely end up just
| going the same way as GlobalFoundries and we all know that didn't
| really work out.
|
| The most bizarre thing to me is that they've appointed co-CEO's
| that are both basically CFO's. That doesn't smell of success to
| me.
|
| I think one of the more interesting directions Intel could go is
| if Nvidia leveraged their currently enormous stock value and
| moved in for an acquisition of the manufacturing division. (Quick
| glance shows a market cap of 3.4 trillion. I knew it was high,
| but still, wow.) Nvidia has the stock price and cash to support
| the purchase and rather uniquely, has the motive with the GPU
| shortage to have their own manufacturing arm. Plus, they've
| already been rumored to be making plays in the general compute
| space, but in ARM and RISC-V, not x86. Personally, Jensen is one
| of the few CEO's that I can imagine having the right tempo and
| tenor for taming that beast.
|
| I'm curious what others think of the Nvidia acquisition idea.
| mrandish wrote:
| > The most bizarre thing to me is that they've appointed co-
| CEO's that are both basically CFO's.
|
| It makes sense once you understand the board has finally
| accepted the obvious reality that the only option remaining is
| to sell/spin-off/merge large parts of the business. Of course,
| the foundry business must remain in one piece and go to an
| American company or the US govt won't approve it.
|
| Gelsinger 'got resigned' so suddenly because he wouldn't agree
| to preside over the process of splitting up the company. These
| co-CEOs are just caretakers to manage the M&A process, so they
| don't need to be dynamic turnaround leaders or even Wall Street
| investable.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Seems like the board is going for a breakup strategy..
| xyst wrote:
| Pat was at the helm for just a few years and has already been
| sent to the guillotine.
|
| Maybe it isn't wise that the USA dump billions into private
| companies that can't even get their own house in order.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if the next CEO installed by the board
| will be hellbent on prepping INTC for sale. A few of the board of
| directors of INTC are from private investment firms.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| Intel either go the IDM route or split the company into two.
| Intel can't afford to fuck around and find out.
|
| AMD is gaining ground on x86 without the burden of fab, and Apple
| has demonstrated that desktop ARM is viable. Nvidia is showing
| the world that GPUs can handle parallel computing better.
| readyplayernull wrote:
| Break their fabs up, make one of those focus on GPUs, another on
| NPUs, so FPGAs, and robotics. Some will die some will yield new
| "Intel's."
| eYrKEC2 wrote:
| TSMC handles AMD chips and NVidia chips. Why do you think Intel
| needs a special fab _for_ GPUs? It's the same lithography
| process.
| readyplayernull wrote:
| It's not about it needing special fabs, but about breaking it
| up into market segments.
| shrubble wrote:
| Here are 2 things I have noticed that seem obvious weaknesses:
|
| 1. Looking at the CyberMonday and BlackFriday deals, I see that
| the 12900K and 14900* series CPUs are what is being offered on
| the Intel side. Meanwhile AMD has released newer chips. So Intel
| has issues with either yield, pricing or other barriers to
| adoption of their latest.
|
| 2. The ARC GPUs are way behind; it seems obvious to me that a way
| to increase usage and sales is to simply add more VRAM to the
| GPUs - Nvidia limits the 4090 to 24GB; so if Intel shipped a GPU
| with 48 or 64GB VRAM, more people would buy those just to have
| the extra VRAM. It would spur more development, more usage, more
| testing and ultimately result in ARC being a better choice for
| LLMs, image processing, etc.
| hedora wrote:
| For that to work, they need a software stack to compete with
| CUDA.
|
| Nvidia is so far ahead that a single manufacturer won't be able
| to compete for developers. Instead, the only chance the rest of
| the AI GPU market has is to build some portable open source
| thing and use it to gang up on Nvidia.
|
| That means bigger GPU players (AMD, hyperscalers) will need to
| be involved.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > For that to work, they need a software stack to compete
| with CUDA.
|
| Doesn't Intel have pretty decent support in PyTorch? It's not
| like most people working on/with AI use CUDA directly.
|
| And especially for stuff like LLMs software is hardly the
| main or even a significant barrier.
| shrubble wrote:
| I am not a PyTorch user, but there is already Intel-supplied
| ARC acceleration for PyTorch: https://www.intel.com/content/w
| ww/us/en/developer/articles/t...
|
| Having half the number of GPUs in a workstation/local server
| setup to have same amount of VRAM might make up for whatever
| slowdown there would be if you had to use less-optimized
| code. For instance running or training a model that required
| 192GB of VRAM would take 4x48GB VRAM but 8x24GB VRAM GPUs.
| Wytwwww wrote:
| > pricing or other barriers to adoption of their latest.
|
| They are just not very good? There is basically no point in
| buying the current gen equivalent 14900K with current pricing
| (the only real advantage is lower power usage).
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| > Meanwhile AMD has released newer chips.
|
| Your comment confuses me. BOTH have released newer chips. Intel
| with the Core Ultra 200 series and AMD with Ryzen 9000. Neither
| are going to be on Black Friday sales.
|
| > So Intel has issues with either yield, pricing or other
| barriers to adoption of their latest.
|
| How does not putting their latest chips on sale indicate
| trouble selling them?
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| It seems really strange to me that the CEOs of two major
| companies have announced immediate retirements on the same day
| (the other being Carlos Tavaris of Stellantis).
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| I'm more surprised about Gelsinger than Tavares. Gelsinger
| seemed to have a viable plan going forward, even if progress
| was slow.
|
| But Tavares has been doing a terrible job for the past year:
| New Jeep inventories stacking up on dealer lots for over a
| year, mass layoffs, plant closings, unreliable cars, and no
| meaningful price reductions or other measures to correct the
| situation. You couldn't pay me to take a new Jeep or Ram truck
| right now.
| ngneer wrote:
| I see a lot more speculation on this thread than data.
| centiromi wrote:
| Does Nvidia use Intel foundry? No.
|
| Does Apple use Intel foundry? No.
|
| The two largest fabless companies in the world never used, and
| have no plans to use Intel foundries.
|
| "Intel foundry" as a service is a fiction, and will remain so.
| Intel can't get others to use their weird custom software
| tooling.
| cwoolfe wrote:
| Amazon AWS said they'd use the hypothetical Intel foundry to
| fab their chips.
| https://press.aboutamazon.com/aws/2024/9/intel-and-aws-expan...
| centiromi wrote:
| The AWS deal is not a "Foundry win" in the true sense. It is
| still a chip designed and built by Intel for AWS: custom Xeon
| chip and custom Intel Clearwater Forest AI chip.
|
| Unlike true foundries which manufacture chips designed by
| customers.
| RandyOrion wrote:
| From a customer's perspective: NO, I don't like the BIG-little
| core architecture of CPUs on desktop platforms, and I don't enjoy
| the quality issues of the 13-14th gen CPUs; I also don't like the
| lack of software support for middling performing GPUs. I used to
| like intel's SSD, but the division was sold.
| hedora wrote:
| They were just rebranded micron ssd's the last time I checked.
| wtallis wrote:
| They weren't. Intel and Micron used to co-develop the flash
| memory but had different strategies for SSD controllers, and
| Intel did a full generation of flash memory after breaking up
| with Micron and before selling their SSD business to Hynix.
| hitekker wrote:
| A few years, Pat said Intel had internally rebuilt their "Grovian
| execution Engine". I found those words empty, a far cry from Andy
| Grove's hard decision to dump memory in favor of microprocessors.
| Andy Grove's decisions made Intel, Intel, not "execution".
|
| It's unfortunate the situation is beyond almost anyone's grasp
| but I wonder if Pat should have talked less, and done more.
| bcantrill wrote:
| 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
| return the company to its past. That people fed into this
| messianic complex by viewing him as "the return of the engineer"
| was further problematic. To be clear: when Gelsinger arrived in
| 2021, the company was in deep crisis. It needed a leader who
| could restore it to technical leadership, but could do so by
| making some tough changes (namely, the immediate elimination of
| the dividend and a very significant reduction in head count). In
| contrast, what Gelsinger did was the worst of all paths: allowed
| for a dividend to be paid out for far (FAR!) too long and never
| got into into really cutting the middle management undergrowth.
| Worst of all, things that WERE innovative at Intel (e.g., Tofino)
| were sloppily killed, destroying the trust that Intel desperately
| needs if it is to survive.
|
| No one should count Intel out (AMD's resurrection shows what's
| possible here!), but Intel under Gelsinger was an unmitigated
| disaster -- and a predictable one.
| nunez wrote:
| Interestingly, people were bullish about Gelsinger at VMware
| too. Many still talk about the glory days with him at the helm
| despite decisions that IMO significantly harmed the company
| baq wrote:
| let's not pretend BK did any good for the company though, you
| sound like he did an ok job
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| I had forgotten who "BK" was , so I dove into
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel
|
| "On May 2, 2013, Executive Vice President and COO Brian
| Krzanich was elected as Intel's sixth CEO [...]"
|
| The next paragraph is ominous ...
|
| 'As of May 2013, Intel's board of directors consists of Andy
| Bryant, John Donahoe, Frank Yeary, Ambassador Charlene
| Barshefsky, Susan Decker, Reed Hundt, Paul Otellini, James
| Plummer, David Pottruck, and David Yoffie and Creative
| director will.i.am. The board was described by former
| Financial Times journalist Tom Foremski as "an exemplary
| example of corporate governance of the highest order" and
| received a rating of ten from GovernanceMetrics
| International, a form of recognition that has only been
| awarded to twenty-one other corporate boards worldwide.'
| bcantrill wrote:
| I definitely have some issues with BK, but it's more that
| there is another entire CEO between BK and Gelsinger (Bob
| Swan!) -- and I think it's strange to blame BK more than
| Swan?
| hedgehog wrote:
| I don't think you're wrong but the overarching structure of the
| chip business is very different from times gone by. It's not
| even clear what "technical leadership" should mean. When Intel
| was the leading edge volume leader just on their own processor
| line, that gave them a scale advantage they no longer have and
| that won't come back. They built a culture and organization
| around thick margins and manufacturing leadership, what we're
| seeing now looks like everyone from investors to employees
| searching for anyone who will tell them a happy story of a
| return to at least the margins part. Without a cohesive version
| of what the next iteration of a healthy Intel should look like
| all the cost cutting in the world won't save them.
| sgerenser wrote:
| Latest story from Bloomberg confirms "He was given the option to
| retire or be removed, and chose to announce the end of his career
| at Intel" https://finance.yahoo.com/news/intel-ceo-gelsinger-
| leaves-ch...
| lawrenceyan wrote:
| If AMD can come back from the brink of bankruptcy, then Intel can
| too. I believe.
|
| [Edit]: Though it might have to be that Intel literally has to
| come to the brink of bankruptcy in order for that comeback to
| happen.
| paxys wrote:
| The CEO of a public company is a glorified cheerleader. Doing the
| right things is half the job, _convincing people_ you are doing
| the right things is the other half. Considering Intel 's share
| price dropped 61% under Gelsinger's tenure, no matter the work he
| did towards the first half, it's pretty clear he thoroughly
| failed at the second. They desperately need someone who will
| drive back investor confidence in the company, and fast.
| dralley wrote:
| January 18, 2022 - "Intel CEO says AMD is in the rearview
| mirror and 'never again will they be in the windshield'"
|
| https://www.pcgamer.com/intel-ceo-says-amd-is-in-the-rearvie...
| nine_k wrote:
| Intel has no GPU. Intel has no mobile processors / SOCs. These
| seem to be the drivers of growth nowadays. And their CPUs have
| hard time competing with AMD now. I'm not sure that the 3 years
| which Geslinger had were enough to turn the tide.
| 999900000999 wrote:
| >Intel has no GPU.
|
| I own one, Arc isn't the best, but it's still able to compete
| with lower end Nvidia and AMD GPUs. They ended up having to
| mark them down pretty drastically though.
|
| I actually owned an Intel Zenphone about 8 years ago. Aside
| from being absolutely massive, it was decent.
|
| I think Intel got arrogant. Even today, with all the
| benchmarks showing Intel isn't any faster than AMD, Intel is
| still more expensive for PC builds.
|
| Check Microcenter, at least in the US, the cheapest AMD
| bundle is 299 vs 399 for Intel.
|
| They're lagging behind in every metric.
| nine_k wrote:
| Yes. Intel _might have_ a GPU, and maybe even a phone SOC,
| if they tried hard enough. Intel 's integrated GPU cores
| are quite decent; I had high hopes on Arc eventually
| becoming the third major discrete offering. Alas.
|
| Intel indeed rested too long on their laurels from early
| 2000s. It's one of the most dangerous things for a company
| to do.
| hintymad wrote:
| > The CEO of a public company is a glorified cheerleader.
|
| I find this view limited. If we look at the most successful
| tech CEOs, they all personally drove the direction of products.
| Steve Jobs is an obvious example. Elon pushes the products of
| his companies so much that he even became a fellow of the
| National Academy of Engineering. Jeff Bezos was widely credited
| as the uber product manager in Amazon. Andrew Grove pushed
| Intel to sell their memory business and go all in on CPUs.
| Walton Jr. was famous for pushing IBM to go all in on
| electronic computers and later the mainframes. The list can go
| on and on. In contrary, we can see how mere cheerleading can
| lead to the demise of companies. Jeff Immelt as described in
| the book Lights Out can be such an example.
| alephnerd wrote:
| 0-to-1-ing a company is different muscle from managing an
| established company.
|
| Revenue expectations, margins expectations, and investors are
| entirely different between the two.
|
| This is why most founder CEOs tend to either get booted out
| or choose to keep their companies private as long as
| possible.
| hintymad wrote:
| Given the average shelf life of S&P companies, I assume
| that even an established company needs to go through 0-to-1
| all the time. The aforementioned companies all reinvented
| themselves multiple times.
|
| > Revenue expectations, margins expectations, and investors
| are entirely different between the two.
|
| Yeah, it's hard. How the great CEOs achieve their successes
| are beyond me. I was just thinking that a great CEO needs
| to drive product changes.
| paxys wrote:
| All the CEOs in your example did some great work, yes, but
| also created a cult following around themselves. They were
| all shareholder darlings. Most of them are featured in
| business school textbooks as examples of how to run a
| company. All this kind of proves the point I'm trying to
| make. Just being involved in products isn't enough, not by a
| long shot. You need to make investors go "Steve Jobs is in
| charge, so the company is in good hands". If you can't do
| that, you may as well be a mid-level product manager or
| director or VP doing all those same things.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > The CEO of a public company is a glorified cheerleader.
|
| It can be. You've just noticed the fact that for publicly
| traded companies where the value of the stock exceeds the total
| value of the assets you actually get to put that difference on
| your books into categories like "Good will" or "Consumer
| confidence."
|
| For companies struggling to create genuine year over year value
| this is a currently validated mechanism for faking it. The
| majority of companies do not need to do this. That companies
| operating in monopolized sectors often have to do it is what
| really should be scrutinized.
| _zoltan_ wrote:
| I don't know why everybody is talking nicely of him and being
| boohoo.
|
| The guy thumped religious stuff on his twitter, didn't
| acknowledge competition, didn't reform company culture and was
| left in the dust.
|
| Intel is better off without him.
| honkycat wrote:
| The Intel story is very simple folks: they spent all of their
| cash on stock purchases instead of upgrading equipment.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| 18A is an absolute disaster, it's investor lawsuit worthy.
|
| When the news came out that 20A was canceled the spin was 18A was
| so advanced that they no longer needed an in-between node.
|
| NOPE, what happened was that 18A was a failure, and they renamed
| 20A to 18A.
| bionade24 wrote:
| Plenty of people here talk about the mistakes from Intel CEOs.
| But do they really have so much influence over the success of new
| production lines? Or is this maybe caused by some group of
| middle-management that backed each other's ass the last 10 years?
| How high is the possibility that the production problems with new
| nodes are mostly bad luck? I haven't seen anything trying analyse
| and quantise those questions.
| efitz wrote:
| Dear Intel Executive Search Team,
|
| Hi! CEOing has always been a hobby of mine, but with the recent
| news, I thought this would be a great opportunity for us to
| synergize.
|
| Sure, I don't have much experience in the chip making world but I
| did buy a Pentium when I built my own computer. I also have never
| run a multinational company but I visited several other countries
| on a Disney cruise.
|
| Let me lay it out- you would get a dynamic new CEO at a fraction
| of the going market rate, and I'd get to take my Chief
| Executiving skills to the next level.
|
| Let's do this together!
|
| You can reply here and let me know if you're interested.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| You joke, but the media-to-leadership pipeline is coming for US
| business.
| pharos92 wrote:
| You always hope as a technical person to see an engineer running
| a company. This move, in these circumstances do little to inspire
| confidence for engineers occupying c-suite positions. I had high
| hopes for Pat, given his previous track record. But it appears
| the damage to Intel had already been done.
| Koshkin wrote:
| Someone should get fired for discontinuing ifort...
| MPSFounder wrote:
| 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, they are there for Visa
| purposes. Mind you, we were not allowed to hire people from China
| since Intel is subject to Export laws). The biggest problem by
| far is lack of talent. Most of the talent I know is either at
| Apple or Facebook/Google, including those trained in hardware.
| Intel is bound to crumble, so I hope we as taxpayers don't foot
| the bill. There was unwillingness to innovate and almost everyone
| wanted to maintain the status quo. This might work in traditional
| manufacturing (think tennis rackets, furniture...), but fabs must
| improve their lithography manufacturing nodes or they get eaten
| by the competition
| bentcorner wrote:
| > _Most of the talent I know is either at Apple or Facebook
| /Google_
|
| A relative of mine with a PhD sounds exactly like this. Worked
| for Intel on chip-production tech then was hired by Apple about
| 10 years ago, working on stuff that gets mentioned in Apple
| keynotes.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| 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.
| whinvik wrote:
| Feels like the wrong move. Turning a chip company around has
| timescales of a decade. Getting rid of a CEO 3 years in simply
| means no turnaround is going to happen.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Maybe this is part of their Tick-Tock CEO strategy?
| aiinnyc wrote:
| What timescale are we looking at to decide if building foundries
| and manufacturing chips in the States is a good idea? There's an
| argument that there aren't nearly enough skilled workers to do
| high tech manufacturing here. Didn't TSMC also struggle to hire
| enough skilled workers in Arizona?
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