[HN Gopher] Intel: Winning and Losing
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Intel: Winning and Losing
Author : rbanffy
Score : 73 points
Date : 2025-05-10 11:19 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.abortretry.fail)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.abortretry.fail)
| ashvardanian wrote:
| The article mostly focuses on the 2008-2014 era.
| igtztorrero wrote:
| The Atom model was the breaking point for Intel. No one forgives
| them for wasting their money on Atom-based laptops, which are
| slower than a tortoise. Never play with the customer's
| intelligence.
| iwontberude wrote:
| I could tell they were cooked when they bought McAfee.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| They what??
| acroyear wrote:
| yes, this was a direct consequence of the Craig Barrett
| mentality. Intel wanted a finger in many pies, since it could
| not predict what would be the next 'thing'. So they went on
| multiple acquisition sprees hoping to hit gold on something.
| I can't think of a single post-2000 acquisition that
| succeeded.
| Demiurge wrote:
| I've always wondered, how do some smart companies, or smart
| film directors, or smart musicians can fail so hard? I
| understand that, sometimes, it's a matter of someone abusing a
| project for personal gain. Some CEOs, workers just want to
| pitch, pocket the money, and move on, but the level of
| absurdity of some of the decisions made are counter-productive
| the 'get rich quick' scheme too. I think there are self
| perpetuating echo chamber self dellusions. Perhaps this is why
| an outside perspective can see the painfully obvious. This is
| probably why having some churn with the outside world, and also
| understanding what is the periphery of the outside, unbiased
| opinion is, is very important.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| It doesn't even have to be that negative. With the best
| intentions in the world, it's rare to have a CEO who is
| fundamentally capable of understanding both the technology
| and the viable market applications of that technology. Steve
| Jobs didn't manage to do it at NeXT.
| acroyear wrote:
| NeXT was a failed rocket launch (analogous to early rocket
| failures within SpaceX). A great step forward and a
| necessary step in the evolution of the PC. I thought NeXT
| workstations were pretty bad-ass for their time and place.
| Recall that only 3 years prior to NeXT, was computers like
| the Atari ST .. what a vast difference!!
| buescher wrote:
| The original NeXT computer was a gorgeously sexy machine
| but slow compared to competitive workstations and
| considered very expensive for what it was at the time. It
| also didn't have the software ecosystem of a less
| expensive loaded PC or loaded Mac II. It's easy to look
| back with hindsight and rose-tinted glasses, squint a
| little, and see a macOS machine but it wouldn't be that
| for many years.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| I mean, the NeXT, Atari ST and Mac computers around that
| time were all m68k-based... And the Atari ST was the
| cheapest by far, since it was competing in the home
| computer market.
| nikanj wrote:
| Essentially no organizations actually reward telling your
| superiors that they're wrong. You pretend to sip the kool-aid
| and work on your resume. If one or two high-ranking leaders
| are steering the ship to the rocks, there's basically nothing
| the rank-and-file can do
| igtztorrero wrote:
| Who doth not answer to the rudder shall answer to the rock.
| foobarian wrote:
| At some point organizations get taken over by the 9-5 crowd
| who just want to collect a paycheck and live a nice life.
| This also leads to the hard-driving talent to leave for more
| aggressive organizations, leaving behind a more average team.
| What leaders remain will come up with not so great ideas, and
| the rank and file will follow along because there won't be a
| critical mass of passionate thought leaders to find a better
| way.
|
| I don't mean to look down on this kind of group, I am
| probably one of them. There is nothing wrong with people
| enjoying a good work life balance at a decent paying job.
| However, I think there is a reality that if one wants a
| world-best company creating world-best products this is
| simply not good enough. Just like a team of weekend warriors
| would not be able to win the Superbowl (or even ever make it
| anywhere close to a NFL team) - which is perfectly fine! -
| the same way it's not fair to expect an average organization
| to perform world champion feats.
| keyringlight wrote:
| I wonder if there will be a similar situation at nvidia,
| which apparently has a challenge with so many of their
| employees being rich as their stock has rocketed up in
| value, and then could cause concerns about motivation or if
| skilled and knowledgeable employees will leave.
| iwontberude wrote:
| I think many Nvidia employees will stick around because
| their new found wealth being at the biggest most
| important company in the world will give them insight
| about the market they invest in. I make an order of
| magnitude more day trading than as a software engineer at
| a Mag7 company and I stay employed for the access to they
| way modern businesses think. Companies like mine are an
| amalgamation of management and engineering from other
| Silicon Valley companies so the tribal knowledge gets
| spread around to my neck of the woods.
| mattkevan wrote:
| Disagree. 9-5 working is fine, and probably more efficient
| long term than permanent crunches.
|
| Organisations fail when the 'business' people take over.
| People who let short term money-thinking make the
| decisions, instead good taste, vision or judgement.
|
| Think Intel when they turned down making the iPhone chips
| because they didn't think it'd be profitable enough, or
| Google's head of advertising (same guy who killed yahoo
| search) degrading search results to improve ad revenue.
|
| Apple have been remarkably immune to it post-Jobs, but it's
| clear that's on the way out with the recent revelations
| about in-app purchases.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| I was working as a contractor in this period and remember
| meeting a thermometer company. They had made the extremely
| questionable decision to build it with Intel Edison, which used
| an even lower performance product line called Quark. The Edison
| chips baffled me. Worse performance than many ARM SoCs at the
| time, far worse efficiency, and they cost so much. That
| thermometer had a BOM cost of over $40 and barely enough
| battery life for its intended purpose.
| acroyear wrote:
| Atom was shit. A desperation move. I was so embarrassed to
| recommend a Poulsbo laptop to friend, it was the worst machine
| I have every seen.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The early Atoms had pretty good performance per watt compared
| to Intel's other offerings. The whole 'netbook' and 'nettop'
| market segment was pretty much enabled by the Atom chips, and
| similar machines are still around nowadays. The E-cores found
| in recent Intel generations are also very Atom-like.
| acroyear wrote:
| about a year after 'netbook's came out, the iPad was in the
| wild and it destroyed any chance of these ever catching
| on.. sure, they were cheaper, but the user experience on a
| tablet was just so much better. (and tablets got cheaper
| fast)
| ianand wrote:
| The site's domain name is the best use of a .fail tld ever.
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| OT from TFA, so high jacking your thread ...
|
| I don't recall if there was ever a difference between "abort"
| and "fail." I could choose to abort the operation, or tell it
| ... to fail? That this is a failure?
|
| -\\_(tsu)_/-
| jbverschoor wrote:
| Their domain name is probably most of their market cap
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| I'll give a viewpoint that the article reads like a listing of
| spec sheets and process improvements for CPUs of that era and not
| much else. Not really worth reading imho.
|
| I'd love some discussion on why Intel left XScale and went to
| Atom and i think Itanium is worthy of discussion in this era too.
| I don't really want a raw listing of [In year X Intel launched Y
| with SPEC_SHEET_LISTING features].
| deaddodo wrote:
| > I'd love some discussion on why Intel left XScale and went to
| Atom
|
| I thought it was pretty obvious. They didn't control the ARM
| ISA and ARM Ltd designs had caught up to + surpassed XScale
| innovations (superscalar, Out-of-order pipelining, MIPS/w,
| etc). So instead of further innovating they decided to launch a
| competitor of their own ISA.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Intel at the time was clear about it: they wanted to
| concentrate fully on x86. They thought they could do
| everything with x86; hadn't they already won against their
| RISC competitors by pushing billions into x86? Why would ARM
| be any different? Shortsighted, in hindsight, but you can see
| how they got there.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| >Itanium
|
| IMO, Intel took us from common, affordable CPUs to high-priced,
| "Intel-only" CPUs. It was originally designed to use Rambus
| RAM, and it turned out Intel had a stake in that company. Intel
| got greedy and tried to force the market to go the way it
| wanted.
|
| Honestly, AMD saved the x86 market for us common folks. Their
| approach of extending x86 to 64-bit and adopting DDR RAM
| allowed for the continuation of affordable, mainstream CPUs.
| This enabled companies to buy tons of servers for cheap.
|
| Intel's u-turn on x86-64 shows even they knew they couldn't
| win.
|
| AMD has saved Intel's x86 platform more than once. The market
| wants a common, gradual upgrade path for the PC platform not a
| sudden, expensive, single-vendor ecosystem.
| sbierwagen wrote:
| Itanium didn't support RDRAM until Itanium 2.
| dash2 wrote:
| These are the years when Intel lost dominance, right? This
| article doesn't seem to show much insight as to why that happened
| or what caused the missteps.
| BearOso wrote:
| Intel really lost dominance when 14nm stagnated. This article
| only goes up to that point.
| mrandish wrote:
| Yep, in 2014 Intel's Haswell architecture was a banger. It
| was one of those occasional node+design intersections which
| yields a CPU with an unusually long useful lifespan due to a
| combination of Haswell being stronger than a typical gen and
| the many generations that followed being decidedly 'meh'. In
| fact, I still run a Haswell i5 in a well-optimized, slightly
| overclocked retro gaming system (with a more modern SSD and
| GFX card).
|
| About a year ago I looked into what practical benefits I'd
| gain if I upgraded the CPU and mobo to a more recent (but
| still used) spec from eBay. Using it mainly for retro game
| emulation and virtual pinball, I assessed single core
| performance and no CPU/mobo upgrade looked potentially
| compelling in real-world performance until at least 2020-ish
| - which is pretty crazy. Even then, one of the primary
| benefits would be access to NVME drives. It reminded me how
| much Intel under-performed and, more broadly, how the end of
| Moore's Law and Dennard Scaling combined around roughly
| 2010-ish to end the 30+ year 'Golden Era' of scaling that
| gave us computers which often roughly doubled performance
| across a broad range of applications which you could feel in
| everyday use - AND at >30% lower price - every three years or
| so.
|
| Nowadays 8% to 15% performance uplift across mainstream
| applications at the same price is considered good and people
| are delighted if the performance is >15% OR if the price for
| the same performance drops >15%. If a generation delivers
| both >15% performance AND >15% lower price it would be stop-
| the-presses newsworthy. Kind of sad how our far our
| expectations have fallen compared to 1995-2005 when >30% perf
| at <30% price was considered baseline and >50% at <50% price
| was good and ~double perf at around half price was "great
| deal, time to upgrade again boys!".
| ls612 wrote:
| Intel lost dominance in the 2017-2019 era. The rise of Ryzen
| and Apple finally deciding to switch to Apple Silicon were the
| two fundamental blows to Intel. They have been able to make a
| brief comeback in 2021-2022 with Alder Lake but quickly fell
| behind again and now have staked everything on 18A being
| competitive with TSMC N2 this year.
| acroyear wrote:
| Mr. Magoo-ism galore.
|
| Intel had constantly try to bring in visionaries, but failed over
| and over. With the exception of Jim Keller, Intel was duped into
| believing in incompetent people. At a critical juncture during
| the smart-phone revolution it was Mike Bell, a full-on Mr. Magoo.
| He never did anything after his stint with Intel worth mentioning
| - he was exposed as a pretender. Eric Kim would be another.
| Murthy Renduchintala is another. It goes on and on. Also critical
| was the the failure of an in-house exec named Anand Chandrasekher
| who completely flubbed the mega-project coop between Intel and
| Nokia to bring about Moblin OS and create a third phone ecosystem
| to the marketplace. WHY would Anand be put in charge of such an
| important effort?????? In Intel's defense, this project was
| submarined by Nokia's Stephen Elop, who usurped their CEO and
| left Intel standing at the altar. (Elop was a former Microsoft
| exec, Microsoft was also working on their foray into smartphones
| at the time. . very suspicious). XScale was mis-handled, Intel
| had a working phone with XScale prior to the iPhone being release
| .. but Intel was afraid of fostering a development community
| outside of x86 (Balmer once chanted -> developer, developer,
| developer). My guess is that ultimately, Intel suffers from the
| Kodak conundrum, i.e. they have probably rejected true
| visionaries because their ideas would always threaten the sacred
| cash cows. They have been afraid to innovate at the expense of
| profit margins (short term thinkers).
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Is Raja Koduri another phony?
| acroyear wrote:
| I don't know tbh, heard both good and bad things .. he was
| brought in after many of the problems had already become
| serious. He probably had a very difficult charter.
| aurizon wrote:
| Intel is a failed monopolist, unlike Apple! So is IBM with MCA,
| micro-channel-architecture
| acroyear wrote:
| yes, they tried with the 'Compute Continuum' .. but this never
| panned out. They spent loads of bandwidth and money trying to
| bring this reality into being, but it failed miserably. They
| assumed every user would have a smart-TV, smart-phone, tablet,
| and desktop .. all running their hardware/software. Turns out,
| no - they won't. They didn't "see" that the phone would
| dominate the non-business segment as it has.
| mrandish wrote:
| I think a key reason they missed mobile is that it was during
| Intel's peak dominance and growth. Mobile was smaller, less
| powerful chips at lower prices _and_ lower margins than Intel
| 's flagship CPUs in that era. The founders who built the
| company were gone and Intel was a conglomerate run by people
| hired/promoted for managing existing product/category growth
| not discovering and homesteading new categories. They managed
| the conglomerate with a portfolio approach of assessing new
| opportunities on things Wall Street analysts focus on:
| margins, total revenue, projected market size and meta-
| metrics like 'return on capital'.
|
| It's classic Christiansen "Innovator's Dilemma" disruption.
| Market leading incumbents run by business managers won't
| assess emerging unproven new opportunities as being worth
| serious sustained investment compared to the existing
| categories they're currently dominating.
| aurizon wrote:
| They wasted the $$ that could have saved Intel by buying
| market shares back to the treasury to appease hedge fund
| managers and accountants to increase the share price/yield
| - a true 'bonfire of the Vanities', not to mention the
| 'Shitanium' = born dead all tries at resuscitation failed.
| That one also almost killed HP - it limps along - a broken
| thing
| acroyear wrote:
| managers, yeh, intel luvs managers ;)
| aurizon wrote:
| Yes, the flowering of Moore's Law - especially with SSD and
| memory density - that is still unfolding to the point that an
| iPhone/android has power of a high end work station from the
| year ~~2000, same with CMOS optical sensor density and
| patterned lenses
| acroyear wrote:
| i don't think it's just the performance .. it's a form-
| factor paradigm shift in the consumer end. the younger
| generations just don't care about screen real estate as
| much as genX and early Millenials did. the devices became
| (surprisingly) much more addictive than what ppl expected
| and consequently, the devices went into pockets, into bed
| with them .. etc, sad really.
| fidotron wrote:
| The core problem at Intel is they promoted the myth that ISA has
| no impact on performance to such a degree they started fully
| believing it while also somehow believing their process advantage
| was unassailable. By that time they'd accumulated so many
| worthless departments that turning it around at any time after
| 2010 was an impossibility.
|
| You could be the greatest business leader in history but you
| cannot save Intel without making most of the company hate you, so
| it will not happen. Just look at the blame game being played in
| these threads where somehow it's always the fault of these newly
| found to be inept individuals, and never the blundering morass of
| the bureaucratic whole.
| high_na_euv wrote:
| https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter
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