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Comment by yeasayer | Hacker News Reader

I think Intel might get away with it.

Last 5 years they were slacking off, because economically there is no reason to go over the usual 10-15% yearly performance bump. But actually they were accumulating aces up their sleeves. Again, no reason to show your hand, if you don't have to.

But the time has come. Right now Intel has 3 major problems: 1) Meltdown/Spectre situation 2) AMD is awoken from sleep with surprisingly good Ryzen lineup 3) Apple craves new powerful CPUs to satisfy unhappy MacBook Pro customers

Intel can fix all of this with one sweep. Just by releasing a brand new CPU that will surprise everyone. Of course with hardware Meltdown/Spectre fix. They were holding off, but it's time to drop all these hidden aces on the table. And I believe it's gonna happen. Not right now with Cannon Lake, but with the one after - Ice Lake on 10nm transistors, by the end of 2018. It's going to be even bigger than NVIDIA's GTX 1080 success.

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Doubtful. You don't just develop a new processor over night, and if they truly had all these aces up their sleeves, they would have dropped them already in response to Zen last year.

Intel's process advantage is shrinking. They're struggling like everybody else because the physics is getting harder and harder. Apart from the fact that it would have been nice to get easy process shrinking forever, this is good news for almost everybody: it means competition for them is getting tougher.

It’s doubtful that they would drop all their aces in response to Zen.

Actually, I'd turn this on its head and ask: Why is there this claim that they had or have any aces in the first place, Zen or no Zen?

What you and the ggp are basically saying is that Intel slowed down the improvement in their processors on purpose over the last several years. Why on earth would they do that?

Besides, all the evidence points to the contrary, what with them being unable to compete in the mobile space.

> Why is there this claim that they had or have any aces in the first place, Zen or no Zen?

I'm not a big hardware person, but from what I've heard the speed they released 6 core processors after Ryzen makes it likely they were capable of producing 6 core (consumer) designs earlier.

The original hexacore Xeon is almost eight years old (March 2010 release). Intel released a consumer hexacore in response to Ryzen. Intel's artificial market segmentation is ridiculous, but so is the typical AMD watcher's near total ignorance if what is happening in the Xeon line.

That may be overstating AMD's ignorance by quite a bit. The big marketing push with the zen launch was that Intel had a chip with a lot of cores, but it was 2x the price for with slightly worse performance.

They produce Xeon chips with dozens of cores forked off the same architecture, so that wasn't too surprising. Sticking to four cores was probably just market segmentation, like not supporting ECC memory in the consumer line, to protect Xeon sales.

I'd speculate that top management was aware of the physics limitations to their biggest market advantage, and they probably even had a timeline for when the competition is going to inevitably catch up. So they must have been spending their billions on something that's going to keep the company afloat in XXI century.

Maybe quantum computing, neuromorphic chips, GPGPU and 3D NAND are where it's at for them in the future, and traditional CPUs will be more or less commoditized.

> this is good news for almost everybody

I don't think CPU capacity failing to double every 18 months is good news for anybody. I'd rather have a monopolistic Intel churning out 2x powerful chips every 2 years than a competitive market giving 5% performance bump per year.

If you think they can redesign their cache geometry, indirect branch predictors, and return stack buffers in the matter of a few months and then tape out new processors by the end of the year, you're nuts.

It's gonna take 3 years minimum until even the easiest of those things is resolved and silicon hits the street, even if Intel begrudgingly admits they need to do this.

> But actually they were accumulating aces up their sleeves.

...

> And I believe it's gonna happen.

I don't notice anything in your post supporting those beliefs, aside from Intel having a motivation to make them true.

Intel is a huge company and it's hard for huge companies to make abrupt transitions. CPUs have a development cycle that spans years, and employees who were laid off during ACT a couple years ago when Intel decided their headcount was too high aren't going to suddenly come back now.

What Intel could do in the short term is reduce their prices drastically. They have the profit margins to afford it.

They had an ace up their sleeve to fix those security issues? If that is true, they should get ready for the lawsuits I guess...

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