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Comment by big_chungus | Hacker News Reader

It's been great for consumers, though. This ought to be a textbook illustration of how serious competition can drive a net increase in surplus, especially for consumers. I'd guess anyone who follows hardware, even from a distance, would agree. Finally broke the four-core "ceiling" intel imposed, too. I don't know if AMD will stay in front long-term (intel's got some nice stuff coming out on new nodes), but that doesn't matter. If intel is forced to put some work in and pull ahead again, still better.

Interestingly enough, I'm hoping that intel does the same to nvidia in the GPU space. Nvidia is still the choice if you want the best performance, and cuda is the standard. That might change (and prices might drop) if intel's cards end up being good. Fingers crossed.

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Wouldn't we all fair better if those doing the duplicate work of researching for their individual companies instead were able to work together on a single design? If instead of two corporations wasting resources fighting each other for market dominance, if we all were only allowed to work for the government, tasks like these could be performed in a way that nothing was wasted and not only that but we all worked for the greater good of the people rather than the profit of a few.

Such a configuration would surely beat the pants off of any capitalist environment regardless of the regulatory structure imposed. Not to mention, by having goals that put the people first, would end up with a society of better served, happier people where empathy was the rule rather than the exception.

Intel's current situation with the 10nm node actually illustrates why having separate designs is a net benefit for the industry and the consumer. It was supposed to be delivered earlier, but due to a design/planning failure (https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-ceo-cpu-shortage-com...), it was stuck in development and kept Intel from rolling out their new architecture (Ice Lake) until recently.

What prevents a government-led project from hitting the same problem? Without serious competition from AMD, I'm quite sure there would be no price reductions and we'd be paying more for inferior products.

Nowhere near where it was in the 90's. All of the various RISC players regularly leapfrogged each other. There was a pretty mad rush to buy, too, because you often ran software that charged "per CPU". So there was a free software upgrade of sorts.

Oracle tried to beat that system with pricing tied to the clock frequency. That approach was kind of funny...they were lining their pockets with effort that other companies were putting forth.

The person in charge could have the same philosophy as you, and after seeing several reports of non-progress, invite some other people with alternative ideas to work in tandem.

There is nothing wrong with trying different approaches in parallel, but why does it have to go all the way from cradle to market that way? At a certain point it would be obvious which design was the better one, and then the group who was working on the design that proved inferior could then join the more successful group and double their productivity. If it was possible to cut losses way ahead of the curve, imagine what could have already been achieved.

It’s still not obvious that Intel’s R&D is inferior (late, sure, but it hasn’t killed the company yet), and ultimately the market is the best judge of which is the best design.

It's not really superior or inferior but different approaches with different levels of risk. Intel invests lots of engineer hours tying their layouts very intimately together the the particular process they're using to get out every scrap of performance. AMD does their best to modularize their design at every level to not spend engineering hours they don't have and to let them move to whatever process node they need to.

When Intel's fabs were doing well they were dominant. When they ran into problems they were stuck in a way AMD wouldn't have been if TSMC had problems.

> ultimately the market is the best judge of which is the best design.

This is just bias. How can you know what the ultimate best judge of anything is? You would have to know what all the alternatives that could ever be conceived would be.

And I can prove you wrong more directly. If the market is the best judge of the of the best design, why is so much money spent on advertising? If a better designed product with less advertising faced a worse designed product with better advertising and always won, since "ultimately the market is the best judge of which is the best design", then there would be no point spending money on advertising at all.

Re "ultimately the market" most people would point to 20th C experiments with command economies here. The hope was as you describe, a benevolent leader trying different approaches until one was clearly superior, and avoiding all the cost & waste of competitors doing the same work twice, not to mention the waste of advertising.

And it didn't work very well, even on purely economic grounds. Cars are a prototypical example to think about, and they were spectacularly awful for decades. It turns out the benevolent leaders are good at figuring out what's good for their careers, and less interested in making useful products (meaning safe, reliable, fast, efficient, etc.) Even in the west there was too little competition, but it turned out that duplicating almost everything GM did independently in Japan was a great investment to be making.

Another way to say this: If 2 competitors each develop the thing, then in the worst case they spend twice as much money as in utopia. But we can't get to utopia. And in situations where there is only one option (be it enforced by the state, or just a monopoly) it's easy to go wrong by a much larger factor than 2. If you don't like cars, think about drug companies, or academic publishes, who seem happy to increase prices by 10 or 100 times if they can get away with it.

The problem is incentives. If you are the only chip in town, who cares if you go for a long lunch and aren't that creative in pushing performance limits? Capatlism creates winners and losers, and creates incentives for people to try their best to not be on the losing team.

The problem is not incentives, but culture. From a view purely based on incentives, there is no reason to support your grandmother, for example, rather than kicking her out in the cold. Only our culture stops us to treat our closest family members this way.

If we expanded what we thought of as “us” from just the individual unit, however small that might be (the familial unit for some, just the individual self for others) to to include the entire country and government running it, there is no telling what we could achieve.

> If we expanded what we thought of as “us” from just the individual unit, however small that might be [...], to include the entire country and government running it, there is no telling what we could achieve.

Please consider that people have historically tried to achieve the Utopia you describe, where everyone is expected to put the State before the individual. It degenerates into totalitarianism, since forceful coercion and defining a "them" to the "us" is necessary for that to happen.

I much prefer the arrangement of putting more emphasis on the individual and money being wasted on duplicated r&d than what you seem to be arguing for.

I would say empathy plays a stronger role than culture in your example.

you need a diversity of opinion in order to make meaningful progress and that is more likely to happen when there are different companies

An under-appreciated point. All heirarchies impose some degree of conformity, whether they are corporate or government. The market is in fact a very non-hierarchical structure, and provides the necessary space for creativity.

If you are able to recognize that diversity of opinion is desirable, why can't the person in charge recognize this, and create groups that work on different ideas in tandem?

Once the ones that are successful bear fruit, those that are working on the failures can be moved over to the successful groups. And instead of the current environment, where there is a lot of wasted effort allowing an inferior product to go all the way to market to languish there, the decision can be made much earlier than that, saving all those wasted resources.

That has worked at companies but it tends to not be a stable state for them long-term. Hewlett-Packard (HP) is the best example I can think of that started off as an innovator and then got re-orged into a walking corpse.

I think it is a result of human nature responding to the incentives provided by their company, their education, and culture. Most people, if hired to lead the work on an idea, will become upset or stressed if they learn of another group at the company that is also focused on the same area.

Companies can adapt their culture and organizational model to create an ecosystem in which diverse efforts can develop at their natural pace. However if that was easy to do well then there would be no need for companies to hire external design agencies.

At the scale of chip manufacturers such as Intel and AMD they probably feel that they are considering many diverse opinions, but each company has its view and once they decide on the path forward they will cut any staff that are not contributing directly to that path (or at least AMD will.)

The problem is how to adequately choose the person in charge. Adam Smith wrote a book that explains this pretty well.

Your idea is appealing in basic theory, for sure, but a few thousand years of experiment and more sophisticated theory of actual human nature disproves it.

I also suggest that those people charged with designing this new unified CPU will have a progress quota. And if they do not meet this quota they will be send to a labour camp. This will surely speed things up!

And just to be sure all is fair you will in charged of defining this quota.

In that case we would likely be stuck with AMD on bulldozer era or Intel now. No competition allowed thus the incubent will stay lazy.

The fault lies with human organizations in general. Everything will stagnate and there will be a boss ”We have always done it this way”. Only by coming from outside can one go around these issues.

In the 50s or so US was actually worried what you say might be the case and communist society would trash capitalism because factories would share innovations instead of competing with them.

For some reason the innovations didn’t really come.

did you forget your /s ?

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