5 and 10 year plans are always over optimistic projections by people who can't deliver in the present to reassure investors faith.
They might ship 1.4nm, but it has a good chance of having Soviet tractor quality.
They might ship 1.4nm, but it has a good chance of having Soviet tractor quality.
Human capital turnover, market trends, butterflies in Thailand all conspire to foil grand organizational visions.
I wonder if a x86-64 CPU will exceed 1024 cores before the end 2029? It feels like that is where we are headed.
If there's something useful about having 32 32-core chiplets connected to an I/O hub talking to a bunch of PCIe5 lanes and a huge pile of DDR6 RAM, that could happen.
But getting all that compute logic coordinated in one place might not be that economically desirable compared to offloading to GPU-style specialized parallel processors, or building better coordination software to run distributed systems, or...
Fifteen years ago a lot of medium-sized organizations had a full rack of single and dual-core servers in their offices that cost half a million dollars and consumed >10KW of electricity day and night.
That made it attractive to put everything in the cloud -- spend $250K on cloud services instead of $500K on local hardware and you're ahead.
But their loads haven't necessarily changed a lot since then, and we're now at the point where you can replace that whole rack with a single one of these high core count beasts with capacity to spare. Then you're back to having the latency and bandwidth of servers on the same LAN as your users instead of having to go out to the internet, not having to pay for bandwidth (on both ends), not having to maintain a separate network infrastructure for The Cloud that uses different systems and interfaces than the ones you use for your offices, etc.
People might soon figure out that it's now less expensive to buy one local server once every five years.
Then you need someone to plan, provision, troubleshoot, and maintain the physical servers. So at best a full time fully loaded position which costs the company roughly 2x the salary. And that's only if you know your workload so well that you can guarantee the shape of your hardware usage 3-5 years out. Rarely possible in practice.
I'd say always start with the cloud, and you'll know if or when you could do (part) of it cheaper yourself.
That doesn't really change much when the difference is a four figure sum spread over five years.
> Then you need someone to plan, provision, troubleshoot, and maintain the physical servers. So at best a full time fully loaded position which costs the company roughly 2x the salary.
Would it really take a full time position to maintain two physical servers? That's a day or two for initial installation and configuration which gets amortized over the full lifetime, OS updates managed by the same system you need in any case for the guests, maybe an hour a year if you get a power supply or drive failure.
If the maintenance on two physical machines add up to a full week out of the year for the person already maintaining the guests, something has gone terribly wrong. Which itself gets balanced against the time it would take the same person to configure and interact with the cloud vendor's provisioning system -- probably not a huge difference in the time commitment.
> And that's only if you know your workload so well that you can guarantee the shape of your hardware usage 3-5 years out. Rarely possible in practice.
Most companies will do about the same business this year as they did last year plus or minus a few percent, so it's really the common case. And if you unexpectedly grow 200% one year then you use some of that unexpected revenue to buy a third server.
Where the scalability could really help is if you could grow 200,000% overnight, but that's not really a relevant scenario to your average company operating a shopping mall or a steel mill.
With respect to changing workloads, I wasn't thinking so much about scale, which I think isn't that hard to plan for, but more about changing requirements. If you add, remove, or change a piece of your stack the cloud gives a lot of flexibility. Add memcached, no problem, spin up some high mem instances. Need more IO on the database server, switch to an instance with fast SSDs, or a bigger instance. I think those kinds of changes are common and hard to plan for. Until it happens you probably don't know if you are disk, network, memory, or CPU bound.
Once your stack is sufficiently mature and not changing much the workload gets a lot more predictable. The cloud is really good for starting out. The danger is it's also really good at locking you in, then you are stuck with it.
True, though all the physical hardware stuff is pretty straight forward, to the point that anybody competent could figure it out in real time just by looking at the pictures in the manual. Configuring a hypervisor is the main thing you actually have to learn, and that's a fundamentally similar skillset to systems administration for the guests. Or for that matter the cloud vendor's provisioning interface. It's just different tooling.
> If you add, remove, or change a piece of your stack the cloud gives a lot of flexibility. Add memcached, no problem, spin up some high mem instances. Need more IO on the database server, switch to an instance with fast SSDs, or a bigger instance. I think those kinds of changes are common and hard to plan for. Until it happens you probably don't know if you are disk, network, memory, or CPU bound.
I see what you're saying.
My point would be that the hardware cost is now so low that it doesn't really matter. You may not be able to predict whether 8 cores will be enough, but the Epyc 7452 at $2025 has 32. 256GB more server memory is below $1000. Enterprise SSDs are below $200/TB. 10Gbps network ports are below $100/port.
If you don't know what you need you could spec the thing to be able to handle anything you might reasonably want to throw at it and still not be spending all that much money, even ignoring the possibility of upgrading the hardware as needed.
> Once your stack is sufficiently mature and not changing much the workload gets a lot more predictable. The cloud is really good for starting out. The danger is it's also really good at locking you in, then you are stuck with it.
Right. And the cloud advantage when you're starting out is directly proportional to the cost of the hardware you might need to buy in the alternative at a time when you're not sure you'll actually need it. But as the cost per unit performance of the hardware comes down, that advantage is evaporating.
But you make some good points. In general I agree it's cheaper to vastly over provision than to use the cloud. And you can do things like build an insane IO system for your database, which you can only sort of do in the cloud.
Of course this is an advantage for hosting internal company stuff, for web facing things you may need to place hardware in remote datacenters, and then you do need people on location on call who can service it. You have to generally have much larger scale for that to make sense. Even Netflix, because of the variability of their load still use a combination of cloud and their own hardware.
I didn't mean to suggest there isn't a skillset there. And that's really important when you're doing it at scale. The person who knows what they're doing can do it in a fifth of the time -- they don't have to consult the manual because they already know the answer, they don't have to spend time exchanging an incompatible part for the right one.
But when you're talking about an amount of work that would take the expert three hours a year, having it take the novice fifteen hours a year is not such a big deal.
> Of course this is an advantage for hosting internal company stuff, for web facing things you may need to place hardware in remote datacenters, and then you do need people on location on call who can service it. You have to generally have much larger scale for that to make sense.
On the other hand you have to have rather larger scale to even need a remote datacenter. A local business that measures its web traffic in seconds per hit rather than hits per second hardly needs to be colocated at a peering exchange.
It's really when you get to larger scales that shared hosting starts to get interesting again. Because on the one hand you can use your scale to negotiate better rates, and on the other hand your expenses start to get large enough that a few percent efficiency gain from being able to sell the idle capacity to someone else starts to look like real money again.
So, basically a mainframe on a chip?
Honestly, how would that work? Is all that memory coherent? There are a couple of reasons why mainframes cost so much, and some of them are technical.
I keep expecting servers to evolve into a multi-CPU non-coherent RAM, but the industry keeps doubling down on coherent RAM¹. At some point servers will turn into a single-board blade hack (that you can mount on a blade hack, piled on a hack), I wonder for how long CPU designers can sustain our current architecture.
1 - Turns out people working full time on the problem have more insight on it than me, go figure.
Intel unveiled their infamous "Tick-Tock Model" around 2007 [1]. It went according to plan for all of four years, and then it COMPLETELY fell apart. If anything, I'm willing to bet they KNEW they could hit the first few iterations. I'm guessing for hardware, you've probably got a really good idea if you're going to be able to even manufacture something in two years, let alone mass-distribute, produce, and sell it at the price point you want. I'm also pretty certain they KNEW they wouldn't hit the rest of the roadmap.
Honestly, I think it was purposefully misleading investors. I heard from dozens of engineers at the company around 2008 that there was NO WAY they would have 10nm chips around 2012 -- what the roadmap was more or less promising. And surprise, we didn't get them until 2018. Now they're promising 1.5nm in a similar time frame. I'm skeptical.
Or to put it another way, nobody is going to charge you with a crime for staying with the herd. That's a passive choice.
But when there's a dissenting voice, suddenly you have to make an active decision to ignore them. And that's when the lawsuits start producing emails about who knew what when.
End result: People intentionally (if they know better) or unintentionally (if people smarter than them are all saying the same thing) agree with the party line, even in the face of demonstrable facts otherwise.
Where did they promise 10nm in 2012? This presentation from 2011 shows 10nm in 2017: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2011/06/intel-roadmap-from-jun... and in 2011 tick-tock was still going strong.
I think you messed up your math. Tick/tock was a process shrink every 2-3 years. Using the more aggressive 2 year cadence:
45 nm – 2007
32 nm – 2009
22 nm – 2011
14 nm – 2013
10 nm – 2015
45 nm – 2007
32 nm – 2010
22 nm – 2013
14 nm – 2016
10 nm – 2019
65 nm – 2005
45 nm – 2007
32 nm – 2010
22 nm – 2012
14 nm – 2014
10 nm – 2018/2019They pretty much nailed tick/tock flawlessly up until 10nm, 10 years out from when tick/tock was first announced. Expecting perfect 10 year predictions is some insane expectations for any company/person. There's no way in hell tick/tock's 2007 unveil could possibly be considered "misleading investors."
Intel 14nm's beginnings were far from flawless, even if it's nowhere near Intel 10nm's issues.
Your link shows 7nm in 2017, 10nm was for 2015.
>Tick/tock was a process shrink every 2-3 years. Using the more aggressive 2 year cadence:
You are confusing "Tick Tock" with "Process, Architecture, Optimization". Tick Tock is strictly 2 years cadence.
So yes 10nm missed by a large margin.
> 10 nm – 2018/2019
Intel has been making 10nm chip irrespective of yield, the current batch were months of stock piling chip before the rush to roll out in Xmas. In reality they barely got it out of the gate in 2019. And if you count Cannon-Lake as 2018, you might as well count TSMC 5nm in 2019.
>There's no way in hell tick/tock's 2007 unveil could possibly be considered "misleading investors."
There were not misleading in 2007, the executed their plan flawlessly, Intel had decent people back then. Pat Gelsinger left in 2009. It was still doing great up to 2012, Otellini retired, BK became CEO in 2013, still promising Tick Tock. That is the point where misleading investor began.
And I forgot to mention during All investor meetings Intel continue to reiterate 10nm is on track all the way until BK was gone. If that is not "misleading investors" I am not sure what is.
65 nm – 2005
45 nm – 2007
32 nm – 2010
22 nm – 2012
14 nm – 2014On the server side, big hyperscale datacenter customers have large, narrow purchase patterns. They are upending the market — ask around and figure out how many HPE or Dell CEs are still around servicing servers these days.
On the client side, similar patterns exist at a smaller scale. At the higher end Apple probably does 90% of their Intel business with like 10 SKUs. At the lower end, there’s a huge demand for cheap, and many companies skipped refresh cycles.
This was impactful imo as the old ways of dealing with manufacturing issues (sell underclocked parts, etc) are harder when Amazon has prepaid for 30 million units of SKU x.
The advances needed to achieve something like this are more in the realm of cleanroom advances than processor architecture.
Fun fact: The first tank (turreted, not land-whale) was based on a tractor design.
Examples:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_IV_tank - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V_tank
The slide seems to have been first disclosed by ASML, which has a vested interest in selling new generations of manufacturing tools.
ASML's P/E ratio is 48.02.
This won’t end well.
What vanity stock price exactly? You could hardly have picked a worse example in this bubbly market.
We need something new, not the same old “add more cameras to the phone” kind of innovations.
It’s the engineers that will make those discoveries—the investors can shove it. All they do is freeload on innovation and cramp peoples style.
The vendor that makes the device definitely cares though I wonder how much Intel cares about consumer oroducts as percentage of mkt share compared to servers.
We can probably still increase the frequencies a bit but we definitely seem pretty close to some fundamental limit in our current understanding of physics. The frequency doublings every other year we experienced until the early 2000's are long gone I'm afraid, and they might never come back until we manage to make a breakthrough discovery in fundamental physics.
Smaller transistors reduce the I, but R goes up with smaller interconnects. The RC time constant also adds delay, probably more so than length.
That being said, 3D stacking won’t help with heat, and dielets won’t help with delay. I rather have 4 cores at 10 GHz than 64 cores at 3 GHz.