Windows already has an ARM version. Apple is about to release its own silicon. Amazon is running its own silicon on servers.
It seems like peak Intel is already behind us, but just how quickly might they fall?
How did Intel go from 24 months ahead of everyone to 4 years behind??
The most advanced process node was arguably Intel's only true differentiator in the past. Now they make CPUs with comparable IPC to ARM or AMD but they have to use old process tech. And they are only getting further behind.
How smart was it for AMD to spin out their fabs into GlobalFoundaries? After all 7nm Ryzen is done by TSMC.
Both are brand names at this point.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-says-first-10nm-desk...
Not quite, but it could be as big an event as the 737 Max debacle was for Boeing.
As I understand it, the 7nm processes in production do not use EUV, but Intel's does. Is that correct?
I'm amazed that anyone can get that "zap tin droplet with laser to emit X-rays" light source to work as a production process. Samsung claims to be in full production with it.
Also, do you remember the 90's? There was a promising 64-bit CPU called the DEC Alpha. Windows once even had an Alpha version. We know how that turned out.
I really wish Intel was doing better, and I hope they come back, somehow. The chip world needs good competition.
TSMC is readying serial production of 5nm (equivalent to Intel 7nm) this year.
I wouldn't plan on seeing a 7nm product from Intel in any volume until 2024, and I wouldn't place money on that as a bet.
Id put money on them already having a new operation crush well underway by this point.
AdoreTV has a video on the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agxSclh27uo
Intel (and HP) countered with Itanium, which was a break from (i.e. incompatible with) the x86 architecture (IA64). It tanked.
AMD created AMD64 which was x86 compatible. They released chips like the Athlon which were very popular. This turned out to be the winning strategy.
In a strange twist, Intel was forced by the market to adopt the AMD64. It released it's own version, Intel64.
Intel messed up there too in the 90s too. It wasn't until the Core CPU roadmap that Intel regained its lead.
There seems to be a link -- Jim Keller [1] was involved in the design of DEC Alpha chips, and then moved to AMD to work on the K8 and then co-wrote the AMD64 instruction set. He also worked on Apple's chips and Tesla's HW. He recently just left Intel. What a career.
Well, they licensed AMD's and CALLED it their own.
The interview with Fridman may offer a bit of insight. Keller is a firm believer in Moore's Law, that it'll continue for a long time yet. He believes you have to redesign things nearly from scratch on a regular basis, to benefit from this firm progress.
Intel, meanwhile, is struggling with Moore's Law. First 10nm, now this. Backporting architectures to older nodes. It may be that Keller realised how deep the production issues went (perhaps he learned that 7nm was starting to fail too) and concluded he wasn't going to be able to achieve what he wanted to achieve when constrained by Intel's fabs.
It's such a throwaway comment, but I think there's deep insight behind it from someone with extensive experience in the matter.
I also feel it applies to many other things, not just ASIC design.
For example, every customer I go to manages their VMware farm just like they managed their bare metal boxes in the past. Just as they're oh-so-slowly wrapping their heads around the design concepts that are a better fit for virtualisation, they're moving to the cloud. So of course, they deploy everything in the cloud just like they're used to in their on-premises VMware environment.
It's shocking how much low-hanging fruit is out there, just waiting to be rearchitected by someone with understanding and a clear vision.
As a random example: I just saw a bunch of Azure servers with empty 1TB "Application" D:\ drives. The team that built it was used to how VMware thin-provisioned drives only allocate 2MB blocks at a time, so the 1TB max capacity is just a high water mark that has no real cost. Meanwhile, Azure bills based on capacity, not usage, so that 1TB is burning money.
It seems like a small thing, but if you store 1GB in a 1TB volume in the cloud, you're not paying $123/TB/month, you're actually paying $12,288 per terabyte of data stored per month!
If you look around, it turns out that everywhere you look, people are doing "what they've always done", and it leads to crazy inefficiencies.
In most of the cases where places just dump money it’s usually a question of labor cost spent to optimize vs the gains, and unless your business is built around scaling a lot of small customers like the usual SaaS unicorns customer acquisition is super long, painful, and technical inefficiency is the default for enterprise as a rule. It’s worth paying $200 for a $1 part because the overhead and risk of renegotiating anything is not worth it. When an hour long meeting essentially costs a minimum of $1000 to a company essentially, it’d better be worth it.
When it comes to ASIC designs and VLSI the technical debt is pretty different because each generation of hardware has past benchmarks primarily to drive it forward. Oftentimes in software people tend to want to keep things the same which discourages innovation or touching.
I think this is the first time they are behind on both process and chip architecture at the same time.
Today Intel is facing the same problem DEC faced, that they make most of their money from workstations and datacenter hardware, while facing disruptive innovation that is ARM
If Clayton Christensen is correct, then Intel is dead in the water
When Alpha launched, proprietary software was the de-facto standard. Windows ran on it, but Office didn't. Neither did a huge number of popular Windows desktop applications. Alpha was reduced to a limited role in servers where the lack of software wasn't an issue and performance was important enough companies procured hardware that would be harder to remission. Alpha lived on for a good couple years running OpenVMS and Tru84 proprietary enterprise OSs and, for some lucky people, Linux.
Now most mission-critical software is one recompilation away from running on ARM. Or POWER, or RISC-V, or SPARC (for now). That AWS offers ARM-based servers is seen as a non-issue. I run the same workloads on x86, ARM and s390x and they all feel the same (except that z15 hardware is ridiculously fast). If tomorrow someone comes up with cloud servers based on RISC-V or MIPS that are competitive in price/performance with x86 and ARM, I see an easy migration path between these architectures.
In terms of mobile, that's the same. If tomorrow someone releases an Android phone running on RISC-V instead of ARM, that'll be largely irrelevant to most software.
On the desktop, Apple (and NeXT) have a couple extremely successful architecture changes under their belt. They should have no problem with this one.
Porting was difficult enough that Itanium and Alpha never got much Windows software and, therefore, were relegated to small niches, with servers and single-purpose workstations. It seems Microsoft made it right this time and that porting Windows software to ARM is easy and seamless. We'll see what happens.
Don't forget that AMD has a vested interest in keeping x86 alive as well. it's not just Intel. So it's not like x86 is stuck in the mud because of Intel's situation.