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Comment by hbbio | Hacker News Reader

It's also funny that Johny Srouji and probably others in his team come from the team at Intel in Israel that "saved" Intel in the early 2000s by designing the Intel Core architecture which is still used by Intel today.

cf. Anandtech article from 2003:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/1083/2

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Did not know that, and indeed the pentium m / core / core 2 series microarches have done incredibly well.

I've become something of CPU collector in recent years, and I have a nice line of p6 cpus from thePentium Pro -> Pentium 2 -> Pentium 3 -> Pentium M -> Core 2 that conveniently sidesteps those awful Netburst p4 CPUs.

It feels like this (p6+) microarch has finally run out of road and needs a rethink. What 'saved' intel was a change in philosophy rather than chasing MHz they chased power savings. And with Apple's new chips that history is repeating itself (and appears to be with a similar outcome).

It's an exciting time for hardware again because Intel and AMD are going to have to react to this and I think there's still legs to x86, it's survived everything thats been thrown at it so far...

It's fascinating to see history repeated - the architecture and design with the most power efficiency generally also turns out to be the one that can be pushed furthest for performance when you want to go that route.

> I've become something of CPU collector in recent years, and I have a nice line of p6 cpus from thePentium Pro

I bought i486DX for $20 month ago, as a memo of my first CPU.

I got a Pentium 100 last month with a motherboard and a psu. I plan to run W95. It's going to be fun!

"I think there's still legs to x86, it's survived everything thats been thrown at it so far..."

Also, some one, some day, had to disrupt it. Maybe this is it, maybe not.

That's an interesting observation. It holds true in other areas as well. For example, we have lots of high horsepower cars as the result of R&D effort into high efficiency engines.

Some people are priceless. One of the designers of Ryzen, Jim Keller [1], for example.

[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/12689/cpu-design-guru-jim-kel...

Jim also lead the team behind the Apple A4 and A5 SOCs - Apple's first venture into designing their own Silicon.

Edit: hadn't clicked through to your article. my comment is redundant

And now he’s left Intel https://www.anandtech.com/show/15846/jim-keller-resigns-from...

It is sad that engineers like him are not multi billionaires, but it all gets pocketed by investors, who don't even pay the same tax as people who actually do the work...

It's also worth pointing out that Apple is also benefitting from TSMC's latest and best fab processes. Intel is not only behind architecturally but in manufacturing too:

https://www.macworld.com/article/3572624/tsmc-details-its-fu...

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