Intel's disruption is now complete
jamesallworth.medium.com
jamesallworth.medium.com
Why so? Few more material, and device generations are on the way. Litho has went through more generation changes in the last 1 decade, than in any previous one.
Whole new device classes are on the way: optics on silicon, new memory, logic in the backend, and logic on package.
Semiconductor engineering is still a career suicide though, that haven't changed in the last few decades.
Wow, so I need to thank myself for accidentally bumbling towards ops and dev? Meh, for me it’s just that in EU there’s a total dearth of opportunities in the industry
> optics on silicon,
Yep! That and quantum and post VNeumann architectures. There's some weird shit on the horizon that I probably won't live to see in household products, but I don't think it will be be optical deposition by layer. It might, who knows, I"m officially talking out my arse now. :)
And not even for I/O, but for on-die communications, and busses.
High speed SERDES may well be replaced by same-die optics, as a lower transistor count, dumber, and cooler solutions.
Could you go into more detail?
The long term is that the industry will get less, and less labour intensive as more, and more old, labour intensive fabs are retired, and new ones are 100% AMHS.
This is so true. I am currently a hardware engineer and planning to switch to software. If you are not in Nvidia, Apple or other mega-growth hardware companies, you are suffering atleast 40% paycut compared to software industry and also working about twice as hard, using obsolete tools and flows, and almost no opportunities for technical advancement or significant impact. Meanwhile the annual raises are cost-of-living adjustments. Its truly depressing.
That was only around 2000. There was a lot for me to get excited about since then:
* AMD64
* SMT
* Dual-core / multicore
* On-chip integrated graphics that weren’t awful (low-end discrete graphics aren’t a thing anymore)
* Gigantic L3 and L4 caches (a side-effect of on-chip graphics)
* Turbo mode making a comeback (yes, I know Turbo Mode switches actually slowed down computers)
Judging by Apple’s direction, it’s looking like we’ll start seeing actual (ultra-fast) RAM on-chip too, with Optane that could mean we can finally move-away from block-addressed storage and have a massive flat memory-space for everything .
I kinda laughed when AMD beat Intel to the punch not once, but TWICE. (1GHz, then 64b).
I also worked on the 740, 810 and 815 (both hardware and drivers, oddly, I did a lot of stuff). Game devs HATED us for the 810/815 because it was such huge volume they had to target it as the LCD.
RTL https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Register-transfer_level
RTL is a way to model a digital circuit and some common HW design languages are VHDL, Verilog amd Intel's proprietary iHDL.
Numbers are just Intel chipset families.
Just one anecdotal story, one of the wafer guys had an idea to improve a process. He went to his boss who shot it down instantly. Wafer guy knew he was right so went to another manager who liked the idea and implemented it. It ended up working and being a great idea. Instead of being rewarded for his idea, wafer guy was fired by his manager for failing to follow the chain of command.
It's built into the culture at Intel to be territorial to advance. It's been that way for at least 30 years. I personally don't see it changing any time soon.
Grove certainly sends quite utilitarian vibes. He also says that a collaborative culture is important. Your comment suggests that neither he nor his successors managed to make Intel's culture collaborative enough.
Higher management is probably often an iterated prisoners dilemma. Collaborating is best for the company but defecting is good for the ambitious manager.
It did have a few ideas which were new to me and it presents a holistic consistent management philosophy which you don't get from reading a hodge-podge of blog posts.
Two (for me) new ideas: Matrix organisation is inevitable for large companies in search of the sweet spot between agility and efficiency. Knowledge workers are middle managers.
Overall: Good book but not "you have to read it" level.
But we are now living in a world where mobile is more important than desktop, and mobile chip designs have enough power to be a threat to the desktop market, and perhaps even the server market in the not-too-distant future. This is something that should worry Intel.
Intel has money and equipment and existing market share: there's no reason for them not to be profitable for the long term, as long as they stop acting like they don't have any competition (as they did until 2018) or that their only competition is AMD (as they currently are pretending).
So which team/location ended up winning?
Natural consequences, timely feedback, parallel modeling, Socratic questioning, mirroring...
If you want to know how to handle the politics of a large organization, try interacting with children. The parallels are amazing.
And he's actually 3, so I can't really sit around and wait another 5-6 years before I get to figure out the perfect "business customer" :D
Two decades of requisite grunt work will also encourage your best junior talent to seek out start-up opportunities.
For silicon and hardware in general, the job market is much, much smaller, making that decision significantly more difficult.
I really feel for people who are in these companies. Who put in 6+ years of university/higher education and think that “if I could only fight my peers for the top spot” when “top” is relative.
To someone else’s point, I totally acknowledge that there are certain industries that you have to have a degree to do anything meaningful. I also know there’s tons of companies out there that need bright minds to create the next big thing.
I used to think that I was in competition with my coworkers for that promotion, for that top spot, to basically prove to myself that I could and prove to others I should. I stopped wasting time trying to prove what I already know and now focus on what I don’t.
Office politics sucks and I refuse to play the game. If I get passed up for promotion or if I’m unhappy I leverage my rights under my states at-will work laws and go find somewhere else to work.
The best places I’ve worked where this wasn’t a thing (the elite competition for who’s right) were places that acknowledged your contributions, explained why you did/didn’t get the promotion, laid out plans for you to achieve that (or have you on that list for when it opens up) and then actually honors that promise.
Edit: I know some people with diploma who "gamed" the system, e.g. memorized queries for exam without having any understanding of SQL and passed.
I didn't say it was. Meritocracy in this case was in reference to the company's internal competition (organic or not) for top spots at the company.
I completely understand there are certain jobs where you need a degree. Bar even. A lot of software engineering doesn't fit that mold. I'm 100% behind requiring an advanced degree if you're writing software that controls: lives/property/money in any meaningful way. Money in this case being large capital investments, not consumer payments. I'm a big proponent of hiring people who need a second chance, who maybe are down on their luck, or otherwise have a different path than suburban white America or the H1B visa mills they created (caveat, I'm white). I think there are plenty of opportunities for software engineers without degrees to build web apps, mobile apps, services, integrations, automation, etc.
There's selfish, winner takes all competition that creates winners and losers, and then there's healthy, productive competition where everyone who engages comes out better off for challenging themselves against a peer.
And obviously, there has to be a culture that provides resources no matter the outcomes. If you starve the 'losers', you're just creating desperate bait dogs in a toxic work environment.
To truly grow as a company you need to grow as teams. Cooperation, trust, empathy for your customers as well as your coworkers. Positions of leadership should be given to those who show an aptitude to lead through problems to desirable outcomes, regardless of who/where they are. Flatter org structures to prevent this chasm of salary difference which creates this toxicity in competition for those spots.
Netflix pays their engineers a ton, because they provide the value. Everyone is compensated at a level that everyone is happy working there (for the most part, happiness is relative, I digress). Companies should be providing everything they can to those who provide value to the company. If an individual wants more responsibility, they must provide more value as a result.
And half the time the supervision is the exact opposite. Concepts like stack ranking are a sure-fire way of making the workplace more contentious, politicised, and publicised.
Because that's the thing about
> intense competition
95% of the time it's about visibility, the technical excellence only matters if it's visible and publicised to decision-makers, which means self-aggrandisement and a mastery of office politics not only can compensate for lacking technical skills, but will usually edge out technical skill entirely.
When you’re small all that competitive energy is directed at your competitors. When you’re king of the hill that competitive energy turns inward.
I think a similar thing is happening at Amazon (the strong dictator stuff, I mean), and it's my hunch that Google has started following Intel's trajectory, they just haven't realised it just yet.
Both have politics since they are structures made of humans.
But they are completely different.
A company is a legal entity functioning within the framework of the legislation of a state, to start with.
It depends on the level you look at. For example the political skills of a manager to advance themselves at the expense of the organisation and their subordinates is identical whether at Raytheon or the DoD (to use an American example).
I think there's a relatively straightforward and fair solution to the problem, and that is to require a certain amount of experience before being permitted to stand as a political candidate. You could do this by having a minimum age limit (e.g. 35), or by having been employed or being an employer for a certain number of years e.g. 15. This would ensure that the people representing us have gained a little understanding and experience of the world we live in and the real needs of the people they serve. Right now, I feel politicians of all stripes are almost completely divorced from the rest of us, and the consequences of their actions.
I do feel it is somewhat foolish that any job in the real world, from management through to the lowliest worker requires years of experience, multiple qualifications and certifications, training and assessment. But politicians require no independent assessment of their capabilities. The ballot box is not a high enough bar when all the candidates are of low quality.
Yes exactly. I don't hold with the notion that the head of the NHS has to have been a doctor or the head of the MoD has to have been a soldier - there is value in being about to look at thing objectively with an outsider's perspective. But at the same time, I do absolutely believe that the Chancellor of the Exchequer should be someone, from any industry, who has employed people and had to make payroll on payday come hell or high water.
It would also benefit everyone if some life experience was required before becoming a teacher.
The ballot box is not a high enough bar when all the candidates are of low quality.
Agreed again, voting now is about holding your nose and choosing the least-worst. I want "none of the above" on the ballot paper and if it wins, the real candidates are banned from politics for life. Repeat until some decent candidates show up. But none of our incumbent politicians would ever pass that law for obvious reasons.
The point about teachers is also something I think is quite neglected today. A teacher with real-world experience of their subject is vastly better than someone who has known nothing of the world outside education. And that's of value far beyond the subject matter: they can provide career guidance and real-world perspectives of all kinds that less experienced teachers simply can't provide. Certainly some of the best teachers I had were those who had done real work.
Regarding the Chancellor of the Exchequer, I absolutely agree. But I think it should go further. I think all MPs should have direct experience of running a business and having to make payroll. Too many of them lack understanding of the reality of what a business is, and how the economy runs. It would temper some of the most extreme and dangerous actions, from taxation to social welfare spending. Too many think businesses are "rich" and can be taxed with impunity to pay for things of dubious benefit. It's easy to be profligate with other people's money if it seems like it's there for the taking. Experience might make them think about how to grow the economy to benefit us all, and reduce unnecessary expenditure. They might also think more carefully about supporting small businesses while ensuring large multinationals also pay their dues. I personally paid more corporation tax than several multinationals, despite earning less than the living wage.
For the first time, I set up and ran my own small consulting business for the past two years after being made redundant. (I'm also in the UK.) It was a small-time business with only one client for a couple of small contracts, and I since got a new permanent position. But the experience of having to do all the company registration, contract negotiation, invoicing, bookkeeping, dealing with accountants, paying corporation tax, and finally getting it all wound up was an invaluable experience which will likely be of great benefit in better understanding the businesses I work for. It gave me a proper appreciation of the realities of running a business, including all of the responsibilities you have to shoulder. I think every elected politician should have this experience. Every self-employed person in the country has a better understanding of the practical reality of economics and taxation than most of our politicians. And I think all politicians should be aware of the reality of what the rest of the country has to bear in response to the decisions they make.
If you're in a competitive market you're forced to innovate.
If you're a monopolist you can just sit there and extract wealth. Which Intel was for a while.
By the way, your little theory has support and a name, it's the resource curse in political economics.
The graph of the distribution for value per person must be wierd, and definitely not flat. Maybe based on a power law, but I am unsure how to model the people that provide negative value, for example bad managers.
Though actually note that the classic Mancur Olson result is "the exploitation of the strong by the weak". That is, the person who has the largest share of output contributes disproportionately much to the public good.
Simple proof: write individual i's marginal benefit from the company's total effort X as
s_i f(X) - x_i
where s_i is i's share of the output f(X), and x_i is i's own effort. Taking everyone else's effort as given, i will equate marginal benefit of own effort to marginal cost, so that total effort solves
s_i f'(X) = 1
equivalently
f'(X) = 1/s_i
Now suppose the person with the largest share satisfies the above. Then everyone with a smaller share must have
f'(X) < 1/s_i
and therefore, if they are contributing more than the minimum possible, they have an incentive to reduce their contribution. So, this extreme version has that only the largest "shareholder" does any work. (A more realistic model has a convex cost of effort, so smaller shareholders do something, but they still contribute less than their output share.)
Intel is not a cooperative.
Fungible employees (the majority?) are paid a market clearing price (salary) for their effort. The company can derive much more value from an employee and the employee earns very little of the excess (perhaps bonuses to align working incentives).
When billions are raining from the sky, whether you do good work or not, the rational plan is to fight over those free resources, rather than work to create new ones.
> coined in 1977 by The Economist to describe the decline of the manufacturing sector in the Netherlands after the discovery of the large Groningen natural gas field in 1959
Maybe those countries would find themselves in a similarly bad state (or worse) without those resources. Maybe their bad state is due to historical reasons - being former colonies with very little power on the world stage - and resources just couldn't help much.
Countries with a dominant resources that only found them when they were already developed don't suffer from the 'resource curse'.
In such cases not having resources doesn't mean you turn into Switzerland or Canada rather it means that it will be harder for one dominant dictator to hold on to power. In some African countries that are now proto-democracies, dictators simply couldn't hold on to power without easily available resource base.
Bruce Bueno de Mesquita work in 'The Logic of Political Survival' and ' The Dictator's Handbook' is quite interesting.
Also the USA is the poster child for this; it's arguable that without the California gold rush there would be no USA as this is what is thought to have capitalised the federal government sufficiently to impose order on the west and fight the south.
having worked at all three of
A Trillion Dollar corporation
A smaller company that grew quite a bit and sold for $5 billion+
A start up now
*
People optimize for what will make them rich/wealthy
In larger companies, the ENTIRE function of middle management is to extract wealth and not create it
In some ways it's a miracle Microsoft managed to get Satya Nadella as CEO. Normally the people who rise up the ranks are the politically astute
Don't discount Nadella's political astuteness. I think it would be more accurate to say he is not merely politically astute, but instead able to combine his skill at internal politics with customer empathy and technical intelligence.
>[...] Steve had invested in it because [search][1] would require the company to compete in a sector beyond Windows and Office and build great technology—which he saw as the future of our industry. There was tremendous pressure for Microsoft to answer Amazon’s growing cloud business. This was the business he was inviting me to join.
>“You should think about it, though,” Steve added. “This might be your last job at Microsoft, because if you fail there is no parachute. You may just crash with it.” I wondered at the time whether he meant it as a grim bit of humor or as a perfectly straightforward warning. I’m still not quite sure which it was.
But yeah, funny, though.
[0] The book is Hit Refresh, if anyone is curious.
[1] It was Bing: >There was no mention of the cloud in that year’s shareholder letter, but, to his credit, Steve had a game plan and a wider view of the playing field. Always a bold, courageous, and famously enthusiastic leader, Steve called me one day to say he had an idea. He wanted me to become head of engineering for the online search and advertising business that would later be relaunched as Bing, one of Microsoft’s first businesses born in the cloud.
I don’t know about you but if my boss made a parachute joke while currently in a private plane flying south, it would be a scary thing.
Whereas, in a smaller company with a smaller pie to divide amongst folks, the growth of the pie is the most important thing.
Pieter Hintjens (creator of ZeroMQ) wrote a lot about this, and how organizations from big companies to small charities to software projects ought to design their internal structures of roles, titles, voting, auditing, to defend themselves against this kind of attack. Particularly if there's any kind of treasury, an opportunist will become tempted to take that role, but any kind of credit will attract people who want to take the credit without doing the work, power structures will attract people who want the power, and programmers who "just want to code" and avoid politics will find themselves at the bottom of a dysfunctional infected organisation structure with no power, no credit, and being instructed by distorted requests.
IIRC he tried to design the ZeroMQ organisation so that there wasn't any way for one person to insert themselves in a key point.
I'm not sure where on his blog I was reading that, but it's related to his writings about psycopaths[1] as the opportunists, and might be part of his book Social Architecture[2]
His book on Psychopathy was panned on Reddit, as well as on Goodreads:
https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/4c27ss/im_pieter_hint...
Likewise, the wikipedia article for Social Architecture has been listed "not notable" for the past four years, and hasn't seen any meaningful edits since 2016.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_architecture
With respect to the author, I'm not surprised. Nerds like ourselves enjoy "discovering" ideas, slapping pretentious labels on them, and then evangelizing them to the whole world... without checking if other people know more about those ideas than we do.
Is there any actual panning of his book by someone who read his book, in your link? Or anyone who engaged in good faith - e.g. it's a book about his experiences of problem behaviour patterns that hurt others?
The larger point is that the audience he chose to market to, rejected his ideas. Whether or not his audience was acting in "good faith" is irrelevant to his failure to communicate.
Pieter Hintjens died in 2016.
"""In late 2009, the Chair and Red Hat sat down and decided, in a secret meeting, to rewrite the spec. [...] From scratch. By himself. After years and years of committee work. After years of investment by others in working code. Without asking anyone except Red Hat. And then, to force this spec through the working group using his usual tactics: bullying and lobbying. [...]
One of my spin-off projects was the Digital Standards Organization, and I came to understand what was needed to protect a standard from predatory hijack. I summarized the definition of a "Free and Open Standard" as "a published specification that is immune to vendor capture at all stages in its life-cycle." What the "free" part means is, if someone hijacks your working group and starts to push the standard in hostile directions (as Red Hat did), can you fork the standard and continue? Does the license allow forking, yes or no? And secondly, does the license prohibit "dark forks," namely private versions of the standard?
If either answer is "no," then you are at the mercy of others. And when there is money on the table, or even the promise of money, the predators will move in. The AMQP experience gave me a lot of material for my later book on psychopaths. [...]
If we'd managed to build a thriving community around OpenAMQ, it would have survived. So the lesson here is simple: community before code. Today this is obvious to me. Eight years ago, it wasn't."""
And reference this (http://hintjens.com/blog:120) Social Architecture FAQ which talks about rude but highly skilled people contributing to projects (read that with "community before code" and the quote "if you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go far go together" in mind).
I could be mistaken, but I think this kind of happened with ZMQ where one contributor got annoyed and went off to create nanomsg.
Or when people complain about Linus Poettering and Systemd, either how it came to be in certain distributions, or how it took over certain subsystems, or people's behaviour around it - isn't that politics and power structures?
Or that recent post on HN ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25076197 ) where the Cairo project appears to have nobody left who is able to make a release and the last few years of releases were done by one person working at Samsung, and there hasn't been one since he left, and presumably there was no organizational structure for how to distribute this power to several people, or how to choose and "promote" someone to the job, or if nobody wants to do it, how years worth of effort came to end up on the rocks where nobody even cares anymore, isn't that a broken or absent organization one way or another?
[1] https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-committers/2018-Jul...
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
This is not a slam against people from wealthy nations. I am one of them. I just think it's a danger to be aware of.
There’s analogies to building institutions in developing countries. See the constitution in the Ukraine (I think) or South Africa. Ginsberg commented publicly and Brayer agreed with (at a talk I attended) from a “source code” perspective those constitutions are superior to the American one. Sort of v2 efforts where you can adopt best practices. Yet most people would agree those younger nations don’t have stronger institutions and than the US.
So there has to be both an individual and organizational component.
This next comment is completely unbaked and probably terribly phrased, so please read it gently: in addition to the rest of the comments, I believe there is also (and I understand this is a terrible analogy) a “standby passive observer” mechanism mentality similar to how Hitler came to power. Conceptually, people that get hired externally should maybe be >50% of any large organization maybe. Those employees need to see repeated instances of malicious political acts go by (“hey aren’t we going to do something here”) and learn that sort of complicit passivity.
That’s probably a terrible analogy, but notice that there seems to be nothing the three or four people in this threat that worked at Intel could do to alter the company’s direction (obviously) but more importantly there’s also a tone of dread and finality in their words, and they seem to have all chosen to have left.
So, it seems, like nation building, a complicated problem to understand and solve.
In a lot of countries the most powerful institution is "family first" (sometimes extending that to ethnic or religious in-group second).
The (currently) successful countries got that way with a different norm, "same rules for everyone".
I'm viewing the emphasis on family first in recent Disney/Pixar movies with increasing concern. Sure it sells better in China, but at what long-term cost?
>The (currently) successful countries got that way with a different norm, "same rules for everyone".
Which successful countries are these? As far as I can tell, the richer, more resourceful, established tribes don't follow the same rules as everyone. They might not be as blatantly corrupt as others, or the corruption may be more higher level with more plausible deniability, but "family first" is human nature.
(Of course there are varying values of "everyone." Most countries pretty much excluded half of the adult population until recently.)
For "family first" countries: this is the default mode for humans, so pretty much every country at one point or another. Nigeria and India would be two ountries where it's important to be related to the right people. India's caste system further reduces opportunities for many, perhaps most, people. For more extreme examples: Yemen, Afghanistan.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12112539-fairness-and-fr...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
[2] https://www.ft.com/content/d1f5d43e-9cef-41d2-a651-f59a40e47...
[3] https://www.ft.com/content/798e6641-ecf9-480e-906e-8ee756296...
[4] https://www.ft.com/content/33809fbc-c999-41c5-97f6-a5d1f33d0...
You could have a constitution that says - everyone is free and we decide how to govern ourselves voluntarily.... And still get a country like Switzerland.
My views on the subject : https://realminority.wordpress.com/
Preventing the decline is possible, but is _continuous_ hard work.
Are you saying that low profit enterprises create more value? The thesis is attractive but also makes me wonder about Apple, high profit and also highly creative.
It seems to me this would go the other way. Making a good product (in the sense that it's successful in the market) is what you want a company to do, but that's the thing mostly aligned with the profit incentive.
If profits are taxed heavily then spending resources on making a better product so that more people buy it doesn't make you a lot more money, but spending resources on office politics brings non-monetary personal benefits like status and control, so managers would have a greater relative incentive to do those things. See e.g. Soviet Union.
One of the biggest problems today is actually that the tax code provides incentives for corporations to retain profits within the organization rather than paying them out to shareholders to invest in something else, which results in inefficient corporate bloating.
Making a better product also doesn't necessarily lead to profits. That's an oversimplified perspective. There's a far greater correlation between monopoly power and profit. In some cases this monopoly status comes from truly groundbreaking work. Not in all cases though.
Multinational corporations commonly avoid taxes by keeping profits offshore in a low tax jurisdiction. In order to pay the money to shareholders they have to repatriate them and pay corporate income tax on the money, and then the shareholder has to pay tax again on the dividend or the capital gain from the buyback.
Or they can leave the money where it is, not pay any of those taxes and invest it in some index fund from there. But then the money is stuck inside the corporation, and gets invested in some index fund instead of potentially going to some higher risk/reward investments that some of the original shareholders would have chosen.
> On the contrary, recently many needed to be bailed out because they paid out too much to shareholders instead of saving enough for a rainy day.
COVID-19 isn't a rainy day, it's a once in a century pandemic. Most companies have never made enough money to be able to survive it, and the ones that did still shouldn't be hoarding it just in case. Systemic problems get solved through systemic actions, e.g. lowering interest rates or sending stimulus checks. To expect companies to have saved enough money to survive rare systemic events without that is to penalize and destroy any company lean enough to have been unable to save it to begin with.
> Making a better product also doesn't necessarily lead to profits.
Making a worse product in a competitive market has a strong relationship with going out of business.
> There's a far greater correlation between monopoly power and profit.
But that's an independent problem. The solution there isn't to raise taxes, it's to break up monopolies.
That does happen, but many including the biggest tech companies found a clever way around it. Via a combination of ultra-low interest bearing bond sales and share repurchases. It does the same thing but avoids those taxes. So there's no incentive for profit retention on net.
> COVID-19 isn't a rainy day, it's a once in a century pandemic.
Part of going into business is accepting risk, including systemic risk. That's why the corporate veil exists and it's generally positive for the overall economy when weak businesses fail. A strong business would have an operating model that can withstand such risk.
> To expect companies to have saved enough money to survive rare systemic events without that is to penalize and destroy any company lean enough to have been unable to save it to begin with.
Maybe those companies shouldn't have been in business then and that capital would have been better deployed somewhere else. I'm surprised that opportunity costs of capital allocation are ignored when defending bailouts. They introduce market inefficiency and reward complacency.
> Making a worse product in a competitive market has a strong relationship with going out of business.
In principle, yes. In reality, most markets are not competitive to that degree. Perfectly competitive markets don't exist in a modern regulated economy. We can talk about removing regulatory burden to make this true, but that's not where we are now.
The loans allow the money to be transferred back into the domestic entity, but there are then restrictions on issuing more in dividends or buybacks than you have in profits, and borrowing isn't considered profit. So they can get the money back into the US and use it for wasteful empire building but they can't give it to the shareholders -- it makes the problem worse.
And buybacks have more advantageous tax treatment than dividends but they're still taxed as capital gains on the difference between the price you bought the shares and the price you tender them for, which doesn't happen if the money stays inside the corporation.
> Part of going into business is accepting risk, including systemic risk. That's why the corporate veil exists and it's generally positive for the overall economy when weak businesses fail. A strong business would have an operating model that can withstand such risk.
You're using two incompatible definitions of weak. In the first case you want weak businesses to fail because they're inefficient, i.e. they're consuming more resources than they produce and go bankrupt. In the second case the business fails because there is a situation resulting in a temporary loss of revenue (shutdowns) but the business still has operating expenses (e.g. rent) and is too efficient to have enough slack to bridge the gap. The inefficiency wasn't caused by the business occupying space it couldn't use, because at the time nobody could use that space -- the loss was a sunk cost to society at large.
If you let them fail then when the temporary situation ends there is greater market concentration because the leanest companies failed, which allows the remaining ones to charge higher margins due to the reduced competition to the detriment of their customers or suppliers.
> I'm surprised that opportunity costs of capital allocation are ignored when defending bailouts. They introduce market inefficiency and reward complacency.
This is why "bailouts" should be distributed uniformly without regard to risk of failure, e.g. through lower interest rates or fixed sum payments to everyone. Then you're not rewarding the most precarious companies because they get no more than anyone else, but you still prevent them from failing. Meanwhile those in a stronger position can use the money they received to increase investment or consumption, which is what you want in a down economy anyway.
> In principle, yes. In reality, most markets are not competitive to that degree.
It still works like that in practice much of the time. Blockbuster's product wasn't as good as Netflix and now they're gone. GM's product wasn't as good as competing ones and it led them into bankruptcy. Blackberry, Sears, RadioShack, Circuit City, AOL.
It could happen more than it does, but it still does.
The argument has been subtly shifted here, from businesses not being able to return capital in the form of dividends due to taxes to business not being able to do so due to loan covenants. Irrespective of the latter point, it is clear that given low interest rates, repatriation tax policy has no effect on incentives for capital repatriation. The biggest most profitable companies that pay out large dividends and do share buybacks make frequent use of this.
As for the loan covenant restrictions, from an economic stability perspective, it's very poor incentive design to allow companies to repay dividends when they're not profitable. This is in effect what you mean when you say "restrictions on issuing more in dividends or buybacks than you have in profits". A business thus impacted should focus on getting profitable. Liquidation is also an option. Dividends and buybacks should not be.
> This is why "bailouts" should be distributed uniformly without regard to risk of failure
This policy sends a message that foresight doesn't matter and reinforces a short-term oriented time horizon. Not only is that worse for society, it's worse for business in the long-run due to investment disincentives. Providing temporary support to individuals or local small businesses to preserve communities, especially vulnerable ones, is a different story and this is not an argument against it. Bailing out large well-managed businesses on the other hand makes no economic sense, these businesses can easily be restructured, sold, and given a new lease on life under new ownership. Antitrust concerns should be handled by courts, not by bailouts.
> increase investment or consumption, which is what you want in a down economy anyway.
Not all investment is equal, some investments have a much better return than others. Good policy incentivizes the latter as opposed to incentivizing indiscriminately. Investment for the sake of investment leads to waste and is bad for the economy in the long-run.
> and is too efficient to have enough slack to bridge the gap. The inefficiency wasn't caused by the business occupying space it couldn't use, because at the time nobody could use that space -- the loss was a sunk cost to society at large.
This is very oversimplified. Larger businesses can tap into financing, working capital, and have many other tools available to deal with this. And if they can't, that's not efficiency, that's poor operational discipline. Since the owners stand to gain when such a business does well, they should be ready to lose when things go poorly. It shouldn't matter if the cause is one akin to a force majeure.
> Blockbuster's product wasn't as good as Netflix and now they're gone.
Netflix had a much lower cost of capital in the beginning and also a much lower fixed expense. In their case not having storefronts improved the product but that's not a fixed relationship. One can come up with many cases where the opposite holds. Therefore it only applies to that particular case and doesn't support the general argument. Similar nuances exist for the other anecdotal examples listed.
F.A. Hayek provides great arguments against government intervention in the economy. There can be a role in providing assistance to individuals or communities, Hayek was famously supportive of both, but it's important to not let that bleed over into market dynamics which must remain competition-based.
Now that it's been a while, it wouldn't totally shock me if they ended up drifting Intel's way eventually.
Steve Jobs apparently demolished internal units, with the following outcome:
> As was the case with Jobs before him, CEO Tim Cook occupies the only position on the organizational chart where the design, engineering, operations, marketing, and retail of any of Apple’s main products meet. In effect, besides the CEO, the company operates with no conventional general managers: people who control an entire process from product development through sales and are judged according to a P&L statement.
https://hbr.org/2020/11/how-apple-is-organized-for-innovatio...
Maybe because it's newer and hasn't rotted yet.
Now if there were a technology to come up agains the iPhone (glasses anyone?) they'd probably face the same conundrum; disrupt themselves or be disrupted?
Most corporations are organised around product groups, but what happens when the mobile products group comes up with a new device and wants to sell it to corporate clients? The enterprise products division might not like that. Imagine if Apple had a Mac division selling laptops, they might not have been happy about the Phone division coming out with the iPad and keyboard cases.
You don’t develop all new low profile keyboard technology, an original touch sensitive display interface system, a new hinge mechanism, a custom integrated security and image processing chip (T2), and a unique 5k display system through neglect. The problem is some of these advancements were simply misconceived. It wasn’t lack of interest or investment, it was poor execution of some of the new developments.
Steve Jobs used to say that being better necessarily meant being different, but being different means taking risks and sometimes they don’t pay off.
For a while, the software quality of new OS releases was night and day, comparing iOS and OS X. It was clear where the focus was. Apple's org structure has it's weaknesses.
Much like countries and empires. Once growth largely stops being the easiest way to capture wealth "entrepreneurs" start eating away from the inside.
https://pedestrianobservations.com/2020/11/13/surplus-extrac...
Instead they optimize to many things like money, prestige, power, security, and so on. Much like you can't describe health as a single thing, when you collapse your insight to a single variable you miss everything in your simulation of how reality works.
This applies to an individual level but especially applies towards a cooperative level with multiple individuals. When we cooperate (or just act in ambiguous situations) sometimes trying to collapse your actions to "mental shortcuts" aka Heuristics in Judgment and Decision-Making to borrow some thinking fast and slow language further reduces insight.
Extremely well said, and having worked at two (initially) successful behemoths so far, I couldn't agree more.
None of the options for dealing with this seem great. I've seen "internal incubator" type things which are designed to come up with new ideas, but honestly I'm not a fan of these. The structure incentivizes prototyping new "left field" ideas, but those ideas are likely not to gain any traction, and if they do, it is likely to be a mess to transition them into real projects within the more normal operations of the organization. And it does nothing for projects that are clearly important from inception, even if new; the "left field" incubator is not the right place to put something that isn't a crazy idea being tested but something known to be important.
The Iron Law of Bureaucracy
> Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people":
> First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.
> Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.
> The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html
This (and other organizational failures and technological innovations) is why there will always be startups and small businesses eventually where there was once a big entrenched business or two (or sometimes three).
There is also, of course, whole new industries and niches to be created out of nothing, value and wealth is never a finite pile. It's mostly a matter of human effort to find and break out these new areas. Sometimes just reinventing things as the old talent grows old and dies off, providing value in learning history.
Strong claims like that require strong evidence and a theory of WHY that would (always) be the outcome.
I'm thinking of society as large. That is an organization too. Are we doomed by bureaucracy?
Just like Christensen’s Dilemma books are mostly just anecdotes combined with patterns in history. As many such business books are.
But in my short time on this planet I’ve seen it in countless forms where I strongly believe it deserves such a title as “iron law”.
I don't have empirical evidence for it, but I can take a stab at a rational explanation.
The second group faces no opposition in their pursuit for control of the organization and its processes.
At best, members of that group will fight among themselves, but certainly won't find resistance from the first group.
Control over various parts of the organization is therefore slowly given to one or more members of the second group.
I work in one of those organizations (US legal requirements make it a nightmare)... I even have stock incentives, and I couldn't care less.
This grows like a cancer: it starts from the bottom of the pool with people with no much skills, but looking for promotions while people with skills are looking for work results. In some very large companies I worked in (or with), techies focus on work while less competent people become managers; techies regard managers initially as admins that do work techies don't want to, but then the managers take over the organization and make it rot. This is initially far from senior leadership's sight, when it becomes visible it means most of the organization is already affected and it is too late. In most cases HR is helping with this because HR is completely disconnected and not understanding techies and the power dynamics ("those geeks nobody understands") and side with the bureaucrats because HR is also a form of bureaucracy (you don't get in HR is you are a brilliant STEM graduate).
Everyone hates “education bureaucrats”, but if the mission is educating children, at some level the state of the institution is critical to that mission.
> Are we doomed by bureaucracy?
When empires collapse, you get small offshoots starting up somewhere nearby. If you search "tree life cycle" on google images you will see the analogy I'm trying to get at :)
Once that happens, the organisation will promote people who do politics well. It's only a matter of time before the entire organisation is focused on internal politics (apart from the people actually doing the work, who become pawns in political moves). As the organisation grows and the layers expand and more layers of management become disconnected, it gets worse.
In a company, eventually the company will get disrupted and die off. In a government that's not a thing, and it'll just keep expanding and playing politics. This gets worse for government departments headed by a politician, because the politician is very focused on getting something they can boast about to their electorate in the few years they have in the department. And they're usually very familiar with the kinds of political games being played.
Source: We studied this in my MBA, it's a known thing. If I still had my textbooks I could dig out a reference.
Term limits are best implemented where someone must take on a different job every x years. This doesn't solve the problem of entrenched vampiric bureaucrats entirely, but it at least pushes them towards the chopping block.
Liquid democracy is a type of democracy where people give their voting power for particular issues to whoever they trust most for that topic. Then that person may pass the cumulative votes onto someone they trust and believe in. The point of liquid democracy is to empower people who are actual experts in a subject. Rather than having laymen vote in ways that just empower the most socially adept.
The entire skillset involved with gaining power is so time-consuming, it's incredibly rare for someone to have it and an actual technical skill at the same time.
> Disentangling Accountability and Competence in Elections: Evidence from U.S. Term Limits
> We exploit variation in U.S. gubernatorial term limits across states and time to empirically estimate two separate effects of elections on government performance. Holding tenure in office constant, differences in performance by reelection-eligible and term-limited incumbents identify an accountability effect: reelection-eligible governors have greater incentives to exert costly effort on behalf of voters. Holding term-limit status constant, differences in performance by incumbents in different terms identify a competence effect: later-term incumbents are more likely to be competent both because they have survived reelection and because they have experience in office. We show that economic growth is higher and taxes, spending, and borrowing costs are lower under reelection- eligible incumbents than under term-limited incumbents (accountability), and under reelected incumbents than under first-term incumbents (competence), all else equal. In addition to improving our understanding of the role of elections in representative democracy, these findings resolve an empirical puzzle about the disappearance of the effect of term limits on gubernatorial performance over time.
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/9639960/Alt_Dise...
B: Elected officials are supposed to be the overseeing representatives, rather than functional executives.(think board vs C-suite). Elected executive is overall a poor idea.
It's a shame. I like the idea of not concentrating power.
Three countries with fairly open and competitive elections, and very high levels of corruption and high levels of incumbency:
https://www.transparency.org/en/countries/india
https://www.transparency.org/en/countries/turkey
https://www.transparency.org/en/countries/hungary
Then there are these least corrupt countries, that elect new people all the time:
https://www.transparency.org/en/countries/finland
https://www.transparency.org/en/countries/new-zealand
Oh... and let's not forget, that the study is about how efficient the governors are... not about corruption at all.
And there's always corruption and politics where there are humans, be it in the mailroom or the boardroom.
Tell that to any college/university in the western world!
There's a reason tuitions have risen so high and it's largely been cited as the ratio of admins to teachers as being at least 10:1 when it used to be much closer.
I personally blame cheap gov subsidized credit for this quickly forming trend, which only took ~2 decades to have a devastating effect on students who come out of school without a degree which can somehow pay back such debt (which we in STEM are fortunate and I personally dropped out early).
1. The only thing that matters is the budget.
2. Bureaucracies only grow, never shrink, and the only thing you can control is the rate of growth.
Thanks for sharing another one with us!
http://doc.cat-v.org/economics/parkinsons-law/the-economist-...
What we have to note is that the 2,000 Admiralty officials of 1914 had become the 3,569 of 1928; and that this growth was unrelated to any possible increase in their work. The Navy during that period had diminished, in point of fact, by a third in men and two-thirds in ships. Nor, from 1922 onwards, was its strength even expected to increase, for its total of ships (unlike its total of officials) was limited by the Washington Naval Agreement of that year.
Edit: thanks OP for continuing to post this link, I as well found it enlightening :)
So yes - a very large organisation. However Apple's chip design teams are much, much smaller than that. And because Apple mostly doesn't do chip design those teams are likely able to work like a startup, without much internal politics or in-fighting. Where as all of Intel's 100,000+ employees are basically devoted to chip design and manufacture.
Apple as a whole, though, is starting to look rather sick from the same sort of problems that Intel has. Under Jobs there was an energy and clarity of purpose that's been lacking for some time. The drift in Apple's core businesses are obvious. The iPhone has been stuck in turgid incrementalism for a long time now, and has already been largely "disrupted" by Android which sold into cheaper markets and used that to fund R&D budgets that match Apple's. We don't think of it as disruption because Android arrive so soon after the iPhone and thus there was no obvious delayed "disruption event", Apple just had their market share capped by the refusal to compete on price, which is why Apple fans have for years been forced to make arguments about why Apple is successful because they take a larger profit margin than others.
Their core Mac business has also been adrift for many years now. I and many others actively avoid trying to upgrade because things frequently get worse rather than better. The first decade of the century saw constant innovation in the Mac business, after all their best people were reallocated to the iPhone and iPad, quality entered a long period of decline. macOS releases struggled with regressions and rarely introduced new innovations worth caring about. Their apps and hardware have also stalled with own goals and unforced errors like the keyboard fiasco <looks at butterfly keys with holes in the plastic from ordinary levels of use>.
Developer experience and docs are another area of problems, there was a good rant about it posted here the other day.
All these are due to organisational rot, and most obviously, a form of in-fighting between iOS / macOS in which the iWorld got the best people and resources, leaving macWorld to pathetically try and steal things from the other group occasionally, regardless of whether it made sense for a laptop context or not.
When the company becomes successful and starts to grow, it starts to attract people who don't really care about the company and its mission—they are in it only for themselves. They only want to improve their lot, and are willing to play politics and backstab as required to get ahead..
If the company is only growing slowly, they can weed these types out during the interview process. But if they are growing quickly, they don't have time to interview properly and slowly and surely the company is transformed from a cooperative, mission-driven organization to one where employees are fighting against themselves.
Unfortunately these politically minded types are the ones who quickly rise up the ranks, and once most of the top areas of the company are populated by assholes, there is no cure.
In the history of the world, 99% of people has been "in it" for the salary. Who gives a rat's ass about the company or the product?
It means there's immense incentive for teams to monopolize skill and reduce other teams' value so they get picked. It also encourages posturing as strongly as possible, rather than accurately, since it's all based on perception - it's not like you can prove you'll do a better job than another team. To make it worse, if a highly valuable project seems like it might fail, the company will likely throw more resources at it - the risk to the team for getting in over their head is relatively low (and still looks great on a résumé), compared to the risk to the company.
And what I view as completely irrational is the fact that in so many cases, the self-interested option is actually to work together and do something meaningful that advances you far more than chasing a quarterly metric.
Startup going well, productive team and people to work with.
Some guy who sucks with years of sucking experience joins to “manage” the company/team/department into the ground.
I work for a not for profit now and we get paid less, very few people suck.
However the small companies almost always have VC investors, which brings negative effects which are approximately as awful (just in totally different ways).
If you can find a small self-funded company that isn't gonna get squashed next time Masayoshi Son sneezes, it'll be the best job you've ever had.
A great example comes from this article. The group in charge of the Pentium product line would not be thrilled to see the Celerons launched, since that would cannibalize their sales. Obviously for long term success of Intel this was the right move, but from the perspective of the Pentium team this might be a horrible idea.
Broadcom also tried and also failed. They came in cocky because they had succeeded in making Wifi chips with a 10-20 people team so thought that 500-ish people was more than enough for cellular even if Qualcomm had 4x that...
I would not be surprised if Intel fell into the same trap.
I guess even Sailfish OS that came after MeeGo is not really immune to SoC supplier dropping out under it as the first Jolla smartphone with Sailfish OS should have run on a SoC from Sony Ericsson only for SE dropping out of the game as well! And the (in?) famous Jolla Tablet had one of those Intel Atom x86 mobile processor.
Ex-Intel engineer here that worked in R&D- I saw the exact same situations during my time and was one of the reasons I left. The way that teams in the same org with the same goals couldn't or wouldn't work together was incredibly frustrating and such a massive waste of effort. At the time I thought it was a unique situation with our group, but it's sad to see that it's more of a systemic issue that still hasn't been corrected.
These issues saw them going from 50% of the console market in 1993/4 to folding console operations less than a decade later.
SEGA is my favourite example of 'too big to fail' and turf wars.
Console Wars is a great book about this story.
People who are political as a prerequisite need to believe there is both a reward and a low fear of retaliation/termination for their actions.
Sometimes it makes sense to have a bit of competition, but having multiple prototypes (often with slightly different design parameters - e.g. a reliable design, an advanced design, and a moonshot) is a better competition than having managers attacking each other with passive-aggressive Powerpoint shows in a conference room.
In our case, making two teams work independently on the same problem just created a situation where each team had half as many resources.
Given Intel’s history of paying median rather than top wages and losing their best employees to competitors, they didn’t even have one full department capable of pulling this off, let alone 2 or 3.
You repeat this multiple times depending on your resources. When things get really expensive, you should be down to one idea.
You got it. Not to mention that you're incentivizing them to hoard work/attention/resources from one another, or engage in other organizational anti-patterns that would obviously be/become problems to solve if you didn't put the artificial "constraint" of internal competition in the way.
Turf war and cookie leaking is a problem for all big companies, we are all humans, when there is no external threat, we turns to infighting. After all, why not? This will compensate the missing competing pressure that is also necessary as well.
But unable to have a cohesive strategy and call the shot would be Intel's own downfall. Looking back the past decade, they are on a one-way losing path, without any meaningful expansion. Had they have a decisive leadership, it will definitely fare better right now.
I also seem to remember shopping around for a new phone a few years back and coming across android phones running on what seemed like a Frankenstein Atom processor. At the time I thought it was a promising concept, though benchmarks weren't flagship quality. But I'd hoped to eventually see dual-boot phones I could slot into a shell of a laptop to have access to a an ultraportable low-end windows box when needed. I'm kind of disappointed that never came about. (I know there's some promising "shells" for android phones, but I'd really like an OS I can fully control for my desktop experience, and Linux phones don't quite seem mature enough)
Anyway, any insight on the above from your unique perspective would be welcome.
I'm no longer surprised, but I'm still always amazed when this happens. It is really crazy how groups within organizations are often unable to see that collaboration is massively more in their interests than minor empire building. It's like they're trying to building a wooden fort a moat filled with mudaround it when they could be building Camelot.
(Well, Camelot minus the whole thing with Lancelot giving it to Guinevere, Arthur to his sister, and his estranged son coming back to kill him. Not quite that Camelot.)
I'm not sure the engineers themselves having a big ego is a negative. I'd want a team who thinks they can do anything. But how you manage those guys is the problem...
Entrepreneurs typically rate low. They rely on goodwill and reciprocity and great relationships to get things done as they have zero power. Early power comes from getting people to buy into your vision.
Corporate middle / senior managers rate higher because it it generally all about the power.
The interesting insight was that as an entrepreneur, when your business scales it is hard to retain the “low Machiavelly” approach. This is where a lot of the growing pains come from..
Edit: add link https://www.harleytherapy.co.uk/counselling/machiavellianism...
Since when is competition and choice a bad thing? If you're a chip design firm and you have a 8-month backlog to get your masks made at TSMC, what do you do then? TSMC can be world's best fab but we need to address the SPOF condition that is so close to the political hot zone in the APEC region.
Intel should spin off its Fab division as a separate company, hire some top executives to rejuvinate the workforce, make it the coolest Fab company in the world to work for and leap ahead. Intel TMG's Sohail was the biggest borderline criminal executive that was forced out a couple of years ago and was responsible for the 10nm delays.
It is enormously difficult for any startup to get into this space - you need billions and years of expertise to start a Fab. Or may be YC folks can? I worked in the Fab but don't have a birds-eye view of what it takes for a startup to get into this space. It would be amazing to see startups trying to manufacture semiconductors... you know live up to the Silicon Valley's name. You could have billions of dollars of economy built on services - US, EU and most advanced economies are shifting towards services; but they all rely on semiconductors. Imagine something were to happen to that... It is a juicy problem. We don't need Uber/AirBnb unicorns out of SV, we need Fairchild of the modern world from SV.
Edit: To see what kind of a beast EUV litho is, this is a good short documentary on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0gMdGrVteI
That's really only because of other countries outsourcing to China and not supporting domestic mining. There is no shortage of rare earths in other countries.
Brilliant really. Get political points for "lowering emissions", then double dip getting more points for "being hard on China" while at the same time not hugely affecting the economy, jobs, or ticking off industrialists.
Yes, but the planned chips are an older generation right now and they'll be even older when the fab actually starts production. TSMC would never move cutting edge production outside of Taiwan.
Just think about it rationally. If TSMC isn’t allowed to meet demand, well of course someone will be incentivized to move the IP elsewhere where you are permitted to meet demand. It would be such a colossal opportunity. Indeed shutting off TSMC would be great for other people interested in getting into chip manufacturing, in the same way that reducing competition in anything benefits producers.
The reason that doesn’t happen has nothing to do with geopolitics and everything to do with what every mainstream US politician has always been saying: subsidies, and the price of labor.
> Just think about it rationally.
Indeed.
Like Foxconn is (still!) saying they're building a fab in WI.
When (not if) China acts on that, there will be trouble.
China has strong infowar capability and is developing it quickly. Old-fashioned spy-vs-spy type warfare works, too, but is less visible.
The Japanese held many untenable defensive positions in the Pacific for months.
Unless China is willing to nuke Taiwan, (what would be the point?) a military offensive to take over Taiwan would be extremely unlikely to succeed within a few months - and assuming the US/Australia/UK/Japan/South Korea provide support - almost impossible.
Doing any kind of amphibious landing offensive is incredibly costly and difficult.
China's best hope would be that Joe Biden is under CCP control.
They have fresh new chip designs that would be perfectly adequate, but they are still hobbled by 14nm. They have now released three? four? iterations of x86 design on the same 14 nm process, because 10nm is that troubled
If you spun off the fabrication, as AMD did, you would have a much smaller, but more-competitive fabless business, and the fabricator would implode. (Which is pretty much what happened to Global Foundries, AMD's former fabrication house)
In any case, much of the value for shareholders would be eradicated. Intel has historically done very well as a vertically integrated business. They would like to remain vertically integrated.
We may see Intel resort to outside fabrication -- executives have already mentioned it in the business press -- but I very much doubt we will see them discard their internal fabrication capabilities.
Great if you’re the company the gov’t blesses for this purpose (like Microsoft) but not so great for their competitors.
Just like Foxconn's plant in Wisconsin.
It'll just keep getting pushed back, and pushed back. Its job is to keep the politicians happy (or at least not angry), and it doesn't need to be built in order to serve that purpose.
That fab will never, ever, ever run a single wafer.
People have been repeating "Si vis pacem, para bellum" for thousands of years for a reason.
Semiconductors and aerospace are important to war efforts, and having domestic manufacturing capability is a big deal if you have serious, wealthy, technically advanced adversaries.
Reality is complicated and many-faceted, and there are a number of reasons to keep Intel alive as far as the govt goes: war, staving off brain-drain, keeping a lot of jobs, etc.
It’s hardly naive to assume that, since there has always been conflict, that conflict will continue for the foreseeable future.
Take that from someone who lost a large chunk of his family currently in an African - shithole as the US president aptly put it- country. I'm on HN because this is the most peaceful time in recent memory. Do me the favour, at the very least, to put a handle on your dillusions grandeur. In our connected world diplomacy should be the only way to resolve national conflicts.
The Military Industrial Complex is a huge beast. Almost all the big tech companies started before 1970 or so were funded by DoD research money. The only reason silicon valley is where it is lies in DoD radar research constraints. Computer tech started as stuff like solid state transistors to improve radio efficiency and size.
Since the MIC is a good ol' boys club with the tax dollars to pick winners and losers, of course they'll help their friends first "for the good of the country".
I'd also like to note my displeasure that my tax dollars pay must of the research bill, but the various companies walk away with the patents, copyrights, and profits. There's no reason for someone else to get rich off my investment.
Want to solve the national debt? Require royalties for government investment.
I don't know where the notion of "Intel is about to die and TMSC will make us suffer due to monopoly" comes from but before having people cheer for Intel again they probably need some time to have their execs cure some disease in some poor part of the world, do a few AMAs on reddit, open-source something, donate to some cool projects in tandem with actually improving their products before regaining the goodwill of the people. Can take some clues from Bill gates and Microsoft.
The consumers are pissed. AMD's comeback is attracting a lot of fanfare because of people being sick of the not having an option beside "should I get i3, i5 or i7" for very long time.
Semiconductor R&D costs have been going up, companies consolidating or went into niches. There are jokes about having to buy from The Semiconductor Company® in the future.
Intel is sitting on a lot of money, so they're not going to die soon. But they haven't been showing signs of improving the situation since 14nm was delayed in 2013. This saga didn't start with 10nm. Remember that the cadence used to be tick-tock every 18 months. We still can't get 10nm desktop chips. So there are some questions how they'll fare in the future.
Intel is stumbling, but up until very recently they were still the fastest gaming CPUs available. That didn’t stop gamers from criticizing them endlessly and cheering their demise. Intel went from cool to uncool.
Give it a few years and they might be able to leverage the underdog position into a comeback story.
This is emphatically untrue. There was always a significant minority in "Hacker" and privacy circles that were intensely sceptical of Facebook in specific and "social media" in general.
The most positive opinion I have ever had of it could be described as indifference.
The comback story will need Intel to become more productive with CPU manufacturing R&D. Is there any reason why after such prolonged decline Intel may have a comback?
The fears have less to do with TSMC the company and more the fact it's a pawn in the geopolitical chess game between the US (and her pacific allies) and China.
The issues with supply chains through Taiwan have little to do with whether gamers are buying their CPUs from AMD or Intel, but the fact that a critical piece of infrastructure in the Western economy is very precariously located, and in the event of war or political strife is not going to be able to be mobilized for domestic (or even friendly-allied) production.
5nm silicon is, literally, the only thing that only one company can make.
And if a war did drag on for years there would be opportunity to switch suppliers and manufacturers or build new infrastructure.
Where do you even get people with the knowledge required to run the 5nm fabs, there night be none at all on thr continent.
Anyway, the machinery that TSMC is using is produced in Netherlands AFAIK. US should be fine, there's a lot of capital available to buy the machinery, recruit the talent and build the Fabs if it comes to TSMC not being reliable partner at some point.
As for ASML, if it were the key to Intel's woes, the article we are all commenting would not have been written.
It not being the issue discussed in the current article doesn't mean it isn't a critical issue.
(Continuing the sky-is-falling theme. :) )
If we're going down that route, every country in the world can be described in an equally alarmist manner.
Who is saying this? There is competition, and Intel is starting to lose.
> If you're a chip design firm and you have a 8-month backlog to get your masks made at TSMC, what do you do then?
Wait 8 months. This is a lot better than getting a "Lol, we don't do custom masks" from Intel.
> Intel should spin off its Fab division as a separate company, hire some top executives to rejuvinate the workforce, make it the coolest Fab company in the world to work for and leap ahead.
Yes, they absolutely should do that. The only question is if they have the guts to do it.
Is it years of work to figure out the placement of CPU/GPU/memory units on the die, routings, and come up with new instruction sets? I imagine this wasn't new physics, Apple was just using contract fabs, right?
What's the secret sauce that let them pull this off, and fend off others?
Edit, oh, this is somewhat answered below in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25093313
Intel had Tigerlake / WillowCove Design but they cant ship it. They also have Golden Cove. If you have put the design they were suppose to be using now, on a IPC basis Intel might still be in the lead.
If you read the anandtech article describing the A14/M1 chips, it seems that the ARM ISA lets Apple do some things that are either exceptionally hard or impossible on x86, like making individual cores much “wider” in terms of instruction decode, allowing the A14/M1 cores to do significant parallel execution. This allows their cores to be significantly more efficient in terms of instructions per clock cycle. To be clear this isn’t just the benefits of ARM - Apple is far ahead of other ARM designers as well. On the other hand, the wider the execution pipeline, generally the slower the cores have to be clocked (Im actually not sure why this is, to be honest). This is part of how Intel is able to produce chips in the 5.0+ GHz range.
So it’s not that every designer converges to the same design (internally, they’re quite different). Instead, what’s happening is that all the relevant trade offs (pipeline width and depth, ISA, fab tech, power targets, etc) are leaving competitors within an order of magnitude in performance. And the question of who’s going to take the lead is a question of who’s executing best on all these fronts, and who’s currently got a lot of talent working on areas that will see continued improvement.
But whatever happens, I wouldn’t bet against Apple. Their team has been delivering improvements like clockwork, year over year for quite a long time now.
No one makes ARM chips for laptop, because of the chicken and egg issue. Windows on ARM going mainline could change it.
Once Microsoft is shipping these layers within Windows, it's only a matter of time before the use of ARM CPUs in more laptops takes off.
Is it the work to figure out how to lay down the component blocks on the die and all the circuit routing? Is it figuring out how to assemble the power-efficient components from the Arm library? Does that take years? Is it the instruction set? Is it the planning for manufacturing capacity?
I'm just curious to know what the actual work and division of labor / time is to "make a chip".
I would love to know for example:
-- Initial design, 10 people, 1 year
-- Prototype runs, 5 people, 6 months
-- Final design, 5 people, 1 year
-- etc etc.
-- Acquiring fab capacity / manufacturing hardware, 10 people, 1 year
-- etc etc.
But sounds like there's no way Intel or others can just "leapfrog" even if they knew what needed to be done and could abandon their prior choices.
At best It take one year to build a Fab. It takes another one just to plan to built it. That is assuming you get the regulation approval with zero delay.
Building a Fab means absolutely nothing if you cant get the process to yield. Look at Samsung Foundry in the past 3- 5 years.
Intel's Leapfrog chances was their Intel Custom Foundry. Had they not mess that one up they would have a Fighting chance. Even if they had a Design that Leapfrog Apple's M1 today, it would still be let down by their 10nm SuperFin Process.
It is about lack of control over legacy killing the progress. The power of Intel is "proven" legacy, but building completely new architecture is expensive and prone to adoption failure (Itanium?) when Intel has no control over OS (Windows), apps or virtualization software.
Then Apple has control over all that: they can make hardware (scaled up mobile HW), change their OS to support it (iOS bits), support past apps (Rosetta), enforce support in new apps (compiler, LLVM, certification).
It wouldn’t have mattered if Intel controlled the OS or not - it just wasn’t competitive. There’s nothing you can learn from it about Apple - who delivered an ultra competitive, likely even when emulating Intel architecture in software.
Intel could easily open up their boot and make the store there much better.
The don't quite have the vertical control of Apple, but to say they are fundamentally hindered by their legacy is quite questionable.
The fucked up improving their manufacturing.
Once devs will sort out their new shiny ARM Macs whoes (Docker, other tooling) I smell there may be ARM server market rising soon.
[1] https://help.ubuntu.com/lts/installation-guide/armhf/ch02s01...
AMD's Epyc chips are pretty awesome though too so I don't think x64 is on it's death bed.. but it should be an interesting couple of years watching this space heat up.
Arm has swapped a large part of its application user base from 32 bit to a completely incompatible but more modern 64 bit ISA and Apple has cast off the 32bit legacy completely due to its ability to control the whole stack.
What really defines Apple’s Firestorm CPU core from other designs in the industry is just the sheer width of the microarchitecture.
Much of the opcode space is wasted with old single byte instructions that are rarely used these days. There are REX prefix bytes required everywhere to access all 16 registers. Modern instructions that are used all the time are hidden away behind prefix bytes.
64bit ARM is a complete redesign of the ARM instruction encoding, and they put a lot of thought into using the instruction space optimally. 32bit ARM also wasted a lot of it's instruction encoding space, but 64bit ARM is a massive improvement. Despite requiring roughly 10% extra instructions on average, the average arm64 is around the same size as the average x86 binary.
Immediates aren't a huge problem. All 32bit immediates and many 64bit immediates can be encoded in 1-2 instructions. Anything that can't should probably just use a PC relative load.
IMO, the much simpler instruction decoding massively outweighs the need for slightly more load bandwidth.
I'd love to see what a CISC-V ISA without the 40 years of baggage looks like (like jeeze, the hlt instruction gets a single byte on x86?)
They won't.
"Other contemporary designs such as AMD’s Zen(1 through 3) and Intel’s µarch’s, x86 CPUs today still only feature a 4-wide decoder designs (Intel is 1+4) that is seemingly limited from going wider at this point in time due to the ISA’s inherent variable instruction length nature, making designing decoders that are able to deal with aspect of the architecture more difficult compared to the ARM ISA’s fixed-length instructions."
Given the complexity of x86, it's amazing that Intel+AMD have gotten 4-wide decoders. But the M1 has 8-wide and if they want to go wider, it's linear rather than quadratic in complexity.
Every transistor used for x86_64 that couldn't also be used for x86 was a competitive liability (increasing size, power, R&D, etc without any real payoff). I think their decisions make a lot of sense given all the constraints.
They being AMD. The counterargument being that if AMD had been too aggressive, Intel could have done something more conservative. However, then there's the cross licensing agreement ... Arggh.
But they didn't remove x87. It's not really used, compilers only emit it when code asks for a long double.
Personally, I do think they should have banned x87 from 64bit code. But it wouldn't have allowed them to remove the x87 units from the chip, as every AMD64 chip to this day still supports 32bit compatibility mode, and regularly uses it.
r1 = r2 * r3
r2 = r3 * r4
r3 = r4 * r5
r4 = r5 * r6
But if you rewrite the names of the registers (variables) and use a larger set of registers (variables) then you can express the same semantics without overwriting any registers. If you do so you can run the operations in parallel on different execution units within the same core.
The ability to run multiple functions at the same time is called "multiple (or wide) issue".
There are different kinds of functional units inside a cpu. For example, some can do basic arithmetic but not divide. At any given time, some functional units will be busy or free. The amount of effective parallelism present in the input stream you can effectively use is bound on whether you can successfully map your instructions into functional units that are free at that time.
Often, you while cannot run a given instruction because for example the multiplier unit is busy, the next instruction could be run because it depends on the divider functional unit, which at that time is free.
The ability to execute instructions out of order is called, well, "out of order execution". It depends on the ability to rename registers and keep track of actual data dependencies. The cpu needs some memory to keep track of that data.
It's unrelated pipelining (which I could give a try explaining too if anybody cares to hear a similar explanation)
Most operation above a certain level of complexity can be broken down in individual smaller steps that have to happen in order and each step takes some time. Once one such step is done, the next step is performed etc.
If the logic for each of those steps is implemented in hardware, once a step is done executing, the logic just sits there idle, waiting for the next operation (composed of smaller steps) to be executed.
Pipelining is a technique that allows to make use of that otherwise idle logic to start performing the first step of the next operation.
For example, let's consider this small program:
r3 = r1 + r2
r2 = r3 + r1
r1 = r3 + r4
load instruction 1
decode instruction 1
perform r1 + r2
write result in r3
load instruction 1
decode instruction 2
perform r3 + r1
write result in r2
load instruction 1
decode instruction 3
perform r3 + r4
write result in r1
load instruction 1
decode instruction 1 | load instruction 1
perform r1 + r2 | decode instruction 2 | load instruction 3
write result in r3 | perform r3 + r1 | decode instruction 3
write result in r2 | perform r3 + r4
write result in r1
This example architecture has a pipeline depth of 4.
The execution is still strictly in order. The idea is that you can start doing some work for the next instruction before the previous one is fully completed.
For example, you can decode the next instruction after you decoded the current one. Also, you can perform a computation on the next instruction as soon as you have computed the results of the previous one, even before you actually have written the results in the actual destination register, provided there is additional logic that ships the result of the current operation as an operand of the arithmetic unit for the next cycle.
The maximum duration of each step is bound by the clock period. The faster the clock, the less time you have for a single step. The deeper the pipeline, the faster the clock can tick and still produce one operation per clock tick. We'll see next some of the many things that prevents us from just riding this idea to the extreme and deepening the pipeline to ludicrous amounts and harness ludicrous clock speeds.
You may have noticed that this dummy architecture here has been carefully designed so that the next instruction can consume the result of the previous instruction if the instruction stream so requires.
Imagine a different architecture that is divided in 6 steps, where the + operation itself is pipelined in two steps.
load instruction 1
decode instruction 1
access r1, r2
start +
continue +
write result in r3
load instruction 2
decode instruction 2
access r3, r1
start +
continue +
write result in r2
load instruction 3
decode instruction 3
access r3, r4
start +
continue +
write result in r1
load instruction 1
decode instruction 1 | load instruction 1
access r1, r2 | decode instruction 2 | load instruction 3
start + | access r3, r1 | decode instruction 3
continue + | start + (HAZARD!) | access r3, r4
write result in r3 | continue + | start +
write result in r2 | continue +
write result in r1
decode instruction 1
access r1, r2 | decode instruction 2
start + | access r3, r1 | decode instruction 3
continue + | nop | nop
write result in r3 | start + | access r3, r4
continue + | start +
write result in r2 | continue +
write result in r1
So far we were looking at a linear instruction stream. Let's see what happens when you have a branch:
r3 = r1 + r2
call func1
r1 = r3 + r4
r2 = r3 + r1
return
load instruction 1
decode instruction 1 | load instruction 2
perform r1 + r2 | decode instruction 2 | load instruction 3
write result in r3 | perform pc + 1 | decode instruction 3 (HAZARD!!)
| write pc=func1, ra=pc+1 | perform r3 + r4 (^^^^^^^^)
| write result in r1 (^^^^^^^^)
As you can see, once we set the program counter and tell the CPU that the program flow continues from another place, the work the CPU has started doing in the pipeline becomes invalid.
load instruction 1
decode instruction 1 | load instruction 2
perform r1 + r2 | decode instruction 2 | load instruction 3
write result in r3 | perform pc+1, &func1 | nop
| write pc=func1, ra=pc+1 | load ins func1.1
| decode ins func1.1 | load ins func1.2
| perform r3 + r1 | decode ins func1.2
| write result in r2 | read ra
| write pc=ra
In our dummy example this adds 2 cycle latency. Not all is lost since we can still do a little bit of pipelining, but for all intents and purposes this is a pipeline flush.
Some architectures (especially the older RISCs but it's still quite common in DSPs) work around this problem by introducing one or more "branch delay slots"; these are instructions that appear physically after a call/jump/branch instruction but get executed before the branch is actually taken.
A equivalent program for such an architecture would look like:
call func1
r3 = r1 + r2
r1 = r3 + r4
return
r2 = r3 + r1
load instruction 1
decode instruction 1 | load instruction 2
perform pc+1, &func | decode instruction 2 | load ins func1.1 |
write pc=func1, ra=pc+1 | perform r1 + r2 | decode ins func1.1 | load ins func1.2
write result in r3 | read ra | decode ins func1.2
| write pc=ra | perform r3 + r1
| write r2
Stalls are ultimately caused by data dependencies. The program counter is just data, on which the instruction stream itself depends on.
(In the real world obviously things get much more complicated but you get the idea)
I'm not a tech journalist, but the way they seem to have done this was exactly what was described in this essay. AMD brought out "chiplet" designs, initially at the low end, but with significant performance gains generation over generation. Combined with simpler motherboard slot conventions, delay's in Intel's next-generation processes, and overperforming Intel in areas like streaming, the value case for buying AMD processors in this space has grown to the point where you would find very few enthusiasts who would strongly recommend Intel over AMD if you're building a new system and wanted the best performance at your price point.
Seems the infighting issues described by another poster have not only affected Intel's competitiveness in the mobile space.
Ryzen came in the door at #2 in a market that goes well beyond #10.
The motherboard conventions aren't simpler, just longer supported.
AMD is doing impressive work with Ryzen, don't get me wrong, but they've already been #1 in x86 performance before, in the mid-aughts. Before and after that, their flagships were #2 in x86.
I just checked my go-to hardware recommendation site, Logical Increments[0], and not a single Intel CPU makes the list. AMD everything.
And they've has offered the 10600k with a $20 rebate on motherboards for months now...
$50 should come straight the case which is totally overshooting for a budget PC (I recommend the 300L here)
That leaves you with a 10 dollar difference for an CPU that competes with the i9 in gaming...
-
And by the way, even the next build up chooses a 3600X over the 10600K despite the former even beating the 3700X in gaming benchmarks.
The 10600K is an insane value for gaming, and still fast enough for non-gaming tasks. Seeing as they're listing "heavy gaming" as a measurement on these builds it doesn't make any sense for at the very least the i5 to make an appearance.
The difference is key.
Meanwhile it trades blows with the 5600X unless you're making a 7zip decompression and Cinebench rendering mule...
I'm guessing that's why they're not recommended? Being able to actually get the CPU is pretty important...
Consider these two builds:
1. Ryzen 5 2600 ($150) + RTX 3070 ($500) for $650
2. i5-10900k ($280) + RX 5700XT ($330) for $610
The first build with the RTX 3070 is far better. The RTX 3070 buys you into 1440p high/ultra @ 90+ FPS, or 4k med/high @ 60+ FPS. Will the 2600 bottleneck that GPU? Maybe, but you still get better performance for the price by investing in the GPU versus the CPU.
Also your comparisons are quite poor... 2600 shouldn't even be in the running here, the 3070 would be held back from doing the thing it does best, high FPS 1440p (in actual games mind you, not just CS:GO)
My suggestion over the included build is spending $10 more on the build and getting a 10600K.
Silicon Lottery has found 100% of 10600ks will do 4.7 Ghz sustained all core.
Even at that number it will easily out perform a 3600 in a meaningful way. Over 70% of them do 4.9 Ghz which where it starts to reach i9 levels of performance in gaming by the way...
-
And the cherry on top over the 3600 is you can actually buy the i5 outside of Microcenter. Microcenter is the only place carrying the 3600 for $180... but they also have 10600k on perma-sale for $250.
Meanwhile outside of Microcenter the 3600 is rarer than hen's teeth while the 10600k is widely available at $270. I happen to have 5 microcenters within an hour or so of me, but most people don't have that luxury.
Ryzen 5 2600 + RTX 3070[1]
80 FPS - Ghost Recon: Breakpoint 1440p / Very High
78 FPS - Horizon Zero Dawn 1440p / Ultimate
72 FPS - Red Dead Redemption 2 1440p / High
115 FPS - Death Stranding 1440p / Very High
220 FPS - Doom Eternal 1440p / Ultra
124 FPS - Resident Evil 3 1440p / Max
75 FPS - Gears 5 1440p / Ultra
67 FPS - Ghost Recon: Breakpoint 1440p / Very High
73 FPS - Horizon Zero Dawn 1440p / Ultimate
70 FPS - Red Dead Redemption 2 1440p / High
111 FPS - Death Stranding 1440p / Very High
185 FPS - Doom Eternal 1440p / Ultra
104 FPS - Resident Evil 3 1440p / Max
77 FPS - Gears 5 1440p / Ultra
I hopped on Gamer's Nexuses 3080 review just to get a number for a 5700XT and an i7 and Horizon Zero Dawn comes in at 10 more FPS: https://www.gamersnexus.net/images/media/2020/rtx-3080-fe/hz...
You can spot check the other numbers and find similar discrepancies...
Of course the reason I can't find a proper reviewer doing this exact setup is because the idea of buying a 2600 for a new build doesn't make any sense period...
Even the i3-10100 beats it in gaming, and that costs as little as $100...
There's no sense in intel right now when doing a new build.
Giant asterisk during a global pandemic no?
And that's paying $50 more than what is apparently already too much for almost equivalent gaming performance (slightly better after overclocking and the motherboard and cooler priced in above support that too)
I'm on the 3900XT, one of the last from the Zen2 line - it's a ripper, yet I can also just drop in a 5900X or 5950X without having to change the motherboard.
Notwithstanding the many Intel security issues where the remedies nerfed performance, between Apple and AMD, I can certainly see Intel in a bit of struggle.
I worked for Intel then... The problem was AMD couldn't compete on volume. An individual could go buy an AMD chip at a great price, but AMD couldn't fill a large order from a PC manufacturer. Furthermore, we suspected their margins were too slim to keep investing in themselves.
Remember that DIY pc building is a niche. Something that makes perfect sense when you're building a single PC may not make sense when you're making thousands of laptops.
* Broken 10nm and 7nm fab process. No end in sight. Even IBM could surpass them.
* Even with much stricter memory guarantee orderings they managed to break caching and C3 kernel/ user seperation security (Spectre, Meltdown, ...).
* Temperature management. Eg AVX512!
* The government "mandated" backdoors.
Who would have expected such massive Boeing-like fuckups from the industry leader?
Let me know when you find one.
Of course a generally competent government probably wouldn't decide it'd be a good idea to backdoor CPUs, but that's another issue.
They should have been suffocating their R&D with cash, but has that happened? Instead Intel is the world leader in buying companies, dissolving them and EOLing their products. I think on more than one occasion, they bought a customer hardware company and refunded every buyer of whatever gadget that company made.
[0] "Proportionately, employees in their 50s were three times more likely to lose their jobs than workers in their 30s, according to a document obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive that tallies every Intel employee in the United States."
[0] https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2015/08/intel_layo...
"But if you don't expand into other markets, you'll eventually die!" Sure, but that's not a bad thing. The purpose of a corporation isn't to continue existing in perpetuity, but rather, to maximize returns for its investors. You found a gold mine? Great, go mine it until it runs dry, then close up shop and call it a day. There's no need to spend half your profits on a wild-goose chase for other gold mines (blackberry investing in self-driving cars anyone?) - if that's what I as an investor want, I can just use my dividends to invest in other companies or startups that are aiming to do exactly that.
I'd rather invest in a company that sticks to the things that it can reliably excel at, and direct its profits back to me, so that I can then invest it in other companies that I trust in other fields. A company that is spending half its profits trying to be something it's not - that's my worst nightmare as an investor.
Films, albums, festivals, etc.
The risk is that a competitor comes out of these adjacent markets and edges you out. That's what's looking likely to happen with ARM, which is slowly moving from embedded / cellphone to laptops and servers.
Society grants a group of people immunity from personal liability when they form an organization that has some chance of carrying out some useful work. The organization becomes a special kind of entity - a corporation. It can operate without its investors & officers fearing that their own wealth is on the line should something go wrong. Societies do this because it is widely believed that it would be impossible for various things to happen without it. That is, if personal liability was always in play, nobody would organize human organizations to try to accomplish difficult/dangerous tasks, and the same might also apply to unlikely-to-succeed-but-potentially-significant efforts.
That's what the purpose of a corporation is, not maximising returns for its investors, which is a recent idea (dating back to the 1970s) and has nothing to do with why corporations exist.
Maybe it actually is in the interests of <some-group> that Intel runs off on tangents. How would we establish that? Well, we'd have to have some understanding of what the purpose of the corporation is. I don't claim to have any special insight into that, I'm just pointing out that claiming that its purpose is maximising shareholder revenue is historically revisionist and inaccurate.
It is not society's business to allow or disallow different kinds of contracts between private parties. If I know that corporation's investors don't have personal liability and still decide to go into business with them, it's my personal decision to accept this risk and not society's. If I so please, I could go into even riskier deals, up to just gifting them my money. It could be a stupid decision, but it's my decision to make, not something that "society" can allow me to do – actually, not society, but it's worst enemy, the government.
Of course, some governments act out of assumptions that you stated, but it's nothing more than just justification for tiranny.
They don't exist and were not created to sell potentially risky products to eager consumers. They were created to engage in capital-requiring efforts (notably expeditions, but also large scale resource extraction and industrial projects) that would not happen without the personal liability release.
They would not happen because the potential for liability related to the endeavor was clear to all (i.e. people would likely die, and vast amounts of money might be lost).
But societies (and notably royal families) wanted those things to happen, and so they create corporate charters to encourage them to do so.
We could make do without corporate charters, but then we'd also likely be making do without most of things they enabled, because essentially nobody would have had the guts to bet their own personal liability on what were clearly risky and dangerous endeavors.
As another comments notes, corporate limited liability is not just, or even primarily, about liability towards your business partners. Build a factory, pollute the water, and without limited liability, you are ruined (which some would argue is the way things ought to be).
That's a common misunderstanding.
"In nearly all legal jurisdictions, disinterested and informed directors have the discretion to act in what they believe to be the interest of the business corporate entity, even if this differs from maximizing profits for present shareholders. Usually maximizing shareholder value is not a legal obligation, but the product of the pressure that activist shareholders, stock-based compensation schemes and financial markets impose on corporate directors." [1]
[1] https://www.lawschool.cornell.edu/academics/clarke_business_...
Nokia’s leadership was also big fans of this book in 2000-2010. They saw themselves as the nimble disrupters, eventually eating away all computing markets with their cheap plastic phones and a smartphone OS derived from embedded systems. If Nokia would just keep adding features, the Christensen theory promised that they’ll one day own the upscale markets too, like in all those case studies in the book.
Instead Nokia’s business was destroyed by actual innovation: Apple combined a new kind of mobile UI with an OS derived from high-end PCs. It didn’t fit on the ladders of innovation shown in the book. It wasn’t a cheaper thing becoming good enough, but an expensive thing that was nearly impossible to manufacture initially. And that’s why Nokia thought they could safely ignore it, until it was too late.
Intel used to have a manufacturing advantage which they longer do. That is where they are trailing: Material science and manufacturing. This stuff cost a lot of money and requires and lot of Research. This is the Kind of stuff MBA types don't necessarily want to invest in.
Here, of course, Apple is unlikely to sell its chips to other manufacturers... so any disruption will be at the product level: affecting wintel laptops, desktops... and eventually perhaps game consoles and linux servers. Everything.
BTW I really enjoy his theories, but let us note that Christensen himself assessed the iphone as non-disruptive.
Which I suppose it is, but I think it's important to ask: if Apple didn't introduce a disruptive technology, why were they able to do what Nokia didn't?
Its hard to deny how the iPhone represented a power shift away from carriers. It's easy to forget but a decade ago you had to pay carriers for the privilege of changing your ringtone. They had their fingers in every pie, in exchange for access to the market the carriers more or less controlled. Hell, you often couldn't even bring your phone if you switched carriers.
Nokia was too busy pleasing their customers: the big cellular providers who ordered most of their phones. And the status quo heavily favored them -- the top selling phone of all time is still a Nokia phone from 2004. They didn't really have any idea how to market direct to consumer and their brand had no particular meaning -- they made as many SKUs as carriers wanted. Since they were in a clearly dominant position, they had no need to arm twist the weakest player to break into the market, and a lot to lose if they played hardball.
Clay's right that it's not a traditional "cheap tech finds a new purpose undermining more expensive status quo" but it definitely rhymes -- all the incentives are the same and adequately explains why Nokia fell apart.
Indeed the iPhone can be seen as opening a completely new market, instead of disrupting an existing technology. Laptops still exist, desktops still exist, servers still exist. iPhone expanded the technologies available, did not replace any existing one.
How do you gather? I think it'd make sense for Apple to earn more money by acquiring Intel's customers.
Secondly, why have part of the pie when you can have the whole pie? i.e. instead of just acquiring Intel's customers, also acquire their customers, all the way to the end-consumer, gobbling up the margins at each step of the way.
This entails converting all Windows user into macOS users. This is not realistic, in my opinion.
In the end, the question should be what makes the most money: keeping Apple silicon exclusive to Apple (and thus selling more Apple devices) or selling Apple CPUs to competitors (and thus adding a new income stream).
I think option number two would make Apple more money, and therefore shareholders should prefer this approach.
Afaik, all of Nvidia, Apple and Qualcomm (dunno about AMD) pay significantly higher wages than Intel.
If Intel is starting off on the back foot and cannot get top talent, then their decline is all but guaranteed.
Intel needs to reach 10nm and 7nm, and they needed to do that 5 years ago.
On the other hand Intel is a huge national security interest for the US, so expect the government to help them out where possible.
This. I'm actually surprised they have grown so uncompetitive considering the critical products their CPUs are presumably used in. But Intel has been a money making machine for many years, I don't think most people realize the amount of resources they've accumulated when they compare them to AMD et al. I just hope they don't make more lousy investments and actually focus on sorting out their core business problems.
Second, perhaps the AMD/Apple fan boys have not noticed but Intel has many times the volume of AMD and whatever ARM volume Apple will have (Apple is typically 10% of lap/desktop sales, up this year from Covid). The world requires Intel to meet its computing needs and no magic wand will give the other guys that capacity anytime soon.
It is way to early to count Intel out.
And laptops sells way more than desktops do. This is a winner takes all market and there is no reason to go with the loser.
The same architecture on a smaller process will use less power and use less silicon (usually making it cheaper: but yields make that equation complicated). A 100mm^2 design using 50W will only be 50mm^2 using only 25W on a smaller node.
Since 300mm wafers are always 70,000 mm^2 in area, you now produce twice as many designs in 50mm^2 instead of 100mm^2.
-------
Now what made Intel get stuck on 14nm+++ is that Intel got really good at increasing 14nm++++'s clock rate. Dennard scaling is dead: a larger process may offer better GHz these days.
But if you can solve the yield issues, the march towards tinier and tinier transistors is a winner. Less power used, less chip-area used, and therefore cheaper and more-efficient chips.
It was a stark contrast from nearly every other fast-growing tech company in the area.
That’s not entirely true, at least in Hillsboro (I interned there recently). Drinks were free, and so was fruit, but you had to pay for e.g. donuts or chips.
I visited Intel HQ once, and it really did look like that. Is it still like that?
They blocked out most of the sound and very few visual distractions when you were sitting down. They worked well if you wanted relative peace and quiet to concentrate.
Since then they have switched to open-concept with cubes about half the size and walls that are maybe four feet high. So now people have plenty of visual distractions and a lot more noise. Didn't help they added sit-stand desks so you will have people who get on calls while standing and can be heard 30+ feet away.
"I worked there when this was filmed. Immediately following the airing there was so much shame that they launched a whole office redesign and open office concept. Nothing like some well deserved ribbing to shake things up!!!"
"The "gray on gray" quip led to an attempt to add color to some office buildings. The open office redesign looked much better than the 80s and 90s cubicles, at least the one I saw in Santa Clara. Much more current, modern aesthetic, without walls. I left the company a couple of years after that so not sure how well it took hold. Friends who stayed said it didn't work out too well but it's been years since then (Conan did this bit in 2007)."
I don't need snacks and drinks at work, just water and the occasional coffe, which I get at the bar anyway so I can have a little walk and clear up my mind
Workplaces that looks like a teenage dream party give me the chill
When I need to relax I stop working entirely and go out
I consider more money or more free time (or both) an incentive
I appreciate solid forniture, a comfortable seat, big windows with natural light, a nice neighborhood (last work I accepted was because they had an office in Duomo in Milan, the one I have now has an office 5 minutes away from the Colosseum in Rome), I don't care much about "free stuff"
Paying for my drinks or snacks it's not what will bankrupt me
With the pandemic in force and the prospect of going into an office itself coming into question, companies will have to stop relying on the (lazy but admittedly effective) lure of free snacks and lunch. Good times.
On the whole, I agree with you: when I see people crumpled up in bean bags and picking at salad on picnic tables in companies' 'Come work with us' webpages, I get the chills. How very juvenile! But we all know that the industry feeds on a steady influx of juveniles and there's a new batch every summer!
It's good to have the option, it's not what drives my decisions.
I have no problem with people that see it as a bonus, to each his own, it simply doesn't matter much to me.
But maybe SV corporate culture has gone a little bit too far on it.
I am from Italy so they even looked a big novelty back then.
I'm not blaming people who appreciate it, I consider my job my professional endeavour and as I pretend the best from myself, I pretend it from my employer.
Which means that they have to provide me the tools and the means to do it at my best.
I used to be a smoker, I wouldn't have considered it a bonus if my employer paid for my cigarettes.
My salary has to be good enough to pay for that.
companies throwing away chocolates and parties are wasting resources that could go to salaries, re-investment or profit
having said that a company as large as Intel and with such a dominant position for many years has a lot of margin to waste money and make mistakes, which is why they often become complacent
There is also a cultural difference between hardware engineers, who are usually more 'serious engineers' who actually engineer things vs software engineers who are often less rigorous in their architecture and design. HW folks deal with long lead times and can't usually fix errors after production, so that creates a vastly different culture.
Second, if you are a PhD in this area (a hybrid of Computer Engineering and Computer Science, and I believe that a PhD in this area is the minimum qualification for this type of work) then you do not have a large pool of employers to choose from in the first place, so any employer that's competing for folks from this group will likely end up with a decent number of talented people anyway.
A lot of the top-talent has left Intel and I think that will continue. Unfortunately for Intel most of the mediocre employees have stayed.
Graph conveniently omits AMD who now beat Intel using the same ISA but different process.
Apple was actually the one designing those cores in the Exynos - up until and including the Exynos 4000. That was when Apple decided to sever ties with Samsung and stopped designing cores for them and Samsung had to go back to stock ARM designs with the Exynos 5000. That was why the 5000 series sucked so badly - Samsung lost access to those Apple/Intrinsity juiced cores. It’s also what prompted Samsung to open SARC in Austin.
Motivation to do so.
Intel had none.
Everyone else with the immediate capability are professional ball-droppers.
Skylake was the "tick", then they couldn't "Tock" to 10nm, so they made 14nm+, then 14nm++, then 14nm+++... Intel's been stuck on the same process for half a decade now.
Even worse - the same architecture as well, which is why they have to backport their 10nm Ice Lake architecture to 14nm to even get anywhere.
That could not have come at a worse time for a company like intel.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-intel-ceo-idUSKBN1JH1VW
So they are working on a smaller process node than their competitors, and they used their market position to ensure that they will be the only ones using it for a little while. That gives them a significant leg up.
M1 apparently has much lower power consumption.
So something else is going on other than “Apple is willing to spend more to make cores wider”.
Even compared to similar manufacturing processes ?
To me the innovation is using phone-type SoC technology.
A lot of the power (and die area) demand in modern chips is in the interface circuitry to drive the few centimetres of PCB trace between ICs.
Put the RAM in the same package as the CPU and you eliminate that interface. That gives you die space and power budget for big buffers and lots of parallel execution.
Interface transistors (and wires) are many times larger than the core compute logic transistors (and wires), so there is much more than a one-for-one gain.
"ROB" and "OOO" might have gotten mixed together here.
OOO = Out-of-order. Refers to the fact that the M1 can decode instructions in parallel.
ROB = Re-Order Buffer. Refers to the stage where the parallel instructions get put back "in-order" and "retired."
[1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
The other factor is Apple is using a "better" process node (TSMC 5nm). I put it in quotes because Intel's 10nm and upcoming nodes may be competitive, but Intel's 14nm is what Apple gets to compete against today, right now.
Intel has been defeated in detail.
Intel's 10nm node is out, I'm typing this on one right now. It's competitive in single-core performance against what we've seen from the M1. Graphics and multi-core it gets beat though...
Or do you mean what Apple used to use? (edit: the following is incorrect) It's true Apple never used an Intel 10nm part.
EDIT: I was wrong! Apple has used an Intel 10nm part. Thanks for the correction!
There are still no 10nm parts for the desktop or the high-end/high-TDP laptops anyway afaik.
Basically computers that start looking and acting more like clusters. Smarter memory and caching, zero-copy/fast-copy-on-mutate IPC as first-class citizens. More system primitives like io_uring to facilitate i/o.
The popularity of modern languages that make concurrency easy means more leveraging of all those cores.
That's only for 32-bit ARM; for 64-bit ARM, the instruction size is always constant (there's no Thumb/Thumb2/ThumbEE/etc). It won't surprise me at all if Apple's new ARM processor is 64-bit only (being 64-bit only is allowed for ARM, unlike x86), which means that not only the decoder does not have to worry about the 2-byte instructions from Thumb, but also the decoder does not have to worry about the older 32-bit ARM instructions (including the quirky ones like LDM/STM).
That would also explains why Apple can have wide decoders while their competitors can't: these competitors want to keep compatibility with 32-bit ARM, while Apple doesn't care.
With more instructions decoded per clock and a larger reorder buffer, the core should be able to keep its units busier, i.e. not wasting energy without producing valuable output.
This efficiency gain of course needs to outweigh the consumption of the additional decoders. This part is easier with ARM as decoding x86 is complicated.
In addition to higher unit utilization, the increased parallelism should also be an advantage in the "race to sleep" power management strategy.
Apparently ARM supports 4KB, 64KB and 1MB (I just googled that)
Also maybe all the x86 crud might be finally taking its toll (and not just the ISA but all the cruft that got on top of it for 40yrs+ like legacy buses and functionalities, ACPI, or even the overengineered mess that's UEFI)
EFI doesn’t seem that bad either. Maybe something like uboot would suit you better? But the reason we have those nice graphical bios utilities now is because of EFI.
Hence why laptops and 2-1 hybrids are basically back to the days of vertical integration of 16 bit computers, whose the PC was the only exception.
Not really, PC laptops and hybrids are pretty standardized. A slim case doesn't really make it vertical integration.
It is getting more and more integrated though which makes it hard to replace parts. But that has more to do with greed and size requirements than vertical integration, a soldering iron can amend some of that. Driver situation isn't by any means something new or necessarily an indication of vertical integration either.
As for the rest, nothing that regular consumers would ever bother with.
We are talking about vertical integration are we not? Don't see how any of that is relevant then.
And since you did your research the wider public would appreciate to learn in what consumer shop one can get such out of the box experience.
And it's a poor analogy because driver licensing is almost a straight consequence of how dangerous cars are, but the openness of an SoC does not directly follow from how fast it is.
The DMV is a revenue source for most states. Same with traffic cops. They both only have a tenuous link to traffic safety.
1. Power efficiency (read: battery life) 2. Performance 3. Openness
99% of consumers only care about 2 of those. The more that time goes on, the more it becomes clear that prioritizing openness, in particular for hardware, is a direct trade-off against building a great consumer product.
They are able to shovel transistors at the core because there are only 4 of them. AMD on the other hand is packing 64 cores into a package, so each core has to make do with less.
AMD in particular wasted an entire generation of Zen by having too few BTB entries. Zen1 performance on real software (i.e. not SPEC) was tragic, similar to Barcelona on a per-clock comparison. They learned this lesson and dramatically increased BTB entries on Zen2 and again for Zen3. But the question in my mind is why would you save a few pennies per million units by shaving off half the BTB entries? Doesn't make sense. They must have been guided by the wrong benchmark software.
What 'real software' are you thinking of? Anything in particular? Just curious, not looking to argue.
(sorry I changed my comment around the same time you replied)
Of those two advantages, the process one is a lot more significant. Their chip loses in single-threaded performance to AMD's newest, which are still one node behind Apple, but appears to be more power-efficient. I fully expect that once AMD gets on the matching node they will take the crown back, even in a laptop power envelope.
Another part of it is just that designing a CPU with good single threaded performance is hard and costs a lot of die area and no one else in the ARM world was incentivized to do this - who needs a smartphone with that kind of performance (I know, I know - all of us, now)? But Apple also makes IPads which are kind of a bridge device - mobile and battery-powered, but also big and something people might want to do real work on.
I’m also going to say that I think Apple is still alone among the phone manufacturers in recognizing that smartphones are software platforms, not simply hardware devices. I think they have a special appreciation for the enabling power of a more capable CPU.
The 5 Watt iPhone CPU almost beats the 45 Watt AMD CPU. And the M1 will then simply obliterate the x86 incumbents.
Why? The real reason is that Apple had/has the real advantage. It's size, resources, money, strategy, know-how.
It's bigger than Intel. It has a better corporate culture than Intel, it has a vertically integrated market completely safe from any outside disruption for years, and will be for years. It had the opportunity to do this switch, so it had the motivation to develop this capability.
Apple was able to hire the best semi designers plus benefit from the ARM platform.
AMD is still too small and relatively spread thin - trying to cover multiple segments of the general market - compared to Apple, which basically has this one chip in two versions (mobile and ultra mobile).
Apple has and had the iPhone. Apple started using their own chips, the A5, about 10 years ago. (In 2011 March, starting with the iPad 2. And they used ARM before that too.) And since then Apple optimized the "supply chain", incremental steps, but when you are Apple every step can be almost revolutionary (and year after year Steve told exactly that to the believers, and it's basically true, just not on actual feature front, but on hardware and systems level - eg. Gorilla glass for the phones, power efficiency, the oversized battery for the MBP, milling, machining, marketing, design, and so on).
That leaves AMD. AMD Isn't eating Intel's lunch, they've had a pretty good taste of it and are about to say "no, not just lunch, we're taking all the food".
But there's a window. My not-very-expert opinion is that the window is 2 years. That's how long Intel has, while AMD chips away its market share with new installed systems, to turn things around. If they do it, they'll still have to claw back their previous position, or there will simply be a new stable equilibrium, but I think Intel's dominance in the server & consumer-grade space gives them some breathing room.
In the consumer space, shoppers for high end systems e.g., gaming etc are gone: AMD has them now, and more every day. They have me, that's for sure. But the much much larger consumer market is not in gaming. Intel has the name recognition for the average consumer, and it's their hardware in most consumer grade systems. A quick glance at a dozen consumer grade laptops & desktops from HP & Dell don't show any AMD CPUs in them.
So, Intel still has that level of inertia. If they can limit the bleeding in server & high end systems to a rapid bleed-out instead of a near instant & complete gushing torrent, that inertia may be enough to allow them to claw things back if they're able to execute within the next two years.
I'm no Intel fanboi: They lost me unless/until they turn things around. And from where they are now, I don't rate their chance more than 50/50, which might be generous. But I do think they've still got 2 years until their viability is really threatened. At that point, and I'm sure they've got some skunkworks & low-profile conversations going on about this already, they'll need to look at offloading high performance fabs to TSMC.
Personally, from a global strategy standpoint, I think the US might not want to lose what is really a strategic asset that way though, so we could also see some type of subsidy/bailout/whatever to prop them up.
Even more generally, in business there are few hard and fast rules and even the ones that work lose their efficacy as the participants learn and adjust to them. Which is a good thing for the system as a whole. I would speculate that entrepreneurs should now look beyond disruption.
(1). http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-...
Zerocool: Yeah, RISC is good.
Intel’s real disruptive strategy was the Pentium Pro architecture that disrupted the mainframe market, proven by ASCII Red in 1995. But you don’t hear about that because the business leaders didn’t even know it existed (same with multi core btw). The problem with this, as with all disruption, was low margins, so IA-64 was an attempt to enter the mainframe market as a peer of the high-margin encumbents, and was itself disrupted by the broadly inferior but cheaper AMD64. Low-margin ARM disruption also should have been expected as normal and unavoidable.
The big question is what market Intel can disrupt next. I have criticisms I’ve held back on, but one thing I will say is that Intel’s portolio of disruptive technology is greater than I had expected. Leadership has to be able to put together the pieces. NVidia, for example, probably has less core technology, but their direction is more aligned.
I made a similar bet on SUN about 17 years ago and a smaller one on RIM (Blackberry). I'm getting a deja vu.
This all started when I bought a bunch of Apple stock around $2 and for the past 20 years I've been trying to make that play again. I guess I'll have to admit this position in GE is similarly worthless.
I gotta stop making these gambles of faith, Intel has ceded nearly everything and is defending their remaining kingdom poorly. Unless there's a major overhaul, things aren't looking good.
They've also been bleeding talent for years. I need to stop second guessing what I find obvious. Nvidia, Arm and AMD have already stormed the castle and have been pillaging the kingdom for years now. Once you see companies like TI and Marvell start to take significant pieces away then you'll know they're done for it.
- The availability of third party IP (Arm CPUs and originally Imagination GPUs) and manufacturing (Samsung and TSMC) that have allowed Apple to pick and mix to build its own SoCs.
- The fact that Arm has clearly been much more focused on power efficiency which might mean it has IP which Intel can't access (speculating here but we have big.LITTLE).
- Possibly the most importantly, the the benefits that Apple gets from being able own the whole stack and design SoCs that precisely match its needs.
As a result I'm a bit sceptical about whether Intel would have got Apple's mobile business long term given that market's eventual structure: the advantages of Apple's current approach are just too great.
October 2007, CFO Andy Bryant Promoted to Operations Chief.
September 2009, CTO Pat Gelsinger left Intel.
2010, CEO Paul Otellini started work on Intel Custom Foundry.
July 2011, Andy Bryant was appointed Vice Chairman on Intel's board.
May 2012, Andy Bryant became Chairman of the Board.
May 2013, The Board appointed Brian Krzanich as new CEO.
And the more recent event you should all be fairly familiar.
Other than that, If I could sum up Intel's problem in one word, it would be Inertia.
> "We ended up not winning it or passing on it, depending on how you want to view it. And the world would have been a lot different if we'd done it"
No, it wouldn't. Maybe the iPhone would have been delayed 1-2 years. But they surely didn't have the capability to make this CPU properly, as all of their attempts in this field in the coming years demonstrated.
But AMD is dominating them now on one front, and now a major customer of theirs makes their own chips which on the surface seem to be better.
Apple's current ARM offerings are strictly locked to their own hardware, and there's been no hints that they may move into the ARM-PC space selling general purpose chips and letting other vendors produce board. I'd expect to see that first before an Apple silicon powered server.
Not to mention buying their own hardware will obviously save them.
[1] https://twitter.com/ajassy/status/1318930486517927937?s=20
I'm hopeful with respect to Apple dogfooding its silicon in the data center because it may feed back into robust ongoing support for Unix/Posix on their publicly-facing platforms.
I mean that's one possibility, but what seems much more "Apple-ey" (aka likely) is that they would release a very much locked-down platform of tightly controlled, managed services which would perform well and would have a beautiful dashboard design, but would offer a small subset of the functionality which is available from AWS or GCP, they would make some weird choices - like only allowing Swift for configuration files - and all of this would be very proprietary in nature and distant from their consumer products.
Right now Apple's cloud engineers are to some extent helping Linux be a better OS by filing bug reports, creating PRs, etc. That activity, directed toward an Apple Silicon rack OS, would redound to those of us sitting behind MacBooks, typing into the terminal, treating it as a Unix box with nice driver support.
Maybe, maybe not. Apple doesn't currently produce servers, so it would probably take a lot of time and money for them to build out that capability to the point where it's break-even or better compared to just buying commodity hardware.
Apple’s Xserves were awesome. Not cheap. Only marginally competitive. But a joy to work with because of all the nice little details like a FireWire port on the front so you could boot it off of an iPod.
there hasn't been a whole lot of evidence that they have what it takes to succeed in this space.
Does it matter? In 2006 and 2007 there were legions of pundits, columnists, and "experts" who said the same thing about Apple making a telephone.
I wonder if there's a market for a server optimized for iOS builds. Cram as many Mx chips and possible into a rackable case with abundant cooling. Certainly it would be useful to Apple internally. But I wonder if there are enough iOS developers with the budget to make this workable.
Do you really think there's a market for dedicated hardware for iOS build servers? I mean there is some market for this since CI vendors already do iOS builds, but it seems like a bit of a stretch to imagine there being enough demand for Apple to actually put the R&D and product development resources into making this a reality.
In contrast, I would say there's very little evidence Apple can pull off a majorly successful server play. It's not impossible, and I think the trends are potentially in their favor, but it definitely doesn't play to their strengths. Apple's biggest strengths are very consumer oriented, and the trade-offs they typically make are not great for an enterprise crowd (expensive hardware, willingness to abandon legacy compatibility, etc.).
There's probably a smallish market for very specialized servers that Apple could fill well, and maybe they will. Long term maybe that could translate to a wider market if they really make an effort. But I think it's at the very least a significantly longer time horizon than the iPhone.
I think you are using the past tense. Those things are still in production in some places. I wish they weren’t.
Also, I’d like one as a chassis for a Pi or NUC cluster.
Now since that is not an issue anymore, you see Intel getting beaten everywhere. And that is only because Intel's actual competitors in Taiwan and Korea are have now surpassed Intel.
Seriously - it was a resounding failure, even with Intel spending big bucks to convince this class of customers it was the future. There was little uptake and vast dissatisfaction with achieved results. IMHO I expect Xe to follow the same (very shallow) trajectory in HPC as in gamer graphics.
There is one remaining large machine (DUG "Bubba") using Xeon Phi and that's only an artifact of software tolerance combined with a _really_ great deal received on Intel's remaining "Knights Whatever" parts inventory.
Edit: Also too, remember that KNx was really an attempt to salvage Intel's failed Larrabee GPU effort.
I do, and I don't think you know that the first "Knights" project was simply a rename of Larrabee. Same exact product. It was called Knights ... Landing I think? Then it became Xeon Phi.
...and yet, was it any better than a midrange GPU in compute?
Intel is the new IBM. IBM at the end of the 80’s was filled with smart people innovating piecemeal technologies that couldn’t be brought together to create compelling products. And the products that they were selling were expensive and technologically moribund.
In case anybody was wondering why Otellini was wearing a cleanroom suit on stage, it was a reference to Apple's 1998 "Toasted Bunny" commercial for the Power Macintosh G3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6PoLiXCA40
…which was itself a reference to the Pentium Ⅱ commercials of the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvt65mHXmR4
It's easy to be wise after the fact, but we can now say that Grove or Otellini didn't take a big enough risk. Instead of risking cannibalisation of their core markets, they might have won a bigger prize over the longer term by straying further.
Desperate Gamers Camp Out in the Pandemic for $700 GPUs Months after the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080's launch, the lines at brick-and-mortar stores across the country can still wrap around the block.
https://www.wired.com/story/nvidia-amd-demand-pandemic-lines...
C'est la vie.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/15846/jim-keller-resigns-from...
Apple designs chips and devices in lockstep. When designers were working on various A-series chips, they knew the details of the device, and could optimise on that.
Qualcomm doesn't get that kind of view. They make a generic CPU design for given market segment, and have to "please" much wider buyer range. As such, if they tried to apply some of the things that are publicly known about Apple designs, they would probably end up with a chip that would be hard to sell due to taking more space or having higher TDP etc. And before advent of multicore, Qualcomm was using the available space budget heavily to integrate the radio functionality internally (then it oscillated a bit over time depending on chip and market segment).
Wow, they don't even know exactly how disrupted they are...
Does anyone know of a collection of other similar crossing plots on this topic? Would be really cool to study those...
If magically Intel 7nm gives awesome yield next year, will they be able to catch up with a bigger caches and Big.small arch. Will they need lot more help from Windows / Linux to achieve performance gain in lockstep like Apple does by controlling both OS and processor?
This disruption, that disruption... what is of it?
The word is progressively loosing any meaning.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2615.The_Innovator_s_Dil...
In the article, the chart from Christensen's early work about disruptive innovation, and the chart of Apple chips overtaking Intel chips in performance, do seem to have a striking resemblance.