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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

I'm skeptical.

Not only because M1 is at TSMC "5nm" (which is probably equivalent to Intel 7nm) but also because this happens every time intel gets kicked to the curb.

"Guys, don't go AMD, the new Intel CPU will be faster"

When the product arrives it usually comes with a huge trade-off such as thermals and power consumption and doesn't do the performance originally claimed anyway.

This has happened after every Ryzen launch, suspiciously only a day or so after each event. It's so obvious and I don't think I'm going to fall for that again.

No more promises: Goodbye Intel, I'll see you when your product can be in my hands and do what you claim.

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I remember being in an intel engineering meeting, and some guy was showing a roadmap of how the next generation the chip was going to allow our solution to be almost on par with Nvidia's solution. That was at a time where the "next generation" chip was 2 years late, 2 years away at best, and we were comparing to what some consumer could run on their nvidia device that they had in their computer already. I'm not sure if everyone in the meeting viewed it as badly as I did, but my take-away from the meeting was "If everything goes to plan, and nvidia stop producing chips in 2-3 years time we'll be a little bit worse than them". Strange times. I guess the good news is Intel don't just do this to their customers.

Are we talking about Intel's plans for a standalone GPU?

Intel hadn't shipped a dedicated GPU in >20 years (until the low-end DG1 last year) and their integrated graphics were anemic at best for most of that time period.

"2-4 years behind Nvidia" would be pretty impressive of a leap to have been aiming for in some meeting a few years ago.

I don't expect to be purchasing their DG2/"Arc Alchemist" when it launches in a few months, but if it's remotely competitive with mid-range current generation cards (as has been rumored/claimed), that'll be pretty impressive to my mind, to basically enter a completely new market segment for them and have a product that's even worth discussing.

No it wasn't, it was something a lot more niche.

“…that'll be pretty impressive to my mind, to basically enter a completely new market segment for them and have a product that's even worth discussing.”

Sounds pretty normal to me. Why would a company enter a new market if they don’t have a product people want?

I can’t think of any company that launched a new product by announcing “We don’t have anything competitive.”

Am I misunderstanding your comment? (Or reality.)

All too frequently we find tech companies comparing their unreleased products against shipping products.

When Apple moved from Motorola to IBM PPC: Motorola soon to release super fast chip updates!

When Apple moved from IBM PPC to intel: IBM soon to release super fast chip updates!

When Apple moved from Intel to M1: Intel soon to release super fast chip updates!

These companies need to release this press coverage - they’re publicly traded and need this.

The fact though is that right now people are using the Max, of course I’d expect some unreleased future chip to be faster.

However even the slower M1’s are still attractive because of the myriad of other benefits they bring: true mobility chips, huge battery life, quiet operation: the Air doesn’t even have a fan, boots/wakes/video switches are seamless, and the special sauce: the chips merge general purpose computing with application specific computing: apple will always be able to generate a tailored product for their audiences.

And it should go without saying: the pro desktops are certain to have compelling performance, and we can expect M2, M3 and so on to continually advance from where we are today.

Moving away from intel wasn't about performance alone, it was about taking control of their own product’s direction.

> this happens every time intel gets kicked to the curb. > > "Guys, don't go AMD, the new Intel CPU will be faster"

To be fair, for years and years, new Intel CPUs were faster/better/whatever. What you remember as "kicked to the curb" was really something more like an occasionally great product in a sea of mediocrity where the industry was having terrible trouble competing. Someone would have a chip out with great reviews, and then the new Intel architecture would ship and everyone would forget about it.

The current environment where they lag in almost all the high end product spaces is very much a novelty.

> Someone would have a chip out with great reviews, and then the new Intel architecture would ship and everyone would forget about it.

What time period or space are you talking about here? Because that did not happen in the last 10 years for consumer and server processors. The last decade saw AMD with the FX processors failing to be competitive, at first single threaded, over time also multi-threaded and in performance per watt. Then after many years Ryzen came out and was at first just surprisingly competitive, then plainly better in every metric. And that's where we are now. The whole back-and-forth you are describing did not happen at all, and there were only AMD and Intel anyway, not "someone" or multiple players.

They were behind for a few years in the beginning of 2000's in the P3 - Core 2 era.

I have to believe that there's a marketing strategy at work here: leak details in highly controlled environments where you "beat" the competition to imply that your next product is better across the board. In the months that pass before your product rolls out, allow the internet/shadow marketing agents to perpetuate the idea that the next release is going to beat everything else.

Roll your product out with a huge array of confusing names like i9-115479k that nobody can really follow. Nobody has the money to buy all of these products, so nobody can truly claim that none of your products are better than the competition, even if none of them offer a better price:performance:consumption ratio.

And even if somebody does call you out on it... well, don't worry! The next release is going to be even better. Just you wait.

I don't think we need to be skeptical because of the lack of information given.

The article just says some future chip, with unknown memory, at some unspecified power level and cooling solution, will be able to eke out a benchmark win against the part Apple is shipping today in laptops.

Imagine if that wasn't true. THAT would be news.

At the very least, have the new Intel CPUs fixed the speculative execution vulnerabilities or are they still manufacturing those? Eg SPOILER, Spectre, etc?

My guess is they've fixed in hardware known issues that previously got patched with performance-robbing microcode updates. So the bulk of that claimed 15% IPC boost might be from that, with some new stuff sprinkled in.

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