Everytime someone predicted the end of Intel - they just kept knocking out of the park when least expected. Thinking going from Pentuim 4 Prescott to Intel Core series for instance. Side note - At least the Prescott was vaguely ambitious!
But the last decade has not been great for Intel. That engineering prowess has faded a little. Their new GPU stuff is neat and very forward thinking but it is still a wait and see on that. But when it comes to their other elements, it feels like they have just been doing the same thing with very minor tweaks for far too long now.
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Another aside, it is same theoretical greatness doesn't always translate to market greatness. If it worked like that we would probably all be using PowerPC machines in some degree. A wonderful ISA!
That ball's in our (the consumers') court, actually. They are priced aggressively, about what video cards cost before the mining and now "AI" craze. They are competently capable, software teething pains notwithstanding.
So will Intel ARC succeed? We as consumers now have to answer. I can't tell which way the arrow is leaning right now, though software devs don't appear interested in accomodating them like Nvidia and AMD.
That they have no DX11 or below legacy combined with some interesting performance profiles especially at the higher resolution areas leads me to think they are looking at where the market needs will be in 2-3 year from now. It seems like higher resolutions doesn't hamper performance are much as one would really expect. It is still way behind Nvidia and AMD but there is a lot of potential there.
I have seen a few people on youtube who benchmark cards who have made the wise choice to not touch these yet and wait for the second generation. That way they can come in when things are more stable and not have a cloud hanging over their head.
If Intel is to treat it like Microsoft did with Xbox and give it a few years to mature - it could be huge. They could also just drop it in a year or two and it just becomes a technical curiosity that we will look back on like "Remember when Inter did that?". Sort of like the i960 processors. Something really neat but a dead end for them.
After the Bulldozer fiasco who would think AMD would be where they are today?
I mean... for people who remember AMD's original breakthrough with the Athlon, it's not super surprising.
Although it feels a bit like a problem with Intel as well. I think, too much time wearing the crown can be bad for a company. Although some companies don't seem to suffer from that problem - Nvidia and TSMC being 2 pretty good examples.
NVidia indeed seems an outlier, although arguably the GPU division of AMD hasn't had the same overhaul that the CPU side had.
Being #1 is bad for everyone and everything period. History has shown us time and time again that the #1 spot inevitably falls from grace, the only question being how disasterously. There is no exception.
#2 and below are where you want to place if your primary interest is continued, ideally permanent, long-term prosperity.
AMD didn't really do so much. It was TSMC that saved them.
AMD's success was also due to their new Zen architecture and move to chiplets. TSMC alone wouln't have been enough to save them if their architecture would have sucked.
AMD still used Glo-Fo for the first gen Ryzens and still do for the I/O die in some chiplets because it's cost competitive.
It they would have just ported their failed Bulldozer architecture to TSMC, that wouldn't have helped them at all.
Your original claim that "AMD didn't do much" and it was "TSMC that saved them" is a blatantly false. You are grossly misinformed if you believe that.
Moving to TSMC definitely helped later, but it was the original Zen architecture that put them back in the game.
The CPU was competitive with Intel in real world scenarios and was very well received when it launched in 2017; eg: https://www.pcworld.com/article/412262/ryzen-review-amd-is-b...
The point is that the architecture and CPU design was the thing, not the later switch to TSMC which didn't happen until Zen 2 in 2019.
Makes me wonder exactly what happened there. Did GloFo hit trouble and give up? Did AMD tell them they weren't going to use them anymore, leading to them giving up? Basically, who dumped who?
Apple didn’t become competitive on a technological basis until 2012 with the iPhone 5s.
What’s Intel’s “unfair advantage”.
Right now, vertical integration is a weakness for Intel -- just as it was for Apple during the Jobs interregnum and the beginning of his return. (e.g. the pre-Apple-on-Intel silicon years.)
But the situation could quickly change and vertical integration could become an advantage again for Intel.
Especially in a "challenging" geopolitical environment.
It happens to have the most profitable niches and it can ignore markets it doesn’t want to serve.
The PC market is not growing. The chance of Intel overtaking Nvidia for GPUs, ARM for low power chips and making “old” chips for cars, microwaves, etc. is slim
The thing Apple does isn't really vertical integration. It's tying.
The only thing stopping iPhone hardware from running Android is Apple. The only thing stopping iOS from running on Samsung hardware is Apple. It's not that they fundamentally require each other. Maybe some minor proportion of iOS features require some iPhone-specific hardware. If you offered iOS on Samsung or Android on iPhone without those features, they would still sell. So why are they not offering combinations customers want?
Because if they sold iOS for Samsung, they'd lose the margin on the hardware. If they sold iPhones with Android, they'd lose the margin on the OS/services. So if you want one you have to take both.
That's not really a competitive advantage. It doesn't gain market share, it costs it, because some of the people who would buy iOS on Samsung or Android on iPhone will go buy Android on Samsung. What it does is increase their margins at the expense of consumer choice.
And it's a risk, because it means they have to execute well everywhere, or the thing that underperforms brings down the whole stack. Right before Mac switched to Intel, the uncompetitiveness of PowerPC processors was hurting them.
Which is the same thing that happened to Intel when their process fell behind, because their designers were stuck with it. So Intel learned their lesson and now Arc is on TSMC and Intel is starting to fab for third parties.
Which means all they need for success is to get back their process advantage. They may or may not be able to do that, but it's all they need.
When Jobs came back and introduced the iMac, Apple wasn’t exactly a behemoth in 1997. Enough users chose using their own free will to buy an integrated product (with a shitty operating system) to get Apple back to profitability.
Even in 2001, when Apple introduced the iPod, Apple was going back and forth between profitability and loss.
By 2003, enough users found value in the integration between iPods and iTunes and the Music Store to choose a more expensive integrated product.
ios would be a worse user experience (on worse hardware) if it was running on Samsung phones. Users have a choice, they can buy an Android device with slower hardware, less updates, and a none integrated ecosystem for less money. 87% of users in the world make that choice.
> Which is the same thing that happened to Intel when their process fell behind, because their designers were stuck with it. So Intel learned their lesson and now Arc is on TSMC and Intel is starting to fab for third parties.
Wow, all they have to do is getter better, I’m sure they never thought about that…
And the third party they are fabbing for is MediaTek and it’s based on a 22nm process - which was stated of the art in 2012.
> Right before Mac switched to Intel, the uncompetitiveness of PowerPC processors was hurting them.
By 2011, if Apple had completely killed the Mac, it would have still been more profitable than any computer company. Fast forward to today, and the Mac only makes up about 10% of their revenue.
So if your product is flour or plate glass... ?
Many products are combinations of things. A simple bench is lumber and screws and paint. But lumber and screws and paint are all widely available commodities. Someone who sells benches doesn't have to sell screws for them to be available in the market. They may not even manufacture the screws, so anyone who wants them can buy them from the same place they did.
When it becomes tying is when there is any part of your product that customers might want to buy separately, but nobody else makes it, so it isn't available separately, from anyone. You can only get it tied to the other parts. That's tying.
> Do you also think Tesla should sell its battery to Ford?
I think Telsa would be happy to sell batteries to Ford. They'd build another battery factory and make a lot of money.
Do you think Tesla should be able to prohibit anyone from taking the battery out of a Tesla and using it in some other car or for some other purpose?
> Is it “tying” when Nintendo doesn’t let you run “PlaystationOS” on a Nintendo Switch?
Obviously. What makes you think that is some kind of controversial result? Anybody who wants to should be able to install iOS on their XBOX.
> When Jobs came back and introduced the iMac, Apple wasn’t exactly a behemoth in 1997. Enough users chose using their own free will to buy an integrated product (with a shitty operating system) to get Apple back to profitability.
Buying an integrated product isn't the same thing as buying a product because it's integrated. By definition if they want any of the parts that isn't available separately, they have to buy the whole thing.
And as shitty as MacOS Classic was, it wasn't as shitty as Windows ME.
> ios would be a worse user experience (on worse hardware) if it was running on Samsung phones.
Not compared to the same Samsung phone running Android, presumably.
> Wow, all they have to do is getter better, I’m sure they never thought about that...
You asked what their competitive advantage would be. For years it was superior process. It's not physically impossible for them to do that again. We just don't know if they will yet.
> And the third party they are fabbing for is MediaTek and it’s based on a 22nm process - which was stated of the art in 2012.
Because their problem was caused by their existing process being a mess. They have to be able to do state of the art in volume before they can sell it to somebody else.
The more significant development was Arc on TSMC.
> By 2011, if Apple had completely killed the Mac, it would have still been more profitable than any computer company. Fast forward to today, and the Mac only makes up about 10% of their revenue.
How does that affect the state of their integrated product just before the Intel switch when they didn't have a competitive PowerPC processor?
And phones using ARM chips are sold by hundreds of manufactures with different feature sets.
> Do you think Tesla should be able to prohibit anyone from taking the battery out of a Tesla and using it in some other car or for some other purpose?
If you can take an iOS image you download to your computer (and you can with iTunes) and make it work without Apple custom hardware go for it. Or do you think that Apple should be forced to support third party hardware?
What if I want to run Teslas infotainment on my Honda civic? Should Tesla be forced to do it?
> Buying an integrated product isn't the same thing as buying a product because it's integrated. By definition if they want any of the parts that isn't available separately, they have to buy the whole thing.
So again should Apple have been forced to make the iMac modular enough so you could rip out the PPC and put in an x86 chip so you could run Windows because you preferred Windows, but you like the Bondi Blue iMac?
Should Apple be forced to sell their custom chips to other manufacturers? What if I just want the T1 security chip in my Android Blu R1 HD I bought from Amazon, should Apple be forced to sell it to you separately?
> And as shitty as MacOS Classic was, it wasn't as shitty as Windows ME
Did you ever deal with manually allocating memory for applications? The cooperative multitasking that caused all applications to stop when you clicked on a menu?
> How does that affect the state of their integrated product just before the Intel switch when they didn't have a competitive PowerPC processor?
The PPC was behind x86 from the time Jobs came back until 2005, yet it still sold well enough to represent half of Apple’s revenue.
You were just making the argument that the hardware from Samsung et al isn't as good.
> If you can take an iOS image you download to your computer (and you can with iTunes) and make it work without Apple custom hardware go for it. Or do you think that Apple should be forced to support third party hardware?
It's not a question of forcing them to.
Suppose Samsung was willing to do the work to get iOS running on their devices. Apple not only won't help, they'll sue them, to keep the OS tied to their own hardware.
> What if I want to run Teslas infotainment on my Honda civic? Should Tesla be forced to do it?
They shouldn't interfere with your attempt.
> Should Apple be forced to sell their custom chips to other manufacturers? What if I just want the T1 security chip in my Android Blu R1 HD I bought from Amazon, should Apple be forced to sell it to you separately?
Why not? If they're the only supplier of something then they should sell it to anyone who wants to buy it.
> Did you ever deal with manually allocating memory for applications? The cooperative multitasking that caused all applications to stop when you clicked on a menu?
Did you ever deal with the infamous instability of DOS-based Windows, complete with a total lack of security as the biggest target for viruses because of the larger user base?
> The PPC was behind x86 from the time Jobs came back until 2005, yet it still sold well enough to represent half of Apple’s revenue.
2005 was pre-iPhone, so of course it was a large percentage of their revenue. But their total revenue in 2004 was lower than it was in 1996 -- and in 1996 there wasn't even an iPod.