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Comment by roughly | Hacker News Reader

To be honest, it’s a little hard to really take this seriously. The number of times I’ve watched Intel make Serious Declarations of Significant Strategic Realignments in the last decade or so only to watch them inevitably shed all the new divisions and product lines to Focus On Core Products makes it hard to really give this the attention it might warrant.

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The difference now is that Intel is being run by an engineer again so at very least there might be some top-down strategy.

And yet they are still delaying releases, canceling promising products, and making some questionable technical choices (like overhauling AVX512 and bifurcating the new standard, instead of uniting it like ARM and AMD did, among others).

I like Pat, I like what Pat says, I get plans are long term, but it still feels like the rubber is not meeting the road.

>canceling promising products

Like? I hope you aren't talking about Optane

What was wrong with Optane?

It was supposed to be cheaper than the equivalent amount of ordinary DRAM but ended up more expensive and slower.

There was nothing wrong with Optane (I'm talking about non-volatile memory, it is important because there were a few products under Optane name)

I believe that was/is impressive tech.

You could have disk and ram in one stick aka kinda unified memory.

Think of it: instead of purchasing RAM+Disk, you purchase one stick and configure it as e.g 40% of the capacity works as a disk and 60% as a "RAM".

But saying that they "cancelled" doesn't tell the whole story.

IIRC: they couldnt find a fab which would produce them after Micron sold their fab.

It wasn't better at being ram then dram and it wasn't better at being persistent store then flash.

The amount of application where it was actually better was very few. And unlike flash and dram it had no huge commodity market to drive down the price.

This podcast has a lot of interesting discussion: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf6a_32vvbU

Falcon Shores, which was partially canceled/delayed. This is a big one.

Nervana, canceled in favor of Havana's Gaudi (though fortunately Gaudi 3 missed the axe).

And there are smaller things here and there, like the cancellation of iGPU-heavy designs like Broadwell or Skylake with eDRAM, and some rumors like the cancellation of the Arc Battlemage big die (albeit from a questionably reliable source).

Like the Tofino.

Pat hasn't been an engineer for a long, long time. He doesn't appear to act or plan like one now.

I was at Intel when Krzanich was shown the door. After some time Bob Swan was announce as the new CEO. A bean counter, that was a first for Intel leadership. On the internal employee bulletin board the company posted how Bob is the right choice to which someone replied "If Bob was the right choice why did it take seven months?"

Should have been Rene TBH. Pat is the wrong type of engineer.

There is a rubicon coming up for Intel. At some point the fab side will be separated out into a separate company. Intel is currently leaving money on the table on the fab side under its current structure as nobody is going to trust Intel to make their latest and greatest while the chip design side is under the same roof.

The alternative is that the fab side goes down with Intel when the bottom drops out of x86.

they are making only one bet now, (two if you account discrete gpu), making the production of the chip different division than the design of the x86 processors, and selling as service , most of this chips are arm or risc-v base so this is more a necessity to change the brand awardness and say "we will produce your non x86 chips", and we are in the committees of this technologies.

Not only is IFS a separate division, it's almost a different company. The x86 group has to purchase foundry services IIRC.

It's not just the last decade

Does anyone remember ViiV, or explain what exactly it was?

just looks like centrino or the multimedia PC standard: a basket of technologies (and like centrino/ultrabook, all intel ones) that define a standard for media PCs and set-top hardware that would support a certain distribution model.

now of course a lot of people didn't get what centrino was either (or what vpro is today!). it's a little hard to market these hardware standards when it's not something obvious like "the multimedia PC standard" that consumers grok. But it's the same kind of idea: we're going to need X, Y and Z hardware and feature support to do this workload or customer use-case. If your PC has it, then it's Centrino/Ultrabook/whatever!

But again I think it's true that people respond more intuitively to the idea of branding the product and not the platform. "Ultrabook" or “Multimedia PC Level 3” makes more sense as a concept to people than "Centrino" or "Viiv".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Viiv

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrino

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_vPro

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multimedia_PC

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultrabook

Centrino was an absolute slam-dunk success that did significantly bring x86 laptop computers forward (it may not be complete hyperbole to say that the Pentium M is the most important Intel CPU of this century), but in some ways it became obsolete by its own success: As all laptop manufacturers followed and gave us Ultrabooks that were amazing, Centrino as a brand didn't become a differentiator anymore, and Viiv just wasn't offering anything important enough - though the brand made perfect sense, given how hot Media Center PCs were for a short while.

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