Putting aside whether the statement is considered true or not, buying McAfee under the guise of the kind of security meant when talking about silicon is... weird, to say the least.
Famously they divested their ARM-based mobile processor division just before smartphones took off.
The new CEO, as the article mentions, seems to have a lot more of a clue. We just hope he hasn't arrived too late.
a lot that can be critiqued about that period.
Wasn't that AMD (perhaps also AMD)? Qualcomm Adreno GPUs are ATi Radeon IP, hence the anagram.
I remember very well as back then I was working in University porting Linux to an Intel XScale development platform we had gotten recently.
After I completed the effort, Android was released as a public beta and I dared to port it too to that Development Board as a side project. I thought back then Intel was making a big mistake by missing that opportunity. But Intel were firm believers in the x86 architecture, specially on their Atom Cores.
Those little Intel PXA chips were actually very capable, I had back then my own Sharp Zaurus PDA running a full Linux system on an Intel ARM chip and I loved it. Great performance and great battery life.
Kind of like Decca Records turning down The Beatles.
I think Netburst mostly came from a misguided place where Intel thought that clock frequency was in fact the holy grail (and would scale far beyond what actually ended up happening), and that all the IPC issues such as costly mispredicts could be solved by e.g. improving branch prediction.
It's embarassing when they go to market and there's no way to say it's faster than the other guy. Currently, they need to pump 400W through the chip to get the clock high enough.
But perf at 200w or even 100w isn't that far below perf at 400w. If you limit power to something like 50w, the compute efficiency is good.
Contrast that to Apple, they don't have to compete in the same way, and they don't let their chips run hot. There's no way to get the extra 1% of perf if you need it.
The difference in performance for 95% of what I do is zero. I even run some (non-AAA) Windows games via crossover, and that's driving a 1440p 165hz display. All while it sits there consuming no more than about 35w (well, plus a bit for all my USB ssds, etc) and I've never seen the thermals much past 60c, even running nastive-accelerated LLMs or highly multithreaded chess engines and the like. Usually sits at about 40c at idle.
It's exactly what almost 40 year old me wants out of a computer. It's quiet, cool, and reliable - but at the same time I'm very picky about input devices so a-bring-your-own peripherals desktop machine with a ton of USB ports is non-negotiable.
Regarding other plans, QPI and UPI for cache coherent FPGAs were pretty infeasible to do at the sluggish pace that they need in the logic fabric. CXL doesn't need a close connection between the two chips (or the companies), and just uses the PCIe lanes.
FPGA programming has always been very hard, too, so the dream of them everywhere is just not happening.
Maybe Habana Labs?
I can't really tell if it's working out for Intel, but I do hear them mentioned now and then.
Haven't heard much about successful Google acquisitions lately though.
Apple does really well on its rare acquisitions, but they aren't very public as they get successfully absorbed. PA Semi, Intrinsity, more I can't remember.
ATi and Xilinx have by all accounts worked out really well for AMD.
But I guess thats the problem - I had to provide an example
Had Intel figured out hyperthreading security and avoided all the various exploits that later showed up …
However, they underperform greatly compared to competitors' cards with similar die areas and memory bus widths. For example the Arc A770 is 406mm^2 on TSMC N6 and a 256-bit bus and performs similarly to the RX 6650XT which is 237mm^2 on TSMC N7 with a 128-bit bus. They're probably losing a lot of money on these cards.
If you're hoping for an nVidia competitor, the units in that market may be more per unit, but there's already an 1-ton gorilla there and AMD can't seem to compete either. Rather, Arc makes sense as an in-house GPU unit to pair with existing silicon (CPUs) and low / mid range dGPUs to compete where nVidia's left that market and where AMD has a lot of lunch to undercut.
I applaud Intel for providing fully capable drivers at no additional cost. Combined with better availability for purchase they are competing in the VDI space.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/discre...
I wish Pat well and I think he might be the only who could save the company if it's not already too late.
Sourced: worked with many ex-Intel people.
POSTSCRIPT: I have seen from the inside (not at Intel) how a politically motivated acquisition failed so utter spectacularly due to that same internal power struggle. I think there are some deeply flawed incentives in corporate America.
And acqu-hired Jensen as CEO.
Prior to the ATI acquisition nvidia actually had been the motherboard chipset manufacturer of choice for AMD cpus for a number of years.
nVidia always had the trump card of saying "if you want SLI, you have to buy our chipset." But conversely, a lot of the options weren't great. VIA tended to alternate between decent and incompetent chipsets, SIS was mostly limited to the bottom of the market, and ATI's chipsets were very rare.
There were and are exactly zero third parties licensing nvidia IP to build competing GPU products.
https://corp.mediatek.com/news-events/press-releases/mediate...
like it’s of course dependent on what “build competing products” means, but assuming you mean semicustom (like AMD sells to Sony or Samsung) then nvidia isn’t as intractibly opposed as you’re implying.
regulators can be dumb fanboys/lack vision too, and nvidia very obviously was not spending $40b just to turn around and burn down the ecosystem. Being kingmaker on a valuable IP is far more valuable than selling some more tegras for a couple years. People get silly when nvidia is involved and make silly assertions, and most of the stories have become overwrought and passed into mythology. Bumpgate is… something that happened to AMD on that generation of gpus too, for instance. People baked their 7850s to reflow the solder back then too - did AMD write you a check for their defective gpu?