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Comment by johnklos | Hacker News Reader

And they rightly deserve to lose the business to AMD.

Intel to Apple: "We're too big to deliver what you want for cell phones." Apple: "Ok. We'll use ARM."

Intel to Sony: "We're too big to commit to pricing, compatibility and volume." Sony:" Ok. We'll keep using AMD."

It's interesting that Intel keeps trying to ship "features", some of arguable utility but others that are decently helpful, like AVX-512, that now AMD delivers and Intel does not. I'm sure Sony didn't want a processor that can't properly and performantly run older and current titles.

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>Intel to Apple: "We're too big to deliver what you want for cell phones." Apple: "Ok. We'll use ARM."

Reality:

“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. The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do… At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought.”

This is from the horses mouth, and reliable as such. However, it does give the impression that they weren’t sufficiently interested to think more creatively about cost optimization, because they were riding the gravy train of Wintel ruling the world. So I think root comment isn’t too far off.

Right. It’s an accurate quote but that doesn’t mean it’s an accurate analysis.

Not only did they not seem to understand the possibilities in front of them, their chips were not well positioned at all to win. They were too hot and too power-hungry because Intel didn’t care much about efficiency at the time.

They were taking the “shrink a big chip” path. Apple, using ARM from Samsung then their own , ended up taking the “grow a little chip” path.

Which is a little bit ironic because Intel made their fortune on the “little” desktop processor that grew up to take over all the servers from main frames and the “big boy“ server chips like the SPARC and Alpha.

They became the big boys and history started repeating.

I'm surprised they didn't learn the same lesson from the P4/NetBurst vs. Pentium M/Banias fiasco: the smaller but scalable architecture somehow always wins – first in power/perf, and then more generally.

(Actually, I need to check the timing of whether the "oh shit" moment for NetBurst happened before or after the development of the iPhone...)

The Core line (2006), when they started to swing back away from “make fast furnaces” was just one year before the iPhone (2007). So the NetBurst debacle had already happened.

But that was desktops. I wonder if they really realized how much a problem that was in mobile. I also think I remember a discussion of that quote from a few weeks ago where someone said the real problem for Intel in the iPhone wasn’t heat but power draw.

I don’t think they ever really got the religion. Apple’s M1 sort of seems like a repeat of this whole thing. Intel still didn’t get it at that point. Still too hot. Still not efficient enough.

The switch from NetBurst to Core seems more like a direction switch because they hit a wall, not a recognition of what the problem actually was. A change from ultra-fast single core to fast multi-core.

The NetBurst line also had a _terribly_ deep pipeline. I can't remember the number of stages offhand but it was _massive_ for the era in an attempt to keep growing the single core single state machine performance (more mhz). Pipeline stalls made for some very erratic and very power hungry bursts of performance and then rewound CPU state to take correct branch.

> no one knew what the iPhone would do

When you are the CEO of Intel you should be able to see/forecast what smartphones would do in the market.

The iPhone wasn't completely new. Nokia already had some "little smart" phones on the market already.

The only real surprise was Apple's ability to get a US phone company on board with selling the iPhone and losing grip on what software that was installed on the phones.

> Nokia already had some "little smart" phones on the market already.

So did other hardware/software vendors, and many of them were a lot smarter than the iPhone.

Intel made ARM chips, then sold that portion of the company in 2006, shortly before the iPhone was announced.

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

It was incredibly bad timing. If intel had continued making ARM chips they could be in an entirely different position today.

>It was incredibly bad timing. If intel had continued making ARM chips they could be in an entirely different position today.

How so?

ARM (ISA) doesn't imply performance characteristics nor significant advantage over x86

IMO, more interesting than Intel not doing the iPhone is Intel ending atom for phones right before Microsoft demoed Continuum for Windows Mobile 10. That would have been a much different product on an x86 phone, IMHO. Maybe it would have been enough of an exciting feature that Microsoft would have not botched the Windows Mobile 10 release.

Otellini was not a dispassionate observer at the time he said this and there are very good reasons to believe that isn’t an accurate portrayal of what happened - including the fact that Otellini had just sold Intel’s smartphone SoC business and no x86 design was remotely suitable.

https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/how-intel-missed-the-ip...

The key in this quote is: "in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong"

100% intel screwup.

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