Comment by spoaceman7777 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spoaceman7777 | Hacker News Reader

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What do you mean by outdated? Companies are already designing chips for their 1.8nm process, in addition to Intel's mid-late 2025 chips switched back to Intel fabs, for 6 months from now. TSMC is still working on their 2nm process.

The only players in that market are Samsung, TSMC, and Intel. It'd be crazy to let one of the three global EUV lithography manufacturers disappear because their R&D costs have lowered net revenue temporarily.

People act like Intel has nothing to offer, when they're one of a low single-digits number of companies who are even capable of making modern microchips. Even China won't likely crack EUV for the next 5 years. Throwing all of the money on pure R&D would be madness. And the chips act is investing in a major R&D facility in upstate NY for next gen stuff anyway.

Scrapping their last gen process to focus on 1.8nm was a long term play, and all signs point out to it working out well.

Not to mention, it'll be nice to have at least this one US company making modern microchips, in case the many fabless US microchip companies ever need to switch to domestic production, due to economic or geopolitical reasons that are clearly on the short term horizon.

>and all signs point out to it working out well.

Intel has always had great "signs" but fell completely apart once the time came for execution.

Which is to say, I'll believe it when I see it. I say that as an Intel fanboi, too.

If Trump/DOGE comes in and slashes Intel funding one way or another, even better.

I was about to write, "yeah, but Intel has good long-term-oriented leadership now in Pat Gelsinger, so while it'll take time, it'll eventually bounce back. Because, under him, it's finally been investing in R&D instead of coasting and doing stock buybacks."

And then I Googled (to check the spelling of "Gelsinger"), and found this:

https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/02/intel-ceo-pat-gelsinger-is-o...

https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/02/intel-ceo-pat-gelsinger-re...

The man's retiring.

Hm. Damn.

So who are David Zinsner and Michelle Johnston Holthaus? They seem to be money and product people, not foundry people or architects? I'll need to look more closely, but to my mind this doesn't bode well for the long term.

I see that the stock is up 5%, but I don't trust investors to think long-term enough. Investors are also happy when you Boeing the shit out of a company.

That news came out after I wrote my comment, but that vindicates my apprehension towards Intel's ability to execute. Only believe them after they deliver.

I guess this other thread is where additional conversation will be happening:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42296067

If you think Intel will fix itself just because it received $8 Billion I have a bridge to sell you.

Intel is so fucked it’s not even slightly funny. Anyone who disagrees, do the most basic research possible by reviewing their benchmarks. It’s like going back in time.

https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks

Top 5 in single core performance are Intel chips.

Which is not particularly important without the context of price, heat, availability, multicore perf, etc. As a whole, there appear to be better values on most fronts, though necessarily when all is combined in some opinionated way. There are certainly good values to be found in the intel world, but I can't think of a time where they have been so comprehensively challenged.

Maybe. My point was more that it's complicated. For example: I couldn't care less about how much power my desktop uses.

Single desktop chips are becoming a niche market. What matters is mobile and server, and both cases require low power consumption.

Single-threaded benchmarks without additional information are pretty much meaningless, because the single-threaded performance is easily increased to beat any competitor just by accepting a higher power consumption.

The best Intel core for single-threaded performance, Lion Cove, has an IPC (instructions per clock cycle) about 2% higher than AMD Zen 5.

Currently both cores are made by TSMC and they reach the same clock frequencies, therefore the Intel core is negligibly better in single-thread performance.

Nevertheless, Intel Lion Cove has a much greater area than AMD Zen 5, despite being made with a superior TSMC process. Because of this, Lion Cove is inefficient for multi-threaded performance (because in the same area more smaller cores could be crammed), so Intel is forced to use it in hybrid configurations with Skymont cores, in order to achieve an acceptable multithreaded performance.

The worst is however that Intel is not able to use its up-to-date cores in server CPUs, because they are too slow at design/validation. Their new server CPUs, Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids, use obsolete CPU cores that are not competitive with AMD Zen 5, instead of using the best Intel cores.

Unlike Intel, where 1 year or more of delay between using a core in consumer CPUs and using it in server CPUs is normal, at AMD they launch the corresponding server CPUs only a few months after launching consumer CPUs.

Hey - I totally get the single-threaded CPU fixation, but it's such a narrow slice of what matters in computing today. We really need to look at the whole picture: power draw, heat output, physical space, AND speed. Cherry-picking just one metric doesn't tell you much.

The biggest compute demands right now are all about GPU power, especially with the AI boom. And Intel... well, take a look at those DirectCompute benchmarks. You'll need to scroll past 100+ other cards before you even see them listed (https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/directCompute.html). They make great CPUs, no doubt, but they've got some serious catching up to do in the GPU space if they want to stay relevant in today's parallel processing world.

I can almost set my watch to comments like this. I understand the HN policy is that conversations should get more nuanced over time rather than less.

And in cases where I don't personally know, one of my heuristics for who's more likely on the right side of a question is who's contributing to my understanding, who's setting context, who's comparing alternatives, who seems to be pointing out specific details I didn't know about. Those are the positive indicators. On the not so good side are things that I would call reflexes, which is to say things that are not expressing ideas but are more like muscular reflexes that don't react to or build on the information of the more constructive comments.

While I'm not thrilled with Intel over the past few years, the context of their capabilities to manufacture chips, the specifics about next gen 1.8nm chips, and the way this is complementary to R&D which is happening simultaneously, those allow me to hold two things in my brain at the same time, namely that Intel has made poor strategic decisions lately and also that they nevertheless are stewards of profoundly important and valuable chip design and manufacturing capabilities.

yes, Intel chips aren't even that bad. Sure Intel fell back a little compared to AMD but the benchmarks are not far off at all, in fact in some Intel is ahead while consuming a bit more power. It really feels like most people make their decisions purely based off of social group consensus and not what is actually true. https://www.phoronix.com/review/apple-m4-intel-amd-linux/3

This was extremely well said. I'm impressed by your eloquence here. Are you primarily a communicator at work? I'm curious... Bravo

Thanks! I've found I've had to lean into it for survival in complicated workplace dynamics but haven't had an opportunity to put it forward as a primary professional skill, for whatever that's worth. You're not wrong that it's been a high priority thing for me, at least.

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