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Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

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.

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