What happened to Intel? Did they need a bailout?
But in reality, they gave up on R&D, Missed Apple mobile chips and then put a lot of MBAs in top leadership positions to make their financial schemes work. Those schemes did not work and they were left without technical leadership. When they got the tech leadership, the board just gave up and fired him and brought in a chop shop CEO to part intel out.
For some reason, the US admin thinks this is a good buy. You probably would too, if you bankrupted multiple casinos.
Intel is going the way of SunBeam, Sears and Toys r Us. The board failed to stop that. And failure attracts more failure.
Has it ever worked?
We can blame the MBAs, but we really should see how we can propose a better system. And then convince people of that.
Okay okay, I give up already.
Long term? No. But what Westerner cares about long term?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7PVZixO35c
New computers aren't as much faster as benchmarks would lead you to believe. If your code relies on unpredictable branches, dependept memory accesses in a tight loop, or very tight feedback loops inside computations, new CPUs won't have that much of an edge.
It's really cool they you get to meet people like you here in the comments :)
However I think the video raises an interesting point - I imagine you're an expert on modern CPU optimization, and spend quite a bit of time thinking about cache access patterns, exposing instruction-level parallelism to the CPU and other such gory bits without which your code wouldn't be running as fast on modern CPUs.
Most of us regular folks however don't really write code like that, and I think for that sort of code, I don't think modern CPUs run as much faster than an ancient Core 2 Duo, as benchmarks would suggest, but we can expect results somewhat more like in the video I linked.
Congrats on your work getting used in Cinebench, but I can't help but ask you - what's your thoughts on your work getting used to basically benchmark every CPU under the sun by tech reviewers, who then make recommendations on whether to buy that CPU or another one. Looping back to the previous point, I think your code has quite likely very different performance characteristics than the sort of generic stuff most people end up running, and this sort of benchmarking creates an incentive for manufacturers to crank out CPUs that are good at running hyper-optimized path tracing code, while ignoring real-world performance. What are your thoughts on that?
Having to do any kind of 2025 type of work on it would be testing my patience to the extremes because all SW and media has grown in size and/or complexity(AV1 encoding, etc) requiring faster CPU, GPU, storage and RAM for the optimum experience. The only things that run fast on it are period accurate Linux 2.6 and Windows XP with websites form 2008, but I wouldn't call that modern computing.
Computers have gotten night and day faster and especially more efficient since 2008, pretending otherwise would be in bad faith.
The current lowest speced Mac can absolutely dominate my previous 2012 2x20c ivy bridge era Xeon tower. And on top of that, the power and heat are drastically less with the new machine.
The only reason a system of this era even kept up is the years Intel just didn’t do anything that was that much better and because of ram and pci express expansion which allowed for upgraded faster storage and faster gpus.
These days I can get better performance in a system that I can hold in my palm (Apple m4, amd ryzen ai 9) that doesn’t produce enough heat to keep my entire room toasty in the winter.
The random acquisitions and board leadership didn't help intel but r&d had plenty of money poured in
OTOH, if TSMC makes a couple bad bets in a row, all their 500 clients will be in deep trouble.
How do you know it?
Itanium was a flop from bad business decisions IIRC. Note too that x86-64 was developed by AMD, and Intel licensed it from them.
Itanium was a flop from a technical standpoint but not from a business one. Intel spent roughly a gigabuck and effectively scared every competitor out the pool except for IBM and AMD.
Intel is suffering because their old fab folks all retired, and no young, smart engineer over the last 20 years wanted to work for any semiconductor company let alone Intel.
Even without the Itanium, the economies of scale in the x86(-64) world would have driven the RISC vendors out of the game.
The false information about the future of Itanium scared almost all of them to surrender, about in the same way as the fictional Strategic Defense Initiative had scared the Russians.
My quick 5 cents for what might have happened in the interim:
- Without a separate high-end offering in the form of the Itanium, Intel is quicker to adopt x86-64, and produce high-end server chips with extra RAS etc. features.
- POWER and SPARC, being the last holdouts in the RISC market in our actual timeline and outliving Itanium, would likely not have been affected much wrt. Itanium existing or not.
- SGI with MIPS would likely have been the first one to fold. Would SGI have pivoted to x86-64 & Linux sooner than they historically did, or would the company have gone bankrupt first?
- HP/Compaq with PA-RISC and Alpha is perhaps the most interesting question. HP did a lot of early VLIW/EPIC research with an eye towards developing a successor to PA-RISC. Would they have thrown that R&D away and selected to focus on either PA-RISC or Alpha after failing to secure Intel as a partner in the Itanium? Or would they have tried to develop something Itanium-like without Intel?
Another interesting what-if, if Itanium didn't exist, would instead 3rd-party manufacturing of high end chips (similar to TSMC today) have been developed sooner than historical? Keeping in mind that a large reason for the Itanium was accessing the semi process R&D and chip manufacturing prowess of Intel, as the thinking at the time was that tight (vertical!) integration of the chip design and manufacturing was a requirement for the highest end CPU's. And it was the spiraling costs and volume required of chip manufacturing that was the boat anchor around the necks of the RISC vendors moreso than the chip design itself.
1. IBM picked the 8088 for the PC platform. This was part luck, part Motorola being too slow to market with the 68k.
2. The first PC with an 80386 was made by Compaq, not IBM.
3. A big part of what held OS/2 1.x back was IBM insisting on it working with the 80286, which made properly supporting DOS programs challenging. OS/2 2.0 came out 6 years after the first 386 based machine from Compaq.
Also Texas didn’t have a second source for the TMS9900.
We definitely live in the worst possible timeline.
You must be missing something.
Intel got no bailout. The government demanded 10% of the company for financial grants that Intel already received, largely under the Biden administration, under vehicles like the CHIPS act (you know -- the massively successful policy that is the actual reason that a bunch of latest tech chip plants are being built in the US). It's an absolutely bizarre situation, and the only reason Intel would even go along with it is that this administration operates like an extortion racket and would somehow cripple the company otherwise.
So in effect, unless the next administration runs on punishing these abuses and actually follows through, may as well be legal.