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Intel is a hot mess even without these security disasters. Just look at their product release lifecycle: In years past, they'd get maybe one extra product rele

• DeepYogurt 9y ago
  Goldmont is the atom line and not related to skylake. Apple has been building cpus for years now and it's unfair to claim that the apple chips blow the intel ones out of the water based on some simple int/fp benchmarks. I agree that they will lose apple in time, but "in time" could be on the order of 10 years.
  • yuhong 9y ago
    That being said, Apple has been waiting for Cannonlake for LPDDR4 support.
  • AdamJacobMuller 9y ago
    10 years isn't that long in a fab-scale company. I would be absolutely shocked if Apple did not already have MacBook-level ARM cores running macOS in their development labs. Just as Apple had OSX running on Intel hardware for years while developing/selling PPC. I think there's a very good chance we see a MacBook form factor laptop running an ARM chip in the next few years. I'd buy one, having a laptop with multi-day battery life would be awesome. I don't need super performance on my MacBook.
    • edvinbesic 9y ago
      Not to mention that Apple has been running their OSs on ARM for years now so it wouldn't exactly be groundbreaking for them. Kind of like how when they switched to Intel they had already has x86 builds running for years prior. It's only a matter of time really.
      • godzillabrennus 9y ago
        There are a fair number of people buying Apple Laptops that use them for virtualizing Windows. I'd expect that a transition to ARM would only be able to happen for some of the lineup. It couldn't be across the board as it wouldn't run Windows. That would present a new challenge for folks who don't understand much about tech and wouldn't be able to differentiate the product lines properly.
        • danielsju6 9y ago
          Isn't Windows ARM ready now? A bunch of ARM laptops w/ Windows 10 are coming out this year.
          • cm2187 9y ago
            I think it requires special hardware (x86 emulation, which is 32 bit only), and many apps won't be ported to ARM for a while. That being said Apple might find x86 emulation useful too.
  • 013a 9y ago
    Goldmont's arch is essentially just Skylake scaled down; in the words of the Wikipedia article "The Goldmont architecture borrows heavily from the Skylake Core processors"
• spicymaki 9y ago
  Intel having little presence in HPC is a laughable claim. There are plenty of Intel Xeons on the TOP 500 https://www.top500.org/list/2017/06/ https://www.top500.org/list/2017/06/ and these Nvidia GPUs don't run themselves.
  • modeless 9y ago
    > these Nvidia GPUs don't run themselves It's only a matter of time before they do. Nvidia's Drive PX platform is Intel-free and something derived from it might look interesting for HPC and/or high-end workstations in the next few years.
    • whoisjuan 9y ago
      Serious question. How likely is for Nvidia to become relevant in the CPU space in the next 10-15 years? (talking specifically about their attempts in this market with things like Tegra)... OR is their goal to keep optimizing form factor, thermal efficiency, energy consumption, etc...to the point they can make a case for a stand-alone GPU effectively replacing a CPU?
      • orbifold 9y ago
        They've already build their own ARM cpu's, they are in the TX1, Nintendo Shield for example. Their most recent Volta GPU made significant progress in terms of general purpose programmability, it gained a much more flexible memory and concurrency model compared to previous chip generations. They also partner with IBM by supporting OpenCAPI for HPC.
        • gallerdude 9y ago
          *Nintendo Switch, Nvidia Shield
      • tgragnato 9y ago
        > https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Tue1100_Nvidia_RISCV_Story_V2.pdf https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Tue1100_Nvidia_... It’s a controller, but if risc-v become established, then the acquired knowledge might be applied in CPU development.
• amiga-workbench 9y ago
  >Do they have an ace they've been hiding? They will fall back on their old tried and tested tactic of anti-competitive practices.
• adventured 9y ago
  > How much longer can Intel keep holding on? Do they have an ace they've been hiding? They do have an ace. $17 billion in operating income the prior four quarters. And about $17 billion in cash on hand. Who knows if they'll put it to appropriate use to recover from their present mess. They very clearly have the resources to do so. Intel's $17 billion in operating income is over 4x the revenue of AMD, and 2x the revenue of nVidia. It's a pretty fantastical premise to be already counting Intel out, they've recovered from dramatically worse business situations in their past.
  • Iwan-Zotow 9y ago
    They had $XX billions in income, and were Nx the revenue of AMD for the last 5 years - and, frankly, nothing spectacular/interesting to show. Some arch tweaking, process improvements, that's about it
    • adventured 9y ago
      Under your premise of prior situations predicting future actions, Microsoft should be collapsing about right now as Windows fades. IBM should not exist at all, the largest US corporate loss in history (at the time) that they produced in 1992 should have spelled their nearing end, with them fading into oblivion. Oracle should have died in the software wars, they survived several bet the ranch situations. You know what was missing the last five years for Intel? Desperation. The need to fight back from a situation that threatens their well-being. They've done it before, usually when they were put in a desperate situation. That's also typical of human behavior in general (which is where the corporate behavior derives from).
      • Iwan-Zotow 9y ago
        well, that is true, but - they need to capture/create product niche with volume of sales in XX billions per quarter, otherwise it is not worth the effort - in their traditional niche they have 90+%, the only way is down, basically we'll see, but signs are not good. F.e., this idiot (https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/01/19/intel-corps-upcoming-core-i9-8950hk-processor-look.aspx https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/01/19/intel-corps-upcomi...) is hyping some 6/12 cores notebook CPU, while for any reasonable analyst this should be sign of desperation - Intel does NOT KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH SILICONE, so it's just slapping more cores together
• icelancer 9y ago
  >> They have little presence in HPC/AI Huh? The Xeon Phi is used regularly in the industry. Nvidia is dominant but to call Intel's presence small is very odd.
  • raugustinus 9y ago
    Did you miss that Intel's stopped developing the Xeon Phi's?
    • icelancer 9y ago
      I did, since that's not true. Knights Landing is discontinued and Knights Hill is suspended, but they are continuing development for DOE Aurora and other projects and targeting 2020-2021 - while existing stock is used regularly and the used market is plenty active. I get a lot of use out of the x200 line.
      • reitzensteinm 9y ago
        It is more or less true. Xeon Phi is being replaced by regular high core count Xeons with HBM MCM on one end, and a traditional GPU on the other. While the brand name lives on, it's not at all a continuation of the product line.
  • deepnotderp 9y ago
    A lot of the Xeon phi usage in HPC is due to non technical reasons (e.g. Intel subsidies). The memory bandwidth is just crushingly bad.
    • icelancer 9y ago
      I guess? I mean it is not poorly represented in the Top500 and Top50 for "crushingly bad" memory bandwidth, I'll say that much.
• ken 9y ago
  > Their failed 10nm shrink has forced product delays Previously [1], from 2012 (starting around t=49:52): "Lots of problems here [at 11nm]. Intel and IBM have publicly discussed solving the problems with 11nm by skipping it", i.e., going straight to 7nm with never-been-used-before EUV lithography. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16175949 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16175949 Were people realistically expecting Intel to hit deadlines at 10nm? This sounded more like a research project than a product line.
  • epmaybe 9y ago
    I always got confused with how companies like Intel planned on getting past a 10nm transistor size. How does one get around the issue of electron tunneling at that threshold (or close to that threshold)? Granted, I only understand CPUs and quantum physics at a very abstract level.
    • frostburg 9y ago
      10nm doesn't actually means that the transistors are 10nm-sized
    • the8472 9y ago
      Direct tunneling in the channel becomes a problem < 4nm. the gate insulator can be even thinner since they use high dielectric constant ones which limits the tunneling current. As GP mentioned the main problem with 10nm is the photolithographic process. Currently they're using 193nm ArF lasers. EUV "light" is very difficult to generate and handle. There aren't even lenses for it, only lossy mirrors, so each optics step will lose you a fraction of the input power and heat the mirrors.
• saas_co_de 9y ago
  > Their failed 10nm shrink has forced product delays This is the most important thing. AMD has already made the switch to Multi Chip Modules which makes it much much easier to produce chips for 10nm (what TSMC/GF/Samsung call 7nm). Right now Intel cant even make a dual core low speed mobile chip on 10nm. How are they going to make a giant 30+ core server processor? This is extremely bad news for them that has not been fully realized by the markets because they have faith that Intel will figure it out, but they may not. AMD may ship 7/10nm server chips before Intel and Intel may never ship them before switching to MCM themselves. MCM is as revolutionary as AMD64 was but most people dont realize yet how important it is and how much of an advantage AMD has because of leading with it.
  • colejohnson66 9y ago
    > 10nm (what TSMC/GF/Samsung call 7nm) What’s the reason for this? From my understanding of numbers, 10 is not 7
    • std_throwaway 9y ago
      They are measuring different things and use different transistor designs.
    • raugustinus 9y ago
      well yeah not really. it's a bit of a long read but it comes down to whom you ask. https://www.extremetech.com/computing/246902-intel-claims-three-year-advantage-10nm-process-wants-change-define-process-nodes https://www.extremetech.com/computing/246902-intel-claims-th...
    • mappu 9y ago
      "10nm" and "7nm" are marketing terms that are not directly comparable across foundries.
      • colejohnson66 9y ago
        How? I thought the number was the size of the smallest transistor?
• emn13 9y ago
  Geekbench is a somewhat odd collection of benchmarks, I'd be careful reading too much into it.* Furthermore, the site you link to, which is clearly rather gung-ho about macs, still shows that the ipad was not able to keep up with the intel chips, not even in multithreaded mode, even though the intel has 2 cores to the a10x's 3+3. The ipad beat the MBP on the GPU tests, and I don't think anybody is going to dispute that intel's gpu's are... not exactly record-breaking. Still, you're totally right that apple demonstrated that intel's tech isn't the uniquely fast chip you might think it to be! It's not a small achievement to come this close, especially if the ipad is using less power (which isn't actually clear - battery capacity is roughly similar, at any rate). * The reason I don't like geekbench as a cpu test is that it includes a great many tests like FFTs, gaussian blurs, jpeg with DCTs, image processing, and crypto (even in the noncrypto segment!) etc - i.e. workloads that are very, very vectorizable. The problem with that is that such workloads are really tricky to get right - small differences in code can make considerable difference in perf, and what's right for one CPU isn't for another (notably, geekbench is necessarily running completely different code on these processors). Secondly, those kinds of workloads are very, very amenable to special-purpose instructions, which leads me to the related point that I don't think they're representative of what is typically annoying slow today, and much less what is likely to matter tomorrow: these kind of workloads are either good enough on the CPU as-is, or they're going to be moved to the GPU (or even more specialized hardware), which happens to excel at that.
• johnny22 9y ago
  how unlikely is it that nvidia won't be the center of their own "meltdown" in the future though?
• rphlx 9y ago
  I agree with your general thrust though I think you are overstating a few points significantly. > Skylake has born SIX new product lines; Goldmont, Goldmont Plus Goldmont, Goldmont Plus are Atom products and are not "Skylake-derived" in any really major sense. > zero presence in mobile This is true only if you disregard the traditional laptop and newer convertible and chromebook markets. More importantly, Intel has an admittedly-indirect but financially very significant presence in the mostly-ARM cell phone and tablet markets, in that the backend for pretty much every cellphone app runs on an x86_64 server core somewhere. Every cell phone and tablet sold helps sell a modest fraction of an x86_64 core too. > little presence in HPC/AI Again, every major HPC/AI deployment that I've heard of still has a huge number of Intel cores. Though - as with the cell phone and tablet markets - you can definitely fault Intel for not capturing these markets in their entirety; they certainly had the talent, IP and the capital to do so, but they screwed up strategically in a way that will almost certainly become a cliched business school study at some point, if it's not already.
  • kbenson 9y ago
    > the backend for pretty much every cellphone app runs on an x86_64 server core somewhere Intel is not the entirety of x86_64 servers, and as the GP notes, AMD is going in the better direction with Zen for serving all those requests than Intel is at the moment. As an aside, because it doesn't really matter to the point, x86_64 is actually an AMD extension that Intel licenses from them.[1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Licensing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Licensing
    • rphlx 9y ago
      I agree there is a good chance they will lose a material share over the coming 1-2 years to epyc, but at the moment, the x86_64 server market is almost 100%-Intel.
      • floatboth 9y ago
        Old Opterons are still around too. Heck, cheap dedicated servers at Hetzner are repurposed desktop Athlon 64s :D
• ZenoArrow 9y ago
  > "In years past, they'd get maybe one extra product release off each new arch (tick/tock)" Intel has moved away from the tick/tock release cycle. They now work to what they call process/architecture/optimization, or in more familiar unofficial terms tick/tock/tweak. Moore's law is essentially broken now, and this isn't just an Intel problem, this is a problem for all the major chip manufacturers. Furthermore, the challenges and cost of future node shrinks is also causing a slowdown in progress in integrated circuit manufacturing. We may get a couple more node shrinks, but we should prepare ourselves for the brick wall that we're likely to hit in the next decade.
  • mrb 9y ago
    «They now work to what they call process/architecture/optimization, or in more familiar unofficial terms tick/tock/tweak.» For this cycle it's been tick/tock/tweak/tweak. Sounds like a broken clock.
    • luckydude 9y ago
      As the bitkeeper guy, I'm watching this with amusement. Intel used BitKeeper for over a decade for their RTL and when they used BK things seemed fine. We did everything that Intel wanted, at one point I realized we had taken $7M of revenue from other customers over the years and spent it on doing work for Intel. And that was still not enough for them. They switched to git because free is better (we were a rounding error on a rounding in terms of cost to Intel, the most they ever paid us in a year is .00000004 of their revenue). But that was too much so they switched to git and it's been downhill for them ever since. I'm not an idiot, I don't think that the switch to git is the cause of their problems, their problems are self inflicted. I'm just one of many many vendors that Intel has fucked over. So I like seeing them squirm. Karma is a bitch Intel. Edit: yup, knew I'd get down voted. Don't care. Try being an Intel vendor and get back to me about how much you like that.
      • alrs 9y ago
        @luckydude isn't just some random troll. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_McVoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_McVoy
• MechEStudent 9y ago
  They could be saved, but I will not speak their rescue here. There is nobody who would ask or hear it. They could have been saved, and still might. I gave them more than they deserved, better than they could have asked and they turned it to crap.
• drsopp 9y ago
  Come on. Just think little bit about what Intel (and their competitors) have given us. It is obvious that they are straining against the inevitable end of Moore’s prediction. I salute them. This despite of Spectre etc.
• matte_black 9y ago
  Curious if you currently you hold a position in AMD?
• partiallypro 9y ago
  It's only a matter of time before Intel makes a huge chip acquisition, possibly of AMD itself to compete with Nvidia. I think they could now make the case that this wouldn't be an anti-trust issue because...there are more competition than ever in the space now. AMD is small potatoes compared to Nvidia, Qualcomm, etc. I am fairly certain that MacOS will eventually be switched to ARM, as they begin to merge MacOS and iOS but in an effort to avoid what Microsoft has encountered in developing for ARM and x86.
  • Aloha 9y ago
    anti-trust makes this unlikely.
• jjtheblunt 9y ago
  "They have zero presence in mobile." is false: Infineon.