8 ms·

The headline is definitely sensationalist but there are threats and missed opportunities on Intel's horizon and past. The lure of mobile is the upgrade cycle a

by aleem 9y ago

The headline is definitely sensationalist but there are threats and missed opportunities on Intel's horizon and past. The lure of mobile is the upgrade cycle as those are much shorter. The same, short upgrade cycles were a boon for intel in the hey day of desktops/laptops. The bigger threat the article fails to focus on is ARM. Singularity for apps has always hinged on write-once-run-everywhere. Intel hasn't been able to compete with ARM lately and it seems that ARM is moving into Intel's turf. A few months back Microsoft launched windows 10 on ARM -- that's an inflection point. Apple relatively recent iPad Pro also continues to blur the lines along with other initiatives around app continuity (Mac/iOS) or the Nintendo Switch's hardware continuity that offers a glimpse into what the same thing could look like for mobile in general. It's not for Intel's lack of trying either. It's just that ARM got off to a good start while Intel failed to make in-roads with Atom and whatever else.

melling 9y ago
The picture at the beginning emphasizes ARMs rapid improvements. It only goes out to 2014. It leaves one with the impression that ARM will soon pass Intel in performance. This would suddenly eat into Intel’s profits.
IshKebab 9y ago
Yeah but the upgrade cycle won't stay short for long, just like it hasn't for desktops. Give it 10 years and people will be keeping their phones until they break. Also anyone can make an ARM CPU so the margins are thin, whereas with x86 CPUs Intel will basically only ever have one competitor - AMD. They want to find another monopoly.
- goblins 9y ago
  >Give it 10 years and people will be keeping their phones until they break. That's basically me right now, still have my trusty sgs2 running lineageOS and will continue to have it till it breaks
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  Even today I see an increasing number of friends moving from 2 years cycles to 3 year cycles. The "killer app" for smartphone refresh rates staying low are (1) battery degradation and (2) forced OS updates for app updates, which in turn slows the phone down to compel an update[1]. [1] I'm actually curious if OS updates slow down older phones these days. This was the case 5 years ago but perhaps things have changed/
  - mcintyre1994 9y ago
    I have an iPhone 6S - I'd say OS updates do slow the phone down, but they also tend to be really buggy and generally rubbish for a while. I think it's probably more bad engineering and software quality than anything nefarious.
    - qplex 9y ago
      My experience with Android is the opposite, it's gradually better and faster with every release.
    - user5454 9y ago
      Apple is intentionally slowing down phones with every OS upgrade to "preserve the battery" [1]. [1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/21/technology/apple-slows-down-old-iphones/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/21/technology/apple-slows-down-...
      - macintux 9y ago
        That's not at all what they said. The said that as the battery degrades, they limit CPU spikiness that can abruptly kill the device even with a non-trivial amount of juice left. That's not nearly the same as "slowing down the phone with every upgrade". Often people have reported better performance after an OS upgrade, although obviously results may vary, and subjective impressions are always, well, subjective.
  - yrro 9y ago
    As a grumpy Moto G 3 owner, I would love for an OS update that slowed my phone down. Short support cycles seriously dent the feasibility of keeping the same phone for even two years...
- pjmlp 9y ago
  In Europe, where most of us use pre-pay without major subsidies, everyone uses them until they break or get stolen.
  - sitepodmatt 9y ago
    I think that very dependent on the target demographic and country. Also definitely some delusion in it too, many people I know will go on about planned obsolescence and so forth in a put the world to right speech and then whip out the latest iPhone or Samsung flagship to call an Uber that they have on contract. Intel gave up too early in my opinion, the Zenfones (pre-Snapdragon) were great phones, I just don't think Asus alone had enough penetration to make it worth their while.
    - vram22 9y ago
      What was the difference between Zenfones pre-Snapdragon and post?
      - opencl 9y ago
        The Intel CPUs were performance-competitive with the SD8xx chips at the time but most of the newer zenfones use slower SD6xx chips. My experience with the Zenfone 2 was not very positive though. It seems to have been more Asus's fault than Intel's, but also Intel could have done a better job with their kernel. Yes the CPU was fast relative to its price (because Intel was dumping them) but almost everything else about it was not very good. Battery life was poor, seemingly because Intel never got core parking to work in their Android kernel (I also owned a Lenovo Atom tablet which had the exact same problem so I'm going to blame Intel here). Most apps ran pretty fast but anything with ARM binaries ran very slowly in emulation or in a few cases didn't work at all. ASUS's Android skin was terrible and had an obscene amount of preinstalled bloatware. There were loads of bugs, and installing updates was always a guessing game of whether it improved things or made it even worse. Sometimes GPS wouldn't work. The Marshmallow update was both extremely late and extremely buggy. The plastic back started developing cracks after about a year without ever dropping it. The ability to run windows software in either Wine or a VM was a rather cool-but-useless novelty.
- simonh 9y ago
  We’re already keeping phones until they break, by handing them down through the family. I’ve bought 5 iPhones and all but 2 of them are still in use. In fact the second one, a 3GS, was only fully retired at the beginning of last year. The upgrade cycle has really just been a process of filling up the market. In fact I’d argue there are still a lot of old devices still in use beyond an ideal lifespan. There’s still going to be a much quicker refresh cycle than desktops for a while, but they’re likely to converge gradually. What we might see is high end users keeping their flagship for longer, and refresh phones ‘downstream’ in the family to more recent midrange devices rather than passing on their own device and getting a new flagship. In fact, that’s what I just did for my teenage daughters.
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    Problem with mobile devices is they long outlast their manufacturer's software support. My iPad, for instance. The first device was announced in 2010, and software support ended with 5.1.1 in 2012. Two measly years of updates. This thing has not had an official update (including security updates) in nearly 6 years. Your 3GS hasn't been supported for 4 years. Whereas, I can keep a desktop computer for 20 years and update its software throughout that time. We should be able to keep our devices until they die, but without regular software updates, you're playing with fire.
    - scarface74 9y ago
      Keep using a computer for 20 years? A 20 year old computer is not going to run the latest version of Windows. Now I do have a 10 year old Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz with 4GB RAM, Gigabit Ethernet and a nice 1920x1200 display serving as a Plex Server. In day to day use, the only time I can tell the difference between that and my modern laptop is when I try to run too many things at once and that could be alleviated by upgrading the RAM to 8GB. As far as the iPad 1st generation, it's true that you can't get software updates -- I have one too -- but you can still download the "last compatible version" of apps for it. I reset mine last year and re-downloaded and ran Netflix, Hulu, Crackle, Google Drive (for reading PDFs), Spotify, Plex, and all of Apple's iWork Suite. It still supports AirPlay and prints to all of my printers. I can check my Exchange email at work. The browser on the other hand crashes constantly.
- FractalLP 9y ago
  I'm most of the way there now. Honestly, all I want is call, text, email, web-browser, and PDF docs.
- cm2187 9y ago
  Something you keep in your pocket along with your keys, that will be dropped ten times, and on which you will regularly sit will inevitably have a shorter life than a laptop. And for the rare people who take good care of their smartphone, there is the matter of non replaceable batteries on a non fixable device.
  - mastazi 9y ago
    On the other hand, all of the above are also reasons why - one could argue - the mobile market is going to be commoditized more and more.
- inventingwithmo 9y ago
  I wouldn't mistake the short-term lull in smartphone innovation as a long-term lull in mobile device innovation. Once they've got AR displays down to a reasonable size the power requirements will keep fuel on the fire for another two decades.
- scarface74 9y ago
  How many times have you had to replace a PC because you dropped it, left it in a cab, etc.? I haven't broken a phone yet, but I doubt I could keep using a phone for 10 years anytime soon.
  - lev99 9y ago
    With the new anti-theft systems on smart phones I can imagine laptops experience theft more frequently than smartphones.
    - scarface74 9y ago
      In aggregate? There are far more smartphones in use world wide than laptops. Even if not, most phones being sold worldwide are cheap Android phones that don't have sophisticated anti-theft technology.
    - Anarch157a 9y ago
      Phones are carried and used in places and situations that a laptop is not, this creates a lot more opportunities for theft.
  - IshKebab 9y ago
    Phone: 1 (dropped; screen broke but I was able to repair it) Laptop: 1 (spilt wine on it, was not able to repair it) I agree for desktops, but laptops regularly get broken and stolen.
TorKlingberg 9y ago
> A few months back Microsoft launched windows 10 on ARM -- that's an inflection point. Microsoft has launched Windows for various non-x86 platforms over the years, including ARM, and it has always petered out. Maybe it will take off this time, but I wouldn't bet too much on it.
- mohdmasd 9y ago
  But this time it's (almost) full windows, and it can run x86 application.
  - SlowBro 9y ago
    Clarification: Only 32 but apps. Not 64 bit apps, which the Windows world has almost fully moved to. And I’m sure they would run at reduced performance as well.
    - gruez 9y ago
      most non-compute intensive programs still are compiled for 32-bit, or have 32 bit versions available. also, visual studio still defaults to 32 bit when creating a new c++ project.
      - sitepodmatt 9y ago
        You can even get Slack for Windows in 32-bit, although I suspect you'd hit the nasty 4gb limitation pretty quickly
        flamedoge 9y ago
        I thought it was odd that a single application would even hit the limit. Then I realized Electron.
        josiahpeters 9y ago
        /s Some people might consider that a blessing in disguise with Slack. I'm not sure what the behavior is, maybe best case Slack crashes and restarts itself. You could almost call that behavior a feature of 32bit Slack: "automatic garbage collection"
golergka 9y ago
> Singularity for apps has always hinged on write-once-run-everywhere. From app developer perspective, processor architecture is low on the list of the problems you have to solve to run anywhere. User-facing apps aren't written in C or anything that close to metal anymore; I suspect that most of the Java, Kotlin and Swift code is completely architecture agnostic: add new capability to the compiler, change the build command and your ARM app becomes x86 app.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Even native languages close to the metal (Ada, Pascal, Basic, ...) don't have any big issue switching processors, unless inline Assembly is used. C and its derivatives (C++ and Objective-C) are the outliers thanks to implementation defined numeric types, the abuse in pointer tricks and casts.
  - flamedoge 9y ago
    a lot of compiler works to enable.. C spec mandates fixed width numerics afaik.. try imagining 64bit division using 32bit.
    - pjmlp 9y ago
      I don't need to imagine it, I started programming on Z80. EDIT: Forgot to mention that C spec only specifies "at least X" sizes, there is no portability guarantee if the types from stdint.h aren't used. http://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/arithmetic_types http://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/arithmetic_types
      - flamedoge 9y ago
        well there is. if you used <= "at least" sizes.
      - jcadam 9y ago
        Reminds me of the time I had to program a Z80-based controller board. It came with a non-standard C Compiler where integers were 16-bits long. Of course, I didn't realize this at first (I suppose I could have read the documentation, but...), so I had to figure it out for myself while debugging :) It was my first time programming C on something that wasn't a 32 bit CPU :)
karpodiem 9y ago
All I want is a single socket CPU and a motherboard that supports ECC/isn't total garbage. AMD has said it's on the motherboard manufacturers, and I haven't been able to get a straight answer as to whether ECC works as it should on motherboards that support Ryzen - https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/80wpd1/ryzen_2_ecc_support/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/80wpd1/ryzen_2_ecc_sup...
- brian_herman 9y ago
  Why not buy a server board? Edit: Its on the motherboard manufacturers not really the chip makers.
  - karpodiem 9y ago
    The C236 chipset is old as hell (2015) - they're holding back on adding PCI-E lanes, because they can. My hope is that Ryzen 2 shakes things up / Xeon 'Entry' offers a decent board. The Xeon D chips are a total frigging racket.
    - intrasight 9y ago
      Totally agree regarding Xeon D statement
- striking 9y ago
  Here's a list of Ryzen motherboards that people have tried and succeeded in using ECC with: http://www.overclock.net/forum/11-amd-motherboards/1629642-ryzen-ecc-motherboards.html http://www.overclock.net/forum/11-amd-motherboards/1629642-r... Additionally, you can check the QVL for each motherboard, and then test it by hand.
  - karpodiem 9y ago
    Thanks! *Edit - $750 is a lot for the cheapest threadripper + mobo. I'd be happy with 48 PCI-E lanes around $400 (CPU+Mobo).

by aleem 9y ago

melling 9y ago

The picture at the beginning emphasizes ARMs rapid improvements. It only goes out to 2014. It leaves one with the impression that ARM will soon pass Intel in performance. This would suddenly eat into Intel’s profits.

IshKebab 9y ago

Yeah but the upgrade cycle won't stay short for long, just like it hasn't for desktops. Give it 10 years and people will be keeping their phones until they break. Also anyone can make an ARM CPU so the margins are thin, whereas with x86 CPUs Intel will basically only ever have one competitor - AMD. They want to find another monopoly.

goblins 9y ago
>Give it 10 years and people will be keeping their phones until they break. That's basically me right now, still have my trusty sgs2 running lineageOS and will continue to have it till it breaks
hkmurakami 9y ago
Even today I see an increasing number of friends moving from 2 years cycles to 3 year cycles. The "killer app" for smartphone refresh rates staying low are (1) battery degradation and (2) forced OS updates for app updates, which in turn slows the phone down to compel an update[1]. [1] I'm actually curious if OS updates slow down older phones these days. This was the case 5 years ago but perhaps things have changed/
- mcintyre1994 9y ago
  I have an iPhone 6S - I'd say OS updates do slow the phone down, but they also tend to be really buggy and generally rubbish for a while. I think it's probably more bad engineering and software quality than anything nefarious.
  - qplex 9y ago
    My experience with Android is the opposite, it's gradually better and faster with every release.
  - user5454 9y ago
    Apple is intentionally slowing down phones with every OS upgrade to "preserve the battery" [1]. [1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/21/technology/apple-slows-down-old-iphones/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2017/12/21/technology/apple-slows-down-...
    - macintux 9y ago
      That's not at all what they said. The said that as the battery degrades, they limit CPU spikiness that can abruptly kill the device even with a non-trivial amount of juice left. That's not nearly the same as "slowing down the phone with every upgrade". Often people have reported better performance after an OS upgrade, although obviously results may vary, and subjective impressions are always, well, subjective.
- yrro 9y ago
  As a grumpy Moto G 3 owner, I would love for an OS update that slowed my phone down. Short support cycles seriously dent the feasibility of keeping the same phone for even two years...
pjmlp 9y ago
In Europe, where most of us use pre-pay without major subsidies, everyone uses them until they break or get stolen.
- sitepodmatt 9y ago
  I think that very dependent on the target demographic and country. Also definitely some delusion in it too, many people I know will go on about planned obsolescence and so forth in a put the world to right speech and then whip out the latest iPhone or Samsung flagship to call an Uber that they have on contract. Intel gave up too early in my opinion, the Zenfones (pre-Snapdragon) were great phones, I just don't think Asus alone had enough penetration to make it worth their while.
  - vram22 9y ago
    What was the difference between Zenfones pre-Snapdragon and post?
    - opencl 9y ago
      The Intel CPUs were performance-competitive with the SD8xx chips at the time but most of the newer zenfones use slower SD6xx chips. My experience with the Zenfone 2 was not very positive though. It seems to have been more Asus's fault than Intel's, but also Intel could have done a better job with their kernel. Yes the CPU was fast relative to its price (because Intel was dumping them) but almost everything else about it was not very good. Battery life was poor, seemingly because Intel never got core parking to work in their Android kernel (I also owned a Lenovo Atom tablet which had the exact same problem so I'm going to blame Intel here). Most apps ran pretty fast but anything with ARM binaries ran very slowly in emulation or in a few cases didn't work at all. ASUS's Android skin was terrible and had an obscene amount of preinstalled bloatware. There were loads of bugs, and installing updates was always a guessing game of whether it improved things or made it even worse. Sometimes GPS wouldn't work. The Marshmallow update was both extremely late and extremely buggy. The plastic back started developing cracks after about a year without ever dropping it. The ability to run windows software in either Wine or a VM was a rather cool-but-useless novelty.
simonh 9y ago
We’re already keeping phones until they break, by handing them down through the family. I’ve bought 5 iPhones and all but 2 of them are still in use. In fact the second one, a 3GS, was only fully retired at the beginning of last year. The upgrade cycle has really just been a process of filling up the market. In fact I’d argue there are still a lot of old devices still in use beyond an ideal lifespan. There’s still going to be a much quicker refresh cycle than desktops for a while, but they’re likely to converge gradually. What we might see is high end users keeping their flagship for longer, and refresh phones ‘downstream’ in the family to more recent midrange devices rather than passing on their own device and getting a new flagship. In fact, that’s what I just did for my teenage daughters.
- ryandrake 9y ago
  Problem with mobile devices is they long outlast their manufacturer's software support. My iPad, for instance. The first device was announced in 2010, and software support ended with 5.1.1 in 2012. Two measly years of updates. This thing has not had an official update (including security updates) in nearly 6 years. Your 3GS hasn't been supported for 4 years. Whereas, I can keep a desktop computer for 20 years and update its software throughout that time. We should be able to keep our devices until they die, but without regular software updates, you're playing with fire.
  - scarface74 9y ago
    Keep using a computer for 20 years? A 20 year old computer is not going to run the latest version of Windows. Now I do have a 10 year old Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz with 4GB RAM, Gigabit Ethernet and a nice 1920x1200 display serving as a Plex Server. In day to day use, the only time I can tell the difference between that and my modern laptop is when I try to run too many things at once and that could be alleviated by upgrading the RAM to 8GB. As far as the iPad 1st generation, it's true that you can't get software updates -- I have one too -- but you can still download the "last compatible version" of apps for it. I reset mine last year and re-downloaded and ran Netflix, Hulu, Crackle, Google Drive (for reading PDFs), Spotify, Plex, and all of Apple's iWork Suite. It still supports AirPlay and prints to all of my printers. I can check my Exchange email at work. The browser on the other hand crashes constantly.
FractalLP 9y ago
I'm most of the way there now. Honestly, all I want is call, text, email, web-browser, and PDF docs.
cm2187 9y ago
Something you keep in your pocket along with your keys, that will be dropped ten times, and on which you will regularly sit will inevitably have a shorter life than a laptop. And for the rare people who take good care of their smartphone, there is the matter of non replaceable batteries on a non fixable device.
- mastazi 9y ago
  On the other hand, all of the above are also reasons why - one could argue - the mobile market is going to be commoditized more and more.
inventingwithmo 9y ago
I wouldn't mistake the short-term lull in smartphone innovation as a long-term lull in mobile device innovation. Once they've got AR displays down to a reasonable size the power requirements will keep fuel on the fire for another two decades.
scarface74 9y ago
How many times have you had to replace a PC because you dropped it, left it in a cab, etc.? I haven't broken a phone yet, but I doubt I could keep using a phone for 10 years anytime soon.
- lev99 9y ago
  With the new anti-theft systems on smart phones I can imagine laptops experience theft more frequently than smartphones.
  - scarface74 9y ago
    In aggregate? There are far more smartphones in use world wide than laptops. Even if not, most phones being sold worldwide are cheap Android phones that don't have sophisticated anti-theft technology.
  - Anarch157a 9y ago
    Phones are carried and used in places and situations that a laptop is not, this creates a lot more opportunities for theft.
- IshKebab 9y ago
  Phone: 1 (dropped; screen broke but I was able to repair it) Laptop: 1 (spilt wine on it, was not able to repair it) I agree for desktops, but laptops regularly get broken and stolen.

TorKlingberg 9y ago

> A few months back Microsoft launched windows 10 on ARM -- that's an inflection point. Microsoft has launched Windows for various non-x86 platforms over the years, including ARM, and it has always petered out. Maybe it will take off this time, but I wouldn't bet too much on it.

mohdmasd 9y ago
But this time it's (almost) full windows, and it can run x86 application.
- SlowBro 9y ago
  Clarification: Only 32 but apps. Not 64 bit apps, which the Windows world has almost fully moved to. And I’m sure they would run at reduced performance as well.
  - gruez 9y ago
    most non-compute intensive programs still are compiled for 32-bit, or have 32 bit versions available. also, visual studio still defaults to 32 bit when creating a new c++ project.
    - sitepodmatt 9y ago
      You can even get Slack for Windows in 32-bit, although I suspect you'd hit the nasty 4gb limitation pretty quickly
      - flamedoge 9y ago
        I thought it was odd that a single application would even hit the limit. Then I realized Electron.
      - josiahpeters 9y ago
        /s Some people might consider that a blessing in disguise with Slack. I'm not sure what the behavior is, maybe best case Slack crashes and restarts itself. You could almost call that behavior a feature of 32bit Slack: "automatic garbage collection"

golergka 9y ago

> Singularity for apps has always hinged on write-once-run-everywhere. From app developer perspective, processor architecture is low on the list of the problems you have to solve to run anywhere. User-facing apps aren't written in C or anything that close to metal anymore; I suspect that most of the Java, Kotlin and Swift code is completely architecture agnostic: add new capability to the compiler, change the build command and your ARM app becomes x86 app.

pjmlp 9y ago
Even native languages close to the metal (Ada, Pascal, Basic, ...) don't have any big issue switching processors, unless inline Assembly is used. C and its derivatives (C++ and Objective-C) are the outliers thanks to implementation defined numeric types, the abuse in pointer tricks and casts.
- flamedoge 9y ago
  a lot of compiler works to enable.. C spec mandates fixed width numerics afaik.. try imagining 64bit division using 32bit.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    I don't need to imagine it, I started programming on Z80. EDIT: Forgot to mention that C spec only specifies "at least X" sizes, there is no portability guarantee if the types from stdint.h aren't used. http://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/arithmetic_types http://en.cppreference.com/w/c/language/arithmetic_types
    - flamedoge 9y ago
      well there is. if you used <= "at least" sizes.
    - jcadam 9y ago
      Reminds me of the time I had to program a Z80-based controller board. It came with a non-standard C Compiler where integers were 16-bits long. Of course, I didn't realize this at first (I suppose I could have read the documentation, but...), so I had to figure it out for myself while debugging :) It was my first time programming C on something that wasn't a 32 bit CPU :)

karpodiem 9y ago

All I want is a single socket CPU and a motherboard that supports ECC/isn't total garbage. AMD has said it's on the motherboard manufacturers, and I haven't been able to get a straight answer as to whether ECC works as it should on motherboards that support Ryzen - https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/80wpd1/ryzen_2_ecc_support/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/80wpd1/ryzen_2_ecc_sup...

brian_herman 9y ago
Why not buy a server board? Edit: Its on the motherboard manufacturers not really the chip makers.
- karpodiem 9y ago
  The C236 chipset is old as hell (2015) - they're holding back on adding PCI-E lanes, because they can. My hope is that Ryzen 2 shakes things up / Xeon 'Entry' offers a decent board. The Xeon D chips are a total frigging racket.
  - intrasight 9y ago
    Totally agree regarding Xeon D statement
striking 9y ago
Here's a list of Ryzen motherboards that people have tried and succeeded in using ECC with: http://www.overclock.net/forum/11-amd-motherboards/1629642-ryzen-ecc-motherboards.html http://www.overclock.net/forum/11-amd-motherboards/1629642-r... Additionally, you can check the QVL for each motherboard, and then test it by hand.
- karpodiem 9y ago
  Thanks! *Edit - $750 is a lot for the cheapest threadripper + mobo. I'd be happy with 48 PCI-E lanes around $400 (CPU+Mobo).