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Intel has fallen so far. It's honestly a shame to watch at this point. I remember back when Sandy Bridge was first released, and I was extremely pleased by the

Intel has fallen so far. It's honestly a shame to watch at this point. I remember back when Sandy Bridge was first released, and I was extremely pleased by the performance improvements my new chip was able to provide. Did they really manage to mess everything up within such a limited timespan? Or was there just always a hidden incompetence that never showed itself until now?

dgacmu 7y ago
It's not Intel, it's the end of Moore's law. Intel's problem is that they are not well positioned to capitalize on the specialized processors that will be required to continue ekeing out advances for the next decade or two before we're entirely up a creek. :)
- jscott0918 7y ago
  reddit.com/r/boneappletea
  - dgacmu 7y ago
    Oh goodness, thanks. Fixed 'ekeing', which my phone apparently did not believe I'd said.
    - cormacrelf 7y ago
      So close! It's eking. Eke, eked, eking.
    - api 7y ago
      Mobile is the foot rub. (Autocorrect of "mobile is the future" I saw once.)
      - mruts 7y ago
        That’s ducking funny!
- lawrenceyan 7y ago
  From how Apple and AMD are doing with their own processors though, it seems like Intel is just fundamentally doing worse even as things become more difficult with smaller transistor sizes. Apple is going to replace Intel with their own processors because Intel has failed to meet requirements. AMD, with a shoestring budget basically on the verge of bankruptcy the entire time they were doing their R&D, managed to build out a new architecture that has provided amazing results while Intel has basically had nothing to show in the same time. But perhaps there's something I'm missing here. Is there a misconception or lack of information here on my end that needs to be clarified? I can only make my analysis largely as an outsider looking in when talking about semiconductors.
  - dgacmu 7y ago
    Intel was ahead, and hit the wall first. Apple & AMD are not ahead, they're just catching up. I don't want to understate how big a problem that could be for Intel, of course. But they're also doing it on low margin parts, and Intel continues to make bank with their data center parts. I don't think any of this represents a short-term problem for Intel, other than the general downturn in processor sales because fewer people will need to upgrade. But I think it represents a very serious long-term threat. They have some really cool technical advances, like 3D xpoint. But I'm concerned that they do so badly on embedded and custom integration from a long-term perspective.
    - vbezhenar 7y ago
      Apple sold millions of iPhones with 7nm chips while Intel struggles to build comparable 10nm chips and keeps releasing 14+++ nm. AMD will release 7nm chips very soon. It does not seem like they are catching up. Quite the opposite.
      - akvadrako 7y ago
        You can’t compare nm between vendors - it’s just marketing numbers.
        7y ago
- ves 7y ago
  You probably want to say “eking out,” not “eating out,” as the latter means something... very different.
  - dgacmu 7y ago
    Someday I will learn to triple check when I use speech recognition.
- cozzyd 7y ago
  They did buy Altera didn't they?
zanny 7y ago
Their design for 10nm and the implementation didn't line up. Whatever their (still undisclosed) problems were, the entire node was fundamentally flawed. It might have been hubris at having been at the cutting edge of fab tech for so long. It could have just been the fruits of pushing the envelope - sometimes what you predict will happen when you put theory to application proves false. It has warped their business heavily for 4+ years now, but in the same way AMD had to "get their act together" with their processor design after Bulldozer failed spectacularly in practice and took ~7 years to fix it companies at these scales cannot turn on a dime - Intel had their roadmap planned a decade in advance, and to have it so thoroughly trashed starting around ~2015-2016 will require until at least 2021 to correct in all likelihood.
- chx 7y ago
  I more and more tend to believe the rumors (started by Semiaccurate) we will not see 10nm in mass quantities and 7nm is the next. We will see very, very soon: Intel said 10nm CPUs in client systems will be on shelves for the 2019 holiday season.
  - DuskStar 7y ago
    But weren't there Intel 10nm chips sold for revenue in 2017? [0] Granted, it was an OEM-only part for some China specific education laptops... 0: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13405/intel-10nm-cannon-lake-and-core-i3-8121u-deep-dive-review https://www.anandtech.com/show/13405/intel-10nm-cannon-lake-...
    - chx 7y ago
      Cannon Lake was released only because many at Intel have their bonuses tied to the process node launch. Well, they launched a 10nm CPU... so bad the GPU is disabled, performance/watt it's worse than KBR and it was only available in limited quantities.
      - dfrage 7y ago
        KBR = Kaby Lake Refresh. Interesting, in that Intel's "10nm" node is said to be more power efficient than their "14nm" node, in this case, per AnandTech (https://www.anandtech.com/show/11738/intel-launches-8th-generation-cpus-starting-with-kaby-lake-refresh-for-15w-mobile https://www.anandtech.com/show/11738/intel-launches-8th-gene...) KBR was launched with 14+nm. Could be that early of a 10nm part wasn't yet very power optimized. And that would be a very good explanation for why the GPU was disabled vs. the yield issue, which we're pretty sure is much more fundamental than specs of dust and other isolated things that can disable a part of a die without killing it altogether.
Shorel 7y ago
And yet they still have the lion's share of the market. And the money to eventually recover from this as if nothing happened. Tell me when they have really fallen. Still very far from it.
- Analemma_ 7y ago
  That means very little. As the saying goes, “How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways: gradually, then all at once.” In technology, downward swings of fate tend to come fast and hard. The camera world went from 100% film to 100% digital in the space of about five years, which extinguished Kodak. Or consider Palm/Nokia/ Blackberry, who went from collectively owning the entire mobile market to dead as doorknobs in even less time. It’s easy to see how it happens to Intel too: AMD’s big-core-count chips start eating up server business, while ARM takes over PCs (at this point people consider it all but certain Apple is switching to ARM in the next few years, and Microsoft is building Windows on ARM as a hedge), and without another business for Intel to fall back on (they’ve shut down modems, mobile chips, and anything else that could’ve been a new source of revenue), that’s the end. I’m not saying it’s certain, but I’m saying it’s totally possible and their current market share means nothing.
  - Shorel 7y ago
    IMO this is only a repeat of the AMD Athlon days and Intel will go back to their anticompetitive antics sooner than later.
    - Lev1a 7y ago
      Did they ever truly stop?
- robdachshund 7y ago
  Losing up to 40% of performance and having to disable hyperthreading is going to kill them in the server space. That ryzen 3 demo didn't look good for Intel either.
gameswithgo 7y ago
maybe it is just hard. amd isnt shipping clearly better stuff either.
- gameswithgo 7y ago
  show me what amd chip performs better instead of just downvoting.
  - serf 7y ago
    performance benchmarks go out the window once you realize that a platform is woefully and unfixably insecure. performance benchmarks mean even less when those security issues are band-aided by performance metric-hurting-workarounds.
    - davrosthedalek 7y ago
      If I buy 100k chips for my HPC to do single-tenant processing, performance, and performance/watt are priority one. The vulnerabilities intel has to fight right now are irrelevant for this use case.
    - gameswithgo 7y ago
      amd isn’t immune to side channel attacks either. the most recent one we think amd is immune to but i wouldn’t assume in the long run that amd will generally prove to be more resistant to them than intel.

dgacmu 7y ago

It's not Intel, it's the end of Moore's law. Intel's problem is that they are not well positioned to capitalize on the specialized processors that will be required to continue ekeing out advances for the next decade or two before we're entirely up a creek. :)

jscott0918 7y ago
reddit.com/r/boneappletea
- dgacmu 7y ago
  Oh goodness, thanks. Fixed 'ekeing', which my phone apparently did not believe I'd said.
  - cormacrelf 7y ago
    So close! It's eking. Eke, eked, eking.
  - api 7y ago
    Mobile is the foot rub. (Autocorrect of "mobile is the future" I saw once.)
    - mruts 7y ago
      That’s ducking funny!
lawrenceyan 7y ago
From how Apple and AMD are doing with their own processors though, it seems like Intel is just fundamentally doing worse even as things become more difficult with smaller transistor sizes. Apple is going to replace Intel with their own processors because Intel has failed to meet requirements. AMD, with a shoestring budget basically on the verge of bankruptcy the entire time they were doing their R&D, managed to build out a new architecture that has provided amazing results while Intel has basically had nothing to show in the same time. But perhaps there's something I'm missing here. Is there a misconception or lack of information here on my end that needs to be clarified? I can only make my analysis largely as an outsider looking in when talking about semiconductors.
- dgacmu 7y ago
  Intel was ahead, and hit the wall first. Apple & AMD are not ahead, they're just catching up. I don't want to understate how big a problem that could be for Intel, of course. But they're also doing it on low margin parts, and Intel continues to make bank with their data center parts. I don't think any of this represents a short-term problem for Intel, other than the general downturn in processor sales because fewer people will need to upgrade. But I think it represents a very serious long-term threat. They have some really cool technical advances, like 3D xpoint. But I'm concerned that they do so badly on embedded and custom integration from a long-term perspective.
  - vbezhenar 7y ago
    Apple sold millions of iPhones with 7nm chips while Intel struggles to build comparable 10nm chips and keeps releasing 14+++ nm. AMD will release 7nm chips very soon. It does not seem like they are catching up. Quite the opposite.
    - akvadrako 7y ago
      You can’t compare nm between vendors - it’s just marketing numbers.
      - 7y ago
ves 7y ago
You probably want to say “eking out,” not “eating out,” as the latter means something... very different.
- dgacmu 7y ago
  Someday I will learn to triple check when I use speech recognition.
cozzyd 7y ago
They did buy Altera didn't they?

zanny 7y ago

Their design for 10nm and the implementation didn't line up. Whatever their (still undisclosed) problems were, the entire node was fundamentally flawed. It might have been hubris at having been at the cutting edge of fab tech for so long. It could have just been the fruits of pushing the envelope - sometimes what you predict will happen when you put theory to application proves false. It has warped their business heavily for 4+ years now, but in the same way AMD had to "get their act together" with their processor design after Bulldozer failed spectacularly in practice and took ~7 years to fix it companies at these scales cannot turn on a dime - Intel had their roadmap planned a decade in advance, and to have it so thoroughly trashed starting around ~2015-2016 will require until at least 2021 to correct in all likelihood.

chx 7y ago
I more and more tend to believe the rumors (started by Semiaccurate) we will not see 10nm in mass quantities and 7nm is the next. We will see very, very soon: Intel said 10nm CPUs in client systems will be on shelves for the 2019 holiday season.
- DuskStar 7y ago
  But weren't there Intel 10nm chips sold for revenue in 2017? [0] Granted, it was an OEM-only part for some China specific education laptops... 0: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13405/intel-10nm-cannon-lake-and-core-i3-8121u-deep-dive-review https://www.anandtech.com/show/13405/intel-10nm-cannon-lake-...
  - chx 7y ago
    Cannon Lake was released only because many at Intel have their bonuses tied to the process node launch. Well, they launched a 10nm CPU... so bad the GPU is disabled, performance/watt it's worse than KBR and it was only available in limited quantities.
    - dfrage 7y ago
      KBR = Kaby Lake Refresh. Interesting, in that Intel's "10nm" node is said to be more power efficient than their "14nm" node, in this case, per AnandTech (https://www.anandtech.com/show/11738/intel-launches-8th-generation-cpus-starting-with-kaby-lake-refresh-for-15w-mobile https://www.anandtech.com/show/11738/intel-launches-8th-gene...) KBR was launched with 14+nm. Could be that early of a 10nm part wasn't yet very power optimized. And that would be a very good explanation for why the GPU was disabled vs. the yield issue, which we're pretty sure is much more fundamental than specs of dust and other isolated things that can disable a part of a die without killing it altogether.

Shorel 7y ago

And yet they still have the lion's share of the market. And the money to eventually recover from this as if nothing happened. Tell me when they have really fallen. Still very far from it.

Analemma_ 7y ago
That means very little. As the saying goes, “How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways: gradually, then all at once.” In technology, downward swings of fate tend to come fast and hard. The camera world went from 100% film to 100% digital in the space of about five years, which extinguished Kodak. Or consider Palm/Nokia/ Blackberry, who went from collectively owning the entire mobile market to dead as doorknobs in even less time. It’s easy to see how it happens to Intel too: AMD’s big-core-count chips start eating up server business, while ARM takes over PCs (at this point people consider it all but certain Apple is switching to ARM in the next few years, and Microsoft is building Windows on ARM as a hedge), and without another business for Intel to fall back on (they’ve shut down modems, mobile chips, and anything else that could’ve been a new source of revenue), that’s the end. I’m not saying it’s certain, but I’m saying it’s totally possible and their current market share means nothing.
- Shorel 7y ago
  IMO this is only a repeat of the AMD Athlon days and Intel will go back to their anticompetitive antics sooner than later.
  - Lev1a 7y ago
    Did they ever truly stop?
robdachshund 7y ago
Losing up to 40% of performance and having to disable hyperthreading is going to kill them in the server space. That ryzen 3 demo didn't look good for Intel either.

gameswithgo 7y ago

maybe it is just hard. amd isnt shipping clearly better stuff either.

gameswithgo 7y ago
show me what amd chip performs better instead of just downvoting.
- serf 7y ago
  performance benchmarks go out the window once you realize that a platform is woefully and unfixably insecure. performance benchmarks mean even less when those security issues are band-aided by performance metric-hurting-workarounds.
  - davrosthedalek 7y ago
    If I buy 100k chips for my HPC to do single-tenant processing, performance, and performance/watt are priority one. The vulnerabilities intel has to fight right now are irrelevant for this use case.
  - gameswithgo 7y ago
    amd isn’t immune to side channel attacks either. the most recent one we think amd is immune to but i wouldn’t assume in the long run that amd will generally prove to be more resistant to them than intel.