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Intel's current situation with the 10nm node actually illustrates why having separate designs is a net benefit for the industry and the consumer. It was suppose

Intel's current situation with the 10nm node actually illustrates why having separate designs is a net benefit for the industry and the consumer. It was supposed to be delivered earlier, but due to a design/planning failure (https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-ceo-cpu-shortage-company-aggression,39955.html https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-ceo-cpu-shortage-com...), it was stuck in development and kept Intel from rolling out their new architecture (Ice Lake) until recently. What prevents a government-led project from hitting the same problem? Without serious competition from AMD, I'm quite sure there would be no price reductions and we'd be paying more for inferior products.

topmonk 7y ago
The person in charge could have the same philosophy as you, and after seeing several reports of non-progress, invite some other people with alternative ideas to work in tandem. There is nothing wrong with trying different approaches in parallel, but why does it have to go all the way from cradle to market that way? At a certain point it would be obvious which design was the better one, and then the group who was working on the design that proved inferior could then join the more successful group and double their productivity. If it was possible to cut losses way ahead of the curve, imagine what could have already been achieved.
- jl6 7y ago
  It’s still not obvious that Intel’s R&D is inferior (late, sure, but it hasn’t killed the company yet), and ultimately the market is the best judge of which is the best design.
  - topmonk 7y ago
    > ultimately the market is the best judge of which is the best design. This is just bias. How can you know what the ultimate best judge of anything is? You would have to know what all the alternatives that could ever be conceived would be. And I can prove you wrong more directly. If the market is the best judge of the of the best design, why is so much money spent on advertising? If a better designed product with less advertising faced a worse designed product with better advertising and always won, since "ultimately the market is the best judge of which is the best design", then there would be no point spending money on advertising at all.
    - iguy 7y ago
      Re "ultimately the market" most people would point to 20th C experiments with command economies here. The hope was as you describe, a benevolent leader trying different approaches until one was clearly superior, and avoiding all the cost & waste of competitors doing the same work twice, not to mention the waste of advertising. And it didn't work very well, even on purely economic grounds. Cars are a prototypical example to think about, and they were spectacularly awful for decades. It turns out the benevolent leaders are good at figuring out what's good for their careers, and less interested in making useful products (meaning safe, reliable, fast, efficient, etc.) Even in the west there was too little competition, but it turned out that duplicating almost everything GM did independently in Japan was a great investment to be making. Another way to say this: If 2 competitors each develop the thing, then in the worst case they spend twice as much money as in utopia. But we can't get to utopia. And in situations where there is only one option (be it enforced by the state, or just a monopoly) it's easy to go wrong by a much larger factor than 2. If you don't like cars, think about drug companies, or academic publishes, who seem happy to increase prices by 10 or 100 times if they can get away with it.
  - Symmetry 7y ago
    It's not really superior or inferior but different approaches with different levels of risk. Intel invests lots of engineer hours tying their layouts very intimately together the the particular process they're using to get out every scrap of performance. AMD does their best to modularize their design at every level to not spend engineering hours they don't have and to let them move to whatever process node they need to. When Intel's fabs were doing well they were dominant. When they ran into problems they were stuck in a way AMD wouldn't have been if TSMC had problems.
tyingq 7y ago
Nowhere near where it was in the 90's. All of the various RISC players regularly leapfrogged each other. There was a pretty mad rush to buy, too, because you often ran software that charged "per CPU". So there was a free software upgrade of sorts. Oracle tried to beat that system with pricing tied to the clock frequency. That approach was kind of funny...they were lining their pockets with effort that other companies were putting forth.

topmonk 7y ago

The person in charge could have the same philosophy as you, and after seeing several reports of non-progress, invite some other people with alternative ideas to work in tandem. There is nothing wrong with trying different approaches in parallel, but why does it have to go all the way from cradle to market that way? At a certain point it would be obvious which design was the better one, and then the group who was working on the design that proved inferior could then join the more successful group and double their productivity. If it was possible to cut losses way ahead of the curve, imagine what could have already been achieved.

jl6 7y ago
It’s still not obvious that Intel’s R&D is inferior (late, sure, but it hasn’t killed the company yet), and ultimately the market is the best judge of which is the best design.
- topmonk 7y ago
  > ultimately the market is the best judge of which is the best design. This is just bias. How can you know what the ultimate best judge of anything is? You would have to know what all the alternatives that could ever be conceived would be. And I can prove you wrong more directly. If the market is the best judge of the of the best design, why is so much money spent on advertising? If a better designed product with less advertising faced a worse designed product with better advertising and always won, since "ultimately the market is the best judge of which is the best design", then there would be no point spending money on advertising at all.
  - iguy 7y ago
    Re "ultimately the market" most people would point to 20th C experiments with command economies here. The hope was as you describe, a benevolent leader trying different approaches until one was clearly superior, and avoiding all the cost & waste of competitors doing the same work twice, not to mention the waste of advertising. And it didn't work very well, even on purely economic grounds. Cars are a prototypical example to think about, and they were spectacularly awful for decades. It turns out the benevolent leaders are good at figuring out what's good for their careers, and less interested in making useful products (meaning safe, reliable, fast, efficient, etc.) Even in the west there was too little competition, but it turned out that duplicating almost everything GM did independently in Japan was a great investment to be making. Another way to say this: If 2 competitors each develop the thing, then in the worst case they spend twice as much money as in utopia. But we can't get to utopia. And in situations where there is only one option (be it enforced by the state, or just a monopoly) it's easy to go wrong by a much larger factor than 2. If you don't like cars, think about drug companies, or academic publishes, who seem happy to increase prices by 10 or 100 times if they can get away with it.
- Symmetry 7y ago
  It's not really superior or inferior but different approaches with different levels of risk. Intel invests lots of engineer hours tying their layouts very intimately together the the particular process they're using to get out every scrap of performance. AMD does their best to modularize their design at every level to not spend engineering hours they don't have and to let them move to whatever process node they need to. When Intel's fabs were doing well they were dominant. When they ran into problems they were stuck in a way AMD wouldn't have been if TSMC had problems.

tyingq 7y ago

Nowhere near where it was in the 90's. All of the various RISC players regularly leapfrogged each other. There was a pretty mad rush to buy, too, because you often ran software that charged "per CPU". So there was a free software upgrade of sorts. Oracle tried to beat that system with pricing tied to the clock frequency. That approach was kind of funny...they were lining their pockets with effort that other companies were putting forth.