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5 and 10 year plans are always over optimistic projections by people who can't deliver in the present to reassure investors faith. They might ship 1.4nm, but i
by huffmsa 7y ago
5 and 10 year plans are always over optimistic projections by people who can't deliver in the present to reassure investors faith.
They might ship 1.4nm, but it has a good chance of having Soviet tractor quality.
- unixhero 7y agoInteresting analogy. Soviet tractors famously were slow to arrive.
- huffmsa 7y agoAnd half didn't work / only met the specifications in appearance, but not so much functionality
- jacquesm 7y agoAnd were typically indestructible once they did run. Soviet pre-fall engineering was ugly and the factories sucked but the designs were solid and could run for ever with very little maintenance.
- Dylan16807 7y agoThough CPUs are already all extremely durable. So an under-specced indestructible CPU is... just an under-specced CPU.
- perceptronas 7y agoI usually hear the opposite: people tend to underestimate what they can do in 10 years and overestimate what they can do in 1-3
- huffmsa 7y agoPeople maybe, but institutions and organizations go the other way. Human capital turnover, market trends, butterflies in Thailand all conspire to foil grand organizational visions.
- bhouston 7y agoBut even if Intel isn't the one to do it, someone will. And given that AMD is just using contract fabs, it means we will have x86-64 chips with these technologies at roughly these times. I wonder if a x86-64 CPU will exceed 1024 cores before the end 2029? It feels like that is where we are headed.
- dsr_ 7y agoDepends on whether there's market demand. If there's something useful about having 32 32-core chiplets connected to an I/O hub talking to a bunch of PCIe5 lanes and a huge pile of DDR6 RAM, that could happen. But getting all that compute logic coordinated in one place might not be that economically desirable compared to offloading to GPU-style specialized parallel processors, or building better coordination software to run distributed systems, or...
- eloff 7y agoBigger servers just get divided up into more VMs. As long as it's cost effective to scale vertically, it will continue to happen at the cloud platform level.
- zrm 7y agoIt'll be interesting to see what these high core count servers do to The Cloud though. Fifteen years ago a lot of medium-sized organizations had a full rack of single and dual-core servers in their offices that cost half a million dollars and consumed >10KW of electricity day and night. That made it attractive to put everything in the cloud -- spend $250K on cloud services instead of $500K on local hardware and you're ahead. But their loads haven't necessarily changed a lot since then, and we're now at the point where you can replace that whole rack with a single one of these high core count beasts with capacity to spare. Then you're back to having the latency and bandwidth of servers on the same LAN as your users instead of having to go out to the internet, not having to pay for bandwidth (on both ends), not having to maintain a separate network infrastructure for The Cloud that uses different systems and interfaces than the ones you use for your offices, etc. People might soon figure out that it's now less expensive to buy one local server once every five years.
- eyegor 7y agoYou might want to check out intels historical roadmaps. They've been missing their own marks since about 2015 iirc.
- jl6 7y agoSounds broadly consistent with the parent poster’s point?
- SimbaOnSteroids 7y agoNot if they meant they missed their 2005 roadmap for 2015.
- onlyrealcuzzo 7y agoSomeone please correct me if I'm wrong. Intel unveiled their infamous "Tick-Tock Model" around 2007 [1]. It went according to plan for all of four years, and then it COMPLETELY fell apart. If anything, I'm willing to bet they KNEW they could hit the first few iterations. I'm guessing for hardware, you've probably got a really good idea if you're going to be able to even manufacture something in two years, let alone mass-distribute, produce, and sell it at the price point you want. I'm also pretty certain they KNEW they wouldn't hit the rest of the roadmap. Honestly, I think it was purposefully misleading investors. I heard from dozens of engineers at the company around 2008 that there was NO WAY they would have 10nm chips around 2012 -- what the roadmap was more or less promising. And surprise, we didn't get them until 2018. Now they're promising 1.5nm in a similar time frame. I'm skeptical. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick%E2%80%93tock_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick%E2%80%93tock_model
- ethbro 7y agoBig lies seem self-reinforcing, particularly in public companies. Or to put it another way, nobody is going to charge you with a crime for staying with the herd. That's a passive choice. But when there's a dissenting voice, suddenly you have to make an active decision to ignore them. And that's when the lawsuits start producing emails about who knew what when. End result: People intentionally (if they know better) or unintentionally (if people smarter than them are all saying the same thing) agree with the party line, even in the face of demonstrable facts otherwise.
- agumonkey 7y agoInteresting bias indeed. medium term ~ambition versus long term patience
- llampx 7y agoIntel promised 10 Ghz by 2005, if I remember correctly.
- earenndil 7y agoTbf, IPC went up by enough that that effectively happened.
- kjaftaedi 7y agoProcessors may get smaller, but the size of dust remains the same. The advances needed to achieve something like this are more in the realm of cleanroom advances than processor architecture.
- antpls 7y agoI actually heard and memorized the opposite : people tend to overestimate what they can do in 10 years (for example, in 1980, some people thought flying cars would be a thing in year 2000) and they underestimate what happens in 1-3 (for example, our smartphones or computers get twice as fast, but the change is so incremental that people don't notice it)
- bjornjaja 7y agoHonestly who even needs a 1.4nm? Hell, who needs a damned 10nm? Most people could get by on yester-decade’s CPUs no problem. We need something new, not the same old “add more cameras to the phone” kind of innovations. It’s the engineers that will make those discoveries—the investors can shove it. All they do is freeload on innovation and cramp peoples style.
- meddlepal 7y agoYou're thinking is flawed. Consumers don't give a damn for the most part, but Intel isn't building this tech for them. They're doing this for enterprise data centers which demand smaller, more powerful, and energy efficient chips constantly.
- wtallis 7y agoConsumers also care about getting better energy efficiency out of their battery powered devices. It's really just the desktop PC market where being stuck with 14nm CPUs is a non-issue, because wall power is cheap and cooling is easy.
- meddlepal 7y agoI agree, they care about battery performance, but they don't understand the correlation of CPU to battery so they don't purchase based on that criteria. The vendor that makes the device definitely cares though I wonder how much Intel cares about consumer oroducts as percentage of mkt share compared to servers.
- staticassertion 7y agoData centers absolutely care about power usage.
- meddlepal 7y agoThat's what I said...
- vsareto 7y agoWhy do investors keep believing it?
- huffmsa 7y agoWhat choice do they have besides selling their stake and leaving?
- Merrill 7y agoTheir P/E ratio is 13.36. Perhaps they don't? The slide seems to have been first disclosed by ASML, which has a vested interest in selling new generations of manufacturing tools. ASML's P/E ratio is 48.02.
- bob1029 7y agoI don't know that they actually are. Like most of the S&P500, Intel is actively participating in billion-dollar stock buyback programs. These allow for these companies with scrooge-mcduck-scale money bins to maintain vanity stock prices while their fundamentals are on fire.
- JohnJamesRambo 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law This won’t end well.
- adventured 7y agoIntel has generated $19.3 billion in net income in the prior four quarters, giving it a whopping 12.9 PE ratio over that time. What vanity stock price exactly? You could hardly have picked a worse example in this bubbly market.
- blihp 7y agoIt's a pretty rich multiple if one believes their fundamentals have been deteriorating. Intel has spent the last decade abandoning market after market while simultaneously not being able to execute in the markets they were still in. If something doesn't change soon, even that 12.9 p/e won't be sustainable.
- marta_morena 7y agoThinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy, just as work fills allocated time.
- tomp 7y agoare they? maybe if you push people really hard (completely unrealistic) they will still deliver much more than otherwise ("just" unrealistic). You might not land a rocket on Mars, but you can still land it on water...
- avmich 7y agoSoviet tractor quality wasn't that bad, especially considering they shared a lot with tanks. And for the price they were likely even better :) . Not to mention that they came with capabilities to be repaired - something Intel in its chips will likely, and sadly, not include...
- webdevatlurk 7y ago> Soviet tractor quality wasn't that bad, especially considering they shared a lot with tanks. Fun fact: The first tank (turreted, not land-whale) was based on a tractor design. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_FT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_FT
- lonelappde 7y agoWhat is a land-whale tank?
- webdevatlurk 7y agoThe kind of tank design that appeared in World War I. They were designed to cross the cratered wastelands and trenches created by the fighting. The crews fought from gun ports and mounted cannons/machineguns, rather than a rotating turret. Examples: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_IV_tank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_IV_tank - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V_tank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_V_tank
- pasabagi 7y agoSocialist design is generally pretty good, in my experience. I preferentially buy DDR-made tools when it makes sense, because they tend to be very solid, and very easy to maintain and repair. The furniture can also be nice.
- doyoulikeworms 7y agoOOC, do you view Intel's projections as being too slow or just plain wrong (i.e., impossible)? I am not knowledgeable about this industry or the engineering behind it, just follow it casually, and I'm shocked to see 1.4nm on a slide.