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If Jim is going back to Apple or AMD then the Intel struggle won’t stop anytime soon. As much as I like Apple, I hope his choice will be AMD.

by klohto 6y ago

ksec 6y ago
Every time I criticise Intel, Or more like pointing out facts , supporters will always use Jim Keller as the excuse, as if he was the silver bullet. Intel's struggle has nothing to do with is processors' design. Sunny Cove and Willow Cove ( aka Icelake and TigerLake ) were close to design complete before Jim Keller joined. Intel's problem is with their manufacturing, both technical and economical. And Jim Keller is not a Fab guy, nothing he could do to fix this.
- jimbob45 6y ago
  Why do you say their problem is based in manufacturing?
  - The_Colonel 6y ago
    They have been working on the 10nm manufacturing process for ages and it's still not completely finished. That gave AMD huge opportunity to catch up (which it did).
    - londons_explore 6y ago
      Nothing stops Intel manufacturing their designs with third parties. Yet they don't. Either it isn't worth it (too much coupling between fab and designs - not the right abstractions), or institutional inertia stops them doing it.
      - theevilsharpie 6y ago
        > Nothing stops Intel manufacturing their designs with third parties. Yet they don't. It wouldn't surprise me if the reason Keller left is because he wanted to outsource manufacturing to a competitive third party fab, and got denied. Keller is an a computer architect, but architecture doesn't matter if you can't physically build the thing.
      - olliej 6y ago
        I'm not a hardware engineer/cpu designer/electrical engineer, but my understanding is that designing high end cpus requires engineering and designing towards the specific manufacturing process of the fabs you're using. Even if intel did decide to, I don't think they could just send their designs to tsmc/global foundries or what have you.
        jabl 6y ago
        Not my expertise either, but it seems that the advantages of vertical integrations between fabbing and chip design being large was the "common wisdom" in the industry for a long time. But it seems that lately AMD/NVIDIA/TSMC and others have demonstrated that fabless chip companies and merchant foundries is a model capable of producing the highest end chips as well. And yes, if for some reason Intel would want to fab their chips at some merchant foundry (see my sibling answer to yours why I think that's unlikely, but just for the sake of argument), I'm quite sure they couldn't just email the RTL's to the foundry and get chips back. It would take a lot of work to adapt the chips to the merchant foundry's process.
        ksec 6y ago
        They cant, they will need to redesign the whole thing with new rules, mask and testing. Not to mention using tools that likely Intel is extremely unfamiliar with. ( At least their CPU teams.) It is more of a cost/ economical issues, which jabl above provides a decent explanation.
      - jabl 6y ago
        IIRC most of Intel's expenses are related to the fabs and semiconductor R&D. The chip designs (the computer architecture part that gets computer people excited) is almost a rounding error on top of that. From that perspective Intel designs chips so that they can sell the silicon real estate they manufacture, not the other way around (that they have fabs so they can realize their chip design ambitions). So if they would fab their chips somewhere else, they would be sitting on a huge expensive asset producing nothing. If they couldn't find a productive use for their fabs it would likely mean the end of the company. And if they can't produce their own chips in their own fabs, why would anyone else want to use Intel fabs? Further, the vertical integration of fab process and chip design is something Intel regards as a competitive advantage. For a long time this was very much true, but it seems the hard work by TSMC and others have made it possible to make top-end chip designs on a merchant foundry process nowadays. Intel at some point tried to play the merchant foundry game, but it seems it wasn't successful and they shut it down. Which perhaps isn't that unsurprising, considering TSMC, and to a lesser extent Globalfoundries, have been at that game for decades and they're good at it. So all in all, I don't think fabbing their chips at some third party is a viable approach for Intel. Either they fix their process or they go under. "Go under" not necessarily meaning bankruptcy, it could also mean a massively, hugely downsized company doing chip designs to be fabbed at some third party. I think they're still far away from such a drastic step.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    Ice Lake outperforms Zen2 in IPC but it can't run on higher clock speed (on efficiently) and can't ship many chips. Many of it is due to 10nm manufacturing.
- wmf 6y ago
  The great man theory of chip design. In a few months we'll get a ton of the "Xe sucks because Raja's GPUs are always too hot" theory.
  - CoolGuySteve 6y ago
    He lovingly lays each atom and then kisses each box gently before it heads out the door.
- tw04 6y ago
  Process didn’t cause all the security holes implemented as performance hacks, architecture did. AMD caught up through architecture, process was just icing on the cake.
  - etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
    No one thought of speculative execution and hypertheading as performance hacks until the last few years. They were brilliant techniques. They still are, they just were found to have a cost. They are still used now but more carefully. Intel Management Engine and SGX on the other hand, are basically user-hostile parts of the hardware, with some bugs mixed in.
    - majewsky 6y ago
      ME is exactly what Intel's data center customers want. It's only present in consumer CPUs because it doesn't scale to have separate ME and non-ME SKUs.
    - wolfgke 6y ago
      > No one thought of speculative execution and hypertheading as performance hacks until the last few years. "Everybody" who has some knowledge in security (espcially with respect to side channels) knew from beginning that these CPU features were a ticking time bomb in terms of potential side channels. What was unclear was how this (at this time played down by CPU vendors) potential threat could be used to create real attacks. Going from potential threat (that "everybody" knew about) to real attack is the central achievement of the authors of the Spectre and Meltdown attacks (and their successors).
      - legulere 6y ago
        That’s not the impression that I got. Research on side channels were basically limited to timing side channels in cryptography. Everything else was not seen as practically exploitable.
        6y ago
- ReticentVole 6y ago
  Intel's problem is that they fired expensive, older American workers and replaced them with H1B contractors. There's a video on AdoredTV about the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agxSclh27uo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agxSclh27uo
  - harichinnan 6y ago
    Keeping up with the mood of the country (US) I want to call these comments out as racist propaganda. The casual reference to H1B workers(90% Indians) as root cause of problems in American tech companies is getting old.
    - ashtonkem 6y ago
      Often the problem isn’t nation of origin, it’s the nature of the training given from one generation to the next and knowledge transfer. My father used to work in Hughes in some areas that required American citizens by US law; he regularly told stories of someone in a department retiring before replacements had been hired for knowledge transfer, causing lost time and knowledge.
    - arein2 6y ago
      The mood of the country is racist propaganda I mean a lot of things are obvious, why pretend they are not
      - harichinnan 6y ago
        Police killing black men is no longer racist propaganda. It's a reality of life for black people.
        ReticentVole 6y ago
        If Black men committed less crime, they wouldn't get in trouble with police in the first place. http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/nypd_annual_firearms_discharge_report_2012.pdf http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_plan... Page 24 - subjects firing on Police: 79% Black Subjects killed by Police gunfire: 69% Black
kasabali 6y ago
There was a joke in the reddit thread but I seriously think it'd be fantastic had he gone to work for VIA to kickstart competitive processors. Even with a strong AMD, we would still benefit from more competition in x86.

If Jim is going back to Apple or AMD then the Intel struggle won’t stop anytime soon. As much as I like Apple, I hope his choice will be AMD.

by klohto 6y ago

If Jim is going back to Apple or AMD then the Intel struggle won’t stop anytime soon. As much as I like Apple, I hope his choice will be AMD.

ksec 6y ago

Every time I criticise Intel, Or more like pointing out facts , supporters will always use Jim Keller as the excuse, as if he was the silver bullet. Intel's struggle has nothing to do with is processors' design. Sunny Cove and Willow Cove ( aka Icelake and TigerLake ) were close to design complete before Jim Keller joined. Intel's problem is with their manufacturing, both technical and economical. And Jim Keller is not a Fab guy, nothing he could do to fix this.

jimbob45 6y ago
Why do you say their problem is based in manufacturing?
- The_Colonel 6y ago
  They have been working on the 10nm manufacturing process for ages and it's still not completely finished. That gave AMD huge opportunity to catch up (which it did).
  - londons_explore 6y ago
    Nothing stops Intel manufacturing their designs with third parties. Yet they don't. Either it isn't worth it (too much coupling between fab and designs - not the right abstractions), or institutional inertia stops them doing it.
    - theevilsharpie 6y ago
      > Nothing stops Intel manufacturing their designs with third parties. Yet they don't. It wouldn't surprise me if the reason Keller left is because he wanted to outsource manufacturing to a competitive third party fab, and got denied. Keller is an a computer architect, but architecture doesn't matter if you can't physically build the thing.
    - olliej 6y ago
      I'm not a hardware engineer/cpu designer/electrical engineer, but my understanding is that designing high end cpus requires engineering and designing towards the specific manufacturing process of the fabs you're using. Even if intel did decide to, I don't think they could just send their designs to tsmc/global foundries or what have you.
      - jabl 6y ago
        Not my expertise either, but it seems that the advantages of vertical integrations between fabbing and chip design being large was the "common wisdom" in the industry for a long time. But it seems that lately AMD/NVIDIA/TSMC and others have demonstrated that fabless chip companies and merchant foundries is a model capable of producing the highest end chips as well. And yes, if for some reason Intel would want to fab their chips at some merchant foundry (see my sibling answer to yours why I think that's unlikely, but just for the sake of argument), I'm quite sure they couldn't just email the RTL's to the foundry and get chips back. It would take a lot of work to adapt the chips to the merchant foundry's process.
      - ksec 6y ago
        They cant, they will need to redesign the whole thing with new rules, mask and testing. Not to mention using tools that likely Intel is extremely unfamiliar with. ( At least their CPU teams.) It is more of a cost/ economical issues, which jabl above provides a decent explanation.
    - jabl 6y ago
      IIRC most of Intel's expenses are related to the fabs and semiconductor R&D. The chip designs (the computer architecture part that gets computer people excited) is almost a rounding error on top of that. From that perspective Intel designs chips so that they can sell the silicon real estate they manufacture, not the other way around (that they have fabs so they can realize their chip design ambitions). So if they would fab their chips somewhere else, they would be sitting on a huge expensive asset producing nothing. If they couldn't find a productive use for their fabs it would likely mean the end of the company. And if they can't produce their own chips in their own fabs, why would anyone else want to use Intel fabs? Further, the vertical integration of fab process and chip design is something Intel regards as a competitive advantage. For a long time this was very much true, but it seems the hard work by TSMC and others have made it possible to make top-end chip designs on a merchant foundry process nowadays. Intel at some point tried to play the merchant foundry game, but it seems it wasn't successful and they shut it down. Which perhaps isn't that unsurprising, considering TSMC, and to a lesser extent Globalfoundries, have been at that game for decades and they're good at it. So all in all, I don't think fabbing their chips at some third party is a viable approach for Intel. Either they fix their process or they go under. "Go under" not necessarily meaning bankruptcy, it could also mean a massively, hugely downsized company doing chip designs to be fabbed at some third party. I think they're still far away from such a drastic step.
- fomine3 6y ago
  Ice Lake outperforms Zen2 in IPC but it can't run on higher clock speed (on efficiently) and can't ship many chips. Many of it is due to 10nm manufacturing.
wmf 6y ago
The great man theory of chip design. In a few months we'll get a ton of the "Xe sucks because Raja's GPUs are always too hot" theory.
- CoolGuySteve 6y ago
  He lovingly lays each atom and then kisses each box gently before it heads out the door.
tw04 6y ago
Process didn’t cause all the security holes implemented as performance hacks, architecture did. AMD caught up through architecture, process was just icing on the cake.
- etaioinshrdlu 6y ago
  No one thought of speculative execution and hypertheading as performance hacks until the last few years. They were brilliant techniques. They still are, they just were found to have a cost. They are still used now but more carefully. Intel Management Engine and SGX on the other hand, are basically user-hostile parts of the hardware, with some bugs mixed in.
  - majewsky 6y ago
    ME is exactly what Intel's data center customers want. It's only present in consumer CPUs because it doesn't scale to have separate ME and non-ME SKUs.
  - wolfgke 6y ago
    > No one thought of speculative execution and hypertheading as performance hacks until the last few years. "Everybody" who has some knowledge in security (espcially with respect to side channels) knew from beginning that these CPU features were a ticking time bomb in terms of potential side channels. What was unclear was how this (at this time played down by CPU vendors) potential threat could be used to create real attacks. Going from potential threat (that "everybody" knew about) to real attack is the central achievement of the authors of the Spectre and Meltdown attacks (and their successors).
    - legulere 6y ago
      That’s not the impression that I got. Research on side channels were basically limited to timing side channels in cryptography. Everything else was not seen as practically exploitable.
      - 6y ago
ReticentVole 6y ago
Intel's problem is that they fired expensive, older American workers and replaced them with H1B contractors. There's a video on AdoredTV about the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agxSclh27uo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agxSclh27uo
- harichinnan 6y ago
  Keeping up with the mood of the country (US) I want to call these comments out as racist propaganda. The casual reference to H1B workers(90% Indians) as root cause of problems in American tech companies is getting old.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Often the problem isn’t nation of origin, it’s the nature of the training given from one generation to the next and knowledge transfer. My father used to work in Hughes in some areas that required American citizens by US law; he regularly told stories of someone in a department retiring before replacements had been hired for knowledge transfer, causing lost time and knowledge.
  - arein2 6y ago
    The mood of the country is racist propaganda I mean a lot of things are obvious, why pretend they are not
    - harichinnan 6y ago
      Police killing black men is no longer racist propaganda. It's a reality of life for black people.
      - ReticentVole 6y ago
        If Black men committed less crime, they wouldn't get in trouble with police in the first place. http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_planning/nypd_annual_firearms_discharge_report_2012.pdf http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/analysis_and_plan... Page 24 - subjects firing on Police: 79% Black Subjects killed by Police gunfire: 69% Black

kasabali 6y ago

There was a joke in the reddit thread but I seriously think it'd be fantastic had he gone to work for VIA to kickstart competitive processors. Even with a strong AMD, we would still benefit from more competition in x86.