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Sooo... is intel like crying in a corner right now? On one side we have AMD eating their lunch in the consumer space, they still haven’t launched a full gamut o

by vxNsr 6y ago

Sooo... is intel like crying in a corner right now? On one side we have AMD eating their lunch in the consumer space, they still haven’t launched a full gamut of 10nm CPUs. Apple just announced that they’re dropping them in basically the next 5 years. And now ARM really is encroaching on their core server business. I feel like in 20 years from now we’re gonna be using intel as a cautionary tale of hubris and mismanagement. Or whatever it is that caused them to fail so spectacularly.

ianai 6y ago
From what I’ve heard Intel management was taken over by marketing “professionals.” It’s an awful place to work and probably devoid of tech leadership. Aka yes it’s a cautionary tail and time to run from that ship.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
numpad0 6y ago
They still have 7nm and 14nm manufacturing businesses...
- PaulHoule 6y ago
  They have milked 14 nm for what it is worth in the long term in the interest of the short term. They bent over backwards for cloud providers and offered them special deals that helped finance the cloud providers transitioning to own silicon. They fused off features to create false product "differentiation" like the IBM of old and failed to deliver technology after technology in working form (SGX, TSX, 10nm, ...) They held the performance of the PC platform back by trying to capture all of the BoM for a PC. (e.g. tried to kill off NVIDIA and ATI with integrated 'graphics') Customers are angry now, that's their problem. Intel is like that Fatboy Slim album, "We're #1, why try harder?" They still think they are the #1 chipmaker in the world but now it is more like #2 or #3.
- sjwright 6y ago
  ...And who wants to take bets for how many years before Intel starts being a contract manufacturer of chips for Apple and others? Shall we open the bidding at five years?
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > They still have 7nm and 14nm manufacturing businesses... I'm pretty sure they have their 14nm business, and are working really hard to get a 7nm manufacturing business? A quick search gives me news articles about Intel hoping to have 7nm working by 2021.
jillesvangurp 6y ago
I think the writing was on the wall for a few years. IMHO Arm on servers is something that's been an option for quite long and the only thing that's surprising is how long x86 has managed to stay popular/relevant there. Also, oss instruction sets like Risc-V are going to be interesting. What went wrong at Intel is that they forgot to take the appropriate steps 10 years ago to avoid running out of options right now. Ten years ago it was already obvious that mobile CPUs were a thing and Intel's attempts to penetrate that market failed around that time. From that moment they were living on borrowed time.
- klodolph 6y ago
  It’s not quite that obvious. Server space is still huge. Growth in mobile usually corresponds to people using more servers. ARM servers are an option but I’d hesitate to lay bets on it—they have to beat Intel on TCO and it’s just not there yet. AMD is great but doesn’t have volume like Intel does, and while the I/O is better on AMD, dealing with NUMA on AMD is a bit more of a beast. I’m not saying that Intel’s not in trouble, just that the conclusions here are far from obvious. I have some skepticism for people who say that they saw this coming. AMD laid off a lot of top engineers before its recent resurgence. Intel’s failure to ship its 7nm node in volume was a surprise to a lot of people. Everyone knew that the new process nodes were more difficult, but outside a few experts, hardly anyone was in a position to predict when the move to smaller nodes would slow down. Not that long ago, people were praising Intel for their superior SSD controllers, or talking about how they would be making 5G modems.
  - deelowe 6y ago
    Generally, Intel is still best for TCO. AMD is better on specific high core count workloads. Arm isn't really competitive in the HPC/Cloud space, or at least hasn't been historically. Maybe that's starting to change?
  - cma 6y ago
    AMD has 64 core processors without any NUMA issues now. They use a dedicated IO die to provide uniform memory access to all chiplets. ARM has a much weaker memory model with significant performance implications for multithreading as well.
google234123 6y ago
I find it sad that the top comment on a HN thread starts with "Sooo... is ${1} like crying in a corner right now". Yes, all 100,000 employees are collectively crying a corner.
raxxorrax 6y ago
Honestly I think the proclaimed death of intel is vastly exaggerated. AMD came back from worse places and they do still have the manufacturing edge. Intel CPU for desktop still use less power, which is a big plus. How many people do you know that bought the fastest CPU available recently? Glad AMD is back on track, they were in a rough place, far worse than intels current situation.
- pedrocr 6y ago
  All I've read says Intel has a manufacturing disadvantage to TSMC (where AMD, Apple and many others get their chips) and their CPUs are less power efficient, not more, compared to AMD and particularly these kinds of upcoming ARM parts. Is that not the case?
  - ksec 6y ago
    > Is that not the case? If simply having a better, and cheaper product will equal to immediate success then Mid-High End Fashion, as well as gazillion of other products in many other industry would not have existed as there are always competitors that offers something better at cheaper price. Marketing / Discovery and Channels / Distributions. And that also excluding the software advantage Intel has. AWS only just had their GA on Zen 2, nearly a year since they first made the announcement. Compared to Intel. I dont have any insider information. But I guess AMD has a lot to learn with regards to dealing with HyperScalers. And you may have notice, Intel has way more leaks than usual in the past 12-18 months. That is part of the PR play to keep people from buying AMD while they try to Catch up. Intel as of today is still operating at 100% capacity with back-log orders to fulfil, and a new record revenue in the last quarter. So yes, technically Intel is inferior, but until all of those disadvantage materialise into financial numbers it is far too early to call the death of Intel. I dont hold any Intel Stocks but speaking as an AMD shareholder.
    - pedrocr 6y ago
      > If simply having a better, and cheaper product will equal to immediate success then... I never said it did. I was just questioning if the facts were indeed those.
jakeinspace 6y ago
I suspect that for national security reasons, the US federal government and DoD would not allow Intel to fail. Still, the military and government aren't big enough buyers of microprocessors to keep Intel competitive at its recent position, and I suppose that TSMC's planned fab in the US could be seen as an alternative.
justapassenger 6y ago
> Apple just announced that they’re dropping them in basically the next 5 years That's a big PR hit, but in terms of sales - Apple isn't really significant customer of x86. But, if it'd trigger Microsoft to double down on Windows on ARM, that could then become a threat. But MS is playing with ARMs for years, and nothing significant came out of it yet.
api 6y ago
Ice Lake 10nm / 10th gen has a super weird crashing bug too: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-2310 https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-2310 https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8248315 https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8248315 No, no, no it is not an OS bug, a hypervisor bug, or a JVM bug. Read the whole thing if you have an hour to kill. It's confirmed to be a CPU bug, and Intel knows about it. I am really looking forward to the postmortem. The behavior reminds me of the old F00F bug. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug
- Google234 6y ago
  Most of those reports seem to be on 14nm procs. Post Morten will probably be a microcode update.
  - api 6y ago
    It's happening on Ice Lake cores. Process node probably doesn't matter.
Aaronstotle 6y ago
I think Intel has learned a painful lesson on resting on their Laurels. That being said, Jim Keller was there for 2 years (he resigned June 12th, so I'd bet they have some big things on the horizon, namely GPUs.
- regularfry 6y ago
  They don't have a particularly good track record here. Have we got reason to think that there's going to be better news for them this time round?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

by vxNsr 6y ago

ianai 6y ago

From what I’ve heard Intel management was taken over by marketing “professionals.” It’s an awful place to work and probably devoid of tech leadership. Aka yes it’s a cautionary tail and time to run from that ship.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

numpad0 6y ago

They still have 7nm and 14nm manufacturing businesses...

PaulHoule 6y ago
They have milked 14 nm for what it is worth in the long term in the interest of the short term. They bent over backwards for cloud providers and offered them special deals that helped finance the cloud providers transitioning to own silicon. They fused off features to create false product "differentiation" like the IBM of old and failed to deliver technology after technology in working form (SGX, TSX, 10nm, ...) They held the performance of the PC platform back by trying to capture all of the BoM for a PC. (e.g. tried to kill off NVIDIA and ATI with integrated 'graphics') Customers are angry now, that's their problem. Intel is like that Fatboy Slim album, "We're #1, why try harder?" They still think they are the #1 chipmaker in the world but now it is more like #2 or #3.
sjwright 6y ago
...And who wants to take bets for how many years before Intel starts being a contract manufacturer of chips for Apple and others? Shall we open the bidding at five years?
yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
> They still have 7nm and 14nm manufacturing businesses... I'm pretty sure they have their 14nm business, and are working really hard to get a 7nm manufacturing business? A quick search gives me news articles about Intel hoping to have 7nm working by 2021.

jillesvangurp 6y ago

I think the writing was on the wall for a few years. IMHO Arm on servers is something that's been an option for quite long and the only thing that's surprising is how long x86 has managed to stay popular/relevant there. Also, oss instruction sets like Risc-V are going to be interesting. What went wrong at Intel is that they forgot to take the appropriate steps 10 years ago to avoid running out of options right now. Ten years ago it was already obvious that mobile CPUs were a thing and Intel's attempts to penetrate that market failed around that time. From that moment they were living on borrowed time.

klodolph 6y ago
It’s not quite that obvious. Server space is still huge. Growth in mobile usually corresponds to people using more servers. ARM servers are an option but I’d hesitate to lay bets on it—they have to beat Intel on TCO and it’s just not there yet. AMD is great but doesn’t have volume like Intel does, and while the I/O is better on AMD, dealing with NUMA on AMD is a bit more of a beast. I’m not saying that Intel’s not in trouble, just that the conclusions here are far from obvious. I have some skepticism for people who say that they saw this coming. AMD laid off a lot of top engineers before its recent resurgence. Intel’s failure to ship its 7nm node in volume was a surprise to a lot of people. Everyone knew that the new process nodes were more difficult, but outside a few experts, hardly anyone was in a position to predict when the move to smaller nodes would slow down. Not that long ago, people were praising Intel for their superior SSD controllers, or talking about how they would be making 5G modems.
- deelowe 6y ago
  Generally, Intel is still best for TCO. AMD is better on specific high core count workloads. Arm isn't really competitive in the HPC/Cloud space, or at least hasn't been historically. Maybe that's starting to change?
- cma 6y ago
  AMD has 64 core processors without any NUMA issues now. They use a dedicated IO die to provide uniform memory access to all chiplets. ARM has a much weaker memory model with significant performance implications for multithreading as well.

google234123 6y ago

I find it sad that the top comment on a HN thread starts with "Sooo... is ${1} like crying in a corner right now". Yes, all 100,000 employees are collectively crying a corner.

raxxorrax 6y ago

Honestly I think the proclaimed death of intel is vastly exaggerated. AMD came back from worse places and they do still have the manufacturing edge. Intel CPU for desktop still use less power, which is a big plus. How many people do you know that bought the fastest CPU available recently? Glad AMD is back on track, they were in a rough place, far worse than intels current situation.

pedrocr 6y ago
All I've read says Intel has a manufacturing disadvantage to TSMC (where AMD, Apple and many others get their chips) and their CPUs are less power efficient, not more, compared to AMD and particularly these kinds of upcoming ARM parts. Is that not the case?
- ksec 6y ago
  > Is that not the case? If simply having a better, and cheaper product will equal to immediate success then Mid-High End Fashion, as well as gazillion of other products in many other industry would not have existed as there are always competitors that offers something better at cheaper price. Marketing / Discovery and Channels / Distributions. And that also excluding the software advantage Intel has. AWS only just had their GA on Zen 2, nearly a year since they first made the announcement. Compared to Intel. I dont have any insider information. But I guess AMD has a lot to learn with regards to dealing with HyperScalers. And you may have notice, Intel has way more leaks than usual in the past 12-18 months. That is part of the PR play to keep people from buying AMD while they try to Catch up. Intel as of today is still operating at 100% capacity with back-log orders to fulfil, and a new record revenue in the last quarter. So yes, technically Intel is inferior, but until all of those disadvantage materialise into financial numbers it is far too early to call the death of Intel. I dont hold any Intel Stocks but speaking as an AMD shareholder.
  - pedrocr 6y ago
    > If simply having a better, and cheaper product will equal to immediate success then... I never said it did. I was just questioning if the facts were indeed those.

jakeinspace 6y ago

I suspect that for national security reasons, the US federal government and DoD would not allow Intel to fail. Still, the military and government aren't big enough buyers of microprocessors to keep Intel competitive at its recent position, and I suppose that TSMC's planned fab in the US could be seen as an alternative.

justapassenger 6y ago

> Apple just announced that they’re dropping them in basically the next 5 years That's a big PR hit, but in terms of sales - Apple isn't really significant customer of x86. But, if it'd trigger Microsoft to double down on Windows on ARM, that could then become a threat. But MS is playing with ARMs for years, and nothing significant came out of it yet.

api 6y ago

Ice Lake 10nm / 10th gen has a super weird crashing bug too: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-2310 https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/JBR-2310 https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8248315 https://bugs.openjdk.java.net/browse/JDK-8248315 No, no, no it is not an OS bug, a hypervisor bug, or a JVM bug. Read the whole thing if you have an hour to kill. It's confirmed to be a CPU bug, and Intel knows about it. I am really looking forward to the postmortem. The behavior reminds me of the old F00F bug. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_F00F_bug

Google234 6y ago
Most of those reports seem to be on 14nm procs. Post Morten will probably be a microcode update.
- api 6y ago
  It's happening on Ice Lake cores. Process node probably doesn't matter.

Aaronstotle 6y ago

I think Intel has learned a painful lesson on resting on their Laurels. That being said, Jim Keller was there for 2 years (he resigned June 12th, so I'd bet they have some big things on the horizon, namely GPUs.

regularfry 6y ago
They don't have a particularly good track record here. Have we got reason to think that there's going to be better news for them this time round?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]