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I'm no cheerleader for Intel but if Intel really wanted to they could release competitive ARM offerings. They've got enough money they could just buy an existin

I'm no cheerleader for Intel but if Intel really wanted to they could release competitive ARM offerings. They've got enough money they could just buy an existing ARM developer and then produce those chips in their fabs. They've managed to change direction in the past. They were all-in on Itanium and NetBurst until the Opteron showed up. They then kicked both to the curb and went all-in on the Pentium-M/Core microarchitecture. Intel would be foolish to ignore the ARM market if for no other reason than the server market has started to change their focus on ops/watt rather than just ops/dollar. A 64 core ARM uses less power than a 64 thread Xeon with comparable performance. That means the lifetime cost of that ARM chip will be much lower than the Xeon since it'll cost less to power and cool it (and the datacenter). Lower power requirements can also change the calculus of datacenter siting. I don't see Intel getting to ARM ops/watt levels with their x86 designs. The Lakefield designs are promising but the "big.LITTLE" core configuration is more useful in mobile applications than servers. Intel losing out to ARM designs is really Intel's choice at this point.

tpmx 6y ago
It's not about the instruction set/architecture. It's about the process node.
- ladyanita22 6y ago
  What do you mean? This is just about nm?
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
    Debating which ISA enables higher performance designs has been shown in the last 25 years to be a lot like debating which JIT API will result in faster execution.
  - ben-schaaf 6y ago
    AMD, Apple, NVIDIA and those AWS chips use TSMCs 7nm process node which has a ~50% efficiency advantage over Intel's 14nm (the actual nm isn't comparable though).
  - flyinglizard 6y ago
    No, it's also about system and memory interconnects, caches, various accelerators, core configuration, and indeed process nodes as mentioned above. I don't think there's anything inherently faster in one ISA than the other.
    - acdha 6y ago
      There can be ISA-level differences: Itanium’s VLIW structure meant a lot of memory was storing NOPs filling unused slots unless your work aligned perfectly with the CPU and you had a brilliant compiler. These days, I think you’re right with the possible exception of density: if you have comparable resources, vector extensions, etc. an ISA which uses memory more efficiently is going to get a little more out of its cache and memory bandwidth, but that’s probably not going to be huge.
    - ladyanita22 6y ago
      Then I fail to understand how is Intel's perf/watt behind some ARM vendors. They probably have the best talent in the industry.
pavlov 6y ago
It’s crazy that Intel owned the best ARM design 15-20 years ago (Xscale) yet sold it a year before the iPhone shipped. Intel actually turned Apple away when they wanted an ARM SoC. Both Intel and Microsoft made some kind of categorical error in 1995-2005 in assuming that their dominance was tied to a particular programming interface. Intel clung to the x86 instruction set while Microsoft operated on a “Windows everywhere” mindset, first pushing Win32 and then .Net. Wintel seems finally dead, and good riddance.
- ETHisso2017 6y ago
  Apparently the financial planning model Intel used to justify turning down Apple in that case had a math error (dividing by 1+X instead of multiplying by 1+X) that actually swung the analysis in the wrong direction. Given the resulting impact (Intel being far behind in the smartphone market), it might qualify as the costliest Excel error of all time.
  - vlovich123 6y ago
    Source? That would be a fascinating read.
  - bigdict 6y ago
    Do you have a source for that?
  - patmorgan23 6y ago
    .... That's like literally trillion dollar mistake
    - lumost 6y ago
      given Apple's near monopsomy power in the mobile market Intel may never have been able to produce high margin chips in that market.
      - reitzensteinm 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ksec 6y ago
>They've managed to change direction in the past Worth pointing out the two directional changes That Intel made, from DRAM to Microprocessor and IA64, NetBust High Clockspeed to Pentium M IPC. The first one was Andrew Grove, the 2nd one was from his disciple Patrick Gelsinger. Those people are gone. Retired or pushed out by Intel's politics. Their legacy and work continues for about 5 years, as that is the lead time of their roadmap. And we saw what happen to Intel since 2016.
- Gangbusters 6y ago
  That generation of senior American workers has been replaced by H1B contractors. There's an insider's account on the AdoredTV youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agxSclh27uo&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agxSclh27uo&feature=youtu.be
  - zymhan 6y ago
    lol no
bsder 6y ago
> I'm no cheerleader for Intel but if Intel really wanted to they could release competitive ARM offerings. Except that everybody seems to forget that Apple's ARM chip isn't commodity. Apple is going to tune their ARM specifically to run portable workloads. For starters, they're going to have humongous caches that make the chips expensive. And they're going to bury the expensiveness of the chip in the enormous margins of iDevice ecosystem.
- greedo 6y ago
  There's no indication that Apple's Silicon will be more expensive than what's used in iOS/tvOS/watchOS devices currently.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - sjwright 6y ago
    Expense is related to chip size. Apple isn’t going to release chips that benchmark slower than the Intel equivalents. To sell the transition they’ll need to say something simple like “2X faster” on the big screen. So I expect to see 8+ core chips as standard even if they don’t need that many to deliver a good product. The question is whether such a chip would be cheaper for Apple.
    - ben-schaaf 6y ago
      They don't need to be 2x faster than any Intel chips, just the ones in products they're replacing. And as it so happens it's pretty easy to get 2x the performance over an essentially passively cooled and severely power limited Intel chip that's in the air.
      - sjwright 6y ago
        Absolutely. And I don't think it will be difficult at all for Apple to crush Intel in benchmark performance per watt—let alone real world performance with their more targeted silicon. The interesting question is going to be how Apple's GPU stacks up to the competition. We know from the A13X that it is already quite good and I fully expect it to exceed Intel embedded graphics. But what about higher end machines? How long till Apple GPUs can take the fight to discrete graphics?
im_down_w_otp 6y ago
>I'm no cheerleader for Intel but if Intel really wanted to they could release competitive ARM offerings. They've got enough money they could just buy an existing ARM developer and then produce those chips in their fabs. The problem is that Intel no longer has the leading state of the art fabs. They used to be two generations ahead of everyone else, and now they're two behind. The inertia of x86 has kept them afloat, but the longer Intel fabs lag the more ground ARM has been able to make up. Intel fabbing ARM parts isn't going to do them much good unless they also manage to get their process shrink delays worked out and behind them.
- giantrobot 6y ago
  Intel does have manufacturing issues at smaller node sizes but that's a really complicated thing to measure, node size claims from various semiconductor manufacturers are more marketing than anything else now. There's been some suggestions to replace node size claims with better density metrics https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9063714 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9063714. It's not like TSMC's fabs are some order of magnitude more advanced than Intel's fabs. If Intel had an ARM chip to produce today they could use their considerable fab volume to produce them profitably. Even at large process sizes they could still produce competitive ARM chips. It's not like their current x86 chips at 14nm are slouches.
coldtea 6y ago
>They've managed to change direction in the past Did they have such competition in the past, plus their main market (desktop) becoming irrelevant and mobile (and maybe server) going to another CPU?
- giantrobot 6y ago
  While desktops specifically are seeing declining sales, laptop sales have remained fairly strong in recent years. Intel still powers the lion's share of laptops sold be they Chromebooks, MacBooks, or Windows laptops. So it's not like their sales are instantly going to dry up. ARM is also still making progress in the server space but it's not predominant. Intel is still powering a lion's share of server hardware as well. So Intel's got the income to make big shifts. There's also enough momentum of continuing x86 sales that their revenue from them won't dry up immediately if they did start building ARM chips.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - coldtea 6y ago
    >While desktops specifically are seeing declining sales, laptop sales have remained fairly strong in recent years. Intel still powers the lion's share of laptops sold be they Chromebooks, MacBooks, or Windows laptops. So it's not like their sales are instantly going to dry up. I don't think absolute numbers are what matters. For a company in the stock market, the fact that mobile has grown 10x the size of desktop sales, where the desktop has become stagnant means they lost big on a market...
    - giantrobot 6y ago
      Intel has huge gross margins on their chips. They make up the difference in sales numbers with their margins. They've had minimal competition from AMD in the desktop/laptop and server markets so they've made money hand over fist. While they could be a player in the smartphone CPU market it's not like they had it tied up and lost it. Intel's real challenge now is recognizing that the desktop/laptop and server markets are no longer guaranteed sales for them.
RobLach 6y ago
Will Intel’s management take the capital risk to gain a fab advantage again? Or will they ride the way down from their peak for 30 years with everyone on the top hopping off with golden parachutes?
senderista 6y ago
What if ARM just refused to sell them a license?
- vidarh 6y ago
  As far as I understand, Intel has a license already.
  - dis-sys 6y ago
    for an very old version
    - vidarh 6y ago
      They have an architecture license. Which means they are free to design their own ARM designs.
      - dis-sys 6y ago
        limited to an very old architecture no one is using anymore. ex-ARM employee here.
        vidarh 6y ago
        I thought the point is the architecture license lets them design their own? Also Intel clearly has some sort of license that covers modern cores as well, given it manufactures FPGA's with various newer ARM cores based on its purchase of Altera.
      - bogomipz 6y ago
        Does the architecture license just allow them to create a CPU that uses the ARM ISA? Or does it include other ARM IP as well?
- jmnicolas 6y ago
  Why would they ?
Causality1 6y ago
Big.LITTLE has always somewhat baffled me as to how well it works. Is my phone actually good at assigning low priority tasks to the little cores? It's always seemed unlikely given how half-assed it seems to be when it comes to much easier things like not trimming the app I'm currently working with for using too much power or taking less than five solid minutes to notice I've driven away from my house's wifi and it needs to use 4G instead.
lebuffon 6y ago
"Intel losing out to ARM designs is really Intel's choice at this point." Historically this seems to be the case most of the time. Market leaders miss the next iteration of their industry. The "Innovators Dilemma" is ever present. "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. Western Union internal memo, 1876.
bogomipz 6y ago
>"They've got enough money they could just buy an existing ARM developer and then produce those chips in their fabs." Is a developer in this context a third party who goes out and licenses the different IP Cores for a customer and then designs a chip using them for that customer? If so I'm curious why would someone use a third party developer over ARM itself? Who are some of the bigger ARM developers today?

tpmx 6y ago

It's not about the instruction set/architecture. It's about the process node.

ladyanita22 6y ago
What do you mean? This is just about nm?
- formerly_proven 6y ago
  Debating which ISA enables higher performance designs has been shown in the last 25 years to be a lot like debating which JIT API will result in faster execution.
- ben-schaaf 6y ago
  AMD, Apple, NVIDIA and those AWS chips use TSMCs 7nm process node which has a ~50% efficiency advantage over Intel's 14nm (the actual nm isn't comparable though).
- flyinglizard 6y ago
  No, it's also about system and memory interconnects, caches, various accelerators, core configuration, and indeed process nodes as mentioned above. I don't think there's anything inherently faster in one ISA than the other.
  - acdha 6y ago
    There can be ISA-level differences: Itanium’s VLIW structure meant a lot of memory was storing NOPs filling unused slots unless your work aligned perfectly with the CPU and you had a brilliant compiler. These days, I think you’re right with the possible exception of density: if you have comparable resources, vector extensions, etc. an ISA which uses memory more efficiently is going to get a little more out of its cache and memory bandwidth, but that’s probably not going to be huge.
  - ladyanita22 6y ago
    Then I fail to understand how is Intel's perf/watt behind some ARM vendors. They probably have the best talent in the industry.

pavlov 6y ago

It’s crazy that Intel owned the best ARM design 15-20 years ago (Xscale) yet sold it a year before the iPhone shipped. Intel actually turned Apple away when they wanted an ARM SoC. Both Intel and Microsoft made some kind of categorical error in 1995-2005 in assuming that their dominance was tied to a particular programming interface. Intel clung to the x86 instruction set while Microsoft operated on a “Windows everywhere” mindset, first pushing Win32 and then .Net. Wintel seems finally dead, and good riddance.

ETHisso2017 6y ago
Apparently the financial planning model Intel used to justify turning down Apple in that case had a math error (dividing by 1+X instead of multiplying by 1+X) that actually swung the analysis in the wrong direction. Given the resulting impact (Intel being far behind in the smartphone market), it might qualify as the costliest Excel error of all time.
- vlovich123 6y ago
  Source? That would be a fascinating read.
- bigdict 6y ago
  Do you have a source for that?
- patmorgan23 6y ago
  .... That's like literally trillion dollar mistake
  - lumost 6y ago
    given Apple's near monopsomy power in the mobile market Intel may never have been able to produce high margin chips in that market.
    - reitzensteinm 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ksec 6y ago

>They've managed to change direction in the past Worth pointing out the two directional changes That Intel made, from DRAM to Microprocessor and IA64, NetBust High Clockspeed to Pentium M IPC. The first one was Andrew Grove, the 2nd one was from his disciple Patrick Gelsinger. Those people are gone. Retired or pushed out by Intel's politics. Their legacy and work continues for about 5 years, as that is the lead time of their roadmap. And we saw what happen to Intel since 2016.

Gangbusters 6y ago
That generation of senior American workers has been replaced by H1B contractors. There's an insider's account on the AdoredTV youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agxSclh27uo&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agxSclh27uo&feature=youtu.be
- zymhan 6y ago
  lol no

bsder 6y ago

> I'm no cheerleader for Intel but if Intel really wanted to they could release competitive ARM offerings. Except that everybody seems to forget that Apple's ARM chip isn't commodity. Apple is going to tune their ARM specifically to run portable workloads. For starters, they're going to have humongous caches that make the chips expensive. And they're going to bury the expensiveness of the chip in the enormous margins of iDevice ecosystem.

greedo 6y ago
There's no indication that Apple's Silicon will be more expensive than what's used in iOS/tvOS/watchOS devices currently.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- sjwright 6y ago
  Expense is related to chip size. Apple isn’t going to release chips that benchmark slower than the Intel equivalents. To sell the transition they’ll need to say something simple like “2X faster” on the big screen. So I expect to see 8+ core chips as standard even if they don’t need that many to deliver a good product. The question is whether such a chip would be cheaper for Apple.
  - ben-schaaf 6y ago
    They don't need to be 2x faster than any Intel chips, just the ones in products they're replacing. And as it so happens it's pretty easy to get 2x the performance over an essentially passively cooled and severely power limited Intel chip that's in the air.
    - sjwright 6y ago
      Absolutely. And I don't think it will be difficult at all for Apple to crush Intel in benchmark performance per watt—let alone real world performance with their more targeted silicon. The interesting question is going to be how Apple's GPU stacks up to the competition. We know from the A13X that it is already quite good and I fully expect it to exceed Intel embedded graphics. But what about higher end machines? How long till Apple GPUs can take the fight to discrete graphics?

im_down_w_otp 6y ago

>I'm no cheerleader for Intel but if Intel really wanted to they could release competitive ARM offerings. They've got enough money they could just buy an existing ARM developer and then produce those chips in their fabs. The problem is that Intel no longer has the leading state of the art fabs. They used to be two generations ahead of everyone else, and now they're two behind. The inertia of x86 has kept them afloat, but the longer Intel fabs lag the more ground ARM has been able to make up. Intel fabbing ARM parts isn't going to do them much good unless they also manage to get their process shrink delays worked out and behind them.

giantrobot 6y ago
Intel does have manufacturing issues at smaller node sizes but that's a really complicated thing to measure, node size claims from various semiconductor manufacturers are more marketing than anything else now. There's been some suggestions to replace node size claims with better density metrics https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9063714 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9063714. It's not like TSMC's fabs are some order of magnitude more advanced than Intel's fabs. If Intel had an ARM chip to produce today they could use their considerable fab volume to produce them profitably. Even at large process sizes they could still produce competitive ARM chips. It's not like their current x86 chips at 14nm are slouches.

coldtea 6y ago

>They've managed to change direction in the past Did they have such competition in the past, plus their main market (desktop) becoming irrelevant and mobile (and maybe server) going to another CPU?

giantrobot 6y ago
While desktops specifically are seeing declining sales, laptop sales have remained fairly strong in recent years. Intel still powers the lion's share of laptops sold be they Chromebooks, MacBooks, or Windows laptops. So it's not like their sales are instantly going to dry up. ARM is also still making progress in the server space but it's not predominant. Intel is still powering a lion's share of server hardware as well. So Intel's got the income to make big shifts. There's also enough momentum of continuing x86 sales that their revenue from them won't dry up immediately if they did start building ARM chips.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- coldtea 6y ago
  >While desktops specifically are seeing declining sales, laptop sales have remained fairly strong in recent years. Intel still powers the lion's share of laptops sold be they Chromebooks, MacBooks, or Windows laptops. So it's not like their sales are instantly going to dry up. I don't think absolute numbers are what matters. For a company in the stock market, the fact that mobile has grown 10x the size of desktop sales, where the desktop has become stagnant means they lost big on a market...
  - giantrobot 6y ago
    Intel has huge gross margins on their chips. They make up the difference in sales numbers with their margins. They've had minimal competition from AMD in the desktop/laptop and server markets so they've made money hand over fist. While they could be a player in the smartphone CPU market it's not like they had it tied up and lost it. Intel's real challenge now is recognizing that the desktop/laptop and server markets are no longer guaranteed sales for them.

RobLach 6y ago

Will Intel’s management take the capital risk to gain a fab advantage again? Or will they ride the way down from their peak for 30 years with everyone on the top hopping off with golden parachutes?

senderista 6y ago

What if ARM just refused to sell them a license?

vidarh 6y ago
As far as I understand, Intel has a license already.
- dis-sys 6y ago
  for an very old version
  - vidarh 6y ago
    They have an architecture license. Which means they are free to design their own ARM designs.
    - dis-sys 6y ago
      limited to an very old architecture no one is using anymore. ex-ARM employee here.
      - vidarh 6y ago
        I thought the point is the architecture license lets them design their own? Also Intel clearly has some sort of license that covers modern cores as well, given it manufactures FPGA's with various newer ARM cores based on its purchase of Altera.
    - bogomipz 6y ago
      Does the architecture license just allow them to create a CPU that uses the ARM ISA? Or does it include other ARM IP as well?
jmnicolas 6y ago
Why would they ?

Causality1 6y ago

Big.LITTLE has always somewhat baffled me as to how well it works. Is my phone actually good at assigning low priority tasks to the little cores? It's always seemed unlikely given how half-assed it seems to be when it comes to much easier things like not trimming the app I'm currently working with for using too much power or taking less than five solid minutes to notice I've driven away from my house's wifi and it needs to use 4G instead.

lebuffon 6y ago

"Intel losing out to ARM designs is really Intel's choice at this point." Historically this seems to be the case most of the time. Market leaders miss the next iteration of their industry. The "Innovators Dilemma" is ever present. "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. Western Union internal memo, 1876.

bogomipz 6y ago

>"They've got enough money they could just buy an existing ARM developer and then produce those chips in their fabs." Is a developer in this context a third party who goes out and licenses the different IP Cores for a customer and then designs a chip using them for that customer? If so I'm curious why would someone use a third party developer over ARM itself? Who are some of the bigger ARM developers today?