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For years, Intel sat on its CPU monopoly and now the tide turns against them
- aurizon 6y agoYears of ruthless commercial exploitation by Intel, especially against AMD - whom we must praise... Chip set purchase linkage and all the rest.
- gpapilion 6y agoIntel still has plenty of margin to buy the market with, and their own fabs. They can keep a good portion of the server market until someone makes the cost to switch low enough to be attractive. That said, I think they blew it the the cellphone market, and now this has haunted them. They aren’t competitive in the broader market, and more the cost to switch from arm there is high. AMD I think is a near term issue in the server market, but ARM is the real issue.
- smallnamespace 6y agoIntel’s previous acquisitions have been pretty bad. It doesn’t matter how deep your pockets are if you’re unable to successfully integrate or manage what you buy, and this speaks to management/organizational dysfunction, which money also doesn’t easily fix.
- _ph_ 6y agoIn general, the elephant in the room is: what if Apple outperforms both Intel and AMD with their Apple Silicon? ARM is an efficient architecture and the have a process node advantage for 2021. If they wanted, they probably could make very convincing server CPUs. If they want to move as announced the Mac Pro to arm, they would need server class CPUs anyway
- wmf 6y agoWhat happened when Apple outperformed Intel and AMD with PowerPC? People kept buying Windows PCs. What if Apple outperforms both Intel and AMD with their Apple Silicon? People will keep buying Windows and ChromeOS PCs. AWS is testing the server market right now with Graviton2, basically a drop-in replacement for x86 that's faster and cheaper. It's going to be fascinating to watch and I hope AWS reports architecture usage share over time.
- snapetom 6y agoApple didn't make PowerPC chips. That's a huge difference. First, Apple wasn't a supplier. If Silicon takes off, they could become a supplier. Second, the reason they're switching to Silicon is the same reason they switched from IBM to Intel - the chip suppliers didn't react to the changing consumer landscape. By making consumer devices, Apple is much more in tune with that landscape than IBM/Intel is. They can adapt chips much better and won't be handcuffed by chip suppliers in the future.
- spideymans 6y agoMoving to their own chips also allows for much more aggressive pricing.
- tpetry 6y agoIs graviton2 really faster? I dont remember the exact details but didnt they still have a (long) way until reaching intel/amd performance? If i remember correctly they are currently only interesting because of their price.
- pantalaimon 6y ago> Is graviton2 really faster? No https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=epyc-vs-graviton2&num=1 https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=epyc-vs-...
- philliphaydon 6y agoFrom running my asp .net core api on Intel vs Graviton 2, graviton turned out to be roughly 15% faster. But the SSR of vue turned out to be roughly 10% slower.
- _ph_ 6y agoThat is almost 20 years past, many things have changed. Most importantly, the iPhone has happened. I am not claiming, that Apple completely takes over the PC market, just that the market share could considerably rise. Having the better processors and iPhone compatibility could do the trick.
- webmobdev 6y ago> what if Apple outperforms both Intel and AMD with their Apple Silicon? It wouldn't matter at all to either AMD or Intel until Apple starts supplying these chips to other OEM's. Till then, it will just be used in the walled garden of Apple products, which is the very thing that makes it very unattractive for many users.
- tonyedgecombe 6y agoI suspect it’s mostly price that makes it unattractive to users. Worrying about the walled garden is a fringe concern.
- amluto 6y agoThis depends on the use case. For phones and consumer applications, the walled garden is often tolerable. But imagine trying to run a cloud service, a FinTech system, a factory, an ERP system, etc in the walled garden.
- _ph_ 6y agoThe Mac isn't a walled garden, why should servers with Apple Silicon be?
- Dahoon 6y agoNot as long as Windows is not a default OS.
- ajuc 6y agoThey have almost 0 computer market share in developing markets, nobody knows how to use apple, nobody knows their stack and their programming languages, all the infrastructure is built around windows. With smartphones it's not such big a problem cause you don't do anything productive on smartphones anyway. With PC/laptops it's a big disadvantage I don't see changing in a few years just because of small performance advantages, even if the prices weren't an issue.
- webmaven 6y ago
- baskire 6y agoThe arm MacBooks will mean developing ARM code for your server is easier than x86. I highly suspect we’ll see a switch from intel to arm in the server space in next 5-10 years. The cloud vendors have so much to gain by building their own arm chips.
- danieldk 6y agoI wonder whether Intel/AMD will start offering x86_64 licensing if AArch64 takes off on servers in a major way. You'd think that they would prefer to have competitors on their own architecture/terms than something out of their control.
- arvinsim 6y agoNvidia bought ARM so it would be interesting to see where this goes.
- AgentOrange1234 6y agoI wonder how much easier? Could devs use the Rosetta emulator to do x86 stuff on the ARM Macs anyway?
- rnantes 6y agoI could see Apple come out with their own in-house Cloud Computing platform within the next 2 years. - They would be vertically integrated with Apple Silicon - Apple themselves are increasingly depending on cloud services - Async/Await in Swift will likely land next year, making Server-Side Swift much more appealing - Apple is greatly increasing cloud / Kubernetes hires - Could share a single Apple Silicon ARM architecture from client(ios) to dev(mac) to cloud
- amluto 6y agoUnless something has changed radically since MacOS Server failed, Apple would either need to do massive software engineering of a sort that they are unfamiliar with or they would need to use a different OS entirely to have a credible cloud offering. Mac OS is unlikely to be able to compete with Linux or FreeBSD in the near future even if the CPU is magically better.
- tpetry 6y agoThey could have a very bare bone macOS based server operating system specialised for running virtual machines. Dont they have their own xhyve virtualisation layer?
- ravi-delia 6y agoA lot of the prelim work is probably already being done with their docker optimizations.
- _ph_ 6y agoFederighi mentioned during some interviews after the Big Sur presentation, that macOS is a great hypervisor for vitualisation, when asked about Linux on AS Macs. Running Linux in the cloud would equally easy.
- snazz 6y agoApple’s in-house cloud stuff is mostly Java on commodity Linux servers. I don’t think they are looking to have macOS compete with Linux. Most of the special sauce from GCP and AWS is the integrated software services anyway.
- snapetom 6y agoRe: ARM - spot on. They sold their XScale/StrongARM assets right around the same time Apple switched to them. They were probably riding high on that win. However, market growth switched so quickly from PC to mobile/IoT, they couldn't get in. Instead, they just wasted resources on projects like Moblin which became boondoggles.
- dehrmann 6y agoThis article focuses on PC CPUs too much. Yes, they're lagging there, and they're lagging on the fab side, too, but their big mistake was failing to get into the mobile CPU market, even if it meant making ARM CPUs. Now they're stuck making PC and server CPUs, while ARM might even be taking over those markets.
- spideymans 6y agoIf Windows on ARM ever goes mainstream, Intel will find themselves unable to compete on consumer PCs as well. Their inability to compete on mobile could decimate their consumer PC business. But only time will tell.
- TwoBit 6y agoYeah but really they never had a chance in the mobile market. No way. But they owned the PC market and blew it by improving nothing from 2010 through 2018. That's much less forgivable.
- coder543 6y ago> Yeah but really they never had a chance in the mobile market. You're saying that if Intel had used their leading edge semiconductor fabs to make ARM CPUs that were exceptionally good, they would not have stood a chance in mobile? I disagree. Qualcomm would have faced serious challenges keeping up with these hypothetical Intel ARM processors back in the early 2010s. They still might, but Intel hasn't even tried. Intel was just too proud to do something like that. They wanted x86 to become the smartphone standard, which it obviously didn't... and now they're suffering defeat on all fronts.
- jerrysievert 6y agowhat's to stop intel from purchasing fab time from TSMC, other than pride?
- slimginz 6y agoThey are purchasing fab time from TSMC right now because of the failure to produce 10nm for years but both sides are saying that it's only a temporary thing. Now if you're talking about in the future, the biggest hurdle is going to be Apple and AMD since they got there first and already have contracts for specific amounts of fab time/wafers. Intel coming in now is basically only able to take whatever table scraps are left.
- simcop2387 6y agoUnless intel decides to fund the creation of a fab just for themselves with tsmc but that'd be a much much more expensive process and likely mean that they'd be giving up on their own fabs in the not too distant future.
- feifan 6y agoIntel is likely planning to purchase some fab capacity from TMSC already: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/27/tsmc-shares-jump-as-intel-faces-next-generation-chip-delays.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/27/tsmc-shares-jump-as-intel-fa... "…U.S. chipmaker Intel said it faces delays for its next-generation chips and could outsource some of the production.…While Intel didn’t name potential third parties, analysts see TSMC as being a contender."
- paulmd 6y agointel already announced that Xe GPUs will be made at "an external fab" (which everyone believes to be TSMC). https://www.anandtech.com/show/15974/intels-xehpg-gpu-unveiled-built-for-enthusiast-gamers-built-at-a-thirdparty-fab https://www.anandtech.com/show/15974/intels-xehpg-gpu-unveil...
- SomeoneFromCA 6y agoIntel produces military grade CPU's too, which probably cannot be produces overseas.
- GeekyBear 6y agoFor years now, Intel's only way to get more performance out of their functional process nodes has been to push power and heat higher. Now, the Tiger Lake performance per watt story just isn't that impressive compared to the competition. >Here we present the 15W vs 28W configuration figures for the single-threaded workloads, which do see a jump in performance by going to the higher TDP configuration, meaning [Tiger Lake] is thermally constrained at 15W even in [single threaded] workloads. Comparing it against Apple’s A13, things aren’t looking so rosy as the Intel CPU barely outmatches it even though it uses several times more power, which doesn’t bode well for Intel once Apple releases its “Apple Silicon” Macbooks. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review-deep-dive-core-11th-gen/8 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review...
- CyberDildonics 6y agoIs something that can be condensed down to a number really a "story"?
- marcinzm 6y ago> which doesn’t bode well for Intel once Apple releases its “Apple Silicon” Macbooks. How so? Apple's market share is something like 10% so it's a minority of Intel's market.
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y agoApple is a trendsetter, though: I think, as a rule, Apple’s decisions are copied by a large part of the market so its market share isn’t an adequate measurement of its influence. This will be especially true if Apple Silicon MacBooks are impressive in some way, like extra-long battery life.
- the-dude 6y agoWill manufacturers start to demand Windows on ARM? ( WARM? )
- 6y ago
- fmajid 6y agoIntel still has an edge in single-core performance for laptop CPUs, and I agree that for a laptop that matters more than multicore due to the sorry state of multithreading in most apps. That said, the cash cow is servers, and the AMD advantage in cores, RAM and I/O is overwhelming except for a very few niches that care about single-thread performance (high frequency trading is probably most of it).
- cowmix 6y agoI dunno, I think my kid's 4900U laptop is the single core king. Right?
- Synaesthesia 6y agoIt is but Intel still manufactures in larger volumes by far.
- BobbyJo 6y agoHaving a worse product in higher volume is hardly any argument that intel had an edge. If anything it's evidence that they are crashing faster than supply changes can shift.
- wmf 6y agoNo, Tiger Lake is faster (sometimes a little, sometimes a lot). From a sibling comment: https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review-deep-dive-core-11th-gen/8 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16084/intel-tiger-lake-review...
- mamon 6y agoThat compares to 4800U, not 4900U GP mentioned...
- selectodude 6y agoUnless the 4900U is twice as fast as the 4800U (it's not), Intel's stuff is still faster.
- skindoe 6y agoAnyone else confused at first glance thinking the article was about the company IntelSat based on the title?
- nimish 6y agoGlad I bought AMD years ago at $7 once they had a solid CEO like Su who can execute well. I have hopes that Swan can kick out the dilletantes. Too much engineering going on at Intel that doesn't translate to actual progress.
- fartcannon 6y agoWas it Su or was it actually Keller?
- FullyFunctional 6y agoIt was actually Su. Keller, for all his brilliance, could not turn a company around. After Su, AMD has been very focused and have executed around a plan (marketing insanity notwithstanding). It's just AMD's good fortune that Intel's consistent stumbling have made their great engineering look even more outstanding in comparison.
- plorkyeran 6y agoBoth were required to turn AMD around. Less competent leadership would have squandered the opportunity that Keller gave the company.
- ece 6y agoYep, everyone deservedly gives Keller credit for K8, A4, Zen, but Su was behind the Cell, and has now shown her leadership with Zen and RDNA.
- maerF0x0 6y agoCan someone help me understand around what time did performance per watt become more important than performance per dollar?
- czzr 6y ago2007
- stagger87 6y agoBoth have always been important in different contexts.
- blihp 6y agoIt started with the Pentium 4. The tradeoff of power/heat for the increased clock speed stopped paying off. In fairness, Apple/IBM/Motorola also learned this lesson with the G5 but they were minor players in the market and were largely ignored. So it was roughly between 2005 and 2008 when perf/watt became a thing. I think public awareness of it had a lot to do with Steve Jobs relentlessly pushing perf/watt to help explain the PPC to Intel transition as Apple was just starting its public awareness rocket ride thanks to the iPod taking off.
- agumonkey 6y agolaptops
- RantyDave 6y agoI'd say somewhere in the 2005 ballpark. Performance per watt matters for mobile, obviously, but also for "hyperscalers". If you plug a chip in and run it at full tilt for five years, the cost of the electricity eclipses the cost of the chip quite handily.
- ksec 6y agoAround Pentium 4 and Centrino, so somewhere around 2002 - 2003 ish. The initial projection was that Intel could scale their transistor down indefinitely, we could somehow cool Pentium 4 effectively, and management think clock speed sells, so some day they could scale to 10Ghz CPU. That was when they hit the TDP ceiling. Internally named as Thermal Wall by Intel CTO Patrick Gelsinger. Before Pentium 4 Intel saw the rise of Laptop computer where energy efficiency was the key. And Pentium-M was a side project from (cough) Patrick Gelsinger. Which ultimately saved Intel's Pentium 4 fiasco. The market might have unlimited Dollar for performance. But it is still limited by TDP.
- mshockwave 6y ago> Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, or Chrome run mostly single-core and are everyday consumer tools As a chromium developer, I'm pretty sure Chrome has been leveraging multi-core for a long time
- Iwan-Zotow 6y agodon't they have process-per-tab architecture, so that bad tab won't crash the Chrome?
- eigenvalue 6y agoExcel is also thoroughly multi-core and has been for many years. The formula dependency engine in Excel allows them to chop up workloads efficiently across the cores.
- fomine3 6y agoChromium utilizes multithreads but sometimes I encounter single-threaded bottleneck.
- pauldickwin 6y agoThis is what happens when you put a sales/marketing guy in charge as the CEO.
- megiddo 6y agoWas this written by GPT2 or something? All the sentences are grammatical, but they didn't say anything
- dragonwriter 6y ago> Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, or Chrome run mostly single-core and are everyday consumer tools. Chrome seems very much not to run single core; from what I've read of it's process/threading architecture, it is both aggressively multiprocess and it's processes aggressively multithreaded, with work pushed out as widely as practical, using as many cores as it can, with a strategy around keeping the UI thread and each process’s IO thread as responsive as possible.
- discreteevent 6y agoI think the aggressively multiprocess bit is about isolation rather than parallelism (background tabs should be mainly idle). On multi threaded rendering, isn't that what servo was trying to do? Not sure if chrome has done much there.
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- tomxor 6y ago> and that's the problem Intel is facing. It's just a matter of time when developers will make use of higher core numbers, and distributing the workload across more cores will also reduce the power consumption of the CPU, which is essential for light and portable laptops. I'm not convinced, parallelism is not inevitable for individual applications, it can be hard or not applicable. I understand there are certain CPU intensive programs where the benefit is too great to ignore, but for the rest it still seems like it's not worth the developers time.
- auggierose 6y agoI can't wait for hardware to have thousands of cores by default. In a way, if you program for iOS, that's already the case if you can target Apple Metal with your problem successfully. Many-cores is certainly worth developer's time. It's just that many developers just don't have the education to make use of it. And software development itself is not good enough right now to make consistent and easy use of it.
- kabdib 6y agoConcurrency, as they say, is a bitch. I would hate to program against that model. The best model I've found so far is cooperative multithreading, that is, coroutines that explicitly yield control, combined with well-isolated worker threads and a rendezvous mechanism for passing parameters and getting results back. I can write code all day long in this model and not run into very hard to find concurrency issues . . . or at least, not as many. I've written a ton of code in the "every thread for itself, have fun with locking" universe, and man, life is just too short for that stuff. Naturally you run out of processor headroom in this model because you're essentially single-threaded; message passing between processes and running multiple services, one in each process, is one good approach to scaling. Often you can scale out to the network, too, and with 1K cores you need start worrying about the blast radius of your services when things eventually go sideways so getting off the box is a good idea. And things will go sideways. I can see a thousand cores being useful for embarrassingly parallel things, like classic graphics algorithms where you're doing mostly SIMD with a few variations. But I can't imagine wrangling a zillion cores to do "random logic" type applications where you have to use traditional low-level synchronization primitives. See above: life is short. Feel free to color me a dinosaur. I've only got another 20 years of my career to figure this out :-)
- kasabali 6y ago> Microsoft Excel, PowerPoint, or Chrome run mostly single-core and are everyday consumer tools. I'm sick of hearing this bullshit. Nobody is using those programs solely. If you're running excel you've also Chrome with some web sites opened, also running Spotify or Slack or whatever in the background. Then add Windows running who knows whatever dozens of services constantly. Even an empty Chrome instance starts with a 6+ processes. If I open a handful of tabs the I can easily observe the CPU usage graph making full use of all cores even if momentarily. And these are very basic baseline usage scenarios that's applicable to every single computer user. I'm sorry but I can't help but think anybody still parroting this bullshit claim in this day and age either 1. doesn't know shit about computing 2. is a narrow minded gamer who thinks only metric of performance is FPS 3. is a fanboy apologizing product segmentation via low core products (beware these fans exist both on intel&amd sides)
- asdfasgasdgasdg 6y agoMore to the point, no one buys enthusiast or professional grade CPUs to run chrome or excel. They buy them to run games or do professional compute tasks (video rendering, 3d rendering, photo editing, code compiling, etc.). The companies that work in these spaces have realized that they can't write single threaded code any more. For example, the two big games I play, Hunt:Showdown (cryengine) and Modern Warfare (custom engine) are both happy to use all sixteen logical threads of my Ryzen 3700x. Gone are the days when gamers only cares about single core performance.
- kasabali 6y ago> Gone are the days when gamers only cares about single core performance Unfortunately that's not true. I closely follow popular hardware subreddits (which are disproportionally gaming oriented) and read a fair share of comments every day. The old mentality is still prevalent. The limit gamers care for multi-core is the # of cores game consoles use. People still happily recommend a 4-core CPU over a 6-core CPU with ever-so-slightly-lower ST performance for new builds.
- 6y ago
- Traster 6y agoI don't think it's fair to say that Intel 'sat' on their monopoly. From McAfee, through Altera to (whatever that stupid company that had the drones was), Intel was desparately trying to leverage their monopoly to expand in to new markets. What I think is unique about Intel when compared to their rightful competitors (FAANG + M/S + AMD + Nvidia) is that Intel don't pay for talent. Intel have been cost orientated for atleast a decade now, when 14nm cost spiralled. The problem wasn't that Intel was a monopoly so much as it's just that Intel has been living it's life in the world of real companies, not silicon valley. Intel is viewed/valued/run as a manufacturing company. So they need to hit the eternal treadmill of performance whlist spending like they're just doing average work. It's difficult to do that when Google is just going to 10x the salary of any of your 10x staff.
- bgorman 6y agoIntel's US employees are mostly in Arizona and Oregon, which are much lower cost of living locations than the Bay Area and Seattle. I would be curious to know which companies pay more for process engineers than Intel in the US. My best guess would be Samsung?
- ETHisso2017 6y agoTSMC
- thebigspacefuck 6y agoFrom Glassdoor for Process Engineer (not senior): Intel average is 124k, Apple average is 143k
- arcticbull 6y agoApple doesn't hire outside of Cupertino, and the cost of living there is easily double Arizona and probably 50% more than Portland. I'd rather make 125K in Arizona than 143K in Cupertino that's for sure.
- tuatoru 6y ago> Intel was desparately trying to leverage their monopoly to expand in to new markets. If your business is in an industry with very rapid innovation, would it be wise to lose focus on your core products and processes?
- vaccinator 6y agoI started coding on android with a physical keyboard and the main problem so far is bugs that dont always allow me to switch windows with alt-tab
- andy_ppp 6y agoI bet Intel make a comeback, it’s just a matter of when. Maybe they’ll decide to sideline ARM and make RISC-V cores in a few years, would be interesting to see them make a mobile part designed for phones.
- williadc 6y ago> would be interesting to see them make a mobile part designed for phones. I worked on a well-funded effort to build a top-of-the-line mobile AP (the Broxton half of these [two cancelled programs]). It was a shit show from start to finish. There is so much mismatch between Intel's strengths and what the industry demands that I don't see Intel being successful in this domain if they make another attempt. Things would be worse now than in that attempt, as Intel has suffered significant brain-drain since then. [two cancelled programs]:https://www.anandtech.com/show/10288/intel-broxton-sofia-smartphone-socs-cancelled https://www.anandtech.com/show/10288/intel-broxton-sofia-sma...
- ece 6y agoIntel has been behind on process before and come out fine. They've been ahead on process and technology, but at those times should have been able to capitalize on it to get into mobile and GPUs early on I feel. They couldn't/didn't do it. I was eagerly awaiting Broxton & successors, and now FPGAs and Optane just aren't going to be as big as GPUs and mobile. They have no choice but to keep investing in GPUs and hope for the best in CPUs.
- andy_ppp 6y agoI really don't get why they were trying to build an x86 mobile part that's just making things very difficult for yourselves no?
- williadc 6y agox86 works in mobile form factors, as evidenced by the Silvermont-based SoCs that made it into a few phones, including a reasonably successful Zenphone. The problem I saw was that the design philosophy at Intel was not conducive to fast turnaround, and the mobile market does not wait.
- m33k44 6y agoIntel has an internal systemic problem. The company is run for shareholders, and it is run by sales, marketing and HR teams. The engineers have become second-class citizens, hardware engineers and then at the bottom of the pile are software engineers. When an engineering company is run by a sales-marketing-hr combo, whatever you do it is not going to have better outcomes. Intel is surviving because of achievements of it's founders. They are still reaping the benefits of that. The question is how long!