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As someone who worked on Intel's phone chip: we definitely didn't win it. We fucked it up twelve ways to Sunday. Why: giant egos. There were turf wars between A
by SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
As someone who worked on Intel's phone chip: we definitely didn't win it. We fucked it up twelve ways to Sunday. Why: giant egos. There were turf wars between Austin, Santa Clara and Israel over who would design it, and the team that won out had long since lost its best principle engineers and had no clue how to spin the architecture to meet the design win. Otellini's hindsight hedge is pure spin: we knew the landing zone, we just didn't know how to get there. And the aforementioned turf war guaranteed we didn't get access to other teams' talent. I'm bitter because it was a really fun team when I moved from Motorola to Intel Austin, and then it just corroded over political battles.
- Someone1234 6y agoDo you think Intel can come back, or is Intel too dysfunctional/inefficient to recover?
- baq 6y agoAMD came back. Fabless, bruised, but also thin, agile and with a 10 year plan that thanks to TSMC they can execute more or less on schedule.
- Ericson2314 6y agoAMD came back from being second fiddle in the right market. Intel would have to come back from being first fiddle in the wrong market.
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y agoI think they have been a commodity for a long time. Rephrased, the discussion is similar to, "Will GE make a comeback in the refrigerator market?" Intel isn't going anywhere, they have many, many big customers to satisfy who simply cannot shift to ARM due to ROIs <=0. And after 30+ years of this, I also don' think there's anything new or revolutionary in silicon fabrication on the horizon. I stopped getting excited about CPU tech when AMD crossed the 1GHz barrier in the PC space. Could be burnout though.
- baybal2 6y ago> And after 30+ years of this, I also don' think there's anything new or revolutionary in silicon fabrication on the horizon. Why so? Few more material, and device generations are on the way. Litho has went through more generation changes in the last 1 decade, than in any previous one. Whole new device classes are on the way: optics on silicon, new memory, logic in the backend, and logic on package. Semiconductor engineering is still a career suicide though, that haven't changed in the last few decades.
- eecc 6y ago> Semiconductor engineering is still a career suicide though, that haven't changed in the last few decades. Wow, so I need to thank myself for accidentally bumbling towards ops and dev? Meh, for me it’s just that in EU there’s a total dearth of opportunities in the industry
- baybal2 6y agoPeople making WordPress websites are making more than PhD research scientists in Taiwan, and Korea.
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
- SteveGerencser 6y agoI had friends at the Intel fab in New Mexico in the 90s and this type of turf war was prevalent even then internally at the fab. Managers were constantly jockeying for position at the expense of manufacturing processes. Just one anecdotal story, one of the wafer guys had an idea to improve a process. He went to his boss who shot it down instantly. Wafer guy knew he was right so went to another manager who liked the idea and implemented it. It ended up working and being a great idea. Instead of being rewarded for his idea, wafer guy was fired by his manager for failing to follow the chain of command. It's built into the culture at Intel to be territorial to advance. It's been that way for at least 30 years. I personally don't see it changing any time soon.
- qznc 6y agoI'm currently reading High Output Management which is 25 years old. So your comment addresses the time where the book was written. Grove certainly sends quite utilitarian vibes. He also says that a collaborative culture is important. Your comment suggests that neither he nor his successors managed to make Intel's culture collaborative enough. Higher management is probably often an iterated prisoners dilemma. Collaborating is best for the company but defecting is good for the ambitious manager.
- ndesaulniers 6y agoIs is a good book you'd recommend otherwise?
- kartickv 6y agoNot the parent, but I read the book, and the principles have become so common nowadays that I never really had a wow moment. It was more like "Yeah, this guy is telling me things I already know." It is nice to see the common knowledge built up from scratch, rather than just automatically accepted the way it is, but I wouldn't consider the value you get from the book worth the time, today.
- 6y ago
- dsr_ 6y agoCompetition is good for markets. There's still not enough competition in the general CPU market, but it's getting closer: Intel, AMD, Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, Broadcom. Intel has money and equipment and existing market share: there's no reason for them not to be profitable for the long term, as long as they stop acting like they don't have any competition (as they did until 2018) or that their only competition is AMD (as they currently are pretending).
- nradov 6y agoIntel will have a chance to regain relevance in several years when the industry reaches the next disruptive inflection point. That will probably be tied to the arrival of a new hardware form factor like AR goggles or direct neural interfaces or something.
- whycombagator 6y ago> There were turf wars between Austin, Santa Clara and Israel over who would design it, and the team that won out had long since lost its best principle engineers So which team/location ended up winning?
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago"winning" is hard to define here, because the work became so diffuse (meaning, several sites grabbed the Bonnell/Silverthorn core and started whacking at it), but on paper (foils?) it was the Austin fellows who got the gold star. Some readers who were there may disagree.
- dirtypersian 6y agoI used to work in Austin. I always thought Austin was the Atom HQ of sorts because that was where ARM was also located. And at the time it seemed like Austin was the mobile epicenter of the chip world. But yeah, at Intel there has always been a rivalry of which location owned what projects. Thank god I'm not there anymore.
- texasbigdata 6y agoWherever the teams at AMD, NVIDIA, Appme and TMSC work out of.
- agumonkey 6y agoIt's somehow incredible how this infiltrates even the most advanced classes of company in terms of technical knowledge. You'd expect a bit more objectivity
- threatofrain 6y agoYou don't use computer science to make sure people are properly incentivized.
- lgessler 6y agoIndeed, for we computer geeks are known for our lack of ego...
- eecc 6y agoAbsolutely, not. Seeing my 4 years old son experiment with social skills I’m learning soo much about the most inexplicable conflict situations I’ve been through in 15 years of IT
- morganf 6y agoSuper super interesting and I'd love discuss - drop me a note (contact info in my bio) :)
- chaboud 6y agoI completely agree with this. I’ve been in software since ‘98, but many of the valuable tools I apply to interpersonal interaction were learned on the path of raising my 5 year old. Natural consequences, timely feedback, parallel modeling, Socratic questioning, mirroring... If you want to know how to handle the politics of a large organization, try interacting with children. The parallels are amazing.
- eecc 6y agoYup, I'm considering offering to help with programming extracurriculars at what will become his school just to get a sneak peek at how the older children deal with unfamiliar abstractions. I've been living in a bubble of tech savviness and contempt for as long as I remember, I need to reset. And he's actually 3, so I can't really sit around and wait another 5-6 years before I get to figure out the perfect "business customer" :D
- _the_inflator 6y agoCorporate mess. I know it, not Intel, but politics, who gets all the credits?, before the first step has been taken - been there.
- zarkov99 6y agoHow much of the blame do you think is Otellini's? I got a really bad feeling about Intel when he became CEO.
- robk 6y ago100% but the culture was already set then. But letting the finance guys run the shop put a stake through the heart of any engineering soul left
- notSupplied 6y agoI have a theory about why turf wars like this happens: the more successful and wealthy an entity, the greater opportunity there is for a manager to take wealth instead of make it. When you’re scrappy and broke, the only path to success is to make the company successful. When the company is rich and multitudinous, an individual can gain more from politics and turf wars rather than actually trying to push an already high enterprise value higher. The “maker:taker” opportunity ratio changes, and so does the type of personality the organization attracts.
- systemvoltage 6y agoYou put it so well, having worked in both large and small companies - I can attest to this theory. An exception might be SpaceX where you have a strong dictator at the top and any annoyances of tribal war get direct authoritarian spanking.
- PakG1 6y agoIs SpaceX already that big to be in the class of overweight titans like Intel?
- systemvoltage 6y agoYou could imagine the division responsible for mobile chip design to be of similar size to a mid-sized company like SpaceX. The optics are the same. You're right Intel is massive - the logistics department at Intel doesn't have any friction with the teams tasked with mobile chip design.
- manquer 6y agoperhaps not in absolute terms, however In the launch industry they are almost as massive if not bigger . spacex also employees 8,000+ people. That is a scale large enough for it to have similar problems of intel size companies.
- paganel 6y ago> An exception might be SpaceX where you have a strong dictator at the top I think a similar thing is happening at Amazon (the strong dictator stuff, I mean), and it's my hunch that Google has started following Intel's trajectory, they just haven't realised it just yet.
- lumberingjack 6y agoFrom my reading articles at the time and me waiting for Android phones to become available before the iPhone was even announced I thought all that apple had to do was scale an SOC to their massive production level other peoplehadd already figured out the computing.
- mytailorisrich 6y agoPhone chips are hard not least, or especially, the telecom part. I'm thinking that some companies underestimate the effort. Broadcom also tried and also failed. They came in cocky because they had succeeded in making Wifi chips with a 10-20 people team so thought that 500-ish people was more than enough for cellular even if Qualcomm had 4x that... I would not be surprised if Intel fell into the same trap.
- evancox100 6y agoTI was also in the mobile AP space for a while then dropped out
- m4rtink 6y agoFrom what I've heard their mobile SoCs were pretty high quality & had superb documentation, running such famous (relatively) open Linux devices such as the legendary Nokia N900. TI dropping out of the mobile game also had a profound effect on the full Maemo/MeeGo saga later on. I guess even Sailfish OS that came after MeeGo is not really immune to SoC supplier dropping out under it as the first Jolla smartphone with Sailfish OS should have run on a SoC from Sony Ericsson only for SE dropping out of the game as well! And the (in?) famous Jolla Tablet had one of those Intel Atom x86 mobile processor.
- ajb 6y agoAt one point there were around 14 companies going for the mobile chip market. So it was clear there was going to be a massive casualty rate.
- rwx 6y agoWhy: giant egos. There were turf wars Ex-Intel engineer here that worked in R&D- I saw the exact same situations during my time and was one of the reasons I left. The way that teams in the same org with the same goals couldn't or wouldn't work together was incredibly frustrating and such a massive waste of effort. At the time I thought it was a unique situation with our group, but it's sad to see that it's more of a systemic issue that still hasn't been corrected.
- intricatedetail 6y agoThere are the opposites as well, I've seen companies that would send you home for even a hint of ego. Essentially "I" was forbidden as it is not in the "TEAM". I much prefer "we" culture than "I" though.
- lostgame 6y agoReminds me of the legendary turf wars between SEGA of Japan and SEGA of America - that cannibalized the company, and resulted in shameful, consumer-insulting mistakes like the SEGA 32x. These issues saw them going from 50% of the console market in 1993/4 to folding console operations less than a decade later. SEGA is my favourite example of 'too big to fail' and turf wars. Console Wars is a great book about this story.
- mrg3_2013 6y agoI used to work there too but from software perspective, they simply did not understand how software world worked. S/W was also relegated as bunch of coding guys. It was not uncommon to see some random benchmark touted to assert superiority, while customers were using it differently. It'll end up becoming a manufacturing company that builds based on spec from Amazon/Google/Apple etc.
- robocat 6y agoUnlike NVIDIA, which is a “Software Company That Produces Chips”. And unlike Apple, which is a software company that sells hardware to run that software.
- Tor3 6y agoIf you want turf wars, even if everything else is perfect: Create turfs. The worst period (and the only bad period) of my own company was during the time when teams working with overlapping stuff worked at different locations (at the time this was simply because we didn't have the room. Fortunately we could get back into the same site when we moved to a bigger location, but it took years to heal what the separate locations cost us).
- foolmeonce 6y agoStrange, I would categorize the problem we had was that most groups had a super-majority of people in California who would end up reaching social consensus instead of having technical arguments.
- rdiddly 6y agoPretty funny, even the one little project I did for Intel as a contractor, apparently there was another group working on their own version of it and mine reeeeally had to beat theirs to be considered a success, and for my client to be considered a success. I think I pulled it off, but it was interesting being a pawn in someone else's chess game!
- texasbigdata 6y agoThat’s why Netflix had that epic comment along the ways of “Enron had engraved Integrity into the marble of the main lobby its corporate headquarters. True values of a corporation get reflected in who gets rewarded, who gets promoted, and who gets let go.” People who are political as a prerequisite need to believe there is both a reward and a low fear of retaliation/termination for their actions.
- BooneJS 6y agoIntel turf wars extend beyond Geos. The 2nd floor and 4th floor of SC12 would tick-tock Xeons and rewrite RTL and verification code just because.
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y agoThe real action was on the 4th floor. You know, I can tell. :)
- jv22222 6y agoPerfect example of why Musk’s no silo rule helps his companies so much.
- wisty 6y agoDidn't Steve Jobs usually greenlight 2 or 3 teams to design then just pick the most promising one to go to production? Sometimes it makes sense to have a bit of competition, but having multiple prototypes (often with slightly different design parameters - e.g. a reliable design, an advanced design, and a moonshot) is a better competition than having managers attacking each other with passive-aggressive Powerpoint shows in a conference room.
- PragmaticPulp 6y agoI worked at a company founded by an ex-Apple CEO. He tried this technique because Steve Jobs did it. The problem was that it doesn’t work at all unless you truly have 2 or 3 entire teams of fully competent people to pull it off. It can work at Apple because they’re absolutely massive and they only focus on a very small number of products. In our case, making two teams work independently on the same problem just created a situation where each team had half as many resources. Given Intel’s history of paying median rather than top wages and losing their best employees to competitors, they didn’t even have one full department capable of pulling this off, let alone 2 or 3.
- socialdemocrat 6y agoI think they are doing it wrong then. You do the cheap parts independently. Then you pair down to fewer choices and transfer resources to fewer groups. You repeat this multiple times depending on your resources. When things get really expensive, you should be down to one idea.
- qchris 6y agoI'd imagine that this can be pretty tricky with more complex systems, where the buy-in for even getting off the ground can be pretty high. In software, that's usually not the case, but I can imagine a number other instances where it wouldn't work. This seems like it would show up the most when the problem isn't a greenfield where getting the first 90% working is the hard part, but on the other end, where the difference comes from optimizing the last 10%, which can be really expensive (i.e. figuring out how to profitably and effectively take production from 1000 parts to 10,000 parts can be much more difficult and costly than moving from 100 to 1000).
- credit_guy 6y agoThis is why good CEO's deserve 100x, 200x, or 300x the median salary. They don't work 300 times more than a regular employees, but they are not supposed to. They are there to prevent all the bad things that naturally happen at large companies: turf wars, bloat, focus on process rather than delivery, duplicated work, manual and buggy processes when automation is possible, unfocused investments, mindless chasing of buzzwords, etc, etc. If you don't have person at the helm who's a blend of visionary and dictator, you end up with a good company sliding in irrelevance, like IBM, and maybe now Intel. Those CEO's who keep their star company in their current place definitely deserve the tens of millions they earn.
- pyb 6y agoDo you observe any correlation between CEO compensation and their skills at the above?
- jdblair 6y agoAre you talking about Atom or XScale? XScale seems the biggest missed opportunity. I can understand the thinking that being just another ARM vendor was a step down from being the owner of an architecture (AMD, and Via, notwithstanding). But with steady improvements and investment, and riding the coat-tails of fabs Intel built, Intel could have been a an actual mobile contender today.
- SoSoRoCoCo 6y agoBonnell which became Atom. I was pushing to make XScale be the 1GHz multi-core lead vehicle but was soundly mocked. XScale died on the vine. You're 100% correct, it was a hyuge missed opportunity.
- martin1975 6y agothis is sad.. sounds like a lot of good talent went wasted. Based on what you said here, sounds like the problem was not engineering talent but lack of vision/leadership :(.
- karmasimida 6y agoIntel didn't have a real competition for a long time. It gets misguided over its own might eventually. Turf war and cookie leaking is a problem for all big companies, we are all humans, when there is no external threat, we turns to infighting. After all, why not? This will compensate the missing competing pressure that is also necessary as well. But unable to have a cohesive strategy and call the shot would be Intel's own downfall. Looking back the past decade, they are on a one-way losing path, without any meaningful expansion. Had they have a decisive leadership, it will definitely fare better right now.
- ineedasername 6y agoI seem to recall Intel was working on a few mobile chips over the past ~15 years. Or was it all part of the same drawn-out failure? I also seem to remember shopping around for a new phone a few years back and coming across android phones running on what seemed like a Frankenstein Atom processor. At the time I thought it was a promising concept, though benchmarks weren't flagship quality. But I'd hoped to eventually see dual-boot phones I could slot into a shell of a laptop to have access to a an ultraportable low-end windows box when needed. I'm kind of disappointed that never came about. (I know there's some promising "shells" for android phones, but I'd really like an OS I can fully control for my desktop experience, and Linux phones don't quite seem mature enough) Anyway, any insight on the above from your unique perspective would be welcome.
- ineedasername 6y agoAnd the aforementioned turf war.... then it just corroded over political battles. I'm no longer surprised, but I'm still always amazed when this happens. It is really crazy how groups within organizations are often unable to see that collaboration is massively more in their interests than minor empire building. It's like they're trying to building a wooden fort a moat filled with mudaround it when they could be building Camelot. (Well, Camelot minus the whole thing with Lancelot giving it to Guinevere, Arthur to his sister, and his estranged son coming back to kill him. Not quite that Camelot.)
- YZF 6y agoIt doesn't help that there's also cultural differences. I've been in a similar turf war between an Israeli team and myself as an ex-Israeli on a different team and there was just a huge gap in how things are done. Both teams could have probably delivered just fine but top management is what really messed things up. So really this is probably mostly lack of leadership, and the turf wars are more of a symptom... The lack of leadership is often not just in being unable to resolve/deal/manage a larger org. but also the hiring of more managers who are unable to do this stuff that eventually get promoted to positions where they end up doing more harm. I'm not sure the engineers themselves having a big ego is a negative. I'd want a team who thinks they can do anything. But how you manage those guys is the problem...
- skynetv2 6y agoPolitics at Intel are crippling. Add too that huge egos, arrogance, red tape, terrible managers, all around arrogance, self congratulatory pats on the back, you'd wonder how anything gets done.
- lr1970 6y agoA former Intel engineer here. Paul Otellini -- a non-engineer -- was not a right man for the CEO job. He instilled a bean-counting culture driving technologists out of the decision-making process. It was downhill ever since he became the boss. And as mentioned elsewhere a counter productive and oftentimes adversarial relationships between "sister" design teams (Santa Clara, Jones Farm, Israel, Austin) was a huge drag.
- Paddywack 6y agoThis thread reminds me of a lecturer I once met who had a theory based on a Machiavellian scale: Entrepreneurs typically rate low. They rely on goodwill and reciprocity and great relationships to get things done as they have zero power. Early power comes from getting people to buy into your vision. Corporate middle / senior managers rate higher because it it generally all about the power. The interesting insight was that as an entrepreneur, when your business scales it is hard to retain the “low Machiavelly” approach. This is where a lot of the growing pains come from.. Edit: add link https://www.harleytherapy.co.uk/counselling/machiavellianism-psychology.htm https://www.harleytherapy.co.uk/counselling/machiavellianism...