7 ms·

I wonder how this is possible? I imagine its partly due to manufacturing improvements (14nm vs 5nm) I mean how can Intel fall so far behind in only a couple yea

I wonder how this is possible? I imagine its partly due to manufacturing improvements (14nm vs 5nm) I mean how can Intel fall so far behind in only a couple years? I know they were one of the earliest investors in ASML’s EUV. Why couldn’t they push for smaller nodes? Is it because they were milking their current nodes too far? I saw them marketing freaking TEC’s to cool down their 500W Cpu gaming rigs on LTT and derbauer recently. What made TSMC so successful? Is it primarily thanks to their business strategy? Or did Intel do something so wrong they tumbled down this far? I know that Intel’s 10nm is closer to 7nm TSMC but still their competition is coming up with interesting and relevant technologies while Intel is like a junkyard of half baked ideas. 5g modems? Arduino competitor? Vaporware GPU’s since Larrabee? Claims of dominance in NN accelerators with nothing solid? Nirvana? Optane 600 series garbage SSDs? Stupid desktop computing form factor ideas? I can go on... I don’t hate Intel or root for any other company. I’m just trying to understand how incompetence like this happens in companies

Nelson69 6y ago
No idea but I suspect the "unified" on chip memory is very very quick. Some friends and I were BSing about the "pro" level parts, it you can graft 2 or 4 M1s together, use off chip RAM and then treat that onboard 16GB like cache? We're talking about some game changing stuff.
- rbanffy 6y ago
  The Xeon Phi had up to 16GB of fast memory in the same package as the main die. IIRC, it could be used as memory or as cache for external memory (which was much slower). If Apple integrates two more memory chips, it'll be able to power a pretty solid desktop or laptop. On the performance, Rosetta is most likely doing JIT so that most of the time it's running native ARM code. It did this with PPC binaries and DEC had it for Alpha.
  - 95014_refugee 6y ago
    As noted elsewhere, Roesetta doesn't JIT unless the AOT transpilation lets it down. Most apps are statically transpiled at installation time...
    - ecnahc515 6y ago
      That's (AOT transpilation) quite the interesting approach to the problem. No wonder it's so fast.
      - kzrdude 6y ago
        We could also entertain the idea that if they would find some instruction particularly hard to emulate - they could have added new instructions on their own chip to cover it.
- ACAVJW4H 6y ago
  Didn’t Intel have a similar idea with Skylake? Those had very fast albeit smaller eDRAM die glued to the processor. It was dropped on subsequent generations.
  - Dylan16807 6y ago
    It worked pretty well but Intel clearly never liked the idea. They only offered it on a couple low-end models even before dropping it.
  - buildbot 6y ago
    It’s actually still surprisingly relevant in terms of performance [1], and I see it as a precursor to the gigantic caches we are seeing in the latest chips. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16195/a-broadwell-retrospective-review-in-2020-is-edram-still-worth-it https://www.anandtech.com/show/16195/a-broadwell-retrospecti...
  - rsynnott 6y ago
    My impression was that this may have been designed at Apple’ behest; certainly they were the major user. Older than Skylake, btw; Haswell had it.
- Geee 6y ago
  It might make sense to use very fast SSD as the main memory and on-chip RAM as cache. Huge amounts of RAM make only sense if your disks are slow or your workload actually needs the whole RAM which is rare.
- MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
  > on chip memory is very very quick It is not on-chip memory, the dies are separate, they're just in the same package. They seem to use standard LPDDR4 connectivity, so I don't think its actually faster. The "unified" bit seems to matter more: having a single address space for both CPU & GPU, but this is pure speculation. I don't know if AMD or Intel APUs do this too.
  - alblue 6y ago
    The fact they are on the same package means that the electrical signals have a lot less far to travel from memory to cpu, and therefore you don’t have the signal losses or interference from the board having to route memory lines externally. As a result you would be able to drive a higher bandwidth because you don’t need to be as limiting with the transfer time of signals.
    - MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
      Or you could use less power for the same speed. Hard to tell what Apple did, without some detailed benchmarks. I suppose one could bench memcpy and derive the clock rate from that.
    - Taniwha 6y ago
      It's unlikely you're going to transfer data any faster - they're using commodity drams like anyone else - they will however be able to save a clocks's worth of latency here and there which is useful
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  I do wonder where Apple will go with the Mac Pro. I guess a lot depends on how well the existing model has been selling (which we don't know).
wtallis 6y ago
Intel's current fab troubles are simply inexcusable. There are some factors that can account for part of the problem, but at this point Intel is 5+ years late on delivering a usable, profitable successor to their 14nm process. And 14nm got off to a slow, rocky start too. Intel's fab business has been horribly mismanaged, and the CPU design business has been forced to believe fab roadmaps that don't have any credibility.
- manquer 6y ago
  Perhaps it is because all the latest Intel fabs are in the U.S. in Hillsboro, Oregon. Other foundries like TSMC benefit from the ecosystem and cheaper cost in East Asia ? i.e. they can afford to make more mistakes than Intel can if it is cheaper to do so.
  - wtallis 6y ago
    I don't think cost of labor is a big factor here. Intel has no trouble maintaining a large enough workforce. They continually decided not to have parallel teams designing processors for their unproven 10nm and their successful 14nm nodes (or one team making a relatively portable design), even years after it was clear that 10nm was not going to work out as well as needed by their processor design roadmap. That wasn't for lack of staffing or inability to afford enough engineers. It was management hubris. (On the other hand, I've often pointed out that Intel's attempts to develop two microarchitectures in parallel have always failed in the long run, with one project ending up woefully uncompetitive.)
pritovido 6y ago
"What made TSMC so successful? Is it primarily thanks to their business strategy?" Basically they are riding the new wave of cheap devices that outnumber the x86 devices by 10x 20x. Basically everything uses an ARM CPU these days, not just tablets and phones, but microwaves, TVs, projectors, refrigerators, ovens, 3D printers... That makes those devices extremely cheap on volume and make innovations to happen faster than o a single company like Intel, that was not interested on those low margin products. Intel is far from incompetent, they just decided to get advantage of their monopoly position to reap as big profits and margins as they could get for the longest possible time, instead of cannibalizing themselves with lower margins. And it was great for them. Their executives have done great. They have just ruled the semiconductor industry and wanted to enjoy it.
- ragnarok451 6y ago
  It's funny because this seems like a textbook case of the innovator's dilemma (from Clayton Christensen) in a nutshell - what worked for Intel was just working so well, that cannibalizing it with something new didn't make sense - until it was too late.
  - tosh 6y ago
    I think you will like this essay: https://jamesallworth.medium.com/intels-disruption-is-now-complete-d4fa771f0f2c https://jamesallworth.medium.com/intels-disruption-is-now-co... discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25092721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25092721
  - rodgerd 6y ago
    Intel have tried time and time and time again to get away from x86; some of their efforts have been underwhelming (the i960) while others were genuinely radical and innovative (the iAXP 432), and others were at least interesting (the Itanium).
    - dboreham 6y ago
      And they made ARM devices for a while.
musicale 6y ago
> I wonder how this is possible? Binary translation can work pretty well for user code, especially synthetic benchmarks.
rsynnott 6y ago
> I mean how can Intel fall so far behind in only a couple years? Arguably Intel has been falling behind since the delays in replacing Haswell (so, last six years or so). It just hasn’t been particularly visible, as the ARM vendors simply don’t compete in the same spaces, until now. Though, in what might be an early sign in retrospect, x86 phone chips, after a lacklustre launch, vanished without a trace some years back.
segmondy 6y ago
Read "Innovator's Dilemma"
w0utert 6y ago
>> I know they were one of the earliest investors in ASML’s EUV. They may have been one of the earliest investors in EUV (along with TSMC, by the way), but in terms of adoption and roadmap they have been way behind both TSMC and Samsung. I don't know the exact numbers of machines but my educated guess is that TSMC and Samsung together probably have close to 10x the EUV wafer capacity compared to Intel. And have had it for much longer as well. The problem Intel created for itself is that they have always had a very stubborn over-confidence in their own knowledge of process technology, and have driven tool manufacturers like ASML to work within Intels constraints, instead of working together to alleviate them. Their hubris has bitten them now that EUV has become economically viable compared to Intels process technology that relies heavily on triple and quadruple patterning, and very little of Intels 'old' process technology knowledge carries over to EUV. TSMC has also had a lot of teething pains with EUV but they have been very determined to make it work, and that's paying off now.
- ksec 6y ago
  > I don't know the exact numbers of machines but my educated guess is that TSMC and Samsung together probably have close to 10x the EUV wafer capacity compared to Intel. There are currently zero EUV Wafer from Intel. Which means the answer to your question with would be close to infinite.
  - w0utert 6y ago
    I'm pretty sure Intel has had some EUV tools installed for some time already, they're just not using them for any kind of HVM yet as they are ~3 years behind their own process technology roadmap by now.
lagadu 6y ago
Intel (or AMD for that matter who are using TSMC) isn't falling behind, it's just that geekbench is completely unrepresentative of real world performance across architectures, as Linus points out here[0] due to the test including hardware accelerated tasks that benefit specifically these modern arm chips. [0] https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpostid=136666 https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpost...
- thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
  That's 7 years old
  - Lionga 6y ago
    still relevant
    - usehackernews 6y ago
      In Geekbench5, they benchmark html5, SQLite reads, pdf rendering, text rendering etc. Seems somewhat relevant. They are providing an upper bound on this activity, and that’s good to know. https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench5-cpu-workloads.pdf https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench5-cpu-workloads.pdf
    - thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
      Still relevant to people running Geekbench 3, unlike this topic.
- GeekyBear 6y ago
  >There’s been a lot of criticism about more common benchmark suites such as GeekBench, but frankly I've found these concerns or arguments to be quite unfounded. The only factual differences between workloads in SPEC and workloads in GB5 is that the latter has less outlier tests which are memory-heavy, meaning it’s more of a CPU benchmark whereas SPEC has more tendency towards CPU+DRAM. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...
simion314 6y ago
There were some ex-Intel people commenting on a previous thread and they told about a lot if internal politics/fighting between inside groups. It might not be the main reason but part of it.

Nelson69 6y ago

No idea but I suspect the "unified" on chip memory is very very quick. Some friends and I were BSing about the "pro" level parts, it you can graft 2 or 4 M1s together, use off chip RAM and then treat that onboard 16GB like cache? We're talking about some game changing stuff.

rbanffy 6y ago
The Xeon Phi had up to 16GB of fast memory in the same package as the main die. IIRC, it could be used as memory or as cache for external memory (which was much slower). If Apple integrates two more memory chips, it'll be able to power a pretty solid desktop or laptop. On the performance, Rosetta is most likely doing JIT so that most of the time it's running native ARM code. It did this with PPC binaries and DEC had it for Alpha.
- 95014_refugee 6y ago
  As noted elsewhere, Roesetta doesn't JIT unless the AOT transpilation lets it down. Most apps are statically transpiled at installation time...
  - ecnahc515 6y ago
    That's (AOT transpilation) quite the interesting approach to the problem. No wonder it's so fast.
    - kzrdude 6y ago
      We could also entertain the idea that if they would find some instruction particularly hard to emulate - they could have added new instructions on their own chip to cover it.
ACAVJW4H 6y ago
Didn’t Intel have a similar idea with Skylake? Those had very fast albeit smaller eDRAM die glued to the processor. It was dropped on subsequent generations.
- Dylan16807 6y ago
  It worked pretty well but Intel clearly never liked the idea. They only offered it on a couple low-end models even before dropping it.
- buildbot 6y ago
  It’s actually still surprisingly relevant in terms of performance [1], and I see it as a precursor to the gigantic caches we are seeing in the latest chips. [1] https://www.anandtech.com/show/16195/a-broadwell-retrospective-review-in-2020-is-edram-still-worth-it https://www.anandtech.com/show/16195/a-broadwell-retrospecti...
- rsynnott 6y ago
  My impression was that this may have been designed at Apple’ behest; certainly they were the major user. Older than Skylake, btw; Haswell had it.
Geee 6y ago
It might make sense to use very fast SSD as the main memory and on-chip RAM as cache. Huge amounts of RAM make only sense if your disks are slow or your workload actually needs the whole RAM which is rare.
MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
> on chip memory is very very quick It is not on-chip memory, the dies are separate, they're just in the same package. They seem to use standard LPDDR4 connectivity, so I don't think its actually faster. The "unified" bit seems to matter more: having a single address space for both CPU & GPU, but this is pure speculation. I don't know if AMD or Intel APUs do this too.
- alblue 6y ago
  The fact they are on the same package means that the electrical signals have a lot less far to travel from memory to cpu, and therefore you don’t have the signal losses or interference from the board having to route memory lines externally. As a result you would be able to drive a higher bandwidth because you don’t need to be as limiting with the transfer time of signals.
  - MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
    Or you could use less power for the same speed. Hard to tell what Apple did, without some detailed benchmarks. I suppose one could bench memcpy and derive the clock rate from that.
  - Taniwha 6y ago
    It's unlikely you're going to transfer data any faster - they're using commodity drams like anyone else - they will however be able to save a clocks's worth of latency here and there which is useful
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
I do wonder where Apple will go with the Mac Pro. I guess a lot depends on how well the existing model has been selling (which we don't know).

wtallis 6y ago

Intel's current fab troubles are simply inexcusable. There are some factors that can account for part of the problem, but at this point Intel is 5+ years late on delivering a usable, profitable successor to their 14nm process. And 14nm got off to a slow, rocky start too. Intel's fab business has been horribly mismanaged, and the CPU design business has been forced to believe fab roadmaps that don't have any credibility.

manquer 6y ago
Perhaps it is because all the latest Intel fabs are in the U.S. in Hillsboro, Oregon. Other foundries like TSMC benefit from the ecosystem and cheaper cost in East Asia ? i.e. they can afford to make more mistakes than Intel can if it is cheaper to do so.
- wtallis 6y ago
  I don't think cost of labor is a big factor here. Intel has no trouble maintaining a large enough workforce. They continually decided not to have parallel teams designing processors for their unproven 10nm and their successful 14nm nodes (or one team making a relatively portable design), even years after it was clear that 10nm was not going to work out as well as needed by their processor design roadmap. That wasn't for lack of staffing or inability to afford enough engineers. It was management hubris. (On the other hand, I've often pointed out that Intel's attempts to develop two microarchitectures in parallel have always failed in the long run, with one project ending up woefully uncompetitive.)

pritovido 6y ago

"What made TSMC so successful? Is it primarily thanks to their business strategy?" Basically they are riding the new wave of cheap devices that outnumber the x86 devices by 10x 20x. Basically everything uses an ARM CPU these days, not just tablets and phones, but microwaves, TVs, projectors, refrigerators, ovens, 3D printers... That makes those devices extremely cheap on volume and make innovations to happen faster than o a single company like Intel, that was not interested on those low margin products. Intel is far from incompetent, they just decided to get advantage of their monopoly position to reap as big profits and margins as they could get for the longest possible time, instead of cannibalizing themselves with lower margins. And it was great for them. Their executives have done great. They have just ruled the semiconductor industry and wanted to enjoy it.

ragnarok451 6y ago
It's funny because this seems like a textbook case of the innovator's dilemma (from Clayton Christensen) in a nutshell - what worked for Intel was just working so well, that cannibalizing it with something new didn't make sense - until it was too late.
- tosh 6y ago
  I think you will like this essay: https://jamesallworth.medium.com/intels-disruption-is-now-complete-d4fa771f0f2c https://jamesallworth.medium.com/intels-disruption-is-now-co... discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25092721 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25092721
- rodgerd 6y ago
  Intel have tried time and time and time again to get away from x86; some of their efforts have been underwhelming (the i960) while others were genuinely radical and innovative (the iAXP 432), and others were at least interesting (the Itanium).
  - dboreham 6y ago
    And they made ARM devices for a while.

musicale 6y ago

> I wonder how this is possible? Binary translation can work pretty well for user code, especially synthetic benchmarks.

rsynnott 6y ago

> I mean how can Intel fall so far behind in only a couple years? Arguably Intel has been falling behind since the delays in replacing Haswell (so, last six years or so). It just hasn’t been particularly visible, as the ARM vendors simply don’t compete in the same spaces, until now. Though, in what might be an early sign in retrospect, x86 phone chips, after a lacklustre launch, vanished without a trace some years back.

segmondy 6y ago

Read "Innovator's Dilemma"

w0utert 6y ago

>> I know they were one of the earliest investors in ASML’s EUV. They may have been one of the earliest investors in EUV (along with TSMC, by the way), but in terms of adoption and roadmap they have been way behind both TSMC and Samsung. I don't know the exact numbers of machines but my educated guess is that TSMC and Samsung together probably have close to 10x the EUV wafer capacity compared to Intel. And have had it for much longer as well. The problem Intel created for itself is that they have always had a very stubborn over-confidence in their own knowledge of process technology, and have driven tool manufacturers like ASML to work within Intels constraints, instead of working together to alleviate them. Their hubris has bitten them now that EUV has become economically viable compared to Intels process technology that relies heavily on triple and quadruple patterning, and very little of Intels 'old' process technology knowledge carries over to EUV. TSMC has also had a lot of teething pains with EUV but they have been very determined to make it work, and that's paying off now.

ksec 6y ago
> I don't know the exact numbers of machines but my educated guess is that TSMC and Samsung together probably have close to 10x the EUV wafer capacity compared to Intel. There are currently zero EUV Wafer from Intel. Which means the answer to your question with would be close to infinite.
- w0utert 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure Intel has had some EUV tools installed for some time already, they're just not using them for any kind of HVM yet as they are ~3 years behind their own process technology roadmap by now.

lagadu 6y ago

Intel (or AMD for that matter who are using TSMC) isn't falling behind, it's just that geekbench is completely unrepresentative of real world performance across architectures, as Linus points out here[0] due to the test including hardware accelerated tasks that benefit specifically these modern arm chips. [0] https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpostid=136666 https://www.realworldtech.com/forum/?threadid=136526&curpost...

thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
That's 7 years old
- Lionga 6y ago
  still relevant
  - usehackernews 6y ago
    In Geekbench5, they benchmark html5, SQLite reads, pdf rendering, text rendering etc. Seems somewhat relevant. They are providing an upper bound on this activity, and that’s good to know. https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench5-cpu-workloads.pdf https://www.geekbench.com/doc/geekbench5-cpu-workloads.pdf
  - thrwyoilarticle 6y ago
    Still relevant to people running Geekbench 3, unlike this topic.
GeekyBear 6y ago
>There’s been a lot of criticism about more common benchmark suites such as GeekBench, but frankly I've found these concerns or arguments to be quite unfounded. The only factual differences between workloads in SPEC and workloads in GB5 is that the latter has less outlier tests which are memory-heavy, meaning it’s more of a CPU benchmark whereas SPEC has more tendency towards CPU+DRAM. https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-deep-dive/4 https://www.anandtech.com/show/16226/apple-silicon-m1-a14-de...

simion314 6y ago

There were some ex-Intel people commenting on a previous thread and they told about a lot if internal politics/fighting between inside groups. It might not be the main reason but part of it.