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To me, that move makes a lot of sense. But judging from the other comments, I'm the only one with that assessment. I'm my opinion, the secret sauce that makes

To me, that move makes a lot of sense. But judging from the other comments, I'm the only one with that assessment. I'm my opinion, the secret sauce that makes Intel dominate certain industries is software. And it has been for some years already. If you need really fast mathematical number crunching, e.g. high frequency trading or realtime audio filtering, then you need MKL, the Intel math kernel library. If you want to further reduce latency with parallelism, you need TBB, the Intel thread building blocks. Raytracing? Intel embree. Once you are locked in that deeply, the raw Intel vs AMD performance becomes meaningless. You only care about how fast the Intel libraries run So a CEO with experience building high performance low level software seems like an amazing fit. Edit: And I almost forgot, the Intel compiler used in pretty every PC game to speed up physics. Plus some people have seen success replacing GPUs with icc+avx for huge deployment cost savings in AI.

danpalmer 6y ago
To me this description sounds like a specialist high performance computing company rather than a consumer technology company. That may be a perfectly reasonable market to be in, but is that type of company worth $200bn? I'm not sure. Roughly 40% of their revenue is consumer chips where, apart from some games optimisation, they are no longer standing out from the crowd, and the leader is arguably Apple, with AMD doing well. The next ~30% of their business is servers, where there may be a significant number of HPC clients, but the bulk of this is again likely to be VMs running non-Intel specific software, and this market is starting to realise that Intel is nothing special here. Looking at their revenue breakdown, I struggle to put more than 20% into the things that you mention they are great at. Should they focus on this? It would lose them much of their market cap if they did.
- fxtentacle 6y ago
  I agree with your market breakdown, but surely not with your assessment. In the consumer segment, you have regular people trying to make vacation videos with software like Adobe Premiere and Adobe Media Encoder, or Magix. Nvenc quality is bad. AMD is horribly slow. The only fast high quality encode is with Intel's dedicated CPU instructions, which both apps heavily promote to their users. And the 30% that you mention that run VMs... Wouldn't they be pretty happy if Intel added dedicated CPU instructions to make VMware better? I agree that for the work that I do, AMD is as good as or better. But people doing highly parallelizable tasks like compiling are the minority.
  - danpalmer 6y ago
    I think you might over estimate the prevalence of video editing software like this. Adobe don't appear to sell consumer versions anymore, it's only pro subscriptions now. Magix is sold at a "vacation video friendly" price, but doesn't mention Intel in their marketing material. I just don't think the market for home devices is thinking about their video encoding time when they buy a laptop, but I do think they'll use an M1 Mac and find it surprisingly fast, or hear from a friend or family member that they are really good. Intel just haven't been optimising for the main user experience seen by these people, or those writing "normal" server software either. They've been pushing AVX512 instead, which looks good for video or things like that, but not for regular use-cases. Another good example is how fast the M1 chips (and the A chips in iPhones) perform at Javascript benchmarks. Those benchmarks look a lot more like what most people are doing most of the time than video encoding benchmarks.
    - mcosta 6y ago
      > but I do think they'll use an M1 Mac and find it surprisingly fast, or hear from a friend or family member that they are really good. That only happens in California.
    - fxtentacle 6y ago
      MAGIX heavily mentions Intel in their marketing. "4K Ultra HD video editing with Intel and MAGIX" "Enjoy HD Video editing with Magix Movie Editor Pro and Intel Iris Graphics" "Edit in 4K Ultra HD" + Intel Logo "Finish and Share videos quickly with Intel Iris Graphics" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT9KOtN7KFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT9KOtN7KFM Plus, as a user of the software, I can tell you that if you tick the "Hardware Acceleration" checkbox on AMD, a popup will tell you to buy a supported Intel CPU and then turn the checkbox off again. BTW I'm picking Magix here because in the local electronics store, that's the video software that you can buy as a box and that is featured in bundles with Intel laptops. So if someone clueless walks in there and says they need video editing, this is most likely what they will end up with.
      - fomine3 6y ago
- tw04 6y ago
  >Roughly 40% of their revenue is consumer chips where, apart from some games optimisation, they are no longer standing out from the crowd, and the leader is arguably Apple, with AMD doing well. You lost me at Apple. Apple owns around 15% of the PC market space and almost the entirety of that is Intel-based systems. Outside of HN, nobody cares about the M1 chip, it isn't a selling point to my mom or her friends. If someone at the Apple store recommends it they might buy it instead of an intel-based system but it definitely isn't something they're seeking out. The only threat Intel has right now in the consumer space is AMD, and it's a very real threat. AMD won both Sony and Microsoft console designs, and the mobile Ryzen 5000 chips released at CES look to have enough OEM design wins to put a serious hurt on Intel in 2021. Even if Apple goes 100% M1, there's the other 85% of the market that Intel is likely far more concerned about.
  - parasubvert 6y ago
    I think you are vastly underestimating the revolution of what the M1 represents to the PC industry.
    - tw04 6y ago
      I think you are vastly overestimating the "revolution" of what the M1 represents to the industry. Apple isn't selling it to any other PC makers, and corporations aren't pivoting away from Microsoft for a CPU. Every single ARM chip that's been targeted at the Windows world has produced yawn-inducing performance.
    - icedchai 6y ago
      M1 is amazing. I think people are also underestimating how fast Intel can catch up.
    - fxtentacle 6y ago
      I think you are vastly underestimating how hard IT departments will kick you if you request or bring a device that cannot properly execute the company-critical legacy Windows x64 software. Like SAP, for example. (SAP is the largest non-American software company by revenue and does business management, workflow automation, and bookkeeping) My prediction is that outside of hipster startups, M1 will have no effect on business laptop sales.
reacharavindh 6y ago
The compiler tricks can only get you so far. I administered a HPC cluster and we have a lot of software dependent on MKL and BLAS. However, with the lucrative performance boost AMD seems to put out, open source libraries like BLIS and open BLAS are attempting to fill gaps. Trust me, no one likes the intel lock-in if there is an alternative that is even close enough in performance.
gameswithgo 6y ago
mkl runs fine on amd now once you un-handicap it
CyberDildonics 6y ago
> If you want to further reduce latency with parallelism, you need TBB, the Intel thread building blocks. That's not how latency works and there is nothing too special about Intel's TBB library. It is a big bloated group of libraries that doesn't actually contain anything irreplaceable. Don't be fooled by marketing or people that haven't looked under the hood. It should also work on amd cpus. > Raytracing? Intel embree. Embree is a cool convenience, but also doesn't marry anyone to intel cpus.
karmasimida 6y ago
> I'm my opinion, the secret sauce that makes Intel dominate certain industries is software. And it has been for some years already Intel's secret sauce is inertia. The thought that Intel's is not challengeable, and the world doesn't need a company to dethrone it either. But that assumption is no longer true, and the counter movement is in its full swing. The future of computing is on not CPU if you ask me. It would move from general computing to heterogeneous computing, and possibly application-specific chips/FPGA. MKL is fast, probably, but GPU and ASIC would be even faster.

danpalmer 6y ago

To me this description sounds like a specialist high performance computing company rather than a consumer technology company. That may be a perfectly reasonable market to be in, but is that type of company worth $200bn? I'm not sure. Roughly 40% of their revenue is consumer chips where, apart from some games optimisation, they are no longer standing out from the crowd, and the leader is arguably Apple, with AMD doing well. The next ~30% of their business is servers, where there may be a significant number of HPC clients, but the bulk of this is again likely to be VMs running non-Intel specific software, and this market is starting to realise that Intel is nothing special here. Looking at their revenue breakdown, I struggle to put more than 20% into the things that you mention they are great at. Should they focus on this? It would lose them much of their market cap if they did.

fxtentacle 6y ago
I agree with your market breakdown, but surely not with your assessment. In the consumer segment, you have regular people trying to make vacation videos with software like Adobe Premiere and Adobe Media Encoder, or Magix. Nvenc quality is bad. AMD is horribly slow. The only fast high quality encode is with Intel's dedicated CPU instructions, which both apps heavily promote to their users. And the 30% that you mention that run VMs... Wouldn't they be pretty happy if Intel added dedicated CPU instructions to make VMware better? I agree that for the work that I do, AMD is as good as or better. But people doing highly parallelizable tasks like compiling are the minority.
- danpalmer 6y ago
  I think you might over estimate the prevalence of video editing software like this. Adobe don't appear to sell consumer versions anymore, it's only pro subscriptions now. Magix is sold at a "vacation video friendly" price, but doesn't mention Intel in their marketing material. I just don't think the market for home devices is thinking about their video encoding time when they buy a laptop, but I do think they'll use an M1 Mac and find it surprisingly fast, or hear from a friend or family member that they are really good. Intel just haven't been optimising for the main user experience seen by these people, or those writing "normal" server software either. They've been pushing AVX512 instead, which looks good for video or things like that, but not for regular use-cases. Another good example is how fast the M1 chips (and the A chips in iPhones) perform at Javascript benchmarks. Those benchmarks look a lot more like what most people are doing most of the time than video encoding benchmarks.
  - mcosta 6y ago
    > but I do think they'll use an M1 Mac and find it surprisingly fast, or hear from a friend or family member that they are really good. That only happens in California.
  - fxtentacle 6y ago
    MAGIX heavily mentions Intel in their marketing. "4K Ultra HD video editing with Intel and MAGIX" "Enjoy HD Video editing with Magix Movie Editor Pro and Intel Iris Graphics" "Edit in 4K Ultra HD" + Intel Logo "Finish and Share videos quickly with Intel Iris Graphics" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT9KOtN7KFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eT9KOtN7KFM Plus, as a user of the software, I can tell you that if you tick the "Hardware Acceleration" checkbox on AMD, a popup will tell you to buy a supported Intel CPU and then turn the checkbox off again. BTW I'm picking Magix here because in the local electronics store, that's the video software that you can buy as a box and that is featured in bundles with Intel laptops. So if someone clueless walks in there and says they need video editing, this is most likely what they will end up with.
    - fomine3 6y ago
tw04 6y ago
>Roughly 40% of their revenue is consumer chips where, apart from some games optimisation, they are no longer standing out from the crowd, and the leader is arguably Apple, with AMD doing well. You lost me at Apple. Apple owns around 15% of the PC market space and almost the entirety of that is Intel-based systems. Outside of HN, nobody cares about the M1 chip, it isn't a selling point to my mom or her friends. If someone at the Apple store recommends it they might buy it instead of an intel-based system but it definitely isn't something they're seeking out. The only threat Intel has right now in the consumer space is AMD, and it's a very real threat. AMD won both Sony and Microsoft console designs, and the mobile Ryzen 5000 chips released at CES look to have enough OEM design wins to put a serious hurt on Intel in 2021. Even if Apple goes 100% M1, there's the other 85% of the market that Intel is likely far more concerned about.
- parasubvert 6y ago
  I think you are vastly underestimating the revolution of what the M1 represents to the PC industry.
  - tw04 6y ago
    I think you are vastly overestimating the "revolution" of what the M1 represents to the industry. Apple isn't selling it to any other PC makers, and corporations aren't pivoting away from Microsoft for a CPU. Every single ARM chip that's been targeted at the Windows world has produced yawn-inducing performance.
  - icedchai 6y ago
    M1 is amazing. I think people are also underestimating how fast Intel can catch up.
  - fxtentacle 6y ago
    I think you are vastly underestimating how hard IT departments will kick you if you request or bring a device that cannot properly execute the company-critical legacy Windows x64 software. Like SAP, for example. (SAP is the largest non-American software company by revenue and does business management, workflow automation, and bookkeeping) My prediction is that outside of hipster startups, M1 will have no effect on business laptop sales.

reacharavindh 6y ago

The compiler tricks can only get you so far. I administered a HPC cluster and we have a lot of software dependent on MKL and BLAS. However, with the lucrative performance boost AMD seems to put out, open source libraries like BLIS and open BLAS are attempting to fill gaps. Trust me, no one likes the intel lock-in if there is an alternative that is even close enough in performance.

gameswithgo 6y ago

mkl runs fine on amd now once you un-handicap it

CyberDildonics 6y ago

> If you want to further reduce latency with parallelism, you need TBB, the Intel thread building blocks. That's not how latency works and there is nothing too special about Intel's TBB library. It is a big bloated group of libraries that doesn't actually contain anything irreplaceable. Don't be fooled by marketing or people that haven't looked under the hood. It should also work on amd cpus. > Raytracing? Intel embree. Embree is a cool convenience, but also doesn't marry anyone to intel cpus.

karmasimida 6y ago

> I'm my opinion, the secret sauce that makes Intel dominate certain industries is software. And it has been for some years already Intel's secret sauce is inertia. The thought that Intel's is not challengeable, and the world doesn't need a company to dethrone it either. But that assumption is no longer true, and the counter movement is in its full swing. The future of computing is on not CPU if you ask me. It would move from general computing to heterogeneous computing, and possibly application-specific chips/FPGA. MKL is fast, probably, but GPU and ASIC would be even faster.