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Honestly, I have no idea what Intel was doing playing with sensors and robots. I think the previous CEO was trying to diversify, seeing his failures in the CPU

Honestly, I have no idea what Intel was doing playing with sensors and robots. I think the previous CEO was trying to diversify, seeing his failures in the CPU business, and rather than playing to company's strengths he looked at whatever hot tech was out there.

worrycue 5y ago
This isn’t the first time Intel has flirted with things outside their core competence. They dabbled with SSDs, mobile phone modems, … etc. It’s just something Intel does. Why? Don’t know.
- bluGill 5y ago
  All companies need to flirt with things that might be good. Some of those things will turn out so great that you leave your orignial company behind, while others will be duds that you drop, and still others will be small side businesses that make you a bit of money in down times but otherwise are just barely worth doing. Intel used to be a memory company that flirted with making CPUs. I don't recall when they left the memory business (I think in the 1980s)
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    Intel used to be a RAM company that sold microprocessors as a side business.
- thrashh 5y ago
  I mean we’ve had Bell Labs et. al. and now we have transistors, Unix, CCDs to allow digital cameras, etc… They can keep on trucking with R&D
- yann2 5y ago
  They are big enough to take the loss. No harm in trying.
  - joezydeco 5y ago
    Unless you actually get duped into using XScale, Zephyr, Edison, etc....
- snovv_crash 5y ago
  I get SSDs and modems, this allows them to leverage their fabs. Maybe even CCDs. But 3D computational geometry, camera lenses and LIDAR? And drones? This seems a bit out-of-line to me.
- morcheeba 5y ago
  The sad thing is that Intel had a real advantage in RealSense... they had good processors in there (especially with the Movidius chips) that were well integrated (e.g. they didn't have to support a fancy SDK for all users - just the internal Realsense group). Doing the same 3d processing with ARM or Intel is 1/10th the frame rate at much more power.
  - reasonabl_human 5y ago
    Can you elaborate on the benefits of what intel built here as opposed to doing the processing on host machines? My company uses these in some products but I never investigated the market or trade space for this type of device
    - morcheeba 5y ago
      Yeah! There is a lot of processing to do the disparity calculation... it's basically doing lots of correlations with a different amount of x shift and finding the delta-x that has the highest correlation. This delta-x disparity gets calculated in to a z distance. So, intel made a custom processor for this that's really good at the correlations. The original one was the D4, and later they used their movidius chip. Both have lots of multiplier-accumulate silicon, so it can do the computations in parallel. Their architectures are also set up for convolution (which re-uses a lot of data) rather than random-processing (like a CPU does), so they could feed these math engines without a lot of data transfer -- this makes it more power efficient. You could do something similar in an FPGA, but dedicated silicon is going to be faster, cheaper, and use less power.
  - snovv_crash 5y ago
    Thing is, my personal perspective (haha) is that single-shot stereo is a dead-end tech. There simply isn't enough information to infer depth in the difficult situations, range is severely limited, and every frame it basically re-calculates all of the information from the previous frame from scratch, making it wildly inefficient. Of course, it works well as a tech demo and in controlled environments, and it's easy to understand and then brute-force with custom hardware. The problem is that it sucked the life out of better techniques which might actually work in the real world.
- sseagull 5y ago
  Tech companies don't know what to do with all their money (although Intel perhaps a bit less so). Google's core is search & advertising. But they are also in email, video streaming, messaging & video chat, cloud computing, mobile phones, gaming (Stadia), self-driving cars, drone delivery, quantum computing, and probably many other things that I can't think of. Edit: Yes I know it’s technically Alphabet, but in practical terms, it’s Google
  - rualca 5y ago
    > Tech companies don't know what to do with all their money (although Intel perhaps a bit less so). Lidar has high computational needs, which directly influences accuracy, and both spacial and time resolution. Post-processing steps also have high computational needs, such as infering structure, do coregistration, handle point density, etc. Also, practical applications often demand and depend on meeting constraints such as low power requirements and size. If a company such as Intel managed to leverage their know-how to provide Lidar hardware that was competitive in both performance and price then they could as well develop a machine that prints money.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  Funny how we now forget that at one point in time Intel was dabbling in CPUs when their core competence was DRAM chips. Things change.
zamadatix 5y ago
RealSense camera technology was used in laptops for Windows Hello the same way as Intel NICs and Intel GPUs and Intel audio controllers and Intel SSDs were used by their traditional segment. It'd be a bit silly for Intel to be successful in all of those spaces and not ask "and what would it look like to sell this part without bundling our CPU".
Traster 5y ago
Yeah the previous CEO bascially announced a number of big bets - AI, 5G, VR, Autonomous Driving and one or two others (can't remember off the top of my head), they were all associated with a number of big acquisitions most of which ended pretty embarassingly (Altera for 5G, MobilEye for Autonomous driving, Nervana for AI etc) It followed the same familiar pattern, screw up the company over a long protracted acquisition, try to gain market share through bundling, all whilst driving the core talent ouf of the business by completely failing to invest. This is a big reason where Intel's problems came from. They looked to diversify rather than deliver.
- jsight 5y ago
  How is mobileye embarrassing? They seem to be overwhelmingly the most common choice among automotive OEMs, and their growth rate is really solid already.
  - Traster 5y ago
    They bought mobilEye because MobilEye and Intel had signed a deal with BMW to produce autonomous vehicles. To quote their press release > BMW Group, Intel, and Mobileye are joining forces to make self-driving vehicles and future mobility concepts become a reality. The three leaders from the automotive, technology and computer vision and machine learning industries are collaborating to bring solutions for highly and fully automated driving into series production by 2021. Needless to say - a few years of toiling away and it turned out that this was not going to happen the way Intel had hoped. In fact if you go and look at BMW's website about autonomous driving it's almost comical that their list of acheivements stop the year before that deal was signed. I'm not saying MobilEye aren't doing decent stuff (and they've certainly done a fantastic job of staying independent of Intel) but they've done nothing like what was expected of them. It's also important to remember that the bundling and strategic acquisitions Intel make often masks how successful they really are in a business - it'll often turn out the design win is more about bundling a bunch of services together rather than actually beating out competition.
    - jsight 5y ago

worrycue 5y ago

This isn’t the first time Intel has flirted with things outside their core competence. They dabbled with SSDs, mobile phone modems, … etc. It’s just something Intel does. Why? Don’t know.

bluGill 5y ago
All companies need to flirt with things that might be good. Some of those things will turn out so great that you leave your orignial company behind, while others will be duds that you drop, and still others will be small side businesses that make you a bit of money in down times but otherwise are just barely worth doing. Intel used to be a memory company that flirted with making CPUs. I don't recall when they left the memory business (I think in the 1980s)
- kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
  Intel used to be a RAM company that sold microprocessors as a side business.
thrashh 5y ago
I mean we’ve had Bell Labs et. al. and now we have transistors, Unix, CCDs to allow digital cameras, etc… They can keep on trucking with R&D
yann2 5y ago
They are big enough to take the loss. No harm in trying.
- joezydeco 5y ago
  Unless you actually get duped into using XScale, Zephyr, Edison, etc....
snovv_crash 5y ago
I get SSDs and modems, this allows them to leverage their fabs. Maybe even CCDs. But 3D computational geometry, camera lenses and LIDAR? And drones? This seems a bit out-of-line to me.
morcheeba 5y ago
The sad thing is that Intel had a real advantage in RealSense... they had good processors in there (especially with the Movidius chips) that were well integrated (e.g. they didn't have to support a fancy SDK for all users - just the internal Realsense group). Doing the same 3d processing with ARM or Intel is 1/10th the frame rate at much more power.
- reasonabl_human 5y ago
  Can you elaborate on the benefits of what intel built here as opposed to doing the processing on host machines? My company uses these in some products but I never investigated the market or trade space for this type of device
  - morcheeba 5y ago
    Yeah! There is a lot of processing to do the disparity calculation... it's basically doing lots of correlations with a different amount of x shift and finding the delta-x that has the highest correlation. This delta-x disparity gets calculated in to a z distance. So, intel made a custom processor for this that's really good at the correlations. The original one was the D4, and later they used their movidius chip. Both have lots of multiplier-accumulate silicon, so it can do the computations in parallel. Their architectures are also set up for convolution (which re-uses a lot of data) rather than random-processing (like a CPU does), so they could feed these math engines without a lot of data transfer -- this makes it more power efficient. You could do something similar in an FPGA, but dedicated silicon is going to be faster, cheaper, and use less power.
- snovv_crash 5y ago
  Thing is, my personal perspective (haha) is that single-shot stereo is a dead-end tech. There simply isn't enough information to infer depth in the difficult situations, range is severely limited, and every frame it basically re-calculates all of the information from the previous frame from scratch, making it wildly inefficient. Of course, it works well as a tech demo and in controlled environments, and it's easy to understand and then brute-force with custom hardware. The problem is that it sucked the life out of better techniques which might actually work in the real world.
sseagull 5y ago
Tech companies don't know what to do with all their money (although Intel perhaps a bit less so). Google's core is search & advertising. But they are also in email, video streaming, messaging & video chat, cloud computing, mobile phones, gaming (Stadia), self-driving cars, drone delivery, quantum computing, and probably many other things that I can't think of. Edit: Yes I know it’s technically Alphabet, but in practical terms, it’s Google
- rualca 5y ago
  > Tech companies don't know what to do with all their money (although Intel perhaps a bit less so). Lidar has high computational needs, which directly influences accuracy, and both spacial and time resolution. Post-processing steps also have high computational needs, such as infering structure, do coregistration, handle point density, etc. Also, practical applications often demand and depend on meeting constraints such as low power requirements and size. If a company such as Intel managed to leverage their know-how to provide Lidar hardware that was competitive in both performance and price then they could as well develop a machine that prints money.
ashtonkem 5y ago
Funny how we now forget that at one point in time Intel was dabbling in CPUs when their core competence was DRAM chips. Things change.

zamadatix 5y ago

RealSense camera technology was used in laptops for Windows Hello the same way as Intel NICs and Intel GPUs and Intel audio controllers and Intel SSDs were used by their traditional segment. It'd be a bit silly for Intel to be successful in all of those spaces and not ask "and what would it look like to sell this part without bundling our CPU".

Traster 5y ago

Yeah the previous CEO bascially announced a number of big bets - AI, 5G, VR, Autonomous Driving and one or two others (can't remember off the top of my head), they were all associated with a number of big acquisitions most of which ended pretty embarassingly (Altera for 5G, MobilEye for Autonomous driving, Nervana for AI etc) It followed the same familiar pattern, screw up the company over a long protracted acquisition, try to gain market share through bundling, all whilst driving the core talent ouf of the business by completely failing to invest. This is a big reason where Intel's problems came from. They looked to diversify rather than deliver.

jsight 5y ago
How is mobileye embarrassing? They seem to be overwhelmingly the most common choice among automotive OEMs, and their growth rate is really solid already.
- Traster 5y ago
  They bought mobilEye because MobilEye and Intel had signed a deal with BMW to produce autonomous vehicles. To quote their press release > BMW Group, Intel, and Mobileye are joining forces to make self-driving vehicles and future mobility concepts become a reality. The three leaders from the automotive, technology and computer vision and machine learning industries are collaborating to bring solutions for highly and fully automated driving into series production by 2021. Needless to say - a few years of toiling away and it turned out that this was not going to happen the way Intel had hoped. In fact if you go and look at BMW's website about autonomous driving it's almost comical that their list of acheivements stop the year before that deal was signed. I'm not saying MobilEye aren't doing decent stuff (and they've certainly done a fantastic job of staying independent of Intel) but they've done nothing like what was expected of them. It's also important to remember that the bundling and strategic acquisitions Intel make often masks how successful they really are in a business - it'll often turn out the design win is more about bundling a bunch of services together rather than actually beating out competition.
  - jsight 5y ago