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Intel is gonna be in deep trouble in couple of years. They are the PowerPC of modern era. IDK what held them back from reimagining the architecture for less pow
by maxpert 5y ago
Intel is gonna be in deep trouble in couple of years. They are the PowerPC of modern era. IDK what held them back from reimagining the architecture for less power hungry processors and tooling. With Mac mainstream switching to ARM and Microsoft doing something similar, I think within next 5 - 10 years ARM is gonna take over Intel architecture in general.
- adminscoffee 5y agodidn't intel have a huge hack where their secret processor data was leaked out? i wouldn't be surprised if all these new chips got inspired by that
- yjftsjthsd-h 5y ago> IDK what held them back from reimagining the architecture They'd been successful for decades, were raking in cash, and remembered the last time they tried something new AKA Itanium AKA the itanic AKA the most mocked architecture of all time. It's a failing, but I can totally understand how they got there.
- tsechin 5y agoClassic innovator's dilemma. They're retreating up-market.
- urda 5y agoThe world is rapidly being consumed by ARM, it will be interesting to see how this plays out from hardware offered on market, to what devs are targeting when conducting builds.
- codezero 5y agoIntel is counting on being nationalized.
- kwere 5y agopretty realistic unfortunately
- codezero 5y agoI’d bet money on it. Or if not nationalized, funded like DOD contractors.
- dragonelite 5y agopretty much they are getting a lot of support from US government. To the point that Samsung and TSMC have to open their order books so the US can "inspect" them. Most likely to snatch away clients or better insight in material usage.
- ivalm 5y agoI think alderlake is very promising. Big-small designed cpus, even on x86, seem like the way to go.
- imwillofficial 5y agoThe way to go for what?
- chorsestudios 5y agoGiven the current semiconductor shortages I don’t think Intel will have any trouble selling chips within the next couple years.
- shrewduser 5y agoSure... but what happens on the other side of these unusual market conditions?
- LegitShady 5y agoamd survived for a long time with worse chips and someone else's fab. Intel has their own fabs and the runway needed to get back in the game.
- metagame 5y agoThey've tried a lot of "reimagining." It never works. No one wants Intel on mobile, despite Intel's mobile chips being absolutely great when they were actually releasing them, and no one wants a genuinely high-performance chip if it means they have to make alterations to how their software is written. I have a lot of criticisms of Intel, but held back from reimagining isn't quite a great one.
- imwillofficial 5y agoTheir low power stuff was garbage. And itanium went unsupported and was half baked. Intel knew where their money makers were, x86 servers. Their attention and investment showed a lack of foresight, combined with their famous bloated engineering teams, is a story as old as time itself.
- genmud 5y agoWhen has intel reimagined products that have low power and low price? Intel has been notorious for having power hungry and overpriced stuff.
- wmf 5y agoDidn't Pouslbo and friends have negative prices ("contra-revenue") yet still nobody wanted them?
- nuerow 5y agoFor those who, like me, never heard of Poulsbo, it's a chipset for Intel's first generation of Atom processors. https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/chipsets/poulsbo https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/chipsets/poulsbo
- baybal2 5y agoPoulsbo was disastrously bad, quirky, and impractical. It took all x86 platform warts, and replaced it with even harder to get right "Poulsbo warts" like SFI, and etc.
- easygenes 5y agoMacs are still a relatively small (but profitable) chunk of the computing world. The ground Intel has lost in desktop and mobile is more than made up for by their utter dominance in server. Intel also has a lot of plays that should bear fruit in holding or retaking ground on consumer compute in the next few years: 1) Arc GPUs. Looks like they will be seriously disruptive. 2) Hedging their process node bets by using TSMC too. The only magic in the wins AMD and Apple have had the last few years have been in them being effectively a manufacturing process node ahead of Intel. 3) Intel will likely be first to market with getting a large set of on-package memory that serves as a bridge between CPU cache and DRAM in terms of latency. Think 8GB+ I am no Intel partisan. My core interest is actually more in seeing performant, open (that is, blob-free [1][2]) hardware. RISC-V and Power10 [3][4] are what I am looking at in that regard. I expect the reports of Intel's impending descent to be largely exaggerated. Still, it is good drama to fuel a hearty compute war. That is to the benefit of all, so have at it. 1: https://raptorcs.com/content/base/faq.html 2: https://www.osnews.com/story/133093/review-blackbird-secure-desktop-a-fully-open-source-modern-power9-workstation-without-any-proprietary-code/ 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power10 4: https://www.hpcwire.com/2021/09/08/ibm-introduces-power10-based-server-the-power-e1080-targets-hybrid-cloud/
- dustintrex 5y agoARM and AMD are both making steady gains in the server space as well though. AMD is already offered by all the hyperscalers, and AWS recently introduced ARM as well.
- rjzzleep 5y agoFrom what I'm seeing, I think assuming that RISC-V CPUs being blob free and open, just because the ISA is open is illusory at best and wilfully lying at worst.
- brucehoult 5y agoWhen you have the complete verilog source code for the CPU core it's pretty hard to hide anything. Following the source code for the C910 core upload 24 hours ago, Olof Kindgren is live-tweeting getting it going in an FPGA using the existing FuseSoC framework. He made significant progress in the first session before going to bed. It would not surprise me if it's working in the next 24 hours.
- fulafel 5y agoIntel had the best high performance ARM processors for a long time (StrongARM, acquired from DEC). Timing is hard.
- a-dub 5y agohow much of arm's renaissance comes from the iphone and qualcomm's socs? i don't recall hearing about arm in other places really... maybe the occasional home router or cable set top box...
- fulafel 5y agoYep, the inertia and economy of scale come from there and when the pendulum is in full swing, servers have seemed inevitable. But timing is hard here too, and lots of things that seem inevitable take many attempts and a long to happen. ARM server chips have near history marked by struggle, there have been several over the last decade. Remember eg AMD in 2012? https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/amd-announces-arm-based-opteron-cpus-due-to-launch-in-2014/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/amd-a... Or this ARM Ltd announcement: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/Server-CPU-Xeon-Opteron-ARM,10302.html#xtor=RSS-181 https://www.tomshardware.com/news/Server-CPU-Xeon-Opteron-AR...
- regularfry 5y agoLow-end ARM chips are everywhere as generic microcontrollers in things you probably only barely think about as having electronic components at all. The next vacuum cleaner I buy will probably have an ARM in it.
- wongarsu 5y agoBut that's mostly phenomenon of this new smartphone era. That market used to be completely dominated by 8bit or 16bit Atmels and PICs (an probably still is, but ARM is gaining market share fast).
- regularfry 5y ago
- phendrenad2 5y agoIt's easy to mistake the obvious computing market for the whole of the computing market. Servers dominates the computing market, and x86 is still dominating the server world, and Intel is still competitive on the server front.
- sidkshatriya 5y ago> Servers dominates the computing market I would wager mobile semiconductor revenue worlwide is bigger than server semiconductor revenue worldwide. But I agree with you that Intel is still dominant in the server world.
- rank0 5y agoAre you comparing ARM to x86 or Intel chips specifically? Intel could design their own ARM chips…it’s an architecture family with a SUPER wide variety of implementations. Everyone seems to be excited about the newer AMD chips which are x86. ARM is nice for low power, low performance workloads like embedded, phones, and laptops.
- yokoprime 5y agoIsn't pretty much all modern x86 cpu's ARM at their core anyways, or am i missing something? The big deal about Apple scilicone is how its an all-in-one and obviously having things compiled for arm in the first place helps
- ElectricalUnion 5y ago> arm at their core Most modern "CISC" processors internally are composed of RISC-like elements with instruction decoders in front. ARM is a specific almost-RISC instruction set architecture.
- snuser 5y agoThat feels like a bit of a stretch their core CPUs are still very competitive, they are planning on manufacturing ARM chips as well
- swalsh 5y agoI'd counter with the opposite sentiment. If Intel's foundry play pays off, they will still be big and important. All these companies designing chips need a place to manufacture them. While Intel's own chips might be decreasing in marketshare, they still have an opportunity to get a tiny sliver from of everyone's pie... and that pie keeps getting bigger.
- micv 5y agoContract manufacturing won't have anywhere near as fat a margin as their CPU lineup has had the last decade though. That'd be a hard thing to sell to the shareholders.
- marcodiego 5y agoApple is using their own cores, Google is using thei own cores, Amazon is using their own cores, I bet Microsoft is next... Eventually these new chips will hit the desktop and then we'll see the x86 start to sink.
- reacharavindh 5y agoI wonder if Intel would see the obvious from a safe distance and play to their strengths instead of a death for pride. Imagine, if Intel would swallow their pride and start building ARM SOCs… they could show their engineering prowess, and use X86 synergies to their advantage. As a buyer, I’d buy ARM cpus from intel if they also provided me a slow path for legacy x86 workloads that I haven’t migrated yet. Also, ADM is just the ISA, so, once a customer locks in to intel’s ARM cpu ecosystem, I’m sure they’ll come up with lots of special additions that then the customer would be hesitant to walk away from. Or, they could be this decade’s IBM and make x86 look like the next generation’s mainframes - niche, even great in some dimensions but out of mainstream use.
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoThey were at the top of the pyramid, that's what happened. Same as when Microsoft had IE6, or the French phone market company was a one provider deal, or when Blackberry was eating the smartphone market. They stop to innovate. They milk the cow. It works for some times, then a new guy arrive in town, Firefox for IE6, Free for French Telecom, iPhone for Blackberry...