5 ms·

Intel seems to be on a mission to slide into historical irrelevance. Rome didn't die in a day and neither will Intel. I think this gives new meaning to planned

Intel seems to be on a mission to slide into historical irrelevance. Rome didn't die in a day and neither will Intel. I think this gives new meaning to planned obsolescence.

ethbr0 5y ago
Intel and AMD don't build features no one asks for. TPM and SecureBoot came directly from large customers requesting exactly that. HN (and more broadly, PC users) aren't all of the market for CPUs.
- temac 5y ago
  You seem to imply customers demand bridled CPUs. Thinking about it, there is one scenario for which their "sw-defined silicon" (hello newspeak) would both make sense and not be too much of a fuckery: instead of their regular process that now consists of shipping unvalidated HW and waiting for complaints about bugs for triggering chicken bits in the next microcode, they could ship processor with only the properly validated parts enabled at first, and make people pay for extra perf or features when the remaining validation is actually completed and if it passes. I do not really believe this is their intent thought: people are way too much continuing to act like mean 5% better perf on arbitrary benchmarks has any significance (even regardless of power consumption). So Intel will likely continue to ship broken but allegedly fast processors, and will continue to kill the perfs to remove the bugs once they sold enough. Plus, in a competitive market, it would be an equilibrium hard to achieve if competitors are not making pay for their own deferred enablement.
  - PeterisP 5y ago
    There definitely are major customers (for example, cloud providers) which explicitly demanded "bridled CPUs" like TPM and SecureBoot. It's not not something imposed by Intel, those features are required by an important part of the market, ignored by another important part of the market (unsophisticated consumers), and opposed by an small part of the market which is highly represented among tech and privacy enthusiasts here on HN, but is not really significant in size.
    - mike_d 5y ago
      > cloud providers) which explicitly demanded "bridled CPUs" like TPM and SecureBoot You seem to be terribly confused. End customers demand features, they do not demand limitations. AWS and GCP don't want to spend money acquiring or powering chips with dead areas of silicon.
      - ethbr0 5y ago
        End customers demand features for a price. If there's unused silicon in a chip, but it costs the same or cheaper and has the features they want, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a customer who's going to complain.
        fragmede 5y ago
        If it's possible, customers will buy as many of the cheap ones as they can, at the lower price, and aftermarket enable the unused silicon to get a better product, for less money, which may make the business people unhappy. This happened with some GPUs where they could be "upgraded" to be a better product with a soldering iron.
        ethbr0 5y ago
        I'm familiar, I've gotten a few free AMD cores. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19Ms49ip5PBB7nYnf5urxsySvH-Sdy6liE2EBDaB8b54/edit https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19Ms49ip5PBB7nYnf5urx... At the end of the day, I don't understand the umbrage at companies segmenting by software instead of hardware. As long as it's obvious what you're getting when you buy, and what you buy lives up to what you were promised, why should I care what it actually is? If the company chooses to look the other way and allow relatively easy unlocks without promising stability, well, that's nice. But nothing I'm owed just because it was physically on the chip. Now on the other hand, if a consumer company switches from a product model to a lease/HaaS model... that's an entirely different can of worms, and they can go to hell.
        summm 5y ago
        Great. Where can I get a CPU where that stupid Intel ME or AMD crap is just permanently fused off, and even pay less for it?
- klelatti 5y ago
  > Intel and AMD don't build features no one asks for. Hmmm. Intel has built whole ISAs that no one asked for and didn’t want.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    If you're referring to IA-64, then what information available in 1994 would have made you believe that VLIW / EPIC wasn't a viable path to provide >1 IPC at competitive clock speeds? Something very many customers were asking for and wanted. Some good ideas work. Some good ideas don't. Doesn't mean they were bad ideas, only that unknown at the time factors or future developments made them bad ideas.
    - klelatti 5y ago
      I wasn’t thinking of IA-64 actually. Not sure how the rest of your comment relates to my point though. Customers may want better performance. Doesn’t mean they want your new architecture. They certainly didn’t want IA-64. That’s just a statement of fact.
      - ethbr0 5y ago
        Which ISA were you talking about? And as for the link between architecture and performance, I'll turn the common quip: "You can have performance or architecture changes, pick two." The debate between runtime parallelism vs compiler parallelism, and which would result in greater performance on real world workloads, was an open question at the time. As it turned out, the market preferred answer was "Screw it, we'll push superscalar and add more cores." But that's non-obvious in foresight. See: the famous P68/NetBurst/Pentium 4 vs P6+/Pentium M struggles.
        klelatti 5y ago
        I broadly agree that it was non obvious and don’t really blame Intel for trying IA-64. I was really (semi humorously) trying to push back against the parent comment saying that everything these firms have done has arisen directly from customer demand. Obviously firms must think that there is demand for new products or features but sometimes they just misunderstand the market. To give another example was there really any demand from customers for x86 cores in smartphones or was it Intel just trying to establish a market presence? To answer your question iAPX432.
- mike_d 5y ago
  The "TPM" you know today started life as Microsoft Palladium, an attempt by Microsoft to create a hardware DRM implementation for "content producers" that could tell the OS what was allowed and not allowed on your computer. The assumed goal at the time was that once the frog was sufficiently boiled it would be used to enforce Windows licensing as well. After much backlash they diverted their efforts into a cabal with Compaq, HP, IBM, and Intel to make it more general purpose and actually allow the end user to store keys. Secure boot was mostly just a toy until Google implemented it in Chromebooks and the large customers you speak of pointed and said "I want that!"
gibbonsrcool 5y ago
Well, it's not for lack of ambition. Their roadmap has them back on top with 18A in 2024. They also have plans to make a zettascale (yes zetta) supercomputer by 2027 +- 1 year. As much as intel is known for stifling progress, so have all (most/many?) encumbant monopolies. I hope they stay close enough to AMD, and vice versa, for healthy competition.
- baq 5y ago
  the 12th gen CPUs are quite close to AMD on performance; perf per watt obviously depends, but it used to be way worse. don't assume intel is dead; AMD was assumed dead back in bulldozer years.

Intel seems to be on a mission to slide into historical irrelevance. Rome didn't die in a day and neither will Intel. I think this gives new meaning to planned obsolescence.

ethbr0 5y ago

Intel and AMD don't build features no one asks for. TPM and SecureBoot came directly from large customers requesting exactly that. HN (and more broadly, PC users) aren't all of the market for CPUs.

temac 5y ago
You seem to imply customers demand bridled CPUs. Thinking about it, there is one scenario for which their "sw-defined silicon" (hello newspeak) would both make sense and not be too much of a fuckery: instead of their regular process that now consists of shipping unvalidated HW and waiting for complaints about bugs for triggering chicken bits in the next microcode, they could ship processor with only the properly validated parts enabled at first, and make people pay for extra perf or features when the remaining validation is actually completed and if it passes. I do not really believe this is their intent thought: people are way too much continuing to act like mean 5% better perf on arbitrary benchmarks has any significance (even regardless of power consumption). So Intel will likely continue to ship broken but allegedly fast processors, and will continue to kill the perfs to remove the bugs once they sold enough. Plus, in a competitive market, it would be an equilibrium hard to achieve if competitors are not making pay for their own deferred enablement.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  There definitely are major customers (for example, cloud providers) which explicitly demanded "bridled CPUs" like TPM and SecureBoot. It's not not something imposed by Intel, those features are required by an important part of the market, ignored by another important part of the market (unsophisticated consumers), and opposed by an small part of the market which is highly represented among tech and privacy enthusiasts here on HN, but is not really significant in size.
  - mike_d 5y ago
    > cloud providers) which explicitly demanded "bridled CPUs" like TPM and SecureBoot You seem to be terribly confused. End customers demand features, they do not demand limitations. AWS and GCP don't want to spend money acquiring or powering chips with dead areas of silicon.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      End customers demand features for a price. If there's unused silicon in a chip, but it costs the same or cheaper and has the features they want, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a customer who's going to complain.
      - fragmede 5y ago
        If it's possible, customers will buy as many of the cheap ones as they can, at the lower price, and aftermarket enable the unused silicon to get a better product, for less money, which may make the business people unhappy. This happened with some GPUs where they could be "upgraded" to be a better product with a soldering iron.
        ethbr0 5y ago
        I'm familiar, I've gotten a few free AMD cores. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19Ms49ip5PBB7nYnf5urxsySvH-Sdy6liE2EBDaB8b54/edit https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/19Ms49ip5PBB7nYnf5urx... At the end of the day, I don't understand the umbrage at companies segmenting by software instead of hardware. As long as it's obvious what you're getting when you buy, and what you buy lives up to what you were promised, why should I care what it actually is? If the company chooses to look the other way and allow relatively easy unlocks without promising stability, well, that's nice. But nothing I'm owed just because it was physically on the chip. Now on the other hand, if a consumer company switches from a product model to a lease/HaaS model... that's an entirely different can of worms, and they can go to hell.
      - summm 5y ago
        Great. Where can I get a CPU where that stupid Intel ME or AMD crap is just permanently fused off, and even pay less for it?
klelatti 5y ago
> Intel and AMD don't build features no one asks for. Hmmm. Intel has built whole ISAs that no one asked for and didn’t want.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  If you're referring to IA-64, then what information available in 1994 would have made you believe that VLIW / EPIC wasn't a viable path to provide >1 IPC at competitive clock speeds? Something very many customers were asking for and wanted. Some good ideas work. Some good ideas don't. Doesn't mean they were bad ideas, only that unknown at the time factors or future developments made them bad ideas.
  - klelatti 5y ago
    I wasn’t thinking of IA-64 actually. Not sure how the rest of your comment relates to my point though. Customers may want better performance. Doesn’t mean they want your new architecture. They certainly didn’t want IA-64. That’s just a statement of fact.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      Which ISA were you talking about? And as for the link between architecture and performance, I'll turn the common quip: "You can have performance or architecture changes, pick two." The debate between runtime parallelism vs compiler parallelism, and which would result in greater performance on real world workloads, was an open question at the time. As it turned out, the market preferred answer was "Screw it, we'll push superscalar and add more cores." But that's non-obvious in foresight. See: the famous P68/NetBurst/Pentium 4 vs P6+/Pentium M struggles.
      - klelatti 5y ago
        I broadly agree that it was non obvious and don’t really blame Intel for trying IA-64. I was really (semi humorously) trying to push back against the parent comment saying that everything these firms have done has arisen directly from customer demand. Obviously firms must think that there is demand for new products or features but sometimes they just misunderstand the market. To give another example was there really any demand from customers for x86 cores in smartphones or was it Intel just trying to establish a market presence? To answer your question iAPX432.
mike_d 5y ago
The "TPM" you know today started life as Microsoft Palladium, an attempt by Microsoft to create a hardware DRM implementation for "content producers" that could tell the OS what was allowed and not allowed on your computer. The assumed goal at the time was that once the frog was sufficiently boiled it would be used to enforce Windows licensing as well. After much backlash they diverted their efforts into a cabal with Compaq, HP, IBM, and Intel to make it more general purpose and actually allow the end user to store keys. Secure boot was mostly just a toy until Google implemented it in Chromebooks and the large customers you speak of pointed and said "I want that!"

gibbonsrcool 5y ago

Well, it's not for lack of ambition. Their roadmap has them back on top with 18A in 2024. They also have plans to make a zettascale (yes zetta) supercomputer by 2027 +- 1 year. As much as intel is known for stifling progress, so have all (most/many?) encumbant monopolies. I hope they stay close enough to AMD, and vice versa, for healthy competition.

baq 5y ago
the 12th gen CPUs are quite close to AMD on performance; perf per watt obviously depends, but it used to be way worse. don't assume intel is dead; AMD was assumed dead back in bulldozer years.