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Seems silly to me. CPU designs are important, but these companies have more than enough engineers to make competent designs even with some people leaving. There

Seems silly to me. CPU designs are important, but these companies have more than enough engineers to make competent designs even with some people leaving. There's another factor that completely dominates. It's all about the fabs. Intel lost the performance lead, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they lost the lead in fabs. AMD passed Intel, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they use TSMC's fabs and TSMC passed Intel. Apple blew everyone away with M1, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they paid TSMC boatloads of money for exclusivity on their latest fabs. Apple M2 disappoints on CPU performance, is it because of their designs? No, it's because TSMC's next fab isn't ready yet so they're still using the same fabs as M1. These days I care more about which TSMC process node my chips came from than which company designed them. I need a new computer but I'm waiting until next year because there will be a wave of new CPUs and GPUs coming out with much better performance. Better designs? Maybe a little, but it's really because they're all moving to TSMC N4. I really hope Pat Gelsinger can save Intel's fab business because we really need another company that can compete in fabs and Samsung isn't doing too hot either.

iosystem 4y ago
I thought AMD succeeded because they managed to get Jim Keller and other great engineers? Unsure why you're placing your hope on a CEO.
- wmf 4y ago
  No one person deserves the credit for a processor and if Intel had delivered on their roadmap (Ice Lake in 2017 and Alder Lake in 2019) AMD would be dead today.
  - BackBlast 4y ago
    AMD survived bulldozer. They survived not because of the quality of their chips, but because there exists a sizable x86 market that is literally anything except Intel.
    - hn_go_brrrrr 4y ago
      Why does that market exist?
      - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
        Because, before the mobile explosion, we had the PC industry explosion which created a huge demand for X86 PCs and Macs in every home. And even after the mobile revolution shrank the demand for X86 PCs, the cloud revolution further entrched X86 in the cloud.
      - BackBlast 4y ago
        I would expect a large part of it to come from personal dislike in dealing with Intel by people in the position to pick parts and make the sourcing decisions.
inkyoto 4y ago
> No, it's because they lost the lead in fabs. AMD passed Intel, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they use TSMC's fabs and TSMC passed Intel. Apple blew everyone away with M1, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they paid TSMC boatloads of money for exclusivity on their latest fabs. The fixation on the fab process is bewildering. Yes, it does help, but it is also an optimisation step that is decoupled from and that bears no relevance on the chip design. Yes, the smaller node size also brings the increased density along and an increased number of things that can be whacked into the same sized piece of silicon, but it will not magically improve the overall system performance or result in the linear architecture scalability. The article is specifically calling out a potentially decreased ROB size in M2 cores, and ARMv9 also potentially not arriving until M3 which are crucial to the speed or software performance. There is absolutely nothing the fab process can do to make SVE2 and matrix instructions automagically appear in lithographic chip designs – those are the «silicon» design time decisions. As we have recently been seeing more and more practical, mainstream use cases of the advanced use of the SIMD instructions at the C/C++/Rust runtime level that bring an order of magnitude level performance gains, having the SVE2 implementation at the ISA level is becoming somewhat critical.
- brigade 4y ago
  Android flagships are shipping with SVE2 as of this year, which I actually didn't realize until like two weeks ago because there's been nearly zero buzz about it. What's SVE2 being used for over NEON as of now?
  - inkyoto 4y ago
    Low level runtime optimisation that yields substantial performance gains in the user facing or system level software, ranging from cryptography through to data processing algorithms and very high throughput JSON parsing. Take OpenSSL as an isolated example. By simply fiddling with the C compiler flags to allow it to use NEON on M1, the sha256 calculation speed-up is 4x for 128 and 256 block sizes, with performance gains quickly tapering off for larger block sizes and resutling in a modest 10% increase only. And that performance increase happens without the involvement of hash functions having been manually optimised for NEON/SVE1. SVE2 with its variable vector size support could improve performance for larger unit sizes. Perhaps it is the time to spin up a Graviton3 instance and poke around with clang/gcc to see how actually good or faster the SVE2 is.
Sakos 4y ago
Key talent is incredibly important. If you lose enough senior engineers, it doesn't matter how talented the rest are. You've lost so much institutional knowledge that is either extremely difficult or impossible to regain. And Apple is notoriously under-staffed for a lot of their projects. With the staffing losses to Nuvia, I wouldn't be surprised if they lost enough key talent that it's going to take them a long time to recover and be able to deliver significant performance improvements again. That's what happens when you treat software developers/engineers like commodities.

iosystem 4y ago

I thought AMD succeeded because they managed to get Jim Keller and other great engineers? Unsure why you're placing your hope on a CEO.

wmf 4y ago
No one person deserves the credit for a processor and if Intel had delivered on their roadmap (Ice Lake in 2017 and Alder Lake in 2019) AMD would be dead today.
- BackBlast 4y ago
  AMD survived bulldozer. They survived not because of the quality of their chips, but because there exists a sizable x86 market that is literally anything except Intel.
  - hn_go_brrrrr 4y ago
    Why does that market exist?
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      Because, before the mobile explosion, we had the PC industry explosion which created a huge demand for X86 PCs and Macs in every home. And even after the mobile revolution shrank the demand for X86 PCs, the cloud revolution further entrched X86 in the cloud.
    - BackBlast 4y ago
      I would expect a large part of it to come from personal dislike in dealing with Intel by people in the position to pick parts and make the sourcing decisions.

inkyoto 4y ago

> No, it's because they lost the lead in fabs. AMD passed Intel, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they use TSMC's fabs and TSMC passed Intel. Apple blew everyone away with M1, was it because of their designs? No, it's because they paid TSMC boatloads of money for exclusivity on their latest fabs. The fixation on the fab process is bewildering. Yes, it does help, but it is also an optimisation step that is decoupled from and that bears no relevance on the chip design. Yes, the smaller node size also brings the increased density along and an increased number of things that can be whacked into the same sized piece of silicon, but it will not magically improve the overall system performance or result in the linear architecture scalability. The article is specifically calling out a potentially decreased ROB size in M2 cores, and ARMv9 also potentially not arriving until M3 which are crucial to the speed or software performance. There is absolutely nothing the fab process can do to make SVE2 and matrix instructions automagically appear in lithographic chip designs – those are the «silicon» design time decisions. As we have recently been seeing more and more practical, mainstream use cases of the advanced use of the SIMD instructions at the C/C++/Rust runtime level that bring an order of magnitude level performance gains, having the SVE2 implementation at the ISA level is becoming somewhat critical.

brigade 4y ago
Android flagships are shipping with SVE2 as of this year, which I actually didn't realize until like two weeks ago because there's been nearly zero buzz about it. What's SVE2 being used for over NEON as of now?
- inkyoto 4y ago
  Low level runtime optimisation that yields substantial performance gains in the user facing or system level software, ranging from cryptography through to data processing algorithms and very high throughput JSON parsing. Take OpenSSL as an isolated example. By simply fiddling with the C compiler flags to allow it to use NEON on M1, the sha256 calculation speed-up is 4x for 128 and 256 block sizes, with performance gains quickly tapering off for larger block sizes and resutling in a modest 10% increase only. And that performance increase happens without the involvement of hash functions having been manually optimised for NEON/SVE1. SVE2 with its variable vector size support could improve performance for larger unit sizes. Perhaps it is the time to spin up a Graviton3 instance and poke around with clang/gcc to see how actually good or faster the SVE2 is.

Sakos 4y ago

Key talent is incredibly important. If you lose enough senior engineers, it doesn't matter how talented the rest are. You've lost so much institutional knowledge that is either extremely difficult or impossible to regain. And Apple is notoriously under-staffed for a lot of their projects. With the staffing losses to Nuvia, I wouldn't be surprised if they lost enough key talent that it's going to take them a long time to recover and be able to deliver significant performance improvements again. That's what happens when you treat software developers/engineers like commodities.