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I am much more hopeful about Intel's chance at EUV than GP. In order to avoid repeating myself, here's my analysis of what went wrong: https://news.ycombinator.

I am much more hopeful about Intel's chance at EUV than GP. In order to avoid repeating myself, here's my analysis of what went wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32335873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32335873

Sakos 4y ago
Why is it that it's taking them so long to pivoting from that failure? 10nm didn't work out, that's fine. But it feels like that didn't work out and they've spent the years after that in a hole and still haven't dug themselves out.
- dreamcompiler 4y ago
  From the rumors I've heard (might be true; might not) Intel lost a great deal of semiconductor engineering talent because they were making so much money on minor evolutions of x86 that they saw little need to truly innovate. The MBAs took over. Once it became clear that AMD and ARM (and by extension TSMC) were eating their lunch, they had great difficulty pivoting because they lacked the talent and the organizational will to do so -- at least until Gelsinger took charge. I have a lot of respect for Gelsinger and I think he just might turn it around.
  - yourapostasy 4y ago
    > ...they were making so much money on minor evolutions of x86 that they saw little need to truly innovate. The MBAs took over. Yet another example in a long history that modeling your talent pipeline as a JIT supply chain does not work in high cognitive input settings. This is a general unsolved management challenge: capturing sufficiently granular and comprehensive institutional knowledge to be able to efficiently restart organizations that rely upon it years down the line. I don't think we will ever solve it until we learn how to share human mind states. The complexity of these high cognitive input activities at large scale has surpassed the ability of our capabilities to transfer comprehension between minds using conventional information transfer techniques (primarily written word and audio video). Even were I to guarantee the capture of all information at sufficient granularity, the only way to QA that is to de novo staff up a brand-new parallel organization, and have them reproduce the original organization's accomplishments. No one is ever funded for that. This is a really interesting problem space for me because I suspect it is a dimension of technical debt very rarely explored because our species has not had to really grapple with it before as our technological progression has been slow enough we could "good enough" brute force our way through it whenever it came up in less severe forms.

Sakos 4y ago

Why is it that it's taking them so long to pivoting from that failure? 10nm didn't work out, that's fine. But it feels like that didn't work out and they've spent the years after that in a hole and still haven't dug themselves out.

dreamcompiler 4y ago
From the rumors I've heard (might be true; might not) Intel lost a great deal of semiconductor engineering talent because they were making so much money on minor evolutions of x86 that they saw little need to truly innovate. The MBAs took over. Once it became clear that AMD and ARM (and by extension TSMC) were eating their lunch, they had great difficulty pivoting because they lacked the talent and the organizational will to do so -- at least until Gelsinger took charge. I have a lot of respect for Gelsinger and I think he just might turn it around.
- yourapostasy 4y ago
  > ...they were making so much money on minor evolutions of x86 that they saw little need to truly innovate. The MBAs took over. Yet another example in a long history that modeling your talent pipeline as a JIT supply chain does not work in high cognitive input settings. This is a general unsolved management challenge: capturing sufficiently granular and comprehensive institutional knowledge to be able to efficiently restart organizations that rely upon it years down the line. I don't think we will ever solve it until we learn how to share human mind states. The complexity of these high cognitive input activities at large scale has surpassed the ability of our capabilities to transfer comprehension between minds using conventional information transfer techniques (primarily written word and audio video). Even were I to guarantee the capture of all information at sufficient granularity, the only way to QA that is to de novo staff up a brand-new parallel organization, and have them reproduce the original organization's accomplishments. No one is ever funded for that. This is a really interesting problem space for me because I suspect it is a dimension of technical debt very rarely explored because our species has not had to really grapple with it before as our technological progression has been slow enough we could "good enough" brute force our way through it whenever it came up in less severe forms.