8 ms·

This is why I can never get excited about Intel doing anything outside mainline x86. Years ago, IBM and Freescale had the faith to build a community through PO

This is why I can never get excited about Intel doing anything outside mainline x86. Years ago, IBM and Freescale had the faith to build a community through POWER and, while not a homerun, that ecosystem still exists today (and I was able to benefit by selling hundreds of thousands/millions of devices powered by PPC/POWER). Every time I’ve tried to get excited about an Intel product line and build on it - Larrabee, Phi, Itanium - I’ve gotten massively burned. I just can’t trust them.

eliaspro 4y ago
Do we need a https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ equivalent for Intel?
- qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
  Googly Eyes rolling
- atdrummond 4y ago
  It would probably be a much tighter circle of interested readers but the kill list is pretty long indeed. What makes me sad is not that Intel isn’t a good company - it is. It is that Intel could be an even greater company if it could just get out of its own way.
  - luma 4y ago
    It feels like Microsoft under Ballmer. Windows made a lot of money but the focus on it was blocking further success with the other MS properties. It took a decapitation to get them pointed in the right direction.
    - chongli 4y ago
      At least we got the developers dance out of the Ballmer era. What do does Intel have to show for it right now?
      - dualboot 4y ago
        Optan... er.. nevermind...
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      People keep parroting how bad Balmer was for Microsoft, without knowing that he's the one that invested heavily in Xbox and set the ground work for Azure and cloud services. Nadella continued this.
      - intvocoder 4y ago
        Ballmer’s purchase of Nokia was a tremendous waste of money, it’s taken a lot of effort under Nadella to right the ship. The scope and performance of (at the time) Windows Azure was not particularly good under Ballmer, but was repositioned under Nadella. The criticism of Ballmer is not unjustified, he lingered around for years after his effectiveness. Personally, I don’t view Microsoft as a consumer company, and Xbox should have been jettisoned after the 360.
        toast0 4y ago
        > Ballmer’s purchase of Nokia was a tremendous waste of money, it’s taken a lot of effort under Nadella to right the ship. Was it the purchase that was the waste, or the subsequent management that wasted the potential? Anyway, bringing Intel back into the picture; things would be a lot different if Intel hadn't canceled x86 phone chips around the same time Microsoft was hyping Continuum, the converged phone/desktop feature of Windows Mobile 10. If that was launched on x86 phones with win32 apps, it would have been really interesting. And, if they had that ready to go, maybe there would have been internal excitememt about WM10 and it wouldn't have been such a poor showing. Then again, maybe ending their massive QA program wasn't great for quality, either. I still miss windows phone, but there's no going back.
        badpun 4y ago
        Xbox helps them maintain Windows as the gaming OS for PC (as they both use Direct3D etc., so porting from xbox to PC is easy/cheap). Gaming is not important per se, but is one of key factors when consumers select OS for their home machines (because kids insist on being able to play games). And whatever kids use at home, they'll want to use at work when they grow up.
      - readthenotes1 4y ago
stewx 4y ago
What kind of PowerPC devices did you build?
- atdrummond 4y ago
  I built a custom Debian based OS for Genesi’s EFIKA board then we sold a handheld computer with similar specs in China. GUI used Mozilla’s rendering engine, so one of the first uses of “web apps” as an application distribution platform. This was mostly pre-smartphones in China, so this device would have been viewed as a PMP (portable media player) for games and movies and maybe productivity, not communications.
misnome 4y ago
Exactly the same experience here. At encouragement of intel contacts, we went into Intel (ex-Altera) FPGA last year, with the oneAPI push and programming the FPGA cards with SYCL being free. The cards are now discontinued (but still sold), the drivers don't work on any distro more recent than 2018 - even though the oneAPI toolkit itself requires a more recent OS; the only non-discontinued replacements require software ecosystem license purchase, it's impossible to download the older (working) versions of the toolkit, and the contacts stopped talking to us once we actually bought the cards. Add to that the constant show-stopping compiler bugs and toolkit issues that made it feel like we were the only people actively using it, I think we've learned to run far, far away now.
- Foobar8568 4y ago
  I have been burnt by the sockit board. I move away from wanting to learn fpga after all the bushit. All fgpa vendors are similar as far as I'm concerned.
  - krasin 4y ago
    Open source FPGA toolchains begin to appear, mostly on the low-end for now. And because all FPGA vendors are doing such a terrible job for tooling, Yosys and friends are likely the future.
    - FullyFunctional 4y ago
      Very true; Lattice Semi’s ECP5 is a fairly decent FPGA with very mature support from Yosys/nextpnr/trellis. Xilinx’ Artix-7/Kintex-7 are much more powerful FPGAs and the support for those is getting to be pretty good (DDR3 support is steadily maturing) It would be nice to see a vendor actually officially supporting these efforts. Maybe one day. (Not to mention various open source FPGAs - actual chips - being developped)
  - rowanG077 4y ago
    Treat them as purely hardware vendors and go open source tooling. The tooling is infinitely superior from a ux point of view. There are still quite a bit of missing features but it is getting there.
owlbite 4y ago
Even on mainline x86 they often seem to have had a try twenty things and see what sticks approach to software, discarding the 19 that didn't win, and burning anyone who was trying to use them.
- ridgered4 4y ago
  GVT-g is the one that got me. Although with all their storage caching antics over the years I knew what I was getting into.
CoastalCoder 4y ago
> This is why I can never get excited about Intel doing anything outside mainline x86. This skepticism could reasonably be extended to x86 as well, given Intel's handling of AVX-512. The inconsistent support for various subsets of AVX-512, on different processors, makes it hard to predict whether some future processor will have the particular instructions that matter to your software.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- colejohnson66 4y ago
  Despite outward appearances, AVX-512 follows two paths: server and consumer. Each year, the support on one tier is larger than before (until Alder Lake, that is). The various "sub instruction sets" are more for categorization reasons than differences in capability. If you look at AVX-512's chart on Wikipedia[0], but reorder it into (the discontinued) Xeon Phi, server, and consumer tiers, it's a nice chart showing increasing support as time goes on. For example, -ER, -PF, -4FMAPS, and -4VNNIW weren't really "removed" after Xeon Phi because the server and consumer lines never had them. That chart is just horrible because it tries to show a timeline without clarifying the differences in tiers. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVX-512#CPUs_with_AVX-512 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVX-512#CPUs_with_AVX-512
  - adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
    there still is the fundamental problem that most people who do compiler work mostly don't work on servers so Intel's strategy has kept avx 512 from having good support
    - imtringued 4y ago
      I think the biggest issue is that auto vectorization would need a programming language that is designed around it. Vectorization is a niche but GPU programming isn't (shader programming is very popular).
rhelz 4y ago
It doesn't matter whether you are Intel or Exxon, any public company has to exit businesses which are not profitable enough. And when it comes to losing money, failing fast is typically better than failing slow.
- abfan1127 4y ago
  the issue with this perspective is if people think Intel won't commit to a long term strategy, no one buys in and it dies quickly. Ecosystems take a long time to build momentum. Intel, along with any other cash-cow business plan company, kills ventures before they have time to mature because they don't cash out soon enough.
arcticbull 4y ago
Intel also had a pretty robust ARM offering, the Intel StrongARM (acquired from DEC in 1997). They continued to evolve the line, renaming it to XScale at some point. They then sold it to Marvell in 2006.
tracker1 4y ago
That's generally how I feel about anything cross-platform from Microsoft... I'll buy into it if it's still supported 3 versions in. And at this point, other than .Net Core and VS Code, I don't really use MS software if I can avoid it.

eliaspro 4y ago

Do we need a https://killedbygoogle.com/ https://killedbygoogle.com/ equivalent for Intel?

qikInNdOutReply 4y ago
Googly Eyes rolling
atdrummond 4y ago
It would probably be a much tighter circle of interested readers but the kill list is pretty long indeed. What makes me sad is not that Intel isn’t a good company - it is. It is that Intel could be an even greater company if it could just get out of its own way.
- luma 4y ago
  It feels like Microsoft under Ballmer. Windows made a lot of money but the focus on it was blocking further success with the other MS properties. It took a decapitation to get them pointed in the right direction.
  - chongli 4y ago
    At least we got the developers dance out of the Ballmer era. What do does Intel have to show for it right now?
    - dualboot 4y ago
      Optan... er.. nevermind...
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    People keep parroting how bad Balmer was for Microsoft, without knowing that he's the one that invested heavily in Xbox and set the ground work for Azure and cloud services. Nadella continued this.
    - intvocoder 4y ago
      Ballmer’s purchase of Nokia was a tremendous waste of money, it’s taken a lot of effort under Nadella to right the ship. The scope and performance of (at the time) Windows Azure was not particularly good under Ballmer, but was repositioned under Nadella. The criticism of Ballmer is not unjustified, he lingered around for years after his effectiveness. Personally, I don’t view Microsoft as a consumer company, and Xbox should have been jettisoned after the 360.
      - toast0 4y ago
        > Ballmer’s purchase of Nokia was a tremendous waste of money, it’s taken a lot of effort under Nadella to right the ship. Was it the purchase that was the waste, or the subsequent management that wasted the potential? Anyway, bringing Intel back into the picture; things would be a lot different if Intel hadn't canceled x86 phone chips around the same time Microsoft was hyping Continuum, the converged phone/desktop feature of Windows Mobile 10. If that was launched on x86 phones with win32 apps, it would have been really interesting. And, if they had that ready to go, maybe there would have been internal excitememt about WM10 and it wouldn't have been such a poor showing. Then again, maybe ending their massive QA program wasn't great for quality, either. I still miss windows phone, but there's no going back.
      - badpun 4y ago
        Xbox helps them maintain Windows as the gaming OS for PC (as they both use Direct3D etc., so porting from xbox to PC is easy/cheap). Gaming is not important per se, but is one of key factors when consumers select OS for their home machines (because kids insist on being able to play games). And whatever kids use at home, they'll want to use at work when they grow up.
    - readthenotes1 4y ago

stewx 4y ago

What kind of PowerPC devices did you build?

atdrummond 4y ago
I built a custom Debian based OS for Genesi’s EFIKA board then we sold a handheld computer with similar specs in China. GUI used Mozilla’s rendering engine, so one of the first uses of “web apps” as an application distribution platform. This was mostly pre-smartphones in China, so this device would have been viewed as a PMP (portable media player) for games and movies and maybe productivity, not communications.

misnome 4y ago

Exactly the same experience here. At encouragement of intel contacts, we went into Intel (ex-Altera) FPGA last year, with the oneAPI push and programming the FPGA cards with SYCL being free. The cards are now discontinued (but still sold), the drivers don't work on any distro more recent than 2018 - even though the oneAPI toolkit itself requires a more recent OS; the only non-discontinued replacements require software ecosystem license purchase, it's impossible to download the older (working) versions of the toolkit, and the contacts stopped talking to us once we actually bought the cards. Add to that the constant show-stopping compiler bugs and toolkit issues that made it feel like we were the only people actively using it, I think we've learned to run far, far away now.

Foobar8568 4y ago
I have been burnt by the sockit board. I move away from wanting to learn fpga after all the bushit. All fgpa vendors are similar as far as I'm concerned.
- krasin 4y ago
  Open source FPGA toolchains begin to appear, mostly on the low-end for now. And because all FPGA vendors are doing such a terrible job for tooling, Yosys and friends are likely the future.
  - FullyFunctional 4y ago
    Very true; Lattice Semi’s ECP5 is a fairly decent FPGA with very mature support from Yosys/nextpnr/trellis. Xilinx’ Artix-7/Kintex-7 are much more powerful FPGAs and the support for those is getting to be pretty good (DDR3 support is steadily maturing) It would be nice to see a vendor actually officially supporting these efforts. Maybe one day. (Not to mention various open source FPGAs - actual chips - being developped)
- rowanG077 4y ago
  Treat them as purely hardware vendors and go open source tooling. The tooling is infinitely superior from a ux point of view. There are still quite a bit of missing features but it is getting there.

owlbite 4y ago

Even on mainline x86 they often seem to have had a try twenty things and see what sticks approach to software, discarding the 19 that didn't win, and burning anyone who was trying to use them.

ridgered4 4y ago
GVT-g is the one that got me. Although with all their storage caching antics over the years I knew what I was getting into.

CoastalCoder 4y ago

> This is why I can never get excited about Intel doing anything outside mainline x86. This skepticism could reasonably be extended to x86 as well, given Intel's handling of AVX-512. The inconsistent support for various subsets of AVX-512, on different processors, makes it hard to predict whether some future processor will have the particular instructions that matter to your software.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
colejohnson66 4y ago
Despite outward appearances, AVX-512 follows two paths: server and consumer. Each year, the support on one tier is larger than before (until Alder Lake, that is). The various "sub instruction sets" are more for categorization reasons than differences in capability. If you look at AVX-512's chart on Wikipedia[0], but reorder it into (the discontinued) Xeon Phi, server, and consumer tiers, it's a nice chart showing increasing support as time goes on. For example, -ER, -PF, -4FMAPS, and -4VNNIW weren't really "removed" after Xeon Phi because the server and consumer lines never had them. That chart is just horrible because it tries to show a timeline without clarifying the differences in tiers. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVX-512#CPUs_with_AVX-512 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVX-512#CPUs_with_AVX-512
- adgjlsfhk1 4y ago
  there still is the fundamental problem that most people who do compiler work mostly don't work on servers so Intel's strategy has kept avx 512 from having good support
  - imtringued 4y ago
    I think the biggest issue is that auto vectorization would need a programming language that is designed around it. Vectorization is a niche but GPU programming isn't (shader programming is very popular).

rhelz 4y ago

It doesn't matter whether you are Intel or Exxon, any public company has to exit businesses which are not profitable enough. And when it comes to losing money, failing fast is typically better than failing slow.

abfan1127 4y ago
the issue with this perspective is if people think Intel won't commit to a long term strategy, no one buys in and it dies quickly. Ecosystems take a long time to build momentum. Intel, along with any other cash-cow business plan company, kills ventures before they have time to mature because they don't cash out soon enough.

arcticbull 4y ago

Intel also had a pretty robust ARM offering, the Intel StrongARM (acquired from DEC in 1997). They continued to evolve the line, renaming it to XScale at some point. They then sold it to Marvell in 2006.

tracker1 4y ago

That's generally how I feel about anything cross-platform from Microsoft... I'll buy into it if it's still supported 3 versions in. And at this point, other than .Net Core and VS Code, I don't really use MS software if I can avoid it.