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I’ll leave the lawyering to the lawyers, but big picture it seems weird to be hitting Intel with any of the “you need to play fair” stuff. They’re operating at

I’ll leave the lawyering to the lawyers, but big picture it seems weird to be hitting Intel with any of the “you need to play fair” stuff. They’re operating at between a 2-4 process node handicap (depending how one counts) and turning out workable stuff (e.g. Raptor Lake) strictly by competing their butts off on micro architecture and other hard, legitimate stuff. My hat is fucking off to the people turning out product that keeps them in the race with thermal/transistor budgets from like, before COVID. There’s a dude in my building who wears an ASML badge and I always ask him: Gelsinger going to get EUV going? He obviously can’t answer but he gets this little smirk. I would love it if it all landed at once: HDET SKUs with 128 physical cores, ARC cards competitive with 4xxx and drivers, and a domestic pure-play foundry business that the PRC can’t even remotely disrupt in their wildest dreams. AMD wants to generate some cap? Pay the big bucks to get ROCm up to par and trim some of that trillion off Jensen’s “how much you got on you?” pricing strategy.

mkl 3y ago
It may seem weird now, but certainly not in 2009, when this case is from.
- benreesman 3y ago
  With the aforementioned caveat about not being a lawyer (or regulator), it does seem on average that there’s a certain discretion involved when the outcome of a case that’s taken fifteen years to reach a judgement on is implemented in light of a presently obtaining situation that renders the appropriate remedy at that time counter-productive now.
beebeepka 3y ago
Intel fanboi alert
- benreesman 3y ago
  I’ve bought processors (and GPUs) from all the major vendors and always been pleased when competition got me a better deal, either individually or on behalf of a business. It’s more like a competition fanboi alert, and watching NVIDIA sit at 1.2T in cap while AMD sits at 175B with competitive (if not strictly parity) GPUs because apparently writing a driver stack that works is out of reach for a company that could trivially finance a Sheryl-style “triple the comp of all the CUDA ballers” just…decides not to? Yeah, I’d like to see some pressure applied by people who know how to write drivers, document their gear, and obviously haven’t cut a deal about supercompute vs. AI-per-se. Zen4 is awesome, add in the TSMC edge? It’s what you’ve got on multi-core x86_64 at the moment. Would I like to see alternatives to Epyc and 4090s that have the same 24Gb of GDDR6 that my 2090s did? Yes I fucking would. And would I like to see Taiwan treated like a nation and not a geopolitical football? That sounds pretty much ethically right too. I cordially invite your input on where I’ve gotten this wrong.
  - beebeepka 3y ago
    Rooting for for intel in the name of competition is rather ironic. Oh, how fast some of you "forget" what things used to be even five years ago
lightedman 3y ago
"They’re operating at between a 2-4 process node handicap (depending how one counts) and turning out workable stuff (e.g. Raptor Lake) strictly by competing their butts off on micro architecture and other hard, legitimate stuff. My hat is fucking off to the people turning out product that keeps them in the race with thermal/transistor budgets from like, before COVID." When they can stop their compiler bullshittery, I might be convinced to think they're actually competing.
benreesman 3y ago
Whoa just to be clear: I don’t and never have worked at Intel, don’t own stock, am not short a competitor: I’ve got no dog in this fight other than wanting to see some options. And I’m well aware they’ve historically been the baddies: I was doing this in the 90s. But no competition for cutting-edge process, no alternative on GPUs, no pure-play foundry capacity without IRBMs trained on it are like, no fun man. The enemy of my enemy is still usually a bad guy, but balance of power is probably as good as we’re going to get on stuff that’s Capital Intensive from Outer Space. Is this gang tackle really indicative that an Apple monopsony of current generation fab, an AMD monopoly on serious multi-core, an NVIDIA monopoly on GPUs you can just use are all preferable to a once evil company down on its luck getting back in the game? It’s not like any of these other actors are exactly leaving margin on the table.

mkl 3y ago

It may seem weird now, but certainly not in 2009, when this case is from.

benreesman 3y ago
With the aforementioned caveat about not being a lawyer (or regulator), it does seem on average that there’s a certain discretion involved when the outcome of a case that’s taken fifteen years to reach a judgement on is implemented in light of a presently obtaining situation that renders the appropriate remedy at that time counter-productive now.

beebeepka 3y ago

Intel fanboi alert

benreesman 3y ago
I’ve bought processors (and GPUs) from all the major vendors and always been pleased when competition got me a better deal, either individually or on behalf of a business. It’s more like a competition fanboi alert, and watching NVIDIA sit at 1.2T in cap while AMD sits at 175B with competitive (if not strictly parity) GPUs because apparently writing a driver stack that works is out of reach for a company that could trivially finance a Sheryl-style “triple the comp of all the CUDA ballers” just…decides not to? Yeah, I’d like to see some pressure applied by people who know how to write drivers, document their gear, and obviously haven’t cut a deal about supercompute vs. AI-per-se. Zen4 is awesome, add in the TSMC edge? It’s what you’ve got on multi-core x86_64 at the moment. Would I like to see alternatives to Epyc and 4090s that have the same 24Gb of GDDR6 that my 2090s did? Yes I fucking would. And would I like to see Taiwan treated like a nation and not a geopolitical football? That sounds pretty much ethically right too. I cordially invite your input on where I’ve gotten this wrong.
- beebeepka 3y ago
  Rooting for for intel in the name of competition is rather ironic. Oh, how fast some of you "forget" what things used to be even five years ago

lightedman 3y ago

"They’re operating at between a 2-4 process node handicap (depending how one counts) and turning out workable stuff (e.g. Raptor Lake) strictly by competing their butts off on micro architecture and other hard, legitimate stuff. My hat is fucking off to the people turning out product that keeps them in the race with thermal/transistor budgets from like, before COVID." When they can stop their compiler bullshittery, I might be convinced to think they're actually competing.

benreesman 3y ago

Whoa just to be clear: I don’t and never have worked at Intel, don’t own stock, am not short a competitor: I’ve got no dog in this fight other than wanting to see some options. And I’m well aware they’ve historically been the baddies: I was doing this in the 90s. But no competition for cutting-edge process, no alternative on GPUs, no pure-play foundry capacity without IRBMs trained on it are like, no fun man. The enemy of my enemy is still usually a bad guy, but balance of power is probably as good as we’re going to get on stuff that’s Capital Intensive from Outer Space. Is this gang tackle really indicative that an Apple monopsony of current generation fab, an AMD monopoly on serious multi-core, an NVIDIA monopoly on GPUs you can just use are all preferable to a once evil company down on its luck getting back in the game? It’s not like any of these other actors are exactly leaving margin on the table.