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They were in big trouble then. The entire company was riding on it being great. It could have easily gone awry as it did for Data General, Honeywell, CDC, AST,
by kristopolous 3y ago
They were in big trouble then. The entire company was riding on it being great.
It could have easily gone awry as it did for Data General, Honeywell, CDC, AST, Tandy, Olivetti, Xerox, DEC Rainbow, AT&T Hobbit, Wang 2200 and Unisys. Strong survivorship bias on this one. Most of the once Titans are in or near the dustbin now, such as SDS, SDC and Fairchild.
Intel's history was primarily as a memory manufacturer. They're arguably near a similar fucked position now - effectively 0% of the mobile and home appliance market and getting slaughtered in their only remaining stronghold by NVIDIA, AMD and ARM pillaging their castle. Hopefully they'll squeeze out of this one.
- xattt 3y agoWhat’s their hope right now? Some sort of Quark-derived desktop CPU à la Dothan?
- scrlk 3y agoDoubling down on becoming a competitive foundry and becoming the western equivalent to TSMC. If their 18A process ships on time (2025), there's a chance that they could regain process leadership.
- baq 3y agoFingers crossed but they don’t have a good track record in the last 10 years. The world needs at least two good processes.
- sweetjuly 3y agoI can't imagine the US government letting Intel Foundry Services fail. Not so much in the banking "too big to fail" sense but a "national security interest" sense: not only are semiconductors critical to the domestic economy but having the latest nodes available for military application gives a major leg up. We see this elsewhere too; SkyWater is a kinda terrible fab (their yield for even very old processes is incredibly bad lol) but the DoD is still throwing gobs of money at them to developed their radhard process because they need some domestic, trusted vendor to turn to. IFS might not be competitive but they probably aren't going anywhere, even if they fail to deliver anywhere near on time.
- kristopolous 3y agoComing out with better chips at lower prices. I know how obvious that sounds but it's true. The difficulty is they need to make nearly decade-long bets that are the size of small countries economies due to the complexity of manufacturing and Intel's made a few bad ones recently. I don't know who to listen to on what chip design will be a market win in 2030 either. AI applications are extremely resource intensive so that will be driving things for a while but how to solve that in an affordable chip created by a reliable efficient manufacturing process is beyond me. This stuff is phenomenally hard. I'd say the winner is something like an NVIDIA graphics pipeline that is separated into a pile called "graphics" and "ai" and then has the graphics part gutted for a cheaper AI pipeline which can use system memory as opposed to preciously expensive graphics memory and then gets integrated into their next gen CPUs taking Nvidia out of the loop and dealing a blow to AMD at the same time. They'd mop the floors with something like that especially if you could just drop it into pytorch and have it work automagically. They could probably then just turn around and license it to ARM. AMD and Nvidia wouldn't work together to mount a unified defense because of ATI and this would allow Intel to weasel their way back into the Apple money stream. But I'm just some unemployed dude typing this on a 4 year old android. Don't listen to me.
- tomcam 3y agowouldn’t graphics and AI both pretty much reduce to mad matrix operations?
- monocasa 3y agoGraphics has more than that between texture pipelines, ROPs, more complex compute dispatch than needed for AI, etc. All of that comes with area and power costs even if you clock gate the blocks you can.
- kristopolous 3y agoThings like hardware raytracing probably aren't needed and there's shading units, texture mapping, and ROPs. I'm not a hardware engineer but there's probably some way Intel can rejigger its IGT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Graphics_Technology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Graphics_Technology) to have the equivalent of Nvidia's "tensor cores". They have an NVIDIA mainline competitor in their A770 but I think they should be exiting the direct nvidia assault strategy. I really don't know how that's going to work. They're basically a nonplayer https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html What's their winning move in that approach? It's just money in a volcano.
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoImagine they got into making an ARM CPU competitive with Apple's? Or a server chip that is better than Ampera's, and sold at scale? I think they have the expertise and ability to do it.
- userbinator 3y agoA dual-mode ARM-x86 core would be an interesting CPU that they certainly have the skill to create. Thanks to the protected mode descriptor model, imagine having ARM64, ARM32, x86-32, and x86-64 code segments all coexisting in the same system, with no emulation nor virtualisation. There wouldn't be any overhead, because all instructions regardless of ISA get translated to uops anyway. They could add a RISC-V front-end too, just for completeness sake.
- scrlk 3y agoAndy Grove moving Intel from memory to microprocessors was an excellent strategic move. > "Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive." Something that Intel's leaders didn't pay attention to during the 2010s.
- ngcc_hk 3y agoThere is even a story plus a term for it. The story is about what if we all go out off this room and come back like a new guy. What would we do? "strategic inflection point" ... They decide to move from a memory company to a CPU company. No access to Nikon but being just a Leica len maker for Canon (and famously found by DDD and used in Korea War), then move to nikon rangefinder (but strangely follow Zeiss approach more). Then jump ship to SLR by inventing Nikon F (and used in Vietnam War). It is just crazy move, but at least it is related. And "survive" and move on. Or just like Fujifilm move to cosmetic in one stage as making film has some knowledge that can be re-used there. And survive and move on.
- Laforet 3y agoNikon started off as a defense contractor making rifle scopes and artillery sights for the military. Camera lens was a side business that took over after the war. While no longer on the cutting edge, they still have a significant presence in the semiconductor lithography business. So they will survive in one way or another even if they stop making cameras one day.
- mschuster91 3y ago> and getting slaughtered in their only remaining stronghold by NVIDIA, AMD and ARM pillaging their castle NVIDIA doesn't make good CPUs, even their SoCs are ... not exactly state of the art. No mass market adoption besides automotive who don't care about anything but long availability of (spare) parts and the Nintendo Switch which likely only still uses the same 2015-era Tegra chipset because even someone as big as Nintendo couldn't kick enough arses at NVIDIA to bring up a new design. ARM doesn't make generally available server CPUs (the ones that do exist all get gobbled up by cloud providers), and there are outside of the Mac world no viable ARM desktop or laptop CPUs because Qualcomm completely fucked up that market for likely years to come - I don't see any way of ARM adoption in that market unless ARM comes up with a competing solution to Rosetta and Qualcomm comes out of the mindset "if it works just barely, ship it" that may be acceptable to smartphone vendors but not the PC/desktop market. That leaves AMD as the sole remaining threat to Intel, and AMD doesn't have the fab space to be enough of a threat to Intel's moat. Yes, I may or may not be extremely frustrated at the state of competition in general computing.
- kristopolous 3y agoArm snatched Intel's hold on the Apple market and we can invoke any Clayton Christensen book on the Raspberry PI series. Maybe not the Raspberry PI 5, but what about say, the imaginary 8 or the 9 a few years hence? The Pi 400 isn't their final attempt into the PC market, only their first. Surely a slew of decent ARM based laptops from one of these SBC manufacturers is coming along eventually - and I don't mean chromebooks.
- mschuster91 3y agoYeah but that was only made possible by Apple's unique circumstances: their close control over the entire tech stack, their experience with architecture transitions (PPC->x86-32->x86-64->ARM) and the required tooling (Rosetta, fat binaries, compilers), their relatively small market size, their expertise in developing with/for ARM from iOS, and enough cash in hand to buy out the entire fab capacity of TSMC. In the Windows world, no one holds even closely to the capabilities required for a transition to ARM: Microsoft doesn't have a fat binary standard or the toolchains needed (that all went down the drain with the end of Microsoft Windows CE / Windows Phone and even then, it was a nightmare to develop for these), the third party developers - especially the enterprise tailor-made application market - have zero experience with ARM and a lot of stuff used in enterprise was made by companies that went defunct long ago, Microsoft doesn't have any hold over what the device vendors do in terms of drivers (unlike Apple, who famously cut ties with NVIDIA because NV didn't want Apple to write drivers for their GPUs), and neither Microsoft itself nor the conglomerate of hardware OEMs has the cash in hand to take all the stuff people use on x86 Windows and make it work on ARM Windows (as they infamously discovered with the early Windows Qualcomm stuff). Oh, and the ARM vendors can't be bothered to get something as basic as PCIe working on a fundamental level beyond "if it works in my very specific use case, ship it" - just look at the RPi 4's issues where people developed breakout boards for PCIe only to discover that crucial functionality was flat out broken [1]. And even with people complaining for years about PCIe issues on the Pi 4, turns out the Pi 5 still managed to fuck things up [2]. The only player in town able to make ARM work on anything but smartphones and servers is Apple, and they don't (and never will, assuming regulators don't finally wake up and force them) sell to third parties. > The Pi 400 isn't their final attempt into the PC market, only their first. Surely a slew of decent ARM based laptops from one of these SBC manufacturers is coming along eventually - and I don't mean chromebooks. These things are and will be toys. The money is in getting corporate to switch over to ARM and until the problems above (especially backwards compatibility and standards conformance) are worked out, which I don't see happen any time soon because it's so hard to break through the chicken-egg scenario, there will be no threat to Intel. Especially not if even many years of development and complaining are not enough to arse Broadcom into fixing PCIe. [1] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/i-built-special-pcie-card-test-gpus-on-pi https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/i-built-special-pcie-... [2] https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/testing-pcie-on-raspberry-pi-5 https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2023/testing-pcie-on-raspb...
- WalterBright 3y agoThe DEC Rainbow would have been fine if they didn't do things like require special floppy disks that cost $5 each. DEC should have packaged the LSI-11 into a consumer machine. They had all the software, which was top shelf. I had an H-11, it was a great machine.
- Aloha 3y agoThats an interesting alternative history thought experiment. I wonder how early one could capture the complexity of the full PDP-11 microarchitecture on a single chip? Would it have been affordable? What about the support hardware?
- WalterBright 3y agoIf Intel could do it, DEC could do it.
- xxs 3y agoDEC Alpha had the weakest memory model, which while cool to write for with its all memory barriers/concurrency - it's quite annoying in the real world, a major reason while DEC failed.
- xxs 3y agoDEC Alpha had the weakest memory model, which while cool to write for with its all memory barriers/concurrency - it's quite annoying to work with in the real world, a major reason while DEC failed.
- jacquesm 3y agoCompared to the madness that was x86 memory models the Alpha was quite sane. I'm not sure what you base your 'weakest' on (it suggests a comparison with others) but when Alpha was released there wasn't much to compare it to besides the R4000 and that just as hard if not harder to source than the Alpha machines were. I had a bunch of them (SGI boxes of various plumage) and the OS hardly took advantage of the chip, but on the Alpha it all just worked at 64 bits out of the box.