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The curse of having weak enemies is that you become complacent. You're right: AMD wasn't competitive for an incredibly long time and ARM wasn't really meaningf

by mdasen 3y ago

The curse of having weak enemies is that you become complacent. You're right: AMD wasn't competitive for an incredibly long time and ARM wasn't really meaningful for a long time. That's the perfect situation for some MBAs to come into. You start thinking that you're wasting money on R&D. Why create something 30% better this year when 10% better will cost a lot less and your competitors are so far behind that it doesn't matter? It's not that Intel should have seen AMD coming or should have seen ARM coming. It's that Intel should have understood that just because you have weak enemies today doesn't mean that you have an unassailable castle. Intel should have been smart enough to understand that backing off of R&D would mean giving up the moat they'd created. Even if it looked like no one was coming for their crown at the moment, you need to understand that disinvestment doesn't get rewarded over the long-run. Intel should have understood that trying to be cheap about R&D and extract as much money from customers wasn't a long-term strategy. It wasn't the strategy that built them into the dominant Intel we knew. It wouldn't keep them as that dominant Intel.

throwup238 3y ago
> It's that Intel should have understood that just because you have weak enemies today doesn't mean that you have an unassailable castle. Their third employee that later went on to become their third CEO and guide Intel from the memory to processor transition literally coined the term and wrote a book called "Only the Paranoid Survive" [1]. It's inexcusable that management degraded that much. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Only_the_Paranoid_Survive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Only_the_Paranoid...
- _the_inflator 3y ago
  Yes, I agree. However, I don’t necessarily see this book title as an imperative to innovate. Patent trolling can also be a way to deal with competitors. After all, Apple and ARM came from the idea to have better end user products around softer factors than shear CPU power. Since Intel‘s products aren’t highly integrated Phones nor assembled computer, Intel had no stake directly. It is complex.
  - IndrekR 3y ago
    Apple came from recreational “there is now a 10 times cheaper CPU than anything else and I can afford to build my video terminal into real computer in my bedroom” and “maybe we can actually sell it?”. [1] ARM literally came from “we need a much better and faster processor” and “how hard can this be?” [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#1971%E2%80%931985:_Jobs_and_Wozniak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#1971%E2%... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family
llamaLord 3y ago
To be fair, they should have seen Ryzen coming, any long-term AMD user knew years before Ryzen landed that it was going to be a good core because AMD were very vocal about how badly wrong they bet with Bulldozer (previous core family). AMD bet BIG on the software industry leaning in heavily on massive thread-counts over high throughput, single-threaded usage... But it never happened so the cores tanked. It was never a secret WHY that generation of core sucked, and it was relatively clear what AMD needed to do to fix the problem, and they were VERY vocal about "doing the thing" once it became clear their bet wasn't paying off.
- bmer 3y ago
  (I'm curious about this story, as I am unfamiliar with it.) Why did that generation of core (Bulldozer) suck? What was it that AMD needed to do to fix the problem? (Links to relevant stories would be sufficient for me!)
  - Macha 3y ago
    Chips and Cheese has probably the most in depth publicly available dive for the tech reasons why Bulldozer was the way it was: https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/01/22/bulldozer-amds-crash-modernization-frontend-and-execution-engine/ https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/01/22/bulldozer-amds-crash-m... https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/01/24/bulldozer-amds-crash-modernization-caching-and-conclusion/ https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/01/24/bulldozer-amds-crash-m... --- From a consumer perspective, Bulldozer and revisions as compared to Skylake and revisions were: + comparable on highly multi-threaded loads + cheaper - significantly behind on less multi-threaded loads - had 1 set of FPUs per 2 cores, so workloads with lots of floating point calculations were also weaker - Most intensive consumer software was single or a very small number of thread focused still (this was also a problem for Intel in trying to get people to buy more expensive i7s/i9s over i5s in those days)
    - ColonelPhantom 3y ago
      Bulldozer was contemporary with Sandy Bridge, not Skylake. Piledriver competed with Ivy Bridge and Haswell. The next Construction cores (Steamroller and Excavator) were only found in APUs, and not in desktop FX parts. Around the time of Skylake, AMD didn't have a meaningful presence in the desktop space. All they were selling was quad-core APUs based on minor revisions of Bulldozer, and the highly outdated FX-x3xx Piledrivers.
nox101 3y ago
This sounds like Google. Some bean counter is firing people left and right and somehow they think that's going to save them from the fact that AI answers destroy their business model. They need more people finding solutions, not less.

by mdasen 3y ago

throwup238 3y ago

> It's that Intel should have understood that just because you have weak enemies today doesn't mean that you have an unassailable castle. Their third employee that later went on to become their third CEO and guide Intel from the memory to processor transition literally coined the term and wrote a book called "Only the Paranoid Survive" [1]. It's inexcusable that management degraded that much. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Only_the_Paranoid_Survive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Only_the_Paranoid...

_the_inflator 3y ago
Yes, I agree. However, I don’t necessarily see this book title as an imperative to innovate. Patent trolling can also be a way to deal with competitors. After all, Apple and ARM came from the idea to have better end user products around softer factors than shear CPU power. Since Intel‘s products aren’t highly integrated Phones nor assembled computer, Intel had no stake directly. It is complex.
- IndrekR 3y ago
  Apple came from recreational “there is now a 10 times cheaper CPU than anything else and I can afford to build my video terminal into real computer in my bedroom” and “maybe we can actually sell it?”. [1] ARM literally came from “we need a much better and faster processor” and “how hard can this be?” [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#1971%E2%80%931985:_Jobs_and_Wozniak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#1971%E2%... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family

llamaLord 3y ago

To be fair, they should have seen Ryzen coming, any long-term AMD user knew years before Ryzen landed that it was going to be a good core because AMD were very vocal about how badly wrong they bet with Bulldozer (previous core family). AMD bet BIG on the software industry leaning in heavily on massive thread-counts over high throughput, single-threaded usage... But it never happened so the cores tanked. It was never a secret WHY that generation of core sucked, and it was relatively clear what AMD needed to do to fix the problem, and they were VERY vocal about "doing the thing" once it became clear their bet wasn't paying off.

bmer 3y ago
(I'm curious about this story, as I am unfamiliar with it.) Why did that generation of core (Bulldozer) suck? What was it that AMD needed to do to fix the problem? (Links to relevant stories would be sufficient for me!)
- Macha 3y ago
  Chips and Cheese has probably the most in depth publicly available dive for the tech reasons why Bulldozer was the way it was: https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/01/22/bulldozer-amds-crash-modernization-frontend-and-execution-engine/ https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/01/22/bulldozer-amds-crash-m... https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/01/24/bulldozer-amds-crash-modernization-caching-and-conclusion/ https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/01/24/bulldozer-amds-crash-m... --- From a consumer perspective, Bulldozer and revisions as compared to Skylake and revisions were: + comparable on highly multi-threaded loads + cheaper - significantly behind on less multi-threaded loads - had 1 set of FPUs per 2 cores, so workloads with lots of floating point calculations were also weaker - Most intensive consumer software was single or a very small number of thread focused still (this was also a problem for Intel in trying to get people to buy more expensive i7s/i9s over i5s in those days)
  - ColonelPhantom 3y ago
    Bulldozer was contemporary with Sandy Bridge, not Skylake. Piledriver competed with Ivy Bridge and Haswell. The next Construction cores (Steamroller and Excavator) were only found in APUs, and not in desktop FX parts. Around the time of Skylake, AMD didn't have a meaningful presence in the desktop space. All they were selling was quad-core APUs based on minor revisions of Bulldozer, and the highly outdated FX-x3xx Piledrivers.

nox101 3y ago

This sounds like Google. Some bean counter is firing people left and right and somehow they think that's going to save them from the fact that AI answers destroy their business model. They need more people finding solutions, not less.