6 ms·

So far Gelsinger's ambitious roadmap has worked out. Goodbye MBA mentality and back to Grovian execution and engineering centric culture. Intel made huge error

• Workaccount2 3y ago
  I'm have my fingers crossed for Arc GPU's too. It would be awesome to get a 3rd competitive GPU manufacturer in the mix.
  • nabla9 3y ago
    FYI: Intel contracted TSMC to manufacture its ARC GPUs on its 6nm process.
    • cubefox 3y ago
      Retrospectively it was a big mistake for Intel not to go into the GPU business when they were still leaders in microchip design.
      • wtallis 3y ago
        Intel used to be undisputed leaders in chip fabrication. They've always been hit or miss on chip design. Most notably, every time they've tried to develop two CPU microarchitectures in parallel, at least one of them has been a major failure. And most of the times AMD has been able to take the lead, it's been because Intel's chip design failed so hard it squandered their fab advantage and gave AMD an opportunity to catch up. Since Intel's early designs for a discrete GPU were based off introducing a third x86 microarchitecture, the failure was not really surprising.
        • deaddodo 3y ago
          > it's been because Intel's chip design failed so hard it squandered their fab advantage and gave AMD an opportunity to catch up. Pretty sure you got that backwards. Intel fell behind because their fab advantage dissipated as they struggled on 14nm for 4 generations longer than their timelines anticipated, their chip design was actually doing alright at the time (without the foreknowledge of Spectre, of course). In addition, AMD and Intel went pretty tit-for-tat all the way through 90nm; with AMD usually having the superior per-node technology (e.g. AMD 90nm > Intel 90nm) and Intel usually being slightly ahead in node-size. Ironically, similar to Intel and Samsung/TSMC/etc now, in reverse. That didn't really fall apart until 65nm, and really crash until 45nm.
          • wtallis 3y ago
            I may simply have been considering a longer period of history than you. I was counting Itanium and later Pentium 4 among Intel's major failures in microarchitecture design, and consider early Opteron to be AMD's most significant and sustained time in the lead prior to their Zen renaissance. Intel being stuck on 14nm for so long was basically a single sustained fab failure, but their inability to make any significant improvements to the Skylake CPU core or deliver an improved iGPU during those years also illustrates some severe problems on the chip design side of the company: they're too trusting of what their fab teams promise, and their chip designs are too closely tied to a particular fab process preventing them from porting their designs to a working process when things go wrong with their fab plans.
            • jorvi 3y ago
              As Gelsinger himself said in an interview > So all of a sudden, as Warren Buffet says, “You don’t know who’s swimming naked until the tide goes out.” When the tide went out with the process technology, and hey, we were swimming naked, our designs were not competitive. So all of a sudden we realized, “Huh, the rising tide ain’t saving us. We don’t have leadership architecture anymore.” And you saw the exposure.
      • MangoCoffee 3y ago
        It's even sadder when Intel says Nvidia got "lucky" (https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/intel-ceo-says-nvidias-ai-dominance-is-pure-luck-nvidia-vp-fires-back-says-intel-lacked-vision-and-execution#:~:text=In%20a%20wide%2Dranging%20interview,lucky%2C'%20in%20his%20view https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/intel-ceo-sa....) Intel can get "lucky" too, so what happened?
      • throwaway2037 3y ago
        Do you think NVidia is the world leader (by a wide margin) in GPU market share because their hardware or software is so great? It seems like no one can displace CUDA at this point.
        • ffgjgf1 3y ago
          Both? I’m leaning a bit more towards HW though. CUDA isn’t exactly that exceptionally hard to replicate (if you’re willing to spend billions of dollars anyway)
        • cubefox 3y ago
          I don't know about the hardware, but one factor about the software is that Nvidia generally pushes their proprietary software solutions, while AMD favors more open source and open standards. This has likely helped Nvidia a lot. People sometimes confuse this, but open source being good overall doesn't mean that it is good for the business of an individual company. Just look at Apple and iMessage vs RCS. Proprietary tech can be used to push out competitors.
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
• dartos 3y ago
  I really hope tech starts a trend of booting that MBA mentality. Did so much harm to the industry and the quality of software.
• BeetleB 3y ago
  > Goodbye MBA mentality and back to Grovian execution and engineering centric culture. > Intel made huge error when they decided to delay DUV -> EUV transition. Just as an FYI, that error was made when the CEO was an engineer, not an MBA. And I find it amusing for folks here to cheer Grovian culture. Andy Grove's management style had all of what people criticize Amazon's culture, on steroids. Indeed, I believe Jeff Bezos took some of the 14 leadership principles from Grove (who was CEO at that time).
  • ryandrake 3y ago
    > And I find it amusing for folks here to cheer Grovian culture. Andy Grove's management style had all of what people criticize Amazon's culture, on steroids. People tend to forgive a leader's flaws, including really terrible flaws, if the leader seems to be producing results that people like.
    • kergonath 3y ago
      Also, the grass tends to be greener in the past.
      • ddispaltro 3y ago
        Oh yeah, rose colored lenses
        • foldr 3y ago
          Strictly speaking those shouldn’t make the grass look greener.
  • jcranmer 3y ago
    > Just as an FYI, that error was made when the CEO was an engineer, not an MBA. And not just any engineer, an engineer who specifically came from the fab side of things and not the chip design side of things.
    • 3y ago
• thunderbird120 3y ago
  I realize the whole MBA bad idea is popular right now on HN but it's worth remembering that Intel's struggles with 10nm were the result of too much engineering ambition rather than too little. The original 10nm was very VERY ambitious and if it had actually worked and had hit volume production on anything resembling the original timeline Intel would have essentially had a half decade worth of a process advantage over its competitors. Unfortunately, letting engineering go nuts can sometimes screw you just as much as letting the out of touch bean counters rule. Engineering based businesses have to manage both the engineering and the business side. Failing to do that means disaster.
  • nabla9 3y ago
    The MBA idea is correct in this case. Intel had the board and leadership that led it to ambitious process without enough urgency or resources, or ability to course correct quickly enough. The most important question must be discussed at C-suite. Intel didn't have have enough people there to make decisions. > Engineering based businesses have to manage both the engineering and the business side. Failing to do that means disaster. Top engineers can learn to manage business at the highest levels. Business leaders can't learn enough engineering to manage engineering companies.
    • 0xbadcafebee 3y ago
      > Business leaders can't learn enough engineering to manage engineering companies. Cisco Systems was led by CEO John T. Chambers from 1995-2015. His education was BS, BA in business and a JD. After he got his MBA he started in sales. During his time as CEO at Cisco, sales went from $1.9 billion to $49.2 billion. In 2000, Cisco became the most valuable company in the world. Before Chambers was John Morgridge, who was an MBA. He helped oust the two founding engineers. Before him was Bill Graves (who had a BS in physics, but was only at Cisco for a year).
      • nabla9 3y ago
        Your are doing "If I can find few counterexamples I debunked your argument."
• isthatafact 3y ago
  The Intel roadmap is a nice work of optimistic investor-targeted marketing, but I have no idea how to interpret it. I can see in the roadmap slide that 10A "arrives" in late 2027. However, the Intel roadmap also shows both intel4/3 and intel 20A/18A present from the start of 2023. The article mentions that 18A/20A nodes have been in "some form of production since 2023". Meanwhile, current Intel chips are still partially outsourced to TSMC, and Intel has promised zetta-scale systems by 2027.
  • ffgjgf1 3y ago
    > are still partially outsourced to TSMC Isn’t that just their GPUs?
    • isthatafact 3y ago
      They also outsource the SoC and IO tiles in addition to the GPU tiles to TSMC for meteor lake. But unless I have missed something, Intel is making all of their own cpu cores/tiles throughout their product lines, even for server/data center, though not necessarily profitably.
• dheera 3y ago
  Why aren't these companies investing more into 3-dimensional chips instead of trying to squeeze more on the same 2-dimensional die when we're so close to hard atom-size limits? A 3cm x 3cm x 3cm cube could fit a hell of a lot of transistors and gates even if it is 20nm.
  • peterfirefly 3y ago
    Cooling and power supply. Plus it's really hard to have more than one transistor level: you can try to put transistors on both sides of a die or you can take separate dies, grind some of them really thin, and then put them on top of each other.
  • jsjohnst 3y ago
    I’m not the one who downvoted you, but while stacking in 3D might work for things like ram and storage, it doesn’t help the same way with cpu. They aren’t trying to get the overall die size smaller per se, but rather the node size. Generally speaking, smaller transistors = lower energy consumption + higher performance for the same number of transistors.
    • patmorgan23 3y ago
      I wonder how practical it would be to switch to non-binary transistors. I believe some early vacuum tubes where trinary instead of binary. Probably not practical but would be interesting to see how it could fit together.
      • wtallis 3y ago
        Storage (NAND flash) and many off-chip communication protocols (both wired and wireless) are already non-binary and use multiple discrete voltage levels. There's also a lot of interest in more or less analog storage and compute elements for ML, where it's fine to have weights and activations represented in a fundamentally fuzzy manner. But I don't think there's any promising way to perform discrete deterministic logic and computation in base 3 or higher using transistors, aside from what we already do for multi-bit quantities.
• bigboy12 3y ago
  [flagged]