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Damn, first Intel missed out on Mobile, then it fumbled AI, and now it's being seriously challenged on its home turf. Pat has his work cut out for him.

jsheard 2y ago
Not to mention that ARM keeps closing in on their ISA moat via Apple, Ampere, Graviton and so on. Their last bastion is the fact that Microsoft keeps botching Windows for ARM every time they try to make it happen.
- DanielHB 2y ago
  Not so much with the latest ARM windows laptops
- pjmlp 2y ago
  Not really Microsoft, rather the Windows developer ecosystem, backwards compatibility is the name of the game in PC land, and as such there is very little value to add additional development costs to support ARM alongside x86, for so little additional software sales. Apple doesn't matter beyond its 10% market share, they don't target servers any more. Ampere is a step away to be fully owned by Oracle, I bet most HN ARM cheering crowd is blessifuly unaware of it. Graviton is only relevant for AWS customers.
bryanlarsen 2y ago
> seriously challenged on its home turf. Is it? I presume that a large chunk of the AMD's $3.5B is MI3XX chips, and very little of Intel's $3.5B is AI, so doesn't that mean that Xeon likely still substantially outsells EPYC?
- adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
  not necessarily. in the past 5 years, the x86 monopoly in the server world has broken. arm chips like graviton are a substantial fraction (20%?) of the server CPU market.
rafaelmn 2y ago
His work now boils down to prepping Intel for an acquisition.
- Wytwwww 2y ago
  By whom though? I don't see how any company directly competing with Intel (or even orthogonal e.g. Nvidia and ARM) could be allowed to by Intel (they'd need approval in the US/EU and presumably a few other places) unless it's actually on the brink of bankruptcy?
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    >unless it's actually on the brink of bankruptcy? This may be in the cards.
- saywhanow 2y ago
  IIRC Intel and AMD have a patent sharing agreement that dissolves if either is purchased.
  - rafaelmn 2y ago
    That's just a thing that needs to be renegotiated - highly doubt these two are getting into a patent war given the state of x86. Unless Intel gets acquired by a litigious company to go after AMD :shrug:
  - tonyhart7 2y ago
    Gov would bail out intel or amd lol, this would negate American tech dominance and would try to prevent that
cheema33 2y ago
Intel has come back recently with a new series of "Lunar Lake" CPUs for laptops. They are actually very good. For now, Intel has regained the crown for Windows laptops. Maybe Pat has lit the much needed fire under them.
- pantalaimon 2y ago
  The only ugly (for Intel) detail being that they are fabbed by TSMC
- hollandheese 2y ago
  Snapdragon X Plus/Elite is still faster and has better battery life. Lunar Lake does have a better GPU and of course better compatibility.
  - hajile 2y ago
    X Elite is faster, but not enough to offset the software incompatibility or dealing with the GPU absolutely sucking. Unfortunately for Intel, X Elite was a bad CPU that has been fixed with Snapdragon 8 Elite's update. The core uses a tiny fraction of the power of X Elite (way less than the N3 node shrink would offer). The core also got a bigger frontend and a few other changes which seem to have updated IPC. Qualcomm said they are leading in performance per area and I believe it is true. Lunar Lake's P-core is over 2x as large (2.2mm2 vs 4.5mm2) and Zen5 is nearly 2x as large too at 4.2mm2 (Even Zen5c is massively bigger at 3.1mm2). X Elite 2 will either be launching with 8 Elite's core or an even better variant and it'll be launching quite a while before Panther Lake.
- pityJuke 2y ago
  Worth noting, > Future Intel generations of chips, including Panther Lake and Nova Lake, won’t have baked-on memory. “It’s not a good way to run the business, so it really is for us a one-off with Lunar Lake,” said Gelsinger on Intel’s Q3 2024 earnings call, as spotted by VideoCardz.[0] [0]: https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/1/24285513/intel-ceo-lunar-lake-one-off-memory-package-discrete-gpu https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/1/24285513/intel-ceo-lunar-...
kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
They didn't miss out. They owned the most desirable mobile platform in StrongARM and cast it aside. They are the footgun masters.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- hajile 2y ago
  They killed StrongARM because they believed the x86 Atom design could compete. Turns out that it couldn't and most of the phones with it weren't that great. Intel should be focused on an x86+RISC-V hybrid chip design where they can control an upcoming ecosystem while also offering a migration path for businesses that will pay the bills for decades to come.
  - kimixa 2y ago
    I'd argue that the Atom core itself could compete - it hit pretty much the same perf/watt targets as it's performance-competitive ARM equivalents. But having worked with Intel on some of those SoCs, it's everything else that fell down. They were late, they were the "disfavored" teams by execs, they were the engineer's last priority, they had stupid hw bugs they refused to fix and respin, they were everything you could do to set up a project to fail.
    - RussianCow 2y ago
      > They were late This was the main thing, as by that point, all native code was being compiled to Arm and not x86. Using x86 meant that some apps, libraries, etc just didn't work.
      - mkl 2y ago
        Intel and Google developed libhoudini to do binary translation of the native code to solve that problem. https://github.com/SGNight/Arm-NativeBridge https://github.com/SGNight/Arm-NativeBridge, https://www.anandtech.com/show/5770/lava-xolo-x900-review-the-first-intel-medfield-phone/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/5770/lava-xolo-x900-review-th..., http://blog.apedroid.com/2013/05/binary-translation-vs-native-x86-code.html?m=1 http://blog.apedroid.com/2013/05/binary-translation-vs-nativ...
nine_k 2y ago
You forgot the 10 nm / 7 nm node troubles that continued for years and held back their CPU architectures (which honestly kept improving).

jsheard 2y ago

Not to mention that ARM keeps closing in on their ISA moat via Apple, Ampere, Graviton and so on. Their last bastion is the fact that Microsoft keeps botching Windows for ARM every time they try to make it happen.

DanielHB 2y ago
Not so much with the latest ARM windows laptops
pjmlp 2y ago
Not really Microsoft, rather the Windows developer ecosystem, backwards compatibility is the name of the game in PC land, and as such there is very little value to add additional development costs to support ARM alongside x86, for so little additional software sales. Apple doesn't matter beyond its 10% market share, they don't target servers any more. Ampere is a step away to be fully owned by Oracle, I bet most HN ARM cheering crowd is blessifuly unaware of it. Graviton is only relevant for AWS customers.

bryanlarsen 2y ago

> seriously challenged on its home turf. Is it? I presume that a large chunk of the AMD's $3.5B is MI3XX chips, and very little of Intel's $3.5B is AI, so doesn't that mean that Xeon likely still substantially outsells EPYC?

adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
not necessarily. in the past 5 years, the x86 monopoly in the server world has broken. arm chips like graviton are a substantial fraction (20%?) of the server CPU market.

rafaelmn 2y ago

His work now boils down to prepping Intel for an acquisition.

Wytwwww 2y ago
By whom though? I don't see how any company directly competing with Intel (or even orthogonal e.g. Nvidia and ARM) could be allowed to by Intel (they'd need approval in the US/EU and presumably a few other places) unless it's actually on the brink of bankruptcy?
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  >unless it's actually on the brink of bankruptcy? This may be in the cards.
saywhanow 2y ago
IIRC Intel and AMD have a patent sharing agreement that dissolves if either is purchased.
- rafaelmn 2y ago
  That's just a thing that needs to be renegotiated - highly doubt these two are getting into a patent war given the state of x86. Unless Intel gets acquired by a litigious company to go after AMD :shrug:
- tonyhart7 2y ago
  Gov would bail out intel or amd lol, this would negate American tech dominance and would try to prevent that

cheema33 2y ago

Intel has come back recently with a new series of "Lunar Lake" CPUs for laptops. They are actually very good. For now, Intel has regained the crown for Windows laptops. Maybe Pat has lit the much needed fire under them.

pantalaimon 2y ago
The only ugly (for Intel) detail being that they are fabbed by TSMC
hollandheese 2y ago
Snapdragon X Plus/Elite is still faster and has better battery life. Lunar Lake does have a better GPU and of course better compatibility.
- hajile 2y ago
  X Elite is faster, but not enough to offset the software incompatibility or dealing with the GPU absolutely sucking. Unfortunately for Intel, X Elite was a bad CPU that has been fixed with Snapdragon 8 Elite's update. The core uses a tiny fraction of the power of X Elite (way less than the N3 node shrink would offer). The core also got a bigger frontend and a few other changes which seem to have updated IPC. Qualcomm said they are leading in performance per area and I believe it is true. Lunar Lake's P-core is over 2x as large (2.2mm2 vs 4.5mm2) and Zen5 is nearly 2x as large too at 4.2mm2 (Even Zen5c is massively bigger at 3.1mm2). X Elite 2 will either be launching with 8 Elite's core or an even better variant and it'll be launching quite a while before Panther Lake.
pityJuke 2y ago
Worth noting, > Future Intel generations of chips, including Panther Lake and Nova Lake, won’t have baked-on memory. “It’s not a good way to run the business, so it really is for us a one-off with Lunar Lake,” said Gelsinger on Intel’s Q3 2024 earnings call, as spotted by VideoCardz.[0] [0]: https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/1/24285513/intel-ceo-lunar-lake-one-off-memory-package-discrete-gpu https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/1/24285513/intel-ceo-lunar-...

kevin_thibedeau 2y ago

They didn't miss out. They owned the most desirable mobile platform in StrongARM and cast it aside. They are the footgun masters.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
hajile 2y ago
They killed StrongARM because they believed the x86 Atom design could compete. Turns out that it couldn't and most of the phones with it weren't that great. Intel should be focused on an x86+RISC-V hybrid chip design where they can control an upcoming ecosystem while also offering a migration path for businesses that will pay the bills for decades to come.
- kimixa 2y ago
  I'd argue that the Atom core itself could compete - it hit pretty much the same perf/watt targets as it's performance-competitive ARM equivalents. But having worked with Intel on some of those SoCs, it's everything else that fell down. They were late, they were the "disfavored" teams by execs, they were the engineer's last priority, they had stupid hw bugs they refused to fix and respin, they were everything you could do to set up a project to fail.
  - RussianCow 2y ago
    > They were late This was the main thing, as by that point, all native code was being compiled to Arm and not x86. Using x86 meant that some apps, libraries, etc just didn't work.
    - mkl 2y ago
      Intel and Google developed libhoudini to do binary translation of the native code to solve that problem. https://github.com/SGNight/Arm-NativeBridge https://github.com/SGNight/Arm-NativeBridge, https://www.anandtech.com/show/5770/lava-xolo-x900-review-the-first-intel-medfield-phone/3 https://www.anandtech.com/show/5770/lava-xolo-x900-review-th..., http://blog.apedroid.com/2013/05/binary-translation-vs-native-x86-code.html?m=1 http://blog.apedroid.com/2013/05/binary-translation-vs-nativ...

nine_k 2y ago

You forgot the 10 nm / 7 nm node troubles that continued for years and held back their CPU architectures (which honestly kept improving).