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Intel has had a few bad years, but frankly I feel like they could fall a lot lower. They aren't as down bad as AMD was during the Bulldozer years, or Apple duri

Intel has had a few bad years, but frankly I feel like they could fall a lot lower. They aren't as down bad as AMD was during the Bulldozer years, or Apple during the PowerPC years, or even Samsung's early Exynos chipsets. The absolute worst thing they've done in the past 5 years was fab on TSMC silicon, which half the industry is guilty of at this point. You can absolutely shoot your feet off trying to modernize too quickly. Intel will be the laughingstock if 18A never makes it to market and their CPU designs start losing in earnest to their competitors. But right now, in a relative sense, Intel isn't even down for the count.

buildbot 2y ago
Intel has failed pretty badly IMO. Fabbing at TSMC might actually have been a good idea, except that every other component of arrow like is problematic. Huge tile to tile latencies, special chiplets that are not reusable in any other design, removal of hyperthreading, etc etc. Intel’s last gen CPU is in general faster than the new gen due to all the various issues. And that’s just the current product! The last two gens are unreliable, quickly killing themselves with too high voltage and causing endless BSODs. The culture and methods of ex-Intel people at the management level is telling as well, from my experiences at my last job at least. (My opinions are my own, not my current employers & a lot of ex-Intel people are awesome!)
- talldayo 2y ago
  We'll see, I mostly object to the "vultures circling" narrative that HN seems to be attached to. Intel's current position is not unprecedented, and people have been speculating Intel would have a rough catchup since the "14nm+++" memes were vogue. But they still have their fabs (and wisely spun it out to it's own business) and their chip designs, while pretty faulty, successfully brought x86 to the big.LITTLE core arrangement. They've beat AMD to the punch on a number of key technologies, and while I still think AMD has the better mobile hardware it still feels like the desktop stuff is a toss-up. Server stuff... glances at Gaudi and Xeon, then at Nvidia ...let's not talk about server stuff. A lot of hopes and promises are riding on 18A being the savior for both Intel Foundry Services and the Intel chips wholesale. If we get official confirmation that it's been cancelled so Intel can focus on something else then it will signal the end of Intel as we know it.
  - Tostino 2y ago
    I mean they were on 14 NM until just about 2022, those memes didn't come from nowhere. And it's not even that long ago.
    - adrian_b 2y ago
      Their last 14 nm launch has been Rocket Lake, the desktop CPU of the year 2020/2021. The next 3 years, 2021/2022, 2022/2023 and 2023/2024, have been dominated by "10 nm" rebranded as "Intel 7" products, which have used the Golden Cove/Raptor Cove and Gracemont CPU core micro-architectures. Now their recent products are split between those made internally with the Intel 4/Intel 3 CMOS processes (which use rather obsolete CPU cores, which are very similar to the cores made with Intel 7, except that the new manufacturing process provides more cores per package and a lower power consumption per core) and those made at TSMC with up-to-date CPU cores, where the latter include all the higher end models for laptop and desktop CPUs (the cheapest models for the year 2024/2025 remain some rebranded older CPU models based on refreshes of Meteor Lake, Raptor Lake and Alder Lake N).
  - phkahler 2y ago
    >> successfully brought x86 to the big.LITTLE core arrangement. Really? I thought they said using e-cores would be better than hyper threading. AMD has doubled down on hyper threading - putting a second decoder in each core that doesn't directly benefit single thread perf. So Intels 24 cores are now competitive with (actually losing to) 16 zen 5 cores. And that's without using AVX512 which Arrow Lake doesn't even support. I was never a fan of big.little for desktop or even laptops.
    - astrange 2y ago
      It's working well for Mac laptops, although I'd rather people call it "asymmetric multiprocessing" than "big.LITTLE". Why is it written like that anyway? (Wikipedia seems to want me to call it "heterogeneous computing", but that doesn't make sense - surely that term should mean running on CPU+GPU at the same time, or multiple different ISAs.) Of course, it might've worked fine if they used symmetric CPU cores as well. Hard to tell.
- hangonhn 2y ago
  Fabbing at TSMC is an embarrassing but great decision. The design side of Intel is the revenue/profit generating side. They can't let the failures of their foundries hold back their design side and leave them hopelessly behind AMD and ARM. Once they've regained their shares of the server market or at least stabilized it, they can start shifting some of their fabbing to Intel Foundry Services, who are going to really suck at the beginning. But no one else is going to take that chance on those foundries if not Intel's design side. The foundry side will need that stream of business while they work out their processes.

buildbot 2y ago

Intel has failed pretty badly IMO. Fabbing at TSMC might actually have been a good idea, except that every other component of arrow like is problematic. Huge tile to tile latencies, special chiplets that are not reusable in any other design, removal of hyperthreading, etc etc. Intel’s last gen CPU is in general faster than the new gen due to all the various issues. And that’s just the current product! The last two gens are unreliable, quickly killing themselves with too high voltage and causing endless BSODs. The culture and methods of ex-Intel people at the management level is telling as well, from my experiences at my last job at least. (My opinions are my own, not my current employers & a lot of ex-Intel people are awesome!)

talldayo 2y ago
We'll see, I mostly object to the "vultures circling" narrative that HN seems to be attached to. Intel's current position is not unprecedented, and people have been speculating Intel would have a rough catchup since the "14nm+++" memes were vogue. But they still have their fabs (and wisely spun it out to it's own business) and their chip designs, while pretty faulty, successfully brought x86 to the big.LITTLE core arrangement. They've beat AMD to the punch on a number of key technologies, and while I still think AMD has the better mobile hardware it still feels like the desktop stuff is a toss-up. Server stuff... glances at Gaudi and Xeon, then at Nvidia ...let's not talk about server stuff. A lot of hopes and promises are riding on 18A being the savior for both Intel Foundry Services and the Intel chips wholesale. If we get official confirmation that it's been cancelled so Intel can focus on something else then it will signal the end of Intel as we know it.
- Tostino 2y ago
  I mean they were on 14 NM until just about 2022, those memes didn't come from nowhere. And it's not even that long ago.
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    Their last 14 nm launch has been Rocket Lake, the desktop CPU of the year 2020/2021. The next 3 years, 2021/2022, 2022/2023 and 2023/2024, have been dominated by "10 nm" rebranded as "Intel 7" products, which have used the Golden Cove/Raptor Cove and Gracemont CPU core micro-architectures. Now their recent products are split between those made internally with the Intel 4/Intel 3 CMOS processes (which use rather obsolete CPU cores, which are very similar to the cores made with Intel 7, except that the new manufacturing process provides more cores per package and a lower power consumption per core) and those made at TSMC with up-to-date CPU cores, where the latter include all the higher end models for laptop and desktop CPUs (the cheapest models for the year 2024/2025 remain some rebranded older CPU models based on refreshes of Meteor Lake, Raptor Lake and Alder Lake N).
- phkahler 2y ago
  >> successfully brought x86 to the big.LITTLE core arrangement. Really? I thought they said using e-cores would be better than hyper threading. AMD has doubled down on hyper threading - putting a second decoder in each core that doesn't directly benefit single thread perf. So Intels 24 cores are now competitive with (actually losing to) 16 zen 5 cores. And that's without using AVX512 which Arrow Lake doesn't even support. I was never a fan of big.little for desktop or even laptops.
  - astrange 2y ago
    It's working well for Mac laptops, although I'd rather people call it "asymmetric multiprocessing" than "big.LITTLE". Why is it written like that anyway? (Wikipedia seems to want me to call it "heterogeneous computing", but that doesn't make sense - surely that term should mean running on CPU+GPU at the same time, or multiple different ISAs.) Of course, it might've worked fine if they used symmetric CPU cores as well. Hard to tell.
hangonhn 2y ago
Fabbing at TSMC is an embarrassing but great decision. The design side of Intel is the revenue/profit generating side. They can't let the failures of their foundries hold back their design side and leave them hopelessly behind AMD and ARM. Once they've regained their shares of the server market or at least stabilized it, they can start shifting some of their fabbing to Intel Foundry Services, who are going to really suck at the beginning. But no one else is going to take that chance on those foundries if not Intel's design side. The foundry side will need that stream of business while they work out their processes.