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>> If 18a is not ready I think the best case scenario for Intel is a merger with AMD. Aside from the x86 monopoly that would create, I don't think Intel has mu

>> If 18a is not ready I think the best case scenario for Intel is a merger with AMD. Aside from the x86 monopoly that would create, I don't think Intel has much of value to AMD at this point other than the fabs (which aren't delivering). IMHO if Intel is failing, let them fail and others will buy the pieces in bankruptcy. This would probably benefit several other companies that could use 22nm and up fab capacity and someone could even pick up the x86 and graphics businesses. BTW I think at this point the graphics business is more valuable. Even though Intel is in 3rd place there are many players in the SoC world that can use a good GPU. You can build a SoC with Intel, ARM, or RISC-V but they all need a GPU.

cogman10 2y ago
Yeah, what both companies would need to be competitive in the GPU sector is a cuda killer. That's perhaps the one benefit of merging Antel can more easily standardize something.
- physicsguy 2y ago
  You don't get a CUDA killer without the software infrastructure. Intel finally seem to have got their act together a bit with OneAPI but they've languished for years in this area.
  - gpapilion 2y ago
    They weren’t interested in creating an open solution. Both intel and AMD have been somewhat short sighted and looked to recreate their own cuda, and the mistrust of each other has prevented them from a solution for both of them.
    - pbalcer 2y ago
      Disclaimer: I work on this stuff for Intel At least for Intel, that is just not true. Intel's DPC++ is as open as it gets. It implements a Khronos standard (SYCL), most of the development is happening in public on GitHub, it's permissively licensed, it has a viable backend infrastructure (with implementations for both CUDA and HIP). There's also now a UXL foundation with the goal of creating an "open standard accelerator software ecosystem".
      - J_Shelby_J 2y ago
        Neat. Now release 48gb GPUs to the hobbyist devs and we’ll use intel for LLMs!
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        redandblack 2y ago
        Apple is your savior if you are looking at it as a CPU/GPU/NPU package for consumer/hobbyists. I decided that I have to start looking at Apple's AI docs
        AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        The Intel A770 is currently $230 and 48GB of GDDR6 is only like a hundred bucks, so what people really want is to combine these things and pay $350 for that GPU with 48GB of memory. Heck, even double that price would have people lining up. Apple will sell you a machine with 48GB of memory for thousands of dollars but plenty of people can't afford that, and even then the GPU is soldered so you can't just put four of them in one machine to get more performance and memory. The top end 40-core M4 GPUs only have performance comparable to a single A770, which is itself not even that fast of a discrete GPU.
      - ur-whale 2y ago
        Actual links to the github would be much appreciated, as well a half-page tuto on how to get this up an running on a simple Linux+Intel setup.
        mepian 2y ago
        This link should cover everything: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/tools/oneapi/dpc-compiler.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/tools/onea...
      - stonogo 2y ago
    - arresin 2y ago
      What’s happening with intel wino? That seemed like their cuda ish effort.
    - wyldfire 2y ago
      OpenCL was born as a cuda-alike that could be apply to GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA, and general purpose CPUs. NVIDIA briefly embraced it (in order to woo Apple?) and then just about abandoned it to focus more on cuda. NVIDIA abandoning OpenCL meant that it just didn't thrive. Intel and AMD both embraced OpenCL. Though admittedly I don't know the more recent history of OpenCL.
- izacus 2y ago
  Why would you want this kind of increased monopolization? That is, CPU companies also owning the GPU market?
  - nemomarx 2y ago
    is it a lot more competitive for Nvidia to just keep winning? I feel like you want two roughly good choices for GPU compute and AMD needs a shot in the arm for that somewhere.
    - izacus 2y ago
      It is absolutely more competitive when nVidia is a separate company from Intel so they can't pull shit like "our GPUs only work with our GPUs" like Intel is now pulling with their WiFi chips.
- bionhoward 2y ago
  WGSL seems like a nice standard everyone could get behind
- quotemstr 2y ago
  There are already packages that let people run CUDA programs unmodified on other GPUs: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970560 For whatever reason, people just delete these tools from their minds, then claim Nvidia still has a monopoly on CUDA.
  - jcranmer 2y ago
    There's already a panoply of CUDA alternatives, and even several CUDA-to-non-Nvidia-GPU alternatives (which aren't supported by the hardware vendors and are in some sense riskier). To my knowledge (this isn't really my space), many of the higher-level frameworks already support these CUDA alternatives. And yet still the popcorn gallery says "there no [realistic] alternative to CUDA." Methinks the real issue is that CUDA is the best software solution for Nvidia GPUs, and the alternative hardware vendors aren't seen as viable competitor for hardware reasons, and people attribute the failure to software failures.
    - quotemstr 2y ago
      > alternative hardware vendors aren't seen as viable competitor for hardware reasons, and people attribute the failure to software failures. It certainly seems like there's a "nobody ever got fired for buying nvidia" dynamic going on. We've seen this mentality repeatedly in other areas of the industry: that's why the phrase is a snowclone. Eventually, someone is going to use non-nvidia GPU accelerators and get a big enough cost or performance win that industry attitudes will change.
    - jdewerd 2y ago
      > There's already a panoply of CUDA alternatives Is there? 10 years ago, I burned about 6 months of project time slogging through AMD / OpenCL bugs before realizing that I was being an absolute idiot and that the green tax was far cheaper than the time I was wasting. If you asked AMD, they would tell you that OpenCL was ready for new applications and support was right around the corner for old applications. This was incorrect on both counts. Disastrously so, if you trusted them. I learned not to trust them. Over the years, they kept making the same false promises and failing to deliver, year after year, generation after generation of grad students and HPC experts, filling the industry with once-burned-twice-shy received wisdom. When NVDA pumped and AMD didn't, presumably AMD could no longer deny the inadequacy of their offerings and launched an effort to fix their shit. Eventually I am sure it will bear fruit. But is their shit actually fixed? Keeping in mind that they have proven time and time and time and time again that they cannot be trusted to answer this question themselves? 80% margins won't last forever, but the trust deficit that needs to be crossed first shouldn't be understated.
- roenxi 2y ago
  This meme comes up from time to time but I'm not sure what the real evidence for it is or whether the people repeating it have that much experience actually trying to make compute work on AMD cards. Every time I've seen anyone try the problem isn't that the card lacks a library, but rather that calling the function that does what is needed causes a kernel panic. Very different issues - if CUDA allegedly "ran" on AMD cards that still wouldn't save them because the bugs would be too problematic.
  - cogman10 2y ago
    > Every time I've seen anyone try the problem isn't that the card lacks a library, but rather that calling the function that does what is needed causes a kernel panic. Do you have experience with SYCL? My experience with OpenCL was that it's really a PITA to work with. The thing that CUDA makes nice is the direct and minimal exercise to start running GPGPU kernels. write the code, compile with nvcc, cudaed. OpenCL had just a weird dance to perform to get a kernel running. Find the OpenCL device using a magic filesystem token. Ask the device politely if it wants to OpenCL. Send over the kernel string blob to compile. Run the kernel. A ton of ceremony and then you couldn't be guarenteed it'd work because the likes of AMD, Intel, or nVidia were all spotty on how well they'd support it. SYCL seems promising but the ecosystem is a little intimidating. It does not seem (and I could be wrong here) that there is a defacto SYCL compiler. The goals of SYCL compilers are also fairly diverse.
    - roenxi 2y ago
      > Do you have experience with SYCL? No, I bought a Nvidia card and just use CUDA. > OpenCL had just a weird dance to perform to get a kernel running... Yeah but that entire list, if you step back and think big picture, probably isn't the problem. Programmers have a predictable response to that sort of silliness. Build a library over it & abstract it away. The sheer number of frameworks out there is awe-inspiring. I gave up on OpenCL on AMD cards. It wasn't the long complex process that got me, it was the unavoidable crashes along the way. I suspect that is a more significant issue than I realised at the time (when I assumed it was just me) because it goes a long way to explain AMD's pariah-like status in the machine learning world. The situation is more one-sided than can be explained by just a well-optimised library. I've personally seen more success implementing machine learning frameworks on AMD CPUs than on AMD's GPUs, and that is a remarkable thing. Although I assume in 2024 the state of the game has changed a lot from when I was investigating the situation actively. I don't think CUDA is the problem here, math libraries are commodity software that give a relatively marginal edge. The lack of CUDA is probably a symptom of deeper hardware problems once people stray off an explicitly graphical workflow. If the hardware worked to spec I expect someone would just build a non-optimised CUDA clone and we'd all move on. But AMD did build a CUDA clone and it didn't work for me at least - and the buzz suggests something is still going wrong for AMD's GPGPU efforts.
- seanmcdirmid 2y ago
  Why doesn’t NVIDIA buy intel? They have the cash and they have the pairing (M chips being NVIDIA and intel’s biggest competitors now). It would be an AMD/ATI move, and maybe NVIDIA could do its own M CPU competitor with…whatever intel can help with.
  - jimbobbam 2y ago
    They don’t need it they have Grace
xbar 2y ago
I'd like to address the aside for completeness' sake. An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now. Today, there are sufficient competitive chip architectures with cross-compatible operating systems and virtualization that x86 does not represent control of the computing market in a manner that should prevent such a merger: ARM licensees, including the special case of Apple Silicon, Snapdragon, NVIDIA SOCs, RISC-V... Windows, MacOS and Linux all run competitively on multiple non-x86 architectures.
- Octoth0rpe 2y ago
  > An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now. I think you're off by 20 years on this. In the 80s and early 90s we had reasonable competition from 68k, powerpc, and arm on desktops; and tons of competition in the server space (mips, sparc, power, alpha, pa-risc, edit: and vax!). It wasn't till the early 2000s that both the desktop/server space coalesced around x86.
  - bane 2y ago
    Thank you for saying this. It's clear that processors are going through something really interesting right now after an extended dwindling and choke point onto x86. This x86 dominance has lasted entire careers, but from a longer perspective we're simply seeing another cycle in ecosystem diversity, specialized functions spinning out of and back into unified packages, and a continued downward push from commoditization forces that are affecting the entire product chain from fab to ISA licensing. We're not quite at the wild-west of the late 80s and 90s, but something's in the air. It seems almost like the forces that are pushing against these long-term trends are focused more on trying to figure out how to saturate existing compute on the high-end, and using that to justify drives away from diversity and vertical integrated cost/price reduction. But there are, long-term, not as many users who need to host this technology as there are users of things like phones and computers who need the benefits the long-term trends provide. Intel has acted somewhat as a rock in a river, and the rest of the world is finding ways around them after having been dammed up for a bit.
    - 2y ago
paulpan 2y ago
Certainly feels like preempting news that Intel 18A is delayed. Restoring Intel's foundry lead starting with 18A was central to Pat's vision and he essentially staked his job on it. 18A is supposed to enter production next year but recent rumors is that it's broken.
- DebtDeflation 2y ago
  The original "5 Nodes in 4 Years" roadmap released in mid 2021 had 18A entering production 2H 2024. So it's already "delayed". The updated roadmap has it coming in Q3 2025 but I don't think anyone ever believed that. This after 20A was canceled, Intel 4 is only used for the Compute Tile in Meteor Lake, Intel 3 only ever made it into a couple of server chips, and Intel 7 was just renamed 10nm.
  - Lammy 2y ago
    https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/opinion/continued-momentum-intel-18a.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/opinion/con... I have next to zero knowledge of semiconductor fabrication, but “Continued Momentum” does sound like the kind of corporate PR-speak that means “people haven't heard from us in a while and there's not much to show”. I also would never have realized the 20A process was canceled were it not for your comment since this press release has one of the most generous euphemisms I've ever heard for canceling a project: “One of the benefits of our early success on Intel 18A is that it enables us to shift engineering resources from Intel 20A earlier than expected as we near completion of our five-nodes-in-four-years plan.”
  - chx 2y ago
    The first iteration of Intel 10nm was simply broken -- you had Ice Lake mobile CPUs in 2019 yes but desktop and server processors took another two years to be released. In 2012 Intel said they will ship 14nm in 2013 and 10nm in 2015. Not only they did fail to deliver 10nm Intel CPUs but they failed Nokia server division too, nearly killing it off in 2018, three years after their initial target. No one in the industry forgot that, it's hardly a surprise they have such trouble getting customers now. And despite this total failure they spent many tens of on stock buybacks https://ycharts.com/companies/INTC/stock_buyback https://ycharts.com/companies/INTC/stock_buyback no less than ten billions in 2014 and in 2018-2021 over forty billions. That's an awful, awful lot of money to waste.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
sitkack 2y ago
I could see Broadcom picking up x86.
- xxpor 2y ago
  This is great "write a horror story in 7 words" content.
  - sitkack 2y ago
    Ok, I'd like to pitch a Treehouse of Horror episode. Part 1, combine branch predictor with the instruction trace cache to be able to detect workloads, have specific licenses for say Renderman, Oracle or CFD software. Part 2, add a mesh network directly to the CPU, require time based signing keys to operate. Maybe every chip just has starlink included. Part 3, In an BWM rent your seats move, the base CPU is just barely able to boot the OS, specific features can be unlocked with signed payloads. Using Shamir secrets so that Broadcom AND the cloud provider are both required for signing the feature request. One can rent AVX512, more last level cache, ECC, overclocking, underclocking. The nice part about including radios in the CPUs directly means that updates can be applied without network connectivity and you can geofence your feature keys. This last part we can petition the government to require as the grounds of being able to produce EAR regulated CPUs globally. I think I'll just sell these patents to Myhrvold.
    - AtlasBarfed 2y ago
      I want to emphasize this is not a defense of this behavior. But didn't IBM do things like this for years with mainframes?
- baq 2y ago
  sir there are children reading this site.
  - zymhan 2y ago
    I'm not sure I've ever laughed this much at a HN comment chain
PaulHoule 2y ago
Intel GFX held back the industry 10 years. If people thought Windows Vista sucked it was because Intel "supported" it by releasing integrated GPUs which could almost handle Windows Vista but not quite. The best they could do with the GFX business is a public execution. We've been hearing about terrible Intel GFX for 15 years and how they are just on the cusp of making one that is bad (not terrible). Most people who've been following hardware think Intel and GFX is just an oxymoron. Wall Street might see some value in it, but the rest of us, no.
- tasuki 2y ago
  > If people thought Windows Vista sucked it was because Intel "supported" it by releasing integrated GPUs which could almost handle Windows Vista but not quite. What does an OS need a GPU for? My current laptop only has integrated Intel GPU. I'm not missing Nvidia, with its proprietary drivers, high power consumption, and corresponding extra heat and shorter battery life...
  - marxisttemp 2y ago
    > What does an OS need a GPU for? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero
    - PaulHoule 2y ago
      The modern paradigm of "application blasts out a rectangle of pixels" and "the desktop manager composes those into another rectangle of pixels and blasts them out to the screen". It actually separates the OS from the GPU. Before WDDM your GFX device driver was the only software that could use GFX acceleration. After WDDM the GPU is another "processor" in your computer that can read and write to RAM and the application can use the GPU in user space any way it wants, and then the compositor can to the same (in user space) and in the end all the OS is managing communication with the GPU. For that approach to work you need to have enough fill rate that you can redraw the screen several times per frame. Microsoft wanted to have enough they could afford some visual bling, but Intel didn't give to them.
zamadatix 2y ago
I wonder how big a downside an x86 monopoly would actually be these days (an M4 MacBook being the best perf/watt way to run x86 Windows apps today as it is) and how that compares to the downsides of not allowing x86 to consolidate efforts against rising competition from ARM CPUs. The problem with the "use the GPU in a SoC" proposition is everyone that makes the rest of a SoC also already has a GPU for it. Often better than what Intel can offer in terms of perf/die space or perf/watt. These SoC solutions tend to coalesce around tile based designs which keep memory bandwidth and power needs down compared to the traditional desktop IMR designs Intel has.
- h_tbob 2y ago
  That’s actually a pretty good pint, honestly

cogman10 2y ago

Yeah, what both companies would need to be competitive in the GPU sector is a cuda killer. That's perhaps the one benefit of merging Antel can more easily standardize something.

physicsguy 2y ago
You don't get a CUDA killer without the software infrastructure. Intel finally seem to have got their act together a bit with OneAPI but they've languished for years in this area.
- gpapilion 2y ago
  They weren’t interested in creating an open solution. Both intel and AMD have been somewhat short sighted and looked to recreate their own cuda, and the mistrust of each other has prevented them from a solution for both of them.
  - pbalcer 2y ago
    Disclaimer: I work on this stuff for Intel At least for Intel, that is just not true. Intel's DPC++ is as open as it gets. It implements a Khronos standard (SYCL), most of the development is happening in public on GitHub, it's permissively licensed, it has a viable backend infrastructure (with implementations for both CUDA and HIP). There's also now a UXL foundation with the goal of creating an "open standard accelerator software ecosystem".
    - J_Shelby_J 2y ago
      Neat. Now release 48gb GPUs to the hobbyist devs and we’ll use intel for LLMs!
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - redandblack 2y ago
        Apple is your savior if you are looking at it as a CPU/GPU/NPU package for consumer/hobbyists. I decided that I have to start looking at Apple's AI docs
        AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        The Intel A770 is currently $230 and 48GB of GDDR6 is only like a hundred bucks, so what people really want is to combine these things and pay $350 for that GPU with 48GB of memory. Heck, even double that price would have people lining up. Apple will sell you a machine with 48GB of memory for thousands of dollars but plenty of people can't afford that, and even then the GPU is soldered so you can't just put four of them in one machine to get more performance and memory. The top end 40-core M4 GPUs only have performance comparable to a single A770, which is itself not even that fast of a discrete GPU.
    - ur-whale 2y ago
      Actual links to the github would be much appreciated, as well a half-page tuto on how to get this up an running on a simple Linux+Intel setup.
      - mepian 2y ago
        This link should cover everything: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/tools/oneapi/dpc-compiler.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/tools/onea...
    - stonogo 2y ago
  - arresin 2y ago
    What’s happening with intel wino? That seemed like their cuda ish effort.
  - wyldfire 2y ago
    OpenCL was born as a cuda-alike that could be apply to GPUs from AMD and NVIDIA, and general purpose CPUs. NVIDIA briefly embraced it (in order to woo Apple?) and then just about abandoned it to focus more on cuda. NVIDIA abandoning OpenCL meant that it just didn't thrive. Intel and AMD both embraced OpenCL. Though admittedly I don't know the more recent history of OpenCL.
izacus 2y ago
Why would you want this kind of increased monopolization? That is, CPU companies also owning the GPU market?
- nemomarx 2y ago
  is it a lot more competitive for Nvidia to just keep winning? I feel like you want two roughly good choices for GPU compute and AMD needs a shot in the arm for that somewhere.
  - izacus 2y ago
    It is absolutely more competitive when nVidia is a separate company from Intel so they can't pull shit like "our GPUs only work with our GPUs" like Intel is now pulling with their WiFi chips.
bionhoward 2y ago
WGSL seems like a nice standard everyone could get behind
quotemstr 2y ago
There are already packages that let people run CUDA programs unmodified on other GPUs: see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40970560 For whatever reason, people just delete these tools from their minds, then claim Nvidia still has a monopoly on CUDA.
- jcranmer 2y ago
  There's already a panoply of CUDA alternatives, and even several CUDA-to-non-Nvidia-GPU alternatives (which aren't supported by the hardware vendors and are in some sense riskier). To my knowledge (this isn't really my space), many of the higher-level frameworks already support these CUDA alternatives. And yet still the popcorn gallery says "there no [realistic] alternative to CUDA." Methinks the real issue is that CUDA is the best software solution for Nvidia GPUs, and the alternative hardware vendors aren't seen as viable competitor for hardware reasons, and people attribute the failure to software failures.
  - quotemstr 2y ago
    > alternative hardware vendors aren't seen as viable competitor for hardware reasons, and people attribute the failure to software failures. It certainly seems like there's a "nobody ever got fired for buying nvidia" dynamic going on. We've seen this mentality repeatedly in other areas of the industry: that's why the phrase is a snowclone. Eventually, someone is going to use non-nvidia GPU accelerators and get a big enough cost or performance win that industry attitudes will change.
  - jdewerd 2y ago
    > There's already a panoply of CUDA alternatives Is there? 10 years ago, I burned about 6 months of project time slogging through AMD / OpenCL bugs before realizing that I was being an absolute idiot and that the green tax was far cheaper than the time I was wasting. If you asked AMD, they would tell you that OpenCL was ready for new applications and support was right around the corner for old applications. This was incorrect on both counts. Disastrously so, if you trusted them. I learned not to trust them. Over the years, they kept making the same false promises and failing to deliver, year after year, generation after generation of grad students and HPC experts, filling the industry with once-burned-twice-shy received wisdom. When NVDA pumped and AMD didn't, presumably AMD could no longer deny the inadequacy of their offerings and launched an effort to fix their shit. Eventually I am sure it will bear fruit. But is their shit actually fixed? Keeping in mind that they have proven time and time and time and time again that they cannot be trusted to answer this question themselves? 80% margins won't last forever, but the trust deficit that needs to be crossed first shouldn't be understated.
roenxi 2y ago
This meme comes up from time to time but I'm not sure what the real evidence for it is or whether the people repeating it have that much experience actually trying to make compute work on AMD cards. Every time I've seen anyone try the problem isn't that the card lacks a library, but rather that calling the function that does what is needed causes a kernel panic. Very different issues - if CUDA allegedly "ran" on AMD cards that still wouldn't save them because the bugs would be too problematic.
- cogman10 2y ago
  > Every time I've seen anyone try the problem isn't that the card lacks a library, but rather that calling the function that does what is needed causes a kernel panic. Do you have experience with SYCL? My experience with OpenCL was that it's really a PITA to work with. The thing that CUDA makes nice is the direct and minimal exercise to start running GPGPU kernels. write the code, compile with nvcc, cudaed. OpenCL had just a weird dance to perform to get a kernel running. Find the OpenCL device using a magic filesystem token. Ask the device politely if it wants to OpenCL. Send over the kernel string blob to compile. Run the kernel. A ton of ceremony and then you couldn't be guarenteed it'd work because the likes of AMD, Intel, or nVidia were all spotty on how well they'd support it. SYCL seems promising but the ecosystem is a little intimidating. It does not seem (and I could be wrong here) that there is a defacto SYCL compiler. The goals of SYCL compilers are also fairly diverse.
  - roenxi 2y ago
    > Do you have experience with SYCL? No, I bought a Nvidia card and just use CUDA. > OpenCL had just a weird dance to perform to get a kernel running... Yeah but that entire list, if you step back and think big picture, probably isn't the problem. Programmers have a predictable response to that sort of silliness. Build a library over it & abstract it away. The sheer number of frameworks out there is awe-inspiring. I gave up on OpenCL on AMD cards. It wasn't the long complex process that got me, it was the unavoidable crashes along the way. I suspect that is a more significant issue than I realised at the time (when I assumed it was just me) because it goes a long way to explain AMD's pariah-like status in the machine learning world. The situation is more one-sided than can be explained by just a well-optimised library. I've personally seen more success implementing machine learning frameworks on AMD CPUs than on AMD's GPUs, and that is a remarkable thing. Although I assume in 2024 the state of the game has changed a lot from when I was investigating the situation actively. I don't think CUDA is the problem here, math libraries are commodity software that give a relatively marginal edge. The lack of CUDA is probably a symptom of deeper hardware problems once people stray off an explicitly graphical workflow. If the hardware worked to spec I expect someone would just build a non-optimised CUDA clone and we'd all move on. But AMD did build a CUDA clone and it didn't work for me at least - and the buzz suggests something is still going wrong for AMD's GPGPU efforts.
seanmcdirmid 2y ago
Why doesn’t NVIDIA buy intel? They have the cash and they have the pairing (M chips being NVIDIA and intel’s biggest competitors now). It would be an AMD/ATI move, and maybe NVIDIA could do its own M CPU competitor with…whatever intel can help with.
- jimbobbam 2y ago
  They don’t need it they have Grace

xbar 2y ago

I'd like to address the aside for completeness' sake. An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now. Today, there are sufficient competitive chip architectures with cross-compatible operating systems and virtualization that x86 does not represent control of the computing market in a manner that should prevent such a merger: ARM licensees, including the special case of Apple Silicon, Snapdragon, NVIDIA SOCs, RISC-V... Windows, MacOS and Linux all run competitively on multiple non-x86 architectures.

Octoth0rpe 2y ago
> An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now. I think you're off by 20 years on this. In the 80s and early 90s we had reasonable competition from 68k, powerpc, and arm on desktops; and tons of competition in the server space (mips, sparc, power, alpha, pa-risc, edit: and vax!). It wasn't till the early 2000s that both the desktop/server space coalesced around x86.
- bane 2y ago
  Thank you for saying this. It's clear that processors are going through something really interesting right now after an extended dwindling and choke point onto x86. This x86 dominance has lasted entire careers, but from a longer perspective we're simply seeing another cycle in ecosystem diversity, specialized functions spinning out of and back into unified packages, and a continued downward push from commoditization forces that are affecting the entire product chain from fab to ISA licensing. We're not quite at the wild-west of the late 80s and 90s, but something's in the air. It seems almost like the forces that are pushing against these long-term trends are focused more on trying to figure out how to saturate existing compute on the high-end, and using that to justify drives away from diversity and vertical integrated cost/price reduction. But there are, long-term, not as many users who need to host this technology as there are users of things like phones and computers who need the benefits the long-term trends provide. Intel has acted somewhat as a rock in a river, and the rest of the world is finding ways around them after having been dammed up for a bit.
  - 2y ago

paulpan 2y ago

Certainly feels like preempting news that Intel 18A is delayed. Restoring Intel's foundry lead starting with 18A was central to Pat's vision and he essentially staked his job on it. 18A is supposed to enter production next year but recent rumors is that it's broken.

DebtDeflation 2y ago
The original "5 Nodes in 4 Years" roadmap released in mid 2021 had 18A entering production 2H 2024. So it's already "delayed". The updated roadmap has it coming in Q3 2025 but I don't think anyone ever believed that. This after 20A was canceled, Intel 4 is only used for the Compute Tile in Meteor Lake, Intel 3 only ever made it into a couple of server chips, and Intel 7 was just renamed 10nm.
- Lammy 2y ago
  https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/opinion/continued-momentum-intel-18a.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/opinion/con... I have next to zero knowledge of semiconductor fabrication, but “Continued Momentum” does sound like the kind of corporate PR-speak that means “people haven't heard from us in a while and there's not much to show”. I also would never have realized the 20A process was canceled were it not for your comment since this press release has one of the most generous euphemisms I've ever heard for canceling a project: “One of the benefits of our early success on Intel 18A is that it enables us to shift engineering resources from Intel 20A earlier than expected as we near completion of our five-nodes-in-four-years plan.”
- chx 2y ago
  The first iteration of Intel 10nm was simply broken -- you had Ice Lake mobile CPUs in 2019 yes but desktop and server processors took another two years to be released. In 2012 Intel said they will ship 14nm in 2013 and 10nm in 2015. Not only they did fail to deliver 10nm Intel CPUs but they failed Nokia server division too, nearly killing it off in 2018, three years after their initial target. No one in the industry forgot that, it's hardly a surprise they have such trouble getting customers now. And despite this total failure they spent many tens of on stock buybacks https://ycharts.com/companies/INTC/stock_buyback https://ycharts.com/companies/INTC/stock_buyback no less than ten billions in 2014 and in 2018-2021 over forty billions. That's an awful, awful lot of money to waste.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

sitkack 2y ago

I could see Broadcom picking up x86.

xxpor 2y ago
This is great "write a horror story in 7 words" content.
- sitkack 2y ago
  Ok, I'd like to pitch a Treehouse of Horror episode. Part 1, combine branch predictor with the instruction trace cache to be able to detect workloads, have specific licenses for say Renderman, Oracle or CFD software. Part 2, add a mesh network directly to the CPU, require time based signing keys to operate. Maybe every chip just has starlink included. Part 3, In an BWM rent your seats move, the base CPU is just barely able to boot the OS, specific features can be unlocked with signed payloads. Using Shamir secrets so that Broadcom AND the cloud provider are both required for signing the feature request. One can rent AVX512, more last level cache, ECC, overclocking, underclocking. The nice part about including radios in the CPUs directly means that updates can be applied without network connectivity and you can geofence your feature keys. This last part we can petition the government to require as the grounds of being able to produce EAR regulated CPUs globally. I think I'll just sell these patents to Myhrvold.
  - AtlasBarfed 2y ago
    I want to emphasize this is not a defense of this behavior. But didn't IBM do things like this for years with mainframes?
baq 2y ago
sir there are children reading this site.
- zymhan 2y ago
  I'm not sure I've ever laughed this much at a HN comment chain

PaulHoule 2y ago

Intel GFX held back the industry 10 years. If people thought Windows Vista sucked it was because Intel "supported" it by releasing integrated GPUs which could almost handle Windows Vista but not quite. The best they could do with the GFX business is a public execution. We've been hearing about terrible Intel GFX for 15 years and how they are just on the cusp of making one that is bad (not terrible). Most people who've been following hardware think Intel and GFX is just an oxymoron. Wall Street might see some value in it, but the rest of us, no.

tasuki 2y ago
> If people thought Windows Vista sucked it was because Intel "supported" it by releasing integrated GPUs which could almost handle Windows Vista but not quite. What does an OS need a GPU for? My current laptop only has integrated Intel GPU. I'm not missing Nvidia, with its proprietary drivers, high power consumption, and corresponding extra heat and shorter battery life...
- marxisttemp 2y ago
  > What does an OS need a GPU for? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero
  - PaulHoule 2y ago
    The modern paradigm of "application blasts out a rectangle of pixels" and "the desktop manager composes those into another rectangle of pixels and blasts them out to the screen". It actually separates the OS from the GPU. Before WDDM your GFX device driver was the only software that could use GFX acceleration. After WDDM the GPU is another "processor" in your computer that can read and write to RAM and the application can use the GPU in user space any way it wants, and then the compositor can to the same (in user space) and in the end all the OS is managing communication with the GPU. For that approach to work you need to have enough fill rate that you can redraw the screen several times per frame. Microsoft wanted to have enough they could afford some visual bling, but Intel didn't give to them.

zamadatix 2y ago

I wonder how big a downside an x86 monopoly would actually be these days (an M4 MacBook being the best perf/watt way to run x86 Windows apps today as it is) and how that compares to the downsides of not allowing x86 to consolidate efforts against rising competition from ARM CPUs. The problem with the "use the GPU in a SoC" proposition is everyone that makes the rest of a SoC also already has a GPU for it. Often better than what Intel can offer in terms of perf/die space or perf/watt. These SoC solutions tend to coalesce around tile based designs which keep memory bandwidth and power needs down compared to the traditional desktop IMR designs Intel has.

h_tbob 2y ago
That’s actually a pretty good pint, honestly