5 ms·

What Arm's CEO makes of the Intel debacle

50 points by m463 2y ago

timmytokyo 2y ago
Article is paywalled.
- TechPlasma 2y ago
  The verge has seemingly been doing this a lot recently and it's been very annoying. It's not obvious that any given article will be paywalled or not. It would be nice if they at least marked them.
  - DeepPhilosopher 2y ago
    Whether or not its paywalled depends on how much you read. You can get around most of the paywalls by going incognito or clearing your cookies.
  - pjmlp 2y ago
    As per last tweets from them, it seem nowadays all of them, they are now subscription based. I understand the change, eventually there won't be any publications left, if people keep refusing to pay for them, and use ad blockers as well.
- 14 2y ago
  which means close the site and ignore the article. Or wait for some kind soul to post the archived version on HN lol.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    I might get kicked out of the cool kids club for suggesting this, but, err, maybe we could use money in exchange for goods and se services? I know! it's a crazy idea. it'll never work. but still.
    - akira2501 2y ago
      The "service" of writing down things people have said out loud is pretty low margin. So your choices are to put a paywall up and hope people pay a flat rate for whatever you happen to offer each month or to increase your distribution as much as you can while embedding relevant static advertisements. Since delivery is exceedingly cheap it seems obvious which strategy to use.
      - oarsinsync 2y ago
        > The "service" of writing down things people have said out loud is Unclear why "service" is in quotes. Not many people get to be in the room where it happens. The people that do get to be in the room, absolutely do provide a real service to the rest of us who don't.
        akira2501 2y ago
        > Unclear why "service" is in quotes. Not many people get to be in the room where it happens. You answer your own question. There's no reason at this point in history the "room size" needs to be artificially limited. Was the Arm CEO paid for their time? If not, why not? > absolutely do provide a real service to the rest of us who don't. It's service for Arm not you. If you wanted unbiased analysis of Intel's position you might seek someone other than a direct competitor. Which makes paywalling this all the more baffling.
    - nottorp 2y ago
      Yep. It will never work when everyone wants you to commit to a year of hard to cancel subscription to read one article that is possibly lousy. Especially since - see another comment thread here on HN - their "AI" thinks you're a regular reader when you click on them once per month.
- kmlx 2y ago
  https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/3/24306571/verge-subscription-launch-fewer-ads-unlimited-access-full-text-rss https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/3/24306571/verge-subscripti... > Our original reporting, reviews, and features will be behind a dynamic metered paywall — many of you will never hit the paywall, but if you read us a lot, we’ll ask you to pay.
  - FrequentLurker 2y ago
    This is the second verge article I opened this month and I already hit the paywall
    - nottorp 2y ago
      I didn't count, but if i ever open a verge article it's from being linked to on here. And the title has to be non click baity. So... pretty sure i don't read verge a lot either. And I get the paywall.
  - ksec 2y ago
    It is funny, but HN wants reporting and publishing to be subscription based because Ads is evil. At the same time complaining about article requires subscription.
polygot 2y ago
https://web.archive.org/web/20241208050739/https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/6/24315123/arm-ceo-rene-haas-intel-ai-chips-samsung-changes https://web.archive.org/web/20241208050739/https://www.theve...
ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
I have not watched Intel closely for a long time. Seeing that its market cap is down 30% over the last decade is crazy. Considering how IT in general grew so much over the same time period. What happened? To see how the Intel CEO is thinking, I now scrolled through a few interviews with him. In this interview, Intel's CEO is asked to describe the difference of a CPU and a GPU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d07wy5AK72E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d07wy5AK72E His answer is that the CPU is capable of doing general computing, while a GPU is made for very specific tasks. I'm not sure if that is a good way to put it. The way I would put it is that a GPU is a bit like an array of many CPUs. And to manage this array of processors all doing computation at the same time brings constraints and management overhead. So it is usually harder to program a GPU but results in better performance.
- hmottestad 2y ago
  The article sheds some light on what’s been going on. You’ll also be happy to know that the video you linked to is not a video of the current Intel CEO.
  - ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
    But he's the CEO under whom things went downhill, right?
    - hmottestad 2y ago
      I wouldn't say so no. Personally I feel that the 5 years of reintroducing 14nm instead of getting 10nm out the door was what ate up any lead that Intel had over its competitors. And don't forget that rumors has it that Apple reported more bugs with Intel Skylake than the QA team at Intel had managed to report. Never a good thing when one of your biggest customers finds more bugs in your product than your own engineers have managed to find. I wouldn't really blame all this on a single person though.
- Nevermark 2y ago
  I think you are right about CPU vs. GPU. It’s complex independent cores vs. simple array cores. The largest part of that “overhead” is the need for much higher memory bandwidth and caching due to having many more cores to feed. And the added complexity of programming is managing groups of cores (and multiple groups of cores) so they are all as active as possible without blocking each other algorithmically or due to memory misalignments, page read/write inconsistency, or cross interference. With many more cores achieved with smaller cores: streamlined Arithmetic Control Units, less pipelining (?) and a simpler/shared Instruction Control Unit. Somebody correct me if I am wrong.
spockz 2y ago
Intel has been hitting all (or enough of) the right notes for about 30 years. In our industry (perhaps everywhere) we have a constant tension between optimising in the current direction and do the same thing but better (CPU general, x86 specifically) and trying another approach. This has to be managed while the world around you changes requiring you to pivot into perhaps a completely different direction. CPUs are still relevant. And x86 can still provide a lot of value and iterate forward. AMD has spent 20 years getting to the front. It is the short term vision that is killing Intel. AI accelerators are going to be useful and valuable until the point they are commoditised just like CPU. Until then someone (Nvidia) will gain a lot of profit. They used this money to buy their way into the datacenter with companies like mellanox. Nvidia will be on top for a while. And then the cycle continues and we will see a new company on top.
- BeefWellington 2y ago
  In terms of performance, AMD spent around 10 getting to the front, 2-3 in front, then another 10 getting back in front. However until the introduction of Ryzen (and really EPYC) AMD hadn't been able to make substantial inroads into the market. Laptops using AMD CPUs are at their most available and they're still lucky to be 20% of any given manufacturer's SKUs. Intel has an opportunity to reclaim some of those areas with their more power efficient chips, but both they and AMD are facing more competition from non-x86 manufacturers than ever, and that competition is likely only to grow. Apple's CPUs seemed to be a product of engineering without concern for backwards compatibility, e.g.: analyze current software, make the CPU do those things well. I wonder what Intel could produce if they came at a new line of processors with the same mindset, though that would require engineers to be in charge of the company again.
  - tw04 2y ago
    The last time they did that we ended up with Itanium.
    - Pet_Ant 2y ago
      Itanium was designed to be diferente for difference sake to build a most using patents to prevent competition/commoditization with a pinch of the second-system effect thrown in. What is needed is a sober look and re-engineering.
relistan 2y ago
That they’ve fallen behind in both fabs and processor tech is an indicator that something is deeply wrong. Boeing’s EVP of operations being on the board can’t have helped. This kind of deeply wrong smells like IBM in 1990. But without a second business line (mainframes) that generated a ton of money.
threeseed 2y ago
For me, Intel needs to buy Oxide or Sidero. And commit to building a simple, powerful, enthusiast/startup friendly platform for running mini-clouds at home/on-premise. And start bringing tech like Optane, Tofino etc to developers so they can get better price/performance than the soon to be ARM dominated cloud.
- newsclues 2y ago
  Intel is already an investor in oxide https://www.intelcapital.com/investing-in-oxide-unlocking-cloud-benefits-for-on-prem-data-centers/ https://www.intelcapital.com/investing-in-oxide-unlocking-cl...
  - threeseed 2y ago
    Sure. But I want an Oxide for enthusiasts/startups/small companies.
    - newsclues 2y ago
      I’d love an oxide homelab.
- klelatti 2y ago
  Didn't 'Gelsinger era' Intel abandon Optane and Tofino? And listening to the most recent Oxide podcast [1] I can't think the Oxide team would want to stay long at Intel unless the new CEO took radical action. [1] https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/2218242 https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/2218242
  - threeseed 2y ago
    Optane died because none of the cloud providers were really interested in it. Which meant no developers could really develop for it so you're in a vicious circle. It's why I think they need to have some way for people to easily use their tech at home/on-premise.
rwmj 2y ago
This article says a lot more about Arm than it does about Intel. A couple of sentences stood out: > Arm is also rumored to be eyeing an expansion into building its own chips and not just licensing its designs > if you’re a vertically integrated company and the power of your strategy is in the fact that you have a product and you have fabs, inherently, you have a potential huge advantage in terms of cost versus the competition I don't get this strategy at all. Why is vertical integration of the designs and the fabs any advantage? Sure, there are probably small savings here and there from changing the design to suit the process. But like Intel you'd get fat and lazy and end up with weird tooling that only your one company uses. And you can't concentrate on being the best at one thing with huge volumes like TSMC. Arm is way overvalued as it is, and now the CEO is going to try something stupid.
- sgt101 2y ago
  Having visibility across the value chain should be very helpful - you can avoid committing to undeliverable products and at the same time anticipate demand from your customers. Overall you should be able to run the same thing on much lower margins and be in a position to out compete anyone who doesn't have the same advantage. Unfortunately I think that the temptation is to give in to the "faster horse that eats less" requests and to accept "we just can't do that boz" on the other end. China seems to be moving to a model that couples integration with bouts of intimidatory violence and so far that seems to be working well, but it does have costs.
- imtringued 2y ago
  Yeah that CEO doesn't understand the benefits of vertical integration. The point of specialization and outsourcing is to amortize fixed costs among a larger customer base. If fixed costs were zero, then it would never make sense to outsource, since the effective marginal cost is identical in the non specialized company versus the specialized company. Every company would produce everything they need in house. Fabs have enormous fixed costs. Any form of vertical integration is going to make your products more expensive, unless you specialize in some kind of underserved niche with no competition. TSMC will always have the lowest marginal cost. What Arm should be doing is partnering with TSMC and other fabs to build optimized cell libraries for Arm designs and investing into software tools for SoC integrators and become a one stop shop for proprietary IP cores and custom ASIPs so people don't even think of talking with Cadence or Synopsys.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
richliss 2y ago
He's too nice to call out the real problem, which is hubris. Intel got arrogant, remained arrogant and despite getting absolutely pummelled by competitors on share price value, believes it is special. Intel needs to realise it's not going to catch up TSMC and so should focus on cannibalising all other competitors and moving into spaces where TSMC doesn't operate. It's going to be a lower margin game from now on but Intel can survive. Oh and be the nicest folks in town, not the shit on the people we need like Gelsinger did. Intel is in effect a Will Ferrell movie character. Character is arrogant, becomes arrogant and stupid in defiance, and potentially finally sees the error of its ways and grows a bit.
snvzz 2y ago
ARM CEO will tell you otherwise, but RISC-V is the ISA that will be replacing x86.
- makerofthings 2y ago
  Just like gimp is replacing photoshop.

50 points by m463 2y ago

timmytokyo 2y ago

Article is paywalled.

TechPlasma 2y ago
The verge has seemingly been doing this a lot recently and it's been very annoying. It's not obvious that any given article will be paywalled or not. It would be nice if they at least marked them.
- DeepPhilosopher 2y ago
  Whether or not its paywalled depends on how much you read. You can get around most of the paywalls by going incognito or clearing your cookies.
- pjmlp 2y ago
  As per last tweets from them, it seem nowadays all of them, they are now subscription based. I understand the change, eventually there won't be any publications left, if people keep refusing to pay for them, and use ad blockers as well.
14 2y ago
which means close the site and ignore the article. Or wait for some kind soul to post the archived version on HN lol.
- fragmede 2y ago
  I might get kicked out of the cool kids club for suggesting this, but, err, maybe we could use money in exchange for goods and se services? I know! it's a crazy idea. it'll never work. but still.
  - akira2501 2y ago
    The "service" of writing down things people have said out loud is pretty low margin. So your choices are to put a paywall up and hope people pay a flat rate for whatever you happen to offer each month or to increase your distribution as much as you can while embedding relevant static advertisements. Since delivery is exceedingly cheap it seems obvious which strategy to use.
    - oarsinsync 2y ago
      > The "service" of writing down things people have said out loud is Unclear why "service" is in quotes. Not many people get to be in the room where it happens. The people that do get to be in the room, absolutely do provide a real service to the rest of us who don't.
      - akira2501 2y ago
        > Unclear why "service" is in quotes. Not many people get to be in the room where it happens. You answer your own question. There's no reason at this point in history the "room size" needs to be artificially limited. Was the Arm CEO paid for their time? If not, why not? > absolutely do provide a real service to the rest of us who don't. It's service for Arm not you. If you wanted unbiased analysis of Intel's position you might seek someone other than a direct competitor. Which makes paywalling this all the more baffling.
  - nottorp 2y ago
    Yep. It will never work when everyone wants you to commit to a year of hard to cancel subscription to read one article that is possibly lousy. Especially since - see another comment thread here on HN - their "AI" thinks you're a regular reader when you click on them once per month.
kmlx 2y ago
https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/3/24306571/verge-subscription-launch-fewer-ads-unlimited-access-full-text-rss https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/3/24306571/verge-subscripti... > Our original reporting, reviews, and features will be behind a dynamic metered paywall — many of you will never hit the paywall, but if you read us a lot, we’ll ask you to pay.
- FrequentLurker 2y ago
  This is the second verge article I opened this month and I already hit the paywall
  - nottorp 2y ago
    I didn't count, but if i ever open a verge article it's from being linked to on here. And the title has to be non click baity. So... pretty sure i don't read verge a lot either. And I get the paywall.
- ksec 2y ago
  It is funny, but HN wants reporting and publishing to be subscription based because Ads is evil. At the same time complaining about article requires subscription.

polygot 2y ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20241208050739/https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/6/24315123/arm-ceo-rene-haas-intel-ai-chips-samsung-changes https://web.archive.org/web/20241208050739/https://www.theve...

ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago

I have not watched Intel closely for a long time. Seeing that its market cap is down 30% over the last decade is crazy. Considering how IT in general grew so much over the same time period. What happened? To see how the Intel CEO is thinking, I now scrolled through a few interviews with him. In this interview, Intel's CEO is asked to describe the difference of a CPU and a GPU: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d07wy5AK72E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d07wy5AK72E His answer is that the CPU is capable of doing general computing, while a GPU is made for very specific tasks. I'm not sure if that is a good way to put it. The way I would put it is that a GPU is a bit like an array of many CPUs. And to manage this array of processors all doing computation at the same time brings constraints and management overhead. So it is usually harder to program a GPU but results in better performance.

hmottestad 2y ago
The article sheds some light on what’s been going on. You’ll also be happy to know that the video you linked to is not a video of the current Intel CEO.
- ArtTimeInvestor 2y ago
  But he's the CEO under whom things went downhill, right?
  - hmottestad 2y ago
    I wouldn't say so no. Personally I feel that the 5 years of reintroducing 14nm instead of getting 10nm out the door was what ate up any lead that Intel had over its competitors. And don't forget that rumors has it that Apple reported more bugs with Intel Skylake than the QA team at Intel had managed to report. Never a good thing when one of your biggest customers finds more bugs in your product than your own engineers have managed to find. I wouldn't really blame all this on a single person though.
Nevermark 2y ago
I think you are right about CPU vs. GPU. It’s complex independent cores vs. simple array cores. The largest part of that “overhead” is the need for much higher memory bandwidth and caching due to having many more cores to feed. And the added complexity of programming is managing groups of cores (and multiple groups of cores) so they are all as active as possible without blocking each other algorithmically or due to memory misalignments, page read/write inconsistency, or cross interference. With many more cores achieved with smaller cores: streamlined Arithmetic Control Units, less pipelining (?) and a simpler/shared Instruction Control Unit. Somebody correct me if I am wrong.

spockz 2y ago

Intel has been hitting all (or enough of) the right notes for about 30 years. In our industry (perhaps everywhere) we have a constant tension between optimising in the current direction and do the same thing but better (CPU general, x86 specifically) and trying another approach. This has to be managed while the world around you changes requiring you to pivot into perhaps a completely different direction. CPUs are still relevant. And x86 can still provide a lot of value and iterate forward. AMD has spent 20 years getting to the front. It is the short term vision that is killing Intel. AI accelerators are going to be useful and valuable until the point they are commoditised just like CPU. Until then someone (Nvidia) will gain a lot of profit. They used this money to buy their way into the datacenter with companies like mellanox. Nvidia will be on top for a while. And then the cycle continues and we will see a new company on top.

BeefWellington 2y ago
In terms of performance, AMD spent around 10 getting to the front, 2-3 in front, then another 10 getting back in front. However until the introduction of Ryzen (and really EPYC) AMD hadn't been able to make substantial inroads into the market. Laptops using AMD CPUs are at their most available and they're still lucky to be 20% of any given manufacturer's SKUs. Intel has an opportunity to reclaim some of those areas with their more power efficient chips, but both they and AMD are facing more competition from non-x86 manufacturers than ever, and that competition is likely only to grow. Apple's CPUs seemed to be a product of engineering without concern for backwards compatibility, e.g.: analyze current software, make the CPU do those things well. I wonder what Intel could produce if they came at a new line of processors with the same mindset, though that would require engineers to be in charge of the company again.
- tw04 2y ago
  The last time they did that we ended up with Itanium.
  - Pet_Ant 2y ago
    Itanium was designed to be diferente for difference sake to build a most using patents to prevent competition/commoditization with a pinch of the second-system effect thrown in. What is needed is a sober look and re-engineering.

relistan 2y ago

That they’ve fallen behind in both fabs and processor tech is an indicator that something is deeply wrong. Boeing’s EVP of operations being on the board can’t have helped. This kind of deeply wrong smells like IBM in 1990. But without a second business line (mainframes) that generated a ton of money.

threeseed 2y ago

For me, Intel needs to buy Oxide or Sidero. And commit to building a simple, powerful, enthusiast/startup friendly platform for running mini-clouds at home/on-premise. And start bringing tech like Optane, Tofino etc to developers so they can get better price/performance than the soon to be ARM dominated cloud.

newsclues 2y ago
Intel is already an investor in oxide https://www.intelcapital.com/investing-in-oxide-unlocking-cloud-benefits-for-on-prem-data-centers/ https://www.intelcapital.com/investing-in-oxide-unlocking-cl...
- threeseed 2y ago
  Sure. But I want an Oxide for enthusiasts/startups/small companies.
  - newsclues 2y ago
    I’d love an oxide homelab.
klelatti 2y ago
Didn't 'Gelsinger era' Intel abandon Optane and Tofino? And listening to the most recent Oxide podcast [1] I can't think the Oxide team would want to stay long at Intel unless the new CEO took radical action. [1] https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/2218242 https://oxide.computer/podcasts/oxide-and-friends/2218242
- threeseed 2y ago
  Optane died because none of the cloud providers were really interested in it. Which meant no developers could really develop for it so you're in a vicious circle. It's why I think they need to have some way for people to easily use their tech at home/on-premise.

rwmj 2y ago

This article says a lot more about Arm than it does about Intel. A couple of sentences stood out: > Arm is also rumored to be eyeing an expansion into building its own chips and not just licensing its designs > if you’re a vertically integrated company and the power of your strategy is in the fact that you have a product and you have fabs, inherently, you have a potential huge advantage in terms of cost versus the competition I don't get this strategy at all. Why is vertical integration of the designs and the fabs any advantage? Sure, there are probably small savings here and there from changing the design to suit the process. But like Intel you'd get fat and lazy and end up with weird tooling that only your one company uses. And you can't concentrate on being the best at one thing with huge volumes like TSMC. Arm is way overvalued as it is, and now the CEO is going to try something stupid.

sgt101 2y ago
Having visibility across the value chain should be very helpful - you can avoid committing to undeliverable products and at the same time anticipate demand from your customers. Overall you should be able to run the same thing on much lower margins and be in a position to out compete anyone who doesn't have the same advantage. Unfortunately I think that the temptation is to give in to the "faster horse that eats less" requests and to accept "we just can't do that boz" on the other end. China seems to be moving to a model that couples integration with bouts of intimidatory violence and so far that seems to be working well, but it does have costs.
imtringued 2y ago
Yeah that CEO doesn't understand the benefits of vertical integration. The point of specialization and outsourcing is to amortize fixed costs among a larger customer base. If fixed costs were zero, then it would never make sense to outsource, since the effective marginal cost is identical in the non specialized company versus the specialized company. Every company would produce everything they need in house. Fabs have enormous fixed costs. Any form of vertical integration is going to make your products more expensive, unless you specialize in some kind of underserved niche with no competition. TSMC will always have the lowest marginal cost. What Arm should be doing is partnering with TSMC and other fabs to build optimized cell libraries for Arm designs and investing into software tools for SoC integrators and become a one stop shop for proprietary IP cores and custom ASIPs so people don't even think of talking with Cadence or Synopsys.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

richliss 2y ago

He's too nice to call out the real problem, which is hubris. Intel got arrogant, remained arrogant and despite getting absolutely pummelled by competitors on share price value, believes it is special. Intel needs to realise it's not going to catch up TSMC and so should focus on cannibalising all other competitors and moving into spaces where TSMC doesn't operate. It's going to be a lower margin game from now on but Intel can survive. Oh and be the nicest folks in town, not the shit on the people we need like Gelsinger did. Intel is in effect a Will Ferrell movie character. Character is arrogant, becomes arrogant and stupid in defiance, and potentially finally sees the error of its ways and grows a bit.

snvzz 2y ago

ARM CEO will tell you otherwise, but RISC-V is the ISA that will be replacing x86.

makerofthings 2y ago
Just like gimp is replacing photoshop.