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That is what Intel does, they build up a market (Optane) and then do a rug pull (Depth Cameras). They continue to do this thing where they do a huge push into
by sitkack 1y ago
That is what Intel does, they build up a market (Optane) and then do a rug pull (Depth Cameras). They continue to do this thing where they do a huge push into a new technology, then don't see the uptake and let it die. Instead of building slowly and then at the right time, doing a big push. Optane support was just getting mature in the Linux kernel when they pulled it. And they focused on some weird cost cutting move when marketing it as a ram replacement for semi-idle VMs, ok.
They keep repeating the same mistakes all the way back to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432
- FpUser 1y agoI am very disappointed about Optane drives. Perfect case for superfast vertically scalable database. I was going to build a solution based on this but suddenly it is gone for all practical intents and purposes.
- sebmellen 1y agoBad habits are hard to break!
- etaioinshrdlu 1y agoWell, Itanium might be a counterexample, they probably tried to make that work for far too long..
- sitkack 1y agoItanium worked as intended.
- paddy_m 1y agoSo far as killing HP PA-Risc, SGI MIPS, DEC Alpha, and seriously hurting the chance for adoption of Sparc, and POWER outside of their respective parents (did I miss any)? Thing is, they could have killed it by 1998, without ever releasing anything, that would have killed the other architectures it was trying to compete with. Instead they waited until 2020 to end support. What the VLIW of Itanium needed and never really got was proper compiler support. Nvidia has this in spades with CUDA. It's easy to port to Nvidia where you do get serious speedups. AVX-512 never offered enough of a speedup from what I could tell, even though it was well supported by at least ICC (and numpy/scipy when properly compiled)
- knowitnone 1y ago"they could have killed it by 1998, without ever releasing anything" perhaps Intel really wanted it to work and killing other architectures was only a side effect?
- kyboren 1y ago> What the VLIW of Itanium needed and never really got was proper compiler support. This is kinda under-selling it. The fundamental problem with statically-scheduled VLIW machines like Itanium is it puts all of the complexity in the compiler. Unfortunately it turns out it's just really hard to make a good static scheduler! In contrast, dynamically-scheduled out-of-order superscalar machines work great but put all the complexity in silicon. The transistor overhead was expensive back in the day, so statically-scheduled VLIWs seemed like a good idea. What happened was that static scheduling stayed really hard while the transistor overhead for dynamic scheduling became irrelevantly cheap. "Throw more hardware at it" won handily over "Make better software".
- bri3d 1y agoNo, VLIW is even worse than this. Describing it as a compiler problem undersells the issue. VLIW is not tractable for a multitasking / multi tenant system due to cache residency issues. The compiler cannot efficiently schedule instructions without knowing what is in cache. But, it can’t know what’s going to be in cache if it doesn’t know what’s occupying the adjacent task time slices. Add virtualization and it’s a disaster.
- mrweasel 1y agoItanium was more of an HP product than an Intel one.
- sheepscreek 1y ago> They continue to do this thing where they do a huge push into a new technology, then don't see the uptake and let it die. Except Intel deliberately made AVX 512 a feature exclusively available to Xeon and enterprise processors in future generations. This backward step artificially limits its availability, forcing enterprises to invest in more expensive hardware. I wonder if Intel has taken a similar approach with Arc GPUs, which lack support for GPU virtualization (SR-IOV). They somewhat added vGPU support to all built-in 12th-14th Gen chips through the i915 driver on Linux. It’s a pleasure to have graphics-acceleration in multiple VMs simultaneously, through the same GPU.
- sitkack 1y agoThey go out their way to segment their markets, ECC, AVX, Optane support (only specific server class skus). I hate it, I hate as a home pc user, I hate it as an enterprise customer, I hate as a shareholder.
- knowitnone 1y agoEvery company does this. If you're grandma only uses a web browser, word processor, and excel, does she really want to spend an additional $50 on a feature she'll not use? Same with NPUs. Different consumers want different features for different prices.
- tliltocatl 1y agoExcept it hinders adoption, because not having a feature in entry-level products will mean less incentive (and ability) for software developers to use it. Compatibility is so valuable it makes everyone converge on the least common denominator, so when you price-gouge on a software-exposed feature, you might as well bury this feature altogether.
- sitkack 1y agoThree fallacies and you are OUT!
- phonon 1y ago
- Gud 1y agoIndeed. Octane/3dxpoint was mind blowing futuristic stuff but it was just gone after 5 years? On the market? Talk about short sighted.
- bobmcnamara 1y agoThey got caught is what happened.
- gaadd33 1y agoCaught doing what? Can you provide some context or links to search?
- bobmcnamara 1y agoWhen Energy Conversion Devices went bankrupt, it appears Intel pirated the technology, and never bothered to pay the royalties for the PCM memory in Optane. Case No. 12-43166 is what killed Optane. Or, in a manner of speaking, Intel being Intel killed Optane.
- wtallis 1y agoThe legal risks were at most the last straw. If Optane had a promising future, Intel could have made the investments necessary to make the legal issues go away. If Optane had a promising future, Micron would have helped Intel secure that future. The long-term value of a persistent memory technology capable of taking a big chunk out of both the DRAM and NAND flash markets is huge. Optane did not have a promising future. The $/GB gap between 3D XPoint memory and 3D NAND flash memory was only going to keep growing. Optane was doomed to only be appealing to the niche of workloads where flash memory is too slow and DRAM is too expensive. But even DRAM was increasing in density faster than 3D XPoint, and flash (especially the latency-optimized variants that are still cheaper than 3D XPoint) is fast enough for a lot of workloads. Optane needed a breakthrough improvement to secure a permanent place in the memory hierarchy, and Intel couldn't come up with one.
- gnfargbl 1y agoThe rugpull on Optane was incredibly frustrating. Intel developed a technology which made really meaningful improvements to workloads in an industry that is full of sticky late adopters (RDBMSes). They kept investing until the point where they had unequivocally made their point and the late adopters were just about getting it... and then killed it! It's hard to understand how they could have played that particular hand more badly. Even a few years on, I'm missing Optane drives because there is still no functional alternative. If they just held out a bit longer, they would have created a set of enterprise customers who would still be buying the things in 2040.
- jerryseff 1y agoOptane was incredible. It's insane that Intel dropped this.
- Spooky23 1y agoThey are a weird company. Their marketing people showed up and invested a significant amount into a buy of optane gear with our OEM a few months before they killed the product. They pulled the rug in themselves in addition to the customers.
- fennecbutt 1y agoExecutives. That everyone on here claims fairly earn their multi million dollar salaries.
- nickysielicki 1y agoIt’s especially hard to understand because so much of their management had a degree which conferred a mastery of business administration. I mean, it’s almost like you could take any tenured software engineeer at the company, and they would have been in a better position to manage the company more effectively. That’s very surprising, and might suggest that people with MBAs are total idiots who understand everything through GRE-friendly analogy rather than, well, actually understanding anything.
- riehwvfbk 1y agoOne could see the death of Optane coming from a mile away. It was only kept afloat by Intel, and its main issue that is was really cool tech, but it was a solution looking for a problem. You need scratch space that's resilient to a power outage? An NVDIMM is faster and cheaper. You need fast storage? Flash keeps getting faster and cheaper. Optane was squeezed from both sides and could never hope to generate the volume needed to cut costs. So now imagine that you are at Intel deciding what initiatives to fund. The company is in trouble and needs to show some movement out of the red, preferably quickly. It also lost momentum and lost ground to competitors, so it needs to focus. What do you do? You kill all the side projects that will never make much money. And of course you kill a lot of innovation in the process, but how would you justify the alternative?
- high_na_euv 1y agoOptane was cancelled because manufacturer sold the fab
- bobmcnamara 1y agoOh? Complete coincidence they got caught not paying ECDL royalties?
- high_na_euv 1y ago? wdym
- bobmcnamara 1y agoWhen Energy Conversion Devices went bankrupt, it appears Intel pirated the technology, and never bothered to pay the royalties for the PCM memory in Optane. Case No. 12-43166 is what finally killed Optane.
- kuschku 1y ago> this thing where they do a huge push into a new technology, then don't see the uptake and let it die. Do we need a second "killed by google"? To companies like Intel or Google anything below a few hundred million users is a failure. Had these projects been in a smaller company, or been spun out, they'd still be successful and would've created a whole new market. Maybe I'm biased — a significant part of my career has been working for German Mittelstand "Hidden Champions" — but I believe you don't need a billion customers to change the world.
- zitterbewegung 1y agoIntel's 5G radio department was formed in 2011 by buying another firm and then it was bought by Apple in 2019. Apple announced a 5G modem this year (C1) . It took 14 years to get a viable 5g wireless modem but still doesn't have feature parity with Apple's cellular modems in the other iPhones. So this happens pretty often by Intel.
- stingraycharles 1y agoUntil this day, I miss Optane — I work for a timeseries database company focused on finance, the amount of use cases I have that screams “faster than NVMe, slower than RAM” is insane. And these companies have money to throw at these problems. Which begs the question, why isn’t anyone else stepping into this gap? Is the technology heavily patented?
- bobmcnamara 1y agoYes, and Intel got caught skirting them.
- Kozmik1 1y agoI made the mistake early in our startup of spending several months and quite a bit of cash building our first iot product on the Intel Edison platform, only to get zero support on the bugs in the SPI chip and the non-existent (but advertised) microcontroller. We finally gave up and made our own boards based on another SOM (and eventually stopped building boards entirely) and they rather unceremoniously cancelled the Edison in 2017. I guess nobody else was surprised, but I had naively thought the platform did have potential and a huge company like Intel would support the things they sold.
- mappu 1y agoBeing right at the wrong time, is the same as being wrong