6 ms·

Between people shifting from pc to arm-powered phones and major data-center users doing their best to cut costs this is shaping up to be a tough decade for Inte

Between people shifting from pc to arm-powered phones and major data-center users doing their best to cut costs this is shaping up to be a tough decade for Intel.

fidotron 12y ago
In all seriousness, I would not want to be leading Intel right now as I can't imagine what they could actually do to escape this. Hindsight makes Itanium look like even more of a disaster, when that energy in that era should have gone into evolving the x86 platform for the future. Without AMD doing what they did (x86-64) I wonder where Intel would actually stand in the server market today.
- orbifold 12y ago
  From what I heard modern Intel chips basically only keep up the x86 instruction set as a facade and the architecture beneath is different (much larger number of registers etc.). Wouldn't it potentially be a good idea to do a clean redesign of the "frontend" and eliminate all the legacy support?
  - lnanek2 12y ago
    That's basically what Itanium was and it failed vs. the AMD competitor that kept support.
  - zhemao 12y ago
    Yes, modern Intel CPUs use a RISC-like architecture underneath. The CPU contains a decoder unit which converts x86 instructions to RISC-like micro-ops. Getting rid of x86 support would not be a good idea. It's their "legacy support" which has allowed them to dominate the desktop and server market. Porting your software to a new architecture can be a real pain.
    - mikeash 12y ago
      I wonder if it would be reasonable to come up with a more modern ISA (or just borrow somebody else's, like AArch64?) and offer that as an alternate front end. Keep the x86 decoder front end that they have now. Add another one for the better ISA. Add another mode that kicks the CPU into that ISA. Current x86-64 OSes already generally support two architectures: x86-64 and i386. This would just be a third one. Then everything could move to the new ISA incrementally, and legacy software could keep on working forever using the legacy decoder. I'd guess that the x86 ISA is no longer enough of a bottleneck to justify it. Throw enough transistors at the problem and perhaps it doesn't matter anymore whether your ISA makes any sense.
    - orbifold 12y ago
      Couldn't the decode unit be translated into software that converts legacy software on the fly? It seems to me that the outdated instruction set is detrimental to innovation and power efficiency. Also how high is the overhead in terms of chip space and power that the decoder incurs, vs. one that has to decode a simpler instruction set? My limited understanding is that the number of instructions issued per cycle heavily depend on the instruction set and decode speed.
      - thrownaway2424 12y ago
        You just suggested that decode is a bottleneck, and that decode should be done in software, in the same paragraph.
        orbifold 12y ago
        Not really, I suggested to decode once at the start of the application, or even at compile time for that matter in order to gain legacy support. A cpu has to decode the instruction stream no matter what, if the decoding is complicated by the fact that there is no close correspondence between the instructions and the hardware this is a potential bottleneck.
      - klodolph 12y ago
        > Couldn't the decode unit be translated into software that converts legacy software on the fly? Not only is it possible, but it has been done. Look up the Transmeta Efficeon. Note that it's not RISC-like but VLIW (which I like to think of as "the next thing after RISC").
  - gsnedders 12y ago
    Hell, to take this to the extreme level, look up the PPC 615 — mid-90s IBM processor that sadly never made it to market. It ran x86, PPC32, and PPC64 code natively in the mid-90s, socket compatible with the current Intel Pentium and with comparable performance. Sadly, it was cancelled as IA-64 was expected to enter the market soon, and those at IBM presumed IA-32 (i.e., x86) was about to be killed.
- thrownaway2424 12y ago
  Intel has a massive advantage in process technology and fundamental physics research and a huge, talented staff. A good executive team can print money in any line of business with all those assets.
  - mindcrime 12y ago
    For a while, yeah. But there really is no such thing as a truly sustainable competitive advantage. Anybody can be knocked off their perch if they don't adapt quickly enough.
Spooky23 12y ago
Maybe, maybe not. IBM was pretty close to cutting off most funding to future development, and they just closed the factory in Minnesota that made the servers. They are pretty much the last survivor of the Unix wars. There are major customers using this stuff and scaling up, but the industry as a whole is shifting to scale out. There might be a good story here with POWER8, but can you trust that the platform will be around?
- protomyth 12y ago
  "they just closed the factory in Minnesota that made the servers" ....which they moved to Guadalajara, Mexico. Given the money they put into Watson, I would expect they keep the POWER machines.
  - wickberg 12y ago
    I wouldn't rely on the Watson connection to influence their chip division strategy. It's not something they spread around, but from what I recall from a Q+A with IBM engineers the Watson prototype was developed on AMD xSeries servers, and only moved to pSeries machines late in the development before the Jeopardy! matches.
  - Spooky23 12y ago
    I would guess that if they were projecting lots of growth in the line, they wouldn't have done a disruptive factory move. The business growth for power was displacing PA-RISC, SPARC and Itanium... IBM is the last man standing, but are competing against whomever is supplying AMazon, etc for barebones x87. In the IBM line, it's jammed between commodity x86 and high margin zSeries.
    - protomyth 12y ago
      I'm not so sure, MN is not business friendly.

Between people shifting from pc to arm-powered phones and major data-center users doing their best to cut costs this is shaping up to be a tough decade for Intel.

fidotron 12y ago

In all seriousness, I would not want to be leading Intel right now as I can't imagine what they could actually do to escape this. Hindsight makes Itanium look like even more of a disaster, when that energy in that era should have gone into evolving the x86 platform for the future. Without AMD doing what they did (x86-64) I wonder where Intel would actually stand in the server market today.

orbifold 12y ago
From what I heard modern Intel chips basically only keep up the x86 instruction set as a facade and the architecture beneath is different (much larger number of registers etc.). Wouldn't it potentially be a good idea to do a clean redesign of the "frontend" and eliminate all the legacy support?
- lnanek2 12y ago
  That's basically what Itanium was and it failed vs. the AMD competitor that kept support.
- zhemao 12y ago
  Yes, modern Intel CPUs use a RISC-like architecture underneath. The CPU contains a decoder unit which converts x86 instructions to RISC-like micro-ops. Getting rid of x86 support would not be a good idea. It's their "legacy support" which has allowed them to dominate the desktop and server market. Porting your software to a new architecture can be a real pain.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    I wonder if it would be reasonable to come up with a more modern ISA (or just borrow somebody else's, like AArch64?) and offer that as an alternate front end. Keep the x86 decoder front end that they have now. Add another one for the better ISA. Add another mode that kicks the CPU into that ISA. Current x86-64 OSes already generally support two architectures: x86-64 and i386. This would just be a third one. Then everything could move to the new ISA incrementally, and legacy software could keep on working forever using the legacy decoder. I'd guess that the x86 ISA is no longer enough of a bottleneck to justify it. Throw enough transistors at the problem and perhaps it doesn't matter anymore whether your ISA makes any sense.
  - orbifold 12y ago
    Couldn't the decode unit be translated into software that converts legacy software on the fly? It seems to me that the outdated instruction set is detrimental to innovation and power efficiency. Also how high is the overhead in terms of chip space and power that the decoder incurs, vs. one that has to decode a simpler instruction set? My limited understanding is that the number of instructions issued per cycle heavily depend on the instruction set and decode speed.
    - thrownaway2424 12y ago
      You just suggested that decode is a bottleneck, and that decode should be done in software, in the same paragraph.
      - orbifold 12y ago
        Not really, I suggested to decode once at the start of the application, or even at compile time for that matter in order to gain legacy support. A cpu has to decode the instruction stream no matter what, if the decoding is complicated by the fact that there is no close correspondence between the instructions and the hardware this is a potential bottleneck.
    - klodolph 12y ago
      > Couldn't the decode unit be translated into software that converts legacy software on the fly? Not only is it possible, but it has been done. Look up the Transmeta Efficeon. Note that it's not RISC-like but VLIW (which I like to think of as "the next thing after RISC").
- gsnedders 12y ago
  Hell, to take this to the extreme level, look up the PPC 615 — mid-90s IBM processor that sadly never made it to market. It ran x86, PPC32, and PPC64 code natively in the mid-90s, socket compatible with the current Intel Pentium and with comparable performance. Sadly, it was cancelled as IA-64 was expected to enter the market soon, and those at IBM presumed IA-32 (i.e., x86) was about to be killed.
thrownaway2424 12y ago
Intel has a massive advantage in process technology and fundamental physics research and a huge, talented staff. A good executive team can print money in any line of business with all those assets.
- mindcrime 12y ago
  For a while, yeah. But there really is no such thing as a truly sustainable competitive advantage. Anybody can be knocked off their perch if they don't adapt quickly enough.

Spooky23 12y ago

Maybe, maybe not. IBM was pretty close to cutting off most funding to future development, and they just closed the factory in Minnesota that made the servers. They are pretty much the last survivor of the Unix wars. There are major customers using this stuff and scaling up, but the industry as a whole is shifting to scale out. There might be a good story here with POWER8, but can you trust that the platform will be around?

protomyth 12y ago
"they just closed the factory in Minnesota that made the servers" ....which they moved to Guadalajara, Mexico. Given the money they put into Watson, I would expect they keep the POWER machines.
- wickberg 12y ago
  I wouldn't rely on the Watson connection to influence their chip division strategy. It's not something they spread around, but from what I recall from a Q+A with IBM engineers the Watson prototype was developed on AMD xSeries servers, and only moved to pSeries machines late in the development before the Jeopardy! matches.
- Spooky23 12y ago
  I would guess that if they were projecting lots of growth in the line, they wouldn't have done a disruptive factory move. The business growth for power was displacing PA-RISC, SPARC and Itanium... IBM is the last man standing, but are competing against whomever is supplying AMazon, etc for barebones x87. In the IBM line, it's jammed between commodity x86 and high margin zSeries.
  - protomyth 12y ago
    I'm not so sure, MN is not business friendly.