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> And tried to get Intel to consider these "Unix workstation" things and they couldn't see past the risk of harming their Microsoft relationship. and by not l

by serge2k 12y ago

> And tried to get Intel to consider these "Unix workstation" things and they couldn't see past the risk of harming their Microsoft relationship. and by not listening they made how many billions?

coldtea 12y ago
That's what's happened. The interesting what-if question is if they would have made more if they had listened.
- rodgerd 12y ago
  Intel have repeatedly blown a fortune on new chip architectures, often chasing what the world was assuring everyone would be the Next Big Thing. The iAPX 432 (hardware garbage collect, targeted at the likes of Ada), the i960 (RISC will own the world!), the i860, and so on. The market has consistently told Intel that it wants more and more out of the x86 chip set. When Intel has ignored that, it has been punished, and punished harshly - most especially so when AMD gave the market an x86 64 bit architecture and Intel didn't. Why should Intel ignore decades of experience now?
  - ChuckMcM 12y ago
    I wouldn't say they have blown "fortunes" (with the exception of Itanium). For a long long time Intel was the dominant force in embedded microcontrollers as well. You may recall the 8051 architecture, still in use today which is in a bazillion products. That line flourished even when Intel was punished for its first 8086 "SOC" the 80186. Intel has never learned the skill of serving multiple markets. Even when I was actively engaged with them in new designs they couldn't have the '64 bits in x86' discussion because that market was "owned" by the Itanium guys. There didn't seem to be any way to talk about x86 with those new features. I'm sure that was the same issue with SOCs. If I could advise them, that is the skill I would really want to work on, actionable listening to get ahead of their customers needs.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
That is kind of the point. They have made billions, an unqualified success, and they have triumphed over all of their rivals of the day. The only problem is the one the Jean-Louis points out, they are running out of road. I was at Sun in 1988 when they decided to "go enterprise" in a big way. The focused on killing DEC and all the other workstation vendors, and partnered with AT&T to make UNIX a real Enterprise OS, combining System V, and BSD 4.2 (aka SunOS) into Solaris. It made them many billions of dollars, heck it paid for most of my house! But that road did not lead to them being a force in the Linux/*BSD world, nor supplying computers for that word. That was lost to the other server manufacturers and Sun Microsystems ran out of road. Long before Sun was effectively dead, they could have moved into a new space. They did not. Now they exist only as assets in the Oracle ledger. Jean-Louis points out that Intel could be headed this way. They say big things but they seem unable to face the reality that the microprocessor world is changing in fundamental ways that make it hard to have giant gross margins on a single chip. Intel has done great things, its a wonderful company, and it will die if it cannot figure out how to compete with ARM.
- e12e 12y ago
  Do you have any thoughts on the future (or lack there of) of AMD? I thought it was very interesting that they won both the Sony Playstation 4 and the XBOX One - in my eyes the first win for their long transition towards "real" on-die GPUs. I'm thinking that they'll now have the whole game industry making graphic engines that work great on their stack (both major consoles, and on PCs). If they can leverage some of that towards tablet/mobile -- that could be interesting. So far it seems that Nvidia is winning there, though. (Obviously, while I have a bit of a crush on AMD as the underdog, and love their push for better open source drivers -- I don't really want to see a new monopoly emerge. But anyway, I'd be curious to hear what you think?)
  - thrownaway2424 12y ago
    So, there's obviously two parts to AMD. There's the part that can't make a decent CPU, and there's the ATI part. The ATI part is surviving on gaming and other consumer graphics applications, and starting to look at a real opportunity in datacenter-scale computation if they can market the S9150 as a realistic competitor to the nvidia K40. This is mostly a matter of the device having actual performance power consumption that AMD says it has, and them being able to actually deliver parts. This is basically AMD's last chance to get into the datacenter market, since they haven't made a competitive CPU in more than five years.
bane 12y ago
The Tyrannosaurus Rex had an incredible run and made mincemeat of uncountable prey animals. But evolutionary dead ends are permanent no matter how successful past performance may have been. I just got a new tablet a couple weeks ago that, on certain tasks, is actually more powerful than my last full desktop computer. From loading off of disk, to compute to final rendering, it's giving me more FPS than my quad-core intel 2.4Ghz system with $350 graphics card was giving me a couple years ago. It's not only kind of crazy that something that can fit into my coat pocket can do that, but it's doing it at some tiny fraction of the power consumption. If I hook it up to an HMDI cable it can drive a nice monitor, and I know it supports a USB keyboard and mouse (and a wireless controller), it basically can replace my desktop for most uses. Between iOS and Android, there's 3 or 4 million applications, from productivity to music authoring. Heck, I have a terminal emulator on my tablet that comes complete with ssh so I can effectively do what I do most of my work day anyway. At this point, I'm counting the days till my OS X and Windows desktops are mere emulated apps, or running off of a spare intel compatible core on the SoC. Intel is going to be a classic case of not realizing they're on the way out, and then suddenly their out of business -- patent portfolio scattered to the winds (and AMD on life-support keeping alive legacy corporate systems that haven't transitioned to something else). About the only way they can "fix" this is for Wintel tablets to find the right feature/price mix and suddenly take off in sales, and then translate that somehow into smartphones. But it's unclear if the new Microsoft is as willing to toss money at that problem to make it happen as the old one, without such a partner intel is in trouble.

by serge2k 12y ago

> And tried to get Intel to consider these "Unix workstation" things and they couldn't see past the risk of harming their Microsoft relationship. and by not listening they made how many billions?

coldtea 12y ago

That's what's happened. The interesting what-if question is if they would have made more if they had listened.

rodgerd 12y ago
Intel have repeatedly blown a fortune on new chip architectures, often chasing what the world was assuring everyone would be the Next Big Thing. The iAPX 432 (hardware garbage collect, targeted at the likes of Ada), the i960 (RISC will own the world!), the i860, and so on. The market has consistently told Intel that it wants more and more out of the x86 chip set. When Intel has ignored that, it has been punished, and punished harshly - most especially so when AMD gave the market an x86 64 bit architecture and Intel didn't. Why should Intel ignore decades of experience now?
- ChuckMcM 12y ago
  I wouldn't say they have blown "fortunes" (with the exception of Itanium). For a long long time Intel was the dominant force in embedded microcontrollers as well. You may recall the 8051 architecture, still in use today which is in a bazillion products. That line flourished even when Intel was punished for its first 8086 "SOC" the 80186. Intel has never learned the skill of serving multiple markets. Even when I was actively engaged with them in new designs they couldn't have the '64 bits in x86' discussion because that market was "owned" by the Itanium guys. There didn't seem to be any way to talk about x86 with those new features. I'm sure that was the same issue with SOCs. If I could advise them, that is the skill I would really want to work on, actionable listening to get ahead of their customers needs.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

That is kind of the point. They have made billions, an unqualified success, and they have triumphed over all of their rivals of the day. The only problem is the one the Jean-Louis points out, they are running out of road. I was at Sun in 1988 when they decided to "go enterprise" in a big way. The focused on killing DEC and all the other workstation vendors, and partnered with AT&T to make UNIX a real Enterprise OS, combining System V, and BSD 4.2 (aka SunOS) into Solaris. It made them many billions of dollars, heck it paid for most of my house! But that road did not lead to them being a force in the Linux/*BSD world, nor supplying computers for that word. That was lost to the other server manufacturers and Sun Microsystems ran out of road. Long before Sun was effectively dead, they could have moved into a new space. They did not. Now they exist only as assets in the Oracle ledger. Jean-Louis points out that Intel could be headed this way. They say big things but they seem unable to face the reality that the microprocessor world is changing in fundamental ways that make it hard to have giant gross margins on a single chip. Intel has done great things, its a wonderful company, and it will die if it cannot figure out how to compete with ARM.

e12e 12y ago
Do you have any thoughts on the future (or lack there of) of AMD? I thought it was very interesting that they won both the Sony Playstation 4 and the XBOX One - in my eyes the first win for their long transition towards "real" on-die GPUs. I'm thinking that they'll now have the whole game industry making graphic engines that work great on their stack (both major consoles, and on PCs). If they can leverage some of that towards tablet/mobile -- that could be interesting. So far it seems that Nvidia is winning there, though. (Obviously, while I have a bit of a crush on AMD as the underdog, and love their push for better open source drivers -- I don't really want to see a new monopoly emerge. But anyway, I'd be curious to hear what you think?)
- thrownaway2424 12y ago
  So, there's obviously two parts to AMD. There's the part that can't make a decent CPU, and there's the ATI part. The ATI part is surviving on gaming and other consumer graphics applications, and starting to look at a real opportunity in datacenter-scale computation if they can market the S9150 as a realistic competitor to the nvidia K40. This is mostly a matter of the device having actual performance power consumption that AMD says it has, and them being able to actually deliver parts. This is basically AMD's last chance to get into the datacenter market, since they haven't made a competitive CPU in more than five years.

bane 12y ago

The Tyrannosaurus Rex had an incredible run and made mincemeat of uncountable prey animals. But evolutionary dead ends are permanent no matter how successful past performance may have been. I just got a new tablet a couple weeks ago that, on certain tasks, is actually more powerful than my last full desktop computer. From loading off of disk, to compute to final rendering, it's giving me more FPS than my quad-core intel 2.4Ghz system with $350 graphics card was giving me a couple years ago. It's not only kind of crazy that something that can fit into my coat pocket can do that, but it's doing it at some tiny fraction of the power consumption. If I hook it up to an HMDI cable it can drive a nice monitor, and I know it supports a USB keyboard and mouse (and a wireless controller), it basically can replace my desktop for most uses. Between iOS and Android, there's 3 or 4 million applications, from productivity to music authoring. Heck, I have a terminal emulator on my tablet that comes complete with ssh so I can effectively do what I do most of my work day anyway. At this point, I'm counting the days till my OS X and Windows desktops are mere emulated apps, or running off of a spare intel compatible core on the SoC. Intel is going to be a classic case of not realizing they're on the way out, and then suddenly their out of business -- patent portfolio scattered to the winds (and AMD on life-support keeping alive legacy corporate systems that haven't transitioned to something else). About the only way they can "fix" this is for Wintel tablets to find the right feature/price mix and suddenly take off in sales, and then translate that somehow into smartphones. But it's unclear if the new Microsoft is as willing to toss money at that problem to make it happen as the old one, without such a partner intel is in trouble.