Intel Gets PA-RISC Engineers

Doctor_D writes "Well it looks like Intel has done it again. They have absorbed more processor engineers, this time from HP. Alpha is gone, PA-RISC is going, what's going to be left? MIPS? SPARC? AMD? Crusoe? "

Comments

what we need are

[Jailbrekr]

more engineers working on open source cores. more innovative ideas and concepts being experimented on. moores law is slowly breaking down, and as such, we need to find a way to get fresh ideas out in the open. what we need is to break away from the traditional model and start looking at some of the more esoteric ideas being thrown around. asyncronous, vliw, or a delightfully bastardized combination.

Hell, I think we should bring back the 6502 core, but that is only because I am fixated on 6502 assembly code. dont mind me, I'm a freak.

Can someone explain...

[Andorion]

Hey, can someone explain the second half of the article to me? What the hell does Heidi Roizen dressing up as a cheerleader or nurse (sketchy) have to do with the employee transfer???????

-Berj

Scott McNealy was right

[Ami Ganguli]

I remember seeing McNealy speak some years ago at a tradeshow (I don't remember exactly when or where). He explained some of the economics of CPU design and predicted that in a few years there would be only three major architectures: SPARC (Sun), PowerPC (IBM), and Intel. It's kind of creepy how his predictions have come true.

His arguement was based on financial analysis of how much it cost to develop and maintain a competitive architecture, and how much revenue each of the big players could expect from their designs. HP was doing comparitively well at the time, but McNealy figured they were using revenue from printers to subsidize their chip business, and that couldn't go on forever.

Alpha was still a viable competitor at that point, but again it comes down to volume. You might get a team of crack engineers together to design a beautiful CPU, but if you don't get the volume (or high margins like IBM mainframes) then you can't afford to keep the architecture competitive.

Why the anti-Intel tone?

[phaze3000]

Why did the poster feel the need to adopt such an anti-Intel tone? Diversity is all well and good, but the fact of the matter is HP had no market need for these people. Would the poster rather they were unemployed, or doing jobs that weren't using their potential?

I for one congratulate Intel for giving these talented engineers jobs.

Scary....

[tcc]

Intel manages to keep the prices over two times higher than an AMD with SAME performance... while I don't really care about the graphics industry right now (ATI can manage to arm Nvidia for the comming year or two, plus they have diversified fields of interrests as well to back up the company), but I am worried by Intel. In comparison, Nvidia brings you quality, performing, and rather cheap parts if you don't want to go to the top of the food chain... Intel by comparison, they are good desing (the chips don't toast, the heat sinks are easier to install than on AMD, etc) but poorly performing and WAY overpriced.

If they can manage to sell some stuff over 2 times the price of an "equivalent" AMD part, what's going to happen if AMD dies or has a major problem with the next product cycle in a year or 2 from now? Forget about crusoe, I'm talking high-end CPUs, x86 renderfarm nodes, etc...

Anyways I do my part, I buy only intel when *really* needed, i.e. when I'm instructed to, or when the programmer needs an SSE2-capable CPU to do his optimisations. Else I try to support AMD the best I can... I am about to build another renderfarm and it'll be using TigerMP an AhtlonXP processors. They need support, and Intel needs to see that it's pricing scheme is bad.