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Intel's Expensive Disco Ball
Re-Pawn writes "From the NY Times: The
Disco Ball of Failed Hopes and Other Tales From Inside Intel (Registration
Required.)
Seems like Intel is losing market share to other chip makers - this
article highlights a few problems that Intel has had including one very expensive
disco ball made from a failed attempt to produce projection televisions."
are no longer belong to them!
--
What's with the /. addiction to NYT?
(Courtesy of bugmenot.com ;-) )
One sign that Intel is having trouble dancing to technology's current beat may be the world's most expensive disco ball.
For a company holiday party next month, a handful of engineers assembled a disco ball - with hundreds of small reflective devices - to hang above the dance floor. The mirrors are leftover projection-television chips from Intel's planned effort to enter the digital television market - an effort the company recently abandoned only 10 months after a splashy introduction at the Consumer Electronics Show last January.
The TV effort became yet another in a series of embarrassing stumbles for Intel. The company has publicly canceled a succession of high-profile projects, has replaced managers in money-losing ventures and has fallen behind its keen competitor Advanced Micro Devices in introducing technologies, like a feature that wards off viruses and worms, in markets that Intel has long dominated.
A.M.D. has been so successful in stealing the spotlight from Intel lately that Kevin B. Rollins, the president of one of Intel's biggest customers, Dell Computer, said at a financial conference call this month that Dell was considering adding computers with A.M.D. chips to its product line.
For two decades, Intel has been the most sure-footed of Silicon Valley companies. But lately, it seems to have lost its way. "They have made many wrong decisions and now it's time for soul-searching and structural, not cosmetic, changes," said Ashok Kumar, a financial analyst at Raymond James & Associates.
This all portends an interesting inauguration for Intel's 50-year-old president, Paul S. Otellini, the longtime Intel marketing executive tapped by the board this month to become only the fourth chief executive in the company's history.
Mr. Otellini does not officially take the job until May. But next week in one of his first official acts as the designated chief executive, he plans to present his strategy to Wall Street analysts. He may have a lot to answer for, including the 25 percent decline in Intel's stock price this year.
Mr. Otellini will tell analysts that he plans to focus on four areas for growth: international markets for desktop personal computers, mobile and wireless applications, the digital home, as well as a new initiative aimed at large corporate computing markets that Intel is calling the Digital Office.
The strategy is a significant shift - a "right-hand turn," as Mr. Otellini likes to say - from Intel's long-term obsession with making ever-faster computer chips. Instead, the company is now concentrating on what he calls platforms: complete systems aimed at both computing and consumer electronics markets.
Mr. Otellini insists that the recent missteps, including the premature introduction he himself made of the digital project, are simply a result of over-optimistic marketing.
"What was wrong was that I made the decision to go public on it at the Consumer Electronics Show," he said in a recent interview in Intel's Santa Clara headquarters. "Error of judgment. Mea culpa. I learned a lesson."
The decision to preannounce an unproven technology was an uncharacteristic one for Intel, said G. Dan Hutcheson, president of VLSI Research Inc., and a longtime observer of the company. However, he said, it has been Mr. Otellini's ascendancy at the company that has changed the way it markets technology.
"As he came into power Intel tried to become a more aggressive marketing company," he said. "They never seemingly made mistakes before and that was simply because they didn't preannounce. This is the classic failure of a company where the marketing guys are pushing the manufacturing guys more than what's there."
Intel is still a technology giant, the global leader in semiconductors, with revenue last year of more than $30 billion. The company retains an unrivaled manufacturing capacity, control of a powerful desktop computing standard, and an enviable internat
Now if you are doing this as a showcase of bad ideas, let's link a few more interesting samples.
You'd think that Slashdot could do the same thing Google News does... no need to register to view stories from there.
I D=/20041129/ZNYT05/411290341/1011
Whatever.
http://www.timesdaily.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?A
Though the x86 now pretty much owns the consumer pc chip market unchallenged-- it's just that Intel isn't always the person shipping that x86 chip-- Intel's platforms are not doing so well in other areas. IBM's POWER chip, the chip the PowerPC is based on, is very very quickly becoming the new MIPS. All three of the next-generation video game systems-- the PS3, the XBox Next, and the Nintendo Revolution-- are known to use CPUs based off of a POWER core...
login: slashdot03 password: slashdot03 ken sent me.
diy muh man
Well, never been a Intel Fan before, i don't like the bullying tactics applied to OEM distributors ala Micro$oft style, for me lower Intel share translates into higher quality and lower prices for the end user, and most important "freedom of choicee", so the next time joe user goes shopping for a new Worm/Spyware host because the old one is too slow, he will see more AMD and less Intel Inside. By the way, the disco ball may be useful for the next wave of laidoff intella employees who will dance to the rythm of "the pink slip blues", sorry for all of them, really sorry. $hitty corporate america has to keep the skyhigh CEO salaries somehow.!
Use this link instead... The Disco Ball of Failed Hopes and Other Tales From Inside Intel
Thanks to the New York Times Link Generator
More than 50% of Intel's workforce in the USA (not China) is current or former H-1Bs. Intel claimed that it absolutely needs Chinese workers in order to build a competitive product: e.g. Itanium. Then, IBM proved Intel wrong by producing the Power5, which is mostly built by American engineers.
Further, Intel has a brutal job evaluation policy: strict bell curve. If an employee falls in the bottom 25% more than once, then the manager shows her the door. Exceptions are made when there is a labor shortage, but officially, the 25% rule is strictly enforced.
I, for one, am glad that Intel is losing. I hope that IBM beats the pants off of it.
You could at least try and make the effort of including
s.
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
Ever heard of www.bugmenot.com ? :)
:P
Check it out, it rules
BTW, we should have a www.spreadbugmenot.com
And oh, www.mailinator.com is the perfect companion
...including one very expensive disco ball made from a failed attempt to produce projection televisions.
So THAT was the inspiration for those commercials with dancers in clean suits!
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
Perhaps now would be a good time for Intel to launch its enigmatic ZIG program. Nobody's quite sure what it is but rumor has it that the new initiative could result in great justice.
If you would like to read the article but don't feel like registering you can as always use Google's NY Times referer or checkbugmenot.com for a login and password.
For two decades, Intel has been the most sure-footed of Silicon Valley companies. But lately, it seems to have lost its way.
Intel maybe is forgetting quality. My PERL mobo and 2.4 GHz died a few weeks ago just out of warranty. This has a tendancy to drive people to AMD. This is why hurtz and not hertz.
Need a dual proc 2GHz AMD... that takes less than 50 watts.
The engineer described sitting in meetings where the company's simulation models showed that 95 percent of the chips from each test wafer would be usable, while the actual yields were closer to 4 percent.
This thing about the disco ball made out of discontinued microchips makes me think of something I've been wondering. Microchip fabrication involves a LOT of defective chips, right? Like chips that burn but then fail the tests. What happens to all those chips? Are they just melted down for metal? Are they thrown away? Can you buy them?
I would just love to have some earrings made out of broken G5s.
o/` Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive, stayin' alive. Ah, ha, ha, ha, stayin' alive. o/`
The engineer described sitting in meetings where the company's simulation models showed that 95 percent of the chips from each test wafer would be usable, while the actual yields were closer to 4 percent.
Unfortunately, the simulations were running on Intel processors and were hit with rampant floating-point errors. They should have gone with AMD like the engineers wanted.
Yay me, ridiculing someone for their poor post and then forgetting to turn off HTML! That was supposed to say
s, instead of a line break there.
The Braying and Neighing of Barnyard Animals Follows.
Could it be that bringing out a compiler for any OS other than MS has them on the Redmond corporate hit list? The intel 64bit linux compiler works fine with Itanium but sure as hell has big trouble with NT and everything else Microsoft centric!
... and they don't have pictures???!!!
Even marketshare and technology takes a back seat to obsession over the closing price of the stock...this is what you get for obsessing over the very short term.
Clicky without logging in! Use NYT Generator for these NYT stories.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
(...)"Seems like Intel is losing market share to other chip makers"(...)
Whoa... that is revealing... anybody else heard of that?
And no, haven't RTFA yet, but c'mon... no need to say it every time we talk about Intel.
Please don't reply. I'm just making a point about recent quality in slashdot blurbs.
"AMD is struggling hard, as they always have, to hold a modicum of the market. They are still nothing more than a small Intel. Intel has proven again and again that all they can do is make CPUs. The dismisal of the p4 line is a sign they acknowledge the trend in low power computing.
They are both about to get blown out of the water by Apple.
Apple is about to introduce an entertainment server. Everyone knows the future is networked consoles, but Sony et al are still focusing on games only. Apple will introduce a device that will displace the PC in a very short time. Fortunately their suppliers have horrible fab capacity. It wouldn't surprise me if Apple built in x86 if their volumes get high enough.
My bet is on the apple device."
You are so full of shit that you don't understand up from down.
1: Apple does not, and will not manufacture or design CPUs.
2: AMD *does* design and manufacture CPUs.
Intel and Apple *don't* compete because they don't manufacture the same products. Intel competes with AMD, Transmeta, IBM, VIA, Samsung, and other companies in a variety of fields.
Apple competes with software companies - like Microsoft, PC companies - like Dell, and, more recently, with
"Apple is about to introduce an entertainment server. Everyone knows the future is networked consoles, but Sony et al are still focusing on games only. Apple will introduce a device that will displace the PC in a very short time."
A media server is going to "displace" the PC? What a load of crap. Analysts have been spelling doom for the PC for *years*. Cellphones were going to kill the PC. Or PDAs. Or "smart" TVs.
Guess what? It's never happened. Because the PC is the best tool for communication. You can't displace the PC with a media center because, for most people, the PC isn't a media center. Most people use their PCs to get on the Internet. They surf the web and read email. A media server isn't going to displace that.
"It wouldn't surprise me if Apple built in x86 if their volumes get high enough."
Assuming your crackpot theory is correct, who do you think is going to manufacture those x86 chips?
AMD or Intel. That's who. They are the only companies producing high-performance x86 CPUs. Heck, they are the only companies *capable* of producing a high-performance x86 cpu in the short term.
"Everyone knows the future is networked consoles"
If by "everyone", you mean crackpot analysts, then, yes, "everyone" knows that.
Remember the PS2 hype? With it's FireWire and USB ports, the PS2 was supposed to be the "future networked console". It wasn't. It's just another game system, just like the XBOX. The PS2 hasn't killed the PC.
"Fortunately their suppliers have horrible fab capacity."
IBM can fab a lot more than you think. Not as much as AMD or Intel, but they have the resources to bring Apple as many PPC970 CPUs as they will need.
I wonder how much of AMD's current market share, and any problems Intel may be having, are due to Intel's cpu serial number fiasco in the PII or PIII or whatever it was.
I can't even recall the details of the whole thing, but I've steered every processor purchase I could to AMD because of it.
Am I the only one?
bugmenot just became my favorite site of the day
we want a picture of the disco ball ... after all if it's covered with MEMs mirror chips maybe it doesn't spin, maybe it's not even a ball ....
Gotta love the xenophobia on Slashdot. Your aware that the 'American Dream' was people leaving the low living conditions they grew up in and go to America and live at a much higher standard right?
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Use < and > instead of brackets. Works every time. Now that's karma whoring!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
The Disco Ball of Failed Hopes and Other Tales From Inside Intel
One word... VALUE!
AMD makes good products. I've NEVER been burned when buying AMD processors. I've been buying them since the K6 chips.
I once had a machine that would periodically crash (K6/2). I thought it was just windows, since windows crashed a fair amount anyway. One day on a whim I opened up the case and discovered the CPU fan was burned out. I'd been running it that way for over a year. I put a new fan in it and all was well.
I had a P4 cpu fan go bad.. it was toast by the time I knew about it.
I haven't tried that trick with newer AMD chips, but that experience was enough for me to stick with them since. Plus they're still usually cheaper.
"We don't talk about the chip, but the collection of attributes that Intel brings," he said. "That's the footprint in the snow for Intel's future."
In other words, it will take me more time to sort through the marketing bullshit to see what's really there.
Unlike the typical luddite (forced to learn the technology), I prefer to know how the parts in my system work.
I could buy a "portable centrino solution" (basically a pentium-m with integrated 802.11b/g) but I could just as easily buy a laptop with an external, better network card for cheaper.
I don't like it when companies generalize for me. I don't like the term "gaming computer" or "workstation computer". What I do like is the performance I see in Athlon 64 4000+ benchmarks. Sorry but for my "gaming computer" a pentium 4 2.8 Ghz with 512 MB RAM doesn't cut it. I so often see this is the case.
What some companies call "gaming computers" I call a mid level workstation.
i.e. A Pentium 4 2.8Ghz with 512 MB of RAM and a Geforce FX 5600 is NOT a "gaming machine". I would call that a satisfactory computer for any use.
Point being, I hate when companies generalize.
Most of the folks at the bottom in India and China have no chance for an engineering education. The parents cannot afford it. The kids cannot enter the good high schools or good colleges in India or China.
Let's deport the H-1B engineers for various reasons. One is that they are an affront to the words on the statue of libery. Her inscription says, "Send me your poor, downtrodden masses", not "Send me your elite, your well educated, your rich."
"Like chips that burn but then fail the tests. What happens to all those chips?"
They get rebranded "Celeron" and sold as a low-cost alternative.
Mr. Otellini will tell analysts that he plans to focus on four areas for growth: international markets for desktop personal computers, mobile and wireless applications, the digital home, as well as a new initiative aimed at large corporate computing markets that Intel is calling the Digital Office.
/. readers) are happy with a single PC to surf, get email, etc. The gamers are a viable market, but the under-24 folks don't have the money for media-center PCs, as they can barely afford to buy new GForce cards and purple case lamps every few months.
International markets are more price-sensitive than the US, so they'll go with the cheapest CPU they can find, which ain't Intel.
If they think that the PC market is fast moving, wait until they see the mobile market. We're talking a 6-9 month obsolesence cycle and incredible price pressures. There's also lots of established players, so Intel had better offer something special that the others don't have (and can't easily duplicate).
So far as a "digital home" -- most people (meaning non-developers and non
The corporate market is the one place that Intel has a chance of succeeding. Most IT departments won't buy anything unless it has "Intel Inside" because they're so conservative. The areas for Intel to focus on there are increasing power density, reducing heat, and improving system managability.
Chip H.
Could someone post the article text, or perhaps another news source with this article, or perhaps post an alternative link that bypasses the NYT registration? I mean, I looked... I really did, but I just couldn't find a way to view that article in all these replies.
Seriously.
Actually, there's a PPC970 FX shortage at the moment, because IBM is having trouble ramping production up on them, as well as getting them faster, which is why the G5 speed bumps have been few and far between.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Wallmart dragged it down though.
/. guys know what it costs to bring a server design tem on line? After all, the ultimate goal of any business is to make $ and beating Intel up on price with AMD noise may pay better than actually bringing AMD based Dell product to market.
AMD is making that spiffy flash too.
I'm a fan of whoever makes the best stuff the cheapest. Right now I'm a Athlon 64 fan and will be happy if Intel can compete with the Opteron.
re: Dell. They areall over the place on this AMD switch. I rad someplace that Dell is holding off because the design their own boards and adding the AMD will mean adding a new design team. Not familiar enough with Dell costing to knwo it this is a significant problem or if it;s just more smoke and mirrors. Any of youy
I can tell Intel there are only two ways to make $ in manufacturing. 1)Be the only guy who CAN make something. 2)Be the guy who can make it the cheapest.
Trying to compete in projection TV which is pretty mature is NOT gonna make you $ unless you've got a spiffy atent likr TI and mirror arrays used for DLP. Of course that patent will expire so if you can beat TI, and everyone else waiting in the wings, handily on the cost/unit front...when that day arrives, you'll clean up.
Manufacturing is all about cost/unit which is all about cycle time, yield, and amortization of the plant. Chip manufacturers would do well to study other USA industries. Excepting the guys who are the only guys who can make the stuff, most stuff that anyone can make is moving offshore. Some exceptions. My brother told me of a 5 pan&pot stamped steel cookware set selling for $4.99 at BrandSmart. Made in USA. It costs less to make here and ship domestic than to ship steel to china and the shp the pots back.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
Intel isn't trying to sell microchips, they're trying to sell packages. "Solutions", if you will.
This doesn't work. People don't want solutions from their chipset provider. They want chipsets. The "solutions", they want from their pc company. That's what the OEM is there for; to provide the solution. It seems like Intel is trying to take over the OEM's job from the inside moving out. I can't fathom that being popular with either OEMs or consumers.
But how many people here looked at the title and summery went over to NYT, went to the trouble of BugMeNotting the registration, expecting a cool story about the neat things Intel engineers do with leftover parts?
That was disappointing.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
intel seems to be succumbing to stubborn 'face-saving' rather than killing projects which are obviously broken beyond repair.
take ia64 for example. over a decade of development, billions and billions sunk into the project, and they have nothing to show for it. remember that intel intended ia64 to replace ia32. go ahead and point to a couple overpriced ( terrible price/performance) top100 machines as "vindication" of ia64 -- but realize that intel expected ia64 to be on millions of desktops and servers by now -- not a tiny niche of a few custom built supercomputers.
project monterey is dead, core ia64 partners are abandoning ship. microsoft cancelled ia64 clustering in their products, which pretty much kills ia64 for business.
while intel is busy trying to save face by continuing to beat the ia64 dead horse, they are being eaten alive by amd.
the old intel killed off i860 and i432 when they didn't deliver on their promises. the old intel would have killed off ia64 by now.
it remains to be seen if today's intel can regain focus, or if they will continue to stubbornly "save face" instead.
www.bugmenot.com/ For one click for a pop-up with both username and password for annoying free registration sites add:
v iew.php?mode=bookmarklet&url='+escape(location),'B ugMeNot','location=no,status=yes,menubar=no,scroll bars=yes,resizable=yes,width=385,height=450'))
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To your your bookmarks bar.
Karma Whoring OFF!
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
My bet is that 95% of consumers will not go with the expensive Apple option while there are much cheaper options that will do almost everything the apple option will do.
Also you can get an Xbox and put XBMC on it right now.
Actually, I believe a system that utilizes H1-B, heavy outsourcing (laying off 50+% of a department and hiring out-of-country labor) and other nasties can be dealt with easily.
Make all government approved tax abatements paid in full, to current date.... Wow, you had an abatement 3 years ago and hired in 4 H1-B's? PAY UP!
I do not advocate fines, fees, or tarriffs. I encourage that if a company wishes to stay here in the US, they either hire US citizens or have no abatements.
Let's deport the H-1B engineers for various reasons. One is that they are an affront to the words on the statue of libery. Her inscription says, "Send me your poor, downtrodden masses", not "Send me your elite, your well educated, your rich."
Worse yet, these people don't even stay in the country. They live as cheaply as they can, and send all their money back home. Then, when they've amassed enough wealth, they move back home too. This only harms our economy.
People who are not interested in living in America (or any country they're emigrating to) and helping make it a better country should not be welcome here. The H-1B visa is expressly designed for people with no loyalty to their new country, because it does nothing to reward any such loyalty. The H-1B should be abolished, and only visas which lead directly to citizenship, with no indentured servitude to corporations, should be permitted.
... for either the person submitting a story, or the editors, from hitting news.google.com and finding the same story somewhere OTHER than the goddamn NYT that turns story links into login forms.
- 8& q=intel+disco+ball&btnG=Search+News
/. that link to the NYT reg form?' plan?
http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&ie=UTF
How do I get into the 'get kickbacks from NYT for submitting stories to
They make nothing but the top of the line chips. That's all they ever try to make. They don't set out to make a Celeron or a 2.4G chip (at least, not anymore.)
;) No, seriously: very few chips made with modern techniques fail every test, and those that do are recycled if possible.
They test all the chips, and the ones that pass enough tests at a certain speed are rated for that speed. The ones that fail are tested at slower speeds until they get to the threshold.
That's why some people have great luck overclocking a system and some don't. They folks who picked up a 2.0 GHz chip that barely failed the 3.0 GHz tests will be able to make a reasonably stable 3.0 GHz chip because it worked okay for most of the tests. Others get something that barely passed the 2.0 GHz tests.
You've heard that Celerons are great for overclocking, right? Well, yeah, of course they are - they're faster chips than what's stamped on them, albeit with a cache wasn't working right at the target speed.
If they fail every test, they send it to VIA to make chipsets.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
intel's (future) ceo:
"Our view is that an evolutionary version of the PC will win that space," he said. "Do you want a rack of single-purpose devices costing from $100 to $250 each or do you want one $400 to $500 device, the PC? The key to the home is networking, and the PC is much better suited to do that."
Somebody get these guys a clue while I go sell my stock!
In their markets, this is the most bone-headed idea I can imagine! Why not go and sell people 4-5 $150 purpose-built devices rather than one $500 one!? He catches on in the last half of his statement, but thinking in terms of services instead of servers might get them back on track.
OK. I have an account at NYT. The cookie for the account never expires unless I clear my cookies. I don't see what the complaint is. Feed them bogus info using your gmail account as the email recipient. Then you can click on the links without worry. If you are paranoid about the NYT corrupting your precious bodily fluids or something, get over it. Our Big Media overlords have better fish to fry than people who post to /. no matter how self-important we think we are.
Also, I trust the NYT more than say The Washington Times. At least the former is not OVERTLY tied to its alledged political masters. I await your flames with steely-eyed lust.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
A little telcom insight, watch Lucent over the next 12 months. I can say no more.
Jaysyn
There is a war going on for your mind.
Then, there's their design strategy - lock everyone else out. By making it damn-near impossible to use a standardized processor socket, anyone who currently uses some other chip-maker is essentially locked out of buying anything Intel. In other words, about now, they're locking out nearly half their potential customers. I'm sorry, but that's just plain dumb.
Their near-violent reactions against people making support chips for the Intel processors means that competitors are going to have to be based on AMD or some other x86 clone, for the most part. A few (eg: Via) will work with Intel, but I've also seen plenty of Intel docs on what breaks when you use Via with some Intel processors. Compatibility sells more products than coercian.
True, most of Intel's competitors aren't too smart on these points, either. But that simply means that the first seriously open competitor is likely to wipe the floor with the lot of them. Transmeta could have. In fact, they could have crushed most of the 32-bit market, if they'd provided people with the means to upload different instruction sets. That capability becomes a liability (it impacts performance and reliability) if nobody can actually make any use of it.
None of the current chip manufacturers has opted to move the southbridge or northbridge into the CPU, despite the fact that this would improve performance, without having to speed the chip up.
Intel moved to copper from aluminium for chip interconnects, because it reduced power consumption. If they moved to silver, they could reduce it further, so the chips could run cooler and/or faster, with no additional work. There's no evidence they're even looking at that.
Instead, Intel are working on projects such as TV decoder boxes running on low-end hardware. This isn't their field. They can't seriously compete in that market, because it's too crowded as it is. There's no money in it.
And now we're told they're going to do MORE of this generalization into markets about which they know nothing, have no solid expertise, no history and no track-record of getting projects complete. They're killing themselves.
What would I do, if I were in their shoes? Easy. I'd shore up the core products, by putting R&D cash into better product differentiation. In other words, cloning AMD's 64/32 is not good enough. That makes them equal to their competitors. Those who need that tech will already be with AMD, so why would they switch?
Intel needs to play the one-upmanship, if they want to survive. The Itanium has been a disaster, so they would be far better off dumping it than continuing to invest in a sure-fire loser.
Right about now, I'd be pushing for a 128/64/32-bit system, that can do everything AMD's chips can do AND support some limited 128-bit operations. Solaris 10 supports a 128-bit filing system, so a 128-bit processor isn't entirely stupid. If they added 128-bit support to controllers, they'd be able to get much smoother dataflow and a much higher throughput. Nice selling points, for servers.
Multi-cores are good, if you have enough processing elements, sharable, and distributed right to maximise what you can push through. Intel are looking at 2. Why, when most multi-processor needs are alread met with 2-way through to 8-way SMP? To compete with Intel's own products, you need to start at 8-core CPUs, or there just isn't any point.
Intel's operations are sluggish, compared to AMD. In fact, they're sluggish compared to anyone. Always have been. Anyone who
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Actually, from a purely economic perspective - you don't want them to stay - H1Bs pay taxes, pay into social security (which you'll someday get) and most probably retire in their countries of origin - without the US having to pay pension/health costs.
The best part of the article is the stock-price chart that almost makes it look as though because AMD's stock price is approaching that of Intel's, that AMD is catching up with the 800 lb. gorilla. The real point of the graph, however, should be that Intel's stock price has fallen steadily over the past 12 months (high 30s to mid 20s), while AMD's hovered around 15 for the first six months, dropped along with Intel, then shot up to the low 20s in the past few weeks.
:wq
I don't know about this. Sounds like a case of short-term vs. long-term. In the past, America was built by immigrants who came here with nothing, and invested everything into their new lives here. America prospered from this. I think, long term, it's better to have immigrants who are here for the long haul than to profit a little off immigrants here for the short term, who then take a big wad of cash, and probably more importantly, their accumulated knowledge and expertise (doing a job an American could have done instead), and leave the country.
Also, having people like this available to American industries makes it easy for those corporations to create a climate where wages are kept lower (higher labor supply), and they don't have to work as hard at keeping people interested in these industries.
This was a processor developed by IBM that had the capability to decode x86 instructions. The project was scrapped in 1996.
~# su -
fluffybunPassword:
No no, anyone who thinks like YOUUU do, that such a clearly out of date, dinosaur of a computer can actually be used for GENERAL USE it clearly a luddite! You're stopping the progress of technology by holding out and not contributing to it's economy! I Scoff are you!! SCOFF SCOFF SCOFF! Silly luddite.
Of course i'm being sarcastic and you're totally right. Just, as the parent to your comment used the word "luddite" in an oh-so-deliciously elitist way, I had to comment.
25% of what? You could have a room full of certified genius, but there would still be a bottom 25%
THat is the core of the American-style neoliberal, laissez faire capitalism. It is darwinism. What's old is new again. THis is the way America was run for centuries, even before it was a country. Law of the jungle. We turned out backs on this earlier this century (New Deal, labor unions, etc), but now we are regressing to hypercompetitiveness. Europe is way way ahead of us in keeping hypercompetitiveness at bay.
And it is not just the tech companies that do this. Many other high profile industries do this. Most law firms do this, at least the larger ones, and many smaller ones. The weakest performers of the bunch are told to leave every year. And the weakest performers are not bad, but they are just relatively weakest.
The officer corps of the American armed services do the same: up, or out.
Insanity, as far as I am concerned. And we swim in currents of death, all around us. Our lives are so short, and yet we subject ourselves to this nonsense. I can understand it in young people. They are too green, too inexperienced to see the forest for the trees. But why don't more older people call Bullshit on this? We have the ability to make our lives better. Why not do so?
eat shiat and bark at the moon
It's typical heavy-handed corporate thought. Cut out the middle man and force a true market system into a pseudo-monopoly. With that comes corporate controlled prices, lower quality, etc etc. There are some gains to the consumer - better integration (look at a via-based board's stability versus an intel-based board's stability, designed for the same CPU), convenience, but in the end it tends turns out shitty for everyone except the corporation. Note the emphasis on "tends", there are exceptions, i'm sure.
Tons of people have been burned by intel board too. Remember all those boards with one of the RAM slots blocked so you couldn't use it? Thousands of people got them before that and had to send them back. Intel has made plenty of faulty hardware, just like anyone else.
Regardless of wether you are buying AMD or Intel, you need to take the time to do a little research first and get a reliable motherboard. Just because 2 boards have the same chipset, does not mean they will both be equally reliable.
The strategy is a significant shift - a "right-hand turn," as Mr. Otellini likes to say - from Intel's long-term obsession with making ever-faster computer chips. Instead, the company is now concentrating on what he calls platforms: complete systems aimed at both computing and consumer electronics markets.
What's that sound? That's intel. Flushing itself down the toilet. Hello, you're INTEL. You make CHIPS. Long term obsession? That's what the company DOES! I haven't checked this guy's past out - but something tells me engineering is not in his blood.
If I had intel stock - I'd be twitching to get rid of it in a hurry. I do, however own AMD stock. I rather like their long-term obession with making ever faster chips, and I expecially like the single-minded focus at doing it better and better and better.
It's going to be fun to watch this one.
..don't panic
I'm very honestly convinced that the reason why IBM chose it for their "IBM PC(tm)" is that it was way too braindead to have any real hope of competing against their big-money IBM/370-family mainframe engines.
It took them 4 tries (8086, 80186, 80286, 80386) to get the '86 family morphed into something half-assed, and it wasn't the only CPU family that came out of Intel and got laughed at until it died of shame. (someone else can provide the list of {sh,n}ames).
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
yea... as many as they need. Six.
"Do you want a rack of single-purpose devices costing from $100 to $250 each or do you want one $400 to $500 device, the PC?"
Right now I have two computers.
My main computer is the powerhouse. It does everything, it has lots of storage space, etc etc.
My second computer is relatively new, and relatively slow. And relatively low-power. It's fast enough to run SNES emulators, and it's got TV-out so I can plug it into a TV if I want, but mostly it's just an email, web browsing, and IRC box. Right now it also functions as a gateway.
I don't much like having an "important" computer being a gateway at the same time, though. If it gets hacked, well, it's got a lot of sensitive data on it. So I'm getting another even smaller less powerful box for a dedicated gateway.
I'm also planning on getting yet another low-power box to act as a file sharing box, and run it over an anonymizing network (by setting up the gateway to route *everything* coming from one ethernet port through the anonymizing network.)
My main computer is starting to have problems with its hard drive and I've always been a little leery of putting all my eggs in one basket, so to speak. So I'm also going to get a RAID system - low-speed CPU, heavy RAID hardware, 8 300gb SATA drives in RAID 5 with a hot spare, for a total of 1.8tb. I'll run continuous backup updates off the other systems onto this one, and also use this one for storing anything that doesn't mind being accessed across the network (music, movies, not games).
This is five specialized computers, and if any of them die, it's fine. My chat box can take over if the gateway dies. If the storage server dies, it just needs new hardware - it's not going to have three hard drives die at once! - and even if it does, all the important data is probably stored on one of the other computers too. My chat box, games box, and security box are also obviously noncritical, now that any important data will be backed up on the storage server.
So in answer to your question. Would I rather have a rack of single-purpose devices costing $100 to $250 each, all independently upgradable, none as a single point of failure, each customized to perform its duty perfectly?
Or would I rather buy a single $500 device which has to be upgraded in one chunk, where failure is catastrophic, and which may not perform adequately in one or more important areas?
I'll take the rack, thanks.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
You know, I think this whole thread should evolve into a bunch of computer guys sharing their best, fastest, easiest, and most efficient ways to bypass registration.
(all using linux of course, or freebsd if you're TRULY old-school like my 21-year old genius friend Paul whose been using it since he was an adolescent and is majoring in physics even though he's the best mathematician at my 30,000 student university! No, not Texas A&M you Longhorn fans! Cedric Bensons sez
I shouldn't spill the *beans, but if you get one subscription to "the economist", your web password stays good for years after your subscription to the dead tree toilet rag dies!
*note:
The Christian in me says it's wrong, but the corrections officer in me says, 'I love to make a grown man piss himself.'
1: Apple does not, and will not manufacture or design CPUs.
I might be horribly wrong, but doesn't Apple have a hand in the design of the PPC with manufacturing done by Motorola and IBM? If that's not the way it is now, but I'm pretty sure that's how it worked with the first few generations (pre-G3) of PPC chips.
I wanted a picture of the shiny intel ball! Oh well. I can always make my own with AOL CDs, even if it isn't the same.
Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain.
use firefox and get the "bugmenot" extension. works great for a lot of sites with registration like NYT.
Spiral out. Keep going...
I changed your password for you.
I'll take the rack, thanks.
But think of your power bill!
Da Blog
That's the way Intel worked in the past, but they haven't done that for some time. The reason is that their yields (supply) on high-end chips are much higher than the demand for said chips. And the number of chips that fail to run at the higher speeds doesn't even begin to satisfy the demand for the lower speed grades.
If Intel sold every 3.4GHz-capable P4 as a 3.4GHz chip, then there would be a glut of those chips in the supply line. Distributers would have to price them down to keep them selling, and that means Intel can't charge as high a premium for their high-end chips, and can't recover their R&D costs as quickly. Meanwhile, with the stock of lower-end chips drying up, the demand can't be satisfied and Intel ends up getting out-priced/out-supplied on the low end. Not a good situation for them.
Instead, a great many 3.4GHz-capable chips are marked down (and hardware locked) at a slower speed, to satisfy the demands for each tier of chip. That's why overclocking is possible--maybe your 2.4GHz chip actually passed the tests for 3.4GHz, but Intel had already met their quota for the higher speed grades. Of course, you might also be getting a chip that failed at 2.5GHz and barely passed 2.4GHz, that's why overclocking is a risk.
Stay away from this guy's drivel.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/
That's Intel's new, big strategy? It sounds so futuristic and forward-looking... for 1979.
i can't think of anything intel produces that i could buy at the moment to amuse myself but if that disco ball hits ebay i don't think i could afford not to bid...
Get your torrents...
here you go
t ml
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20010917/index.h
Otellini said he believed that future consumer versions of Intel's Entertainment PC would gain favor over traditional video game machines.
"Hey, guess what I got for Christmas? Extreme Deer Hunter for Intel Entertainment PC!"
"PS3? Pssshht. InEnPC's got way better... core temperature monitoring."
Sorry Mr. Otellini, I tried. Intel will never succeed in the console market. Don't waste your investors' money.
Here's a thought: stick with processors. Put a lot of money into doing x86-64 better than AMD ever will. Put out the first mobile version, or something. Then, when that platform stagnates, create a new one that is not patent-encrusted, and do that better than anyone else ever will.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
Zilog? WTF?
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/29/technology/29int el.html?ex=1259384400&en=88622b1f02d16578&ei=5090& partner=rssuserland
Enjoy the read,
Gex
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/29/technology/29int el.html?ex=1259384400&en=88622b1f02d16578&ei=5090& partner=rssuserland
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/29/technology/29int el.html?ex=1259384400&en=88622b1f02d16578&ei=5090& partner=rssuserland
Mostly chips that fail are crushed and tossed. they are crushed because the chips contain your IP and you don't want, say, a compeitor finding a shiny (but bad) wafer in your trash and take a microscope to it - and face it, test is not 100% so that "defective" wafer you tossed out might actually be fully functional, more reason to fear the competitor getting your secrets*.
i don't even think the crushed silicon is recycled - after dozens of litho runs, the chips have too much junk on it and it's cheaper to get the high purity stuff directly. So, unfortunately, just tossed.
Now, if you befriend somebody in semiconductor industry, you might swing some bad wafers (or even better, blank wafers). let me tell you, ultrapure silicon polished to within atoms precision makes excellent mirrors - they have this erie purple / metallic colour. And you KNOW that your mug reflected in it is going to be the most precise image you will see of yourself. ever.
too bad that these days wafers are cut so thin that they would curl if not packaged right away after the baking, though - ruins the mirror thing.
*in packaging, the chips are embedded in resin, and it's a pain to get the resin off without ruining the circuit underneath, so it's a lot harder for someone to see your chip "naked." That does not prevent them from trying, though - it's time consuming but with enough patience and acid (to burn away the resin), you can eventually reveal the chip underneath.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
You don't need to be afraid. No matter what the author of the article may think, Intel still has enormous cash reserves and some solid products. Their Pentium M processors are quite good, actually. Let's hope they produce more products of equal or greater quality in the future.
Even still, your fear is understandable, and your voice is one that should be heard.
Yields at advanced fabs are generally secret, but for a chip the size of a P4 they would be doing very well to exceed 70%. That's still a lot of ICs that are absolutely nonfunctional.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
If I was reincarnated as an Intel Fan I would be most unimpressed. Zalman rules!
60k*3 years - 8% of that, but the other 50% gets sent back to india.
If a local was hired he would spend all the 60k*3 in usa, and thus benefit the local economy much more so than some indian living with 4 others in a 2bedroom flat all sharing costs.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
Copper is therefore easier to work, and the heat issues aren't quite great enough to make silver a practical alternative, given the extra complexities.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
NYT is a liberal news site. The /. crowd is, for the most part, about as left as left can be. If you don't think the NYT is liberal, recent news said that the NYT's only conservative columnist is leaving. And I hardly doubt that the rest of the columnists are neutral.
You can tell by the way I fill your box
I'm an Intel man, no time for Macs
Fan so loud and chip so warm
Transistor count from Mr. Moore
But it's all right, it's ok
Just behind your CD tray
My mission, you understand
Is pusher for the Redmond man
Whether I'm a Xeon or a first-gen peon
I'm x-eighty-six, x-eighty-six
Maybe I'm a-F00Fin' or power-supply poofin'
I'm x-eighty-six, x-eighty-six
Ah ah ah ah x-eighty-six, x-eighty-six
Ah ah ah ah x-eighty-six!
Well now, cache gets low and temp gets high
And for overclockers, I really fry
Got the gold flashing on my pads
And an F_DIV bug etched in my sand
But it's all right, it's ok
I also heard AMD is gay
And that VIA, and Transmeta
Can kiss my royal FPU
Whether I'm Centrino, you can bet that we know
I'm x-eighty-six, x-eighty-six
Ain't got sixty-four-bit, but still think I'm hot shit
I'm x-eighty-six, x-eighty-six
Ah ah ah ah x-eighty-six, x-eighty-six
Ah ah ah ah x-eighty-six!
Anybody want a peanut?
"IBM can fab a lot more than you think. Not as much as AMD or Intel, but they have the resources to bring Apple as many PPC970 CPUs as they will need."
That is not true at all currently, especially not true for 90nm.
I would still fill out the form. Here's why: you would have to link to places like MyWay (reknowned for changing AP stories to suit the DrudgeReport) or to non-subscriber news sites such as the Tampa. FL paper or the Muskogee, OK rag. Who do you trust? I will give them bogus info and just remember some dumb auth stuff to get a better article. Let them link all they want. The reason the NYT is a dream journalism job is not that the pay is great, it's because the paper is great. Yeah, they get shit wrong and are notoriously centrist, but I trust it over, say, some random site off GoogleNews.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
no kidding, I am an IT-potter
It's perfect, ontopic and provides a better link to the content. I don't understand why more than one person chose to downmod it with something that can't be meta-modded...
...a big outfit is going to have a lot of failed projects, *because* it is big enough to fail and survive to keep trying, and because it has been around long enough to get big. A single failure can kill a small organization, but the way to get big is to generate lots of ideas, keep spending from going wild (*not* the same as pinching every penny till it screams), and know how to make money from the ones that don't bomb.
It's important to understand one's corporate identity, though. If Intel came round to ask my advice, the one thing I'd tell them is to remember that they make *parts*. Not computers or TV sets; parts. They can best succeed by making downstream system-builders successful.
(AMD probably has some interesting failures to discuss, too. They've been around since 1969, and made some of the parts in the DEC mainframes I used and ran back in the 1970s-80s.)
We do have some parting gifts for you.
does the NYT have a logic to their use of dots in abbreviations? e.g. they say "A.M.D." they also say "U.S.B." but they say "DVD", and i've even seen a mix of "DVD" and "U.S.B." in the same article. Is there some underlying logic?
It is the US "Paper of Record." In Britain, that would be a paper like the Sunday Times or the Independent. In France, Le Monde. In Slovenia, Delo. In Japan, Asahi Shimbun. In Nashville, TN, that would be the Tennesseean.
What makes the NYT great is that they hire only the best (and fire them when they fail) and they know their audience holds them to a high standard and BITCHES mightily when they fail. Also, Dick Cheney has banned them from reporting on him. I wonder why?
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
You're my hero.
Your staggering intellect gleams like a glistening nerd erection in a dark bedroom in your parents house.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Obviously this magazine writer has never tried to write a code generator for an x86 FPU or Itanic, or he'd have a better idea of where Intel's problems might be coming from.
You set us up the disco ball!
Intel has been bombing lately!
Disco balls... Hmm, now I understand what 1000 points of light meant.
Newspaper readership per capita in the US is dwarfed by Britain, etc. A newpaper of record doesn't represent the ideas the country as a whole, but is one that is respected throughout. The LATimes, Washington Post and Chicago Tribune (to a lesser degree) are all newspapers of record in the US.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
My bet is that 95% of consumers will not go with the expensive Apple option while there are much cheaper options that will do almost everything the apple option will do.
Yeah, exactly... Like, remember that iPod thing a few years back? LOL! What a failure! What ever happened with that, anyway?
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
I just had the honor of meta-moderating the 'troll' mod of this... I had to call it fair, because this is a troll. Too bad I wasn't asked to meta the 'funny' mod, cause that was fair, too :)