Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
I don't normaly read the times for tech news though (that's what slashdot is for). But it certainly rather see this posted than a nother article about the guy who made a working death star out of old shampoo bottles and ber cans in his parents basement :)
sorry 'bout the mess...
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.
Those are just a few of the things I can think off the top of my head that have looked awful suspicious.
Not all postings are made by this finicially interested individual or group. There are some exceptions, such as a professor who once posted a link to an article about his research, and maybe one or two other people who were genuinely bored, found something the liked, wrote a summary, and submitted it to Slashdot. However, I think those submitters are in a minority.
Using Firefox?
Try BugMeNot. It is also available by doing Tools --> Extensions --> Get More Extensions in the browser.
I am in no way related to this extension. I just love it.
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.
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)
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