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Intel Is in an Increasingly Bad Position in Part Because It Has Been Captive To Its Integrated Model (stratechery.com)
Once one of the Valley's most important companies, Intel is increasingly finding itself in a bad position, in part because of its major bet on integration model. Ben Thompson, writing for Stratechery: When Krzanich was appointed CEO in 2013 it was already clear that arguably the most important company in Silicon Valley's history was in trouble: PCs, long Intel's chief money-maker, were in decline, leaving the company ever more reliant on the sale of high-end chips to data centers; Intel had effectively zero presence in mobile, the industry's other major growth area. [...] [Analyst] Ben Bajarin wrote last week in Intel's Moment of Truth. As Bajarin notes, 7nm for TSMC (or Samsung or Global Foundries) isn't necessarily better than Intel's 10nm; chip-labeling isn't what it used to be. The problem is that Intel's 10nm process isn't close to shipping at volume, and the competition's 7nm processes are. Intel is behind, and its insistence on integration bears a large part of the blame.
The first major miss [for Intel] was mobile: instead of simply manufacturing ARM chips for the iPhone the company presumed it could win by leveraging its manufacturing to create a more-efficient x86 chip; it was a decision that evinced too much knowledge of Intel's margins and not nearly enough reflection on the importance of the integration between DOS/Windows and x86. Intel took the same mistaken approach to non general-purpose processors, particularly graphics: the company's Larrabee architecture was a graphics chip based on -- you guessed it -- x86; it was predicated on leveraging Intel's integration, instead of actually meeting a market need. Once the project predictably failed Intel limped along with graphics that were barely passable for general purpose displays, and worthless for all of the new use cases that were emerging. The latest crisis, though, is in design: AMD is genuinely innovating with its Ryzen processors (manufactured by both GlobalFoundries and TSMC), while Intel is still selling varations on Skylake, a three year-old design.
The first major miss [for Intel] was mobile: instead of simply manufacturing ARM chips for the iPhone the company presumed it could win by leveraging its manufacturing to create a more-efficient x86 chip; it was a decision that evinced too much knowledge of Intel's margins and not nearly enough reflection on the importance of the integration between DOS/Windows and x86. Intel took the same mistaken approach to non general-purpose processors, particularly graphics: the company's Larrabee architecture was a graphics chip based on -- you guessed it -- x86; it was predicated on leveraging Intel's integration, instead of actually meeting a market need. Once the project predictably failed Intel limped along with graphics that were barely passable for general purpose displays, and worthless for all of the new use cases that were emerging. The latest crisis, though, is in design: AMD is genuinely innovating with its Ryzen processors (manufactured by both GlobalFoundries and TSMC), while Intel is still selling varations on Skylake, a three year-old design.
This just marks the end of an era. Moores Law is dead (and has been dead for quite some time). Intel will need some other way to innovate. All they have been doing is adding cores and trying to push up clock speeds. Even this is running into a dead end: because of physics. The entire industry will need to come to grips with this, because a lot of people assumed Moores Law was going to continue.
>> arguably the most important company in Silicon Valley's history
Wait - I thought this was an article about Intel. (Not sure a PC chipmaker would be on top; without Microsoft and it's strategy to commoditize the PC makers Intel wouldn't have been a Tier 1 brand.)
It's much better to differentiate yourself - you can group yourself with like-minded people and never have to think for yourself again.
Hell, you never have to think at all.
You can smile stupidly and cheer on an orange baboon or smile happily when your intellectual brothers try to assassinate members of Congress!
"instead of simply manufacturing ARM chips for the iPhone"
What's simple about it? Intel's ARM was Xscale, which was based directly on DEC's StrongARM (which they purchased.) It was the fastest ARM core at the time, but while it [x]scaled up, it didn't [x]scale down. It had the highest power consumption at low clock rates of all the ARM cores.
Intel did not have an ARM-based product which would have been a viable core for the iPhone.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think this kind of analysis is quite premature. Presently, there is no mobile-worthy x86 option -- for lots of reasons. Until there is, I don't think you can judge Intel for their direction.
Presume, for a moment, that in a few years, Intel successfully produces an x86 proc for mobile specifications. It's distinctly possible, indeed even probable, that ARM becomes useless, and the entire mobile market moves to x86. What a boon for Intel to have not wasted time and effort during these middle-ground years.
We've lived through this before. I refer you to WAP. How many web developers spent how many hours fumbling through WAP-limited options, before the entire mobile market moved to full web technologies? What a wasted investment for any small company. And what a horrible experience in was for consumers.
We'll wait and see.
And that power-per-watt disadvantage vs ARM predates Intel's integration strategy and also their current process-size disadvantage. I don't see any evidence to the contrary in the linked story.
I thought Intel was in a bad position because it decided to dump $300m at diversity initiatives and fire a bunch of engineers instead of investing that money in R&D like AMD has.
Om, nomnomnom...
I still say it's Compaq, not MS, that deserves the credit here. Compaq created the PC compatible. Microsoft did have the foresight to make sure its software worked too, but at the time the money was in hardware and you more or less expected incompatibilities between generations of the machine. The idea of cross-vendor compatibility in the micro market was Compaq's, for sure.
I'm not that up on US geography, but is Redmond, Washington now part of silicon valley? I thought the latter was someplace in California, a completely different state.
Intel isn't *that* dead. They still have a shitload of resources and inertia. And articles like this are exactly what pushes Intel to drift around that corner.
The main topic is, how much of a dick Intel was, is, and due to its corporate culture, will be for a long time, before it has starved so much that it learns the value of cooperation and social (I don't mean SJW) behavior.
The need quite a bit more trouble than this, to become what we want them to become: A non-criminal, fair competitor, deservedly succeeding because of high-quality CPUs and chips.
I know they can do it. But I don't know if their leadership is even able to not act like psychoaths.
My point still applies: Intel is an important company in Silicon Valley, but not the "most important" (because their success depended on another company; the location of that other company is irrelevant).
Please let me know if I can help you with anything else.
This is why Microsoft is doing it. The realized they are not beholden to Intel. They made Windows RT (port of Win32 to ARM) so if the Intel x86-64 ship ever sank, it wouldn't take Windows down with it. They don't need it to sell like hotcakes; heck they don't need it to sell at all. They just need to to be there and ready if ARM overtakes Intel. It's insurance - a hedge against Intel imploding. If that should happen, they'll just transition to Windows for ARM, and all the software companies making Windows apps will (more or less) simply recompile their programs for ARM64, and Windows will carry on as if Intel never existed.
Intel is a company that has a lot of good things floating around, choked by a management that can only think one way. x86
People who think Intel is losing to ARM + AMD have obviously never compared revenue and profit!
Buy a modern mini tower, and the first thing that strikes you is there are no slots on the back, no spare drive bays, these are not meant to be expanded, YET THEY ARE SIZED TO BE EXPANDED, full of empty air and wasted space. I don't think they're worth adding cards to these days, but why the huge size? Either you get big or you get tiny (with 2.5 inch slots and external power), but nothing in the middle....
Next up, you start it up, Windows 10 does its thing and takes over, installing apps without permission, games magically appear, candy crush, lots of others, Facebook, bookmarks appear in the edge browser you didn't set, Agoda. A few clicks in privacy settings and you realize Microsoft has given itself permission to read your contacts, read your emails, locations etc., and installed a tempting 'secure' folder to drop private files onto 'OneDrive', except it isn't private. And remote services are all turned on, your PC is not yours.
You try to uninstall this crapware, and turn it off, but its like whackamole, there's another thing popping up. You can no longer disable various spyware services.
Then you use Intel screen drivers, and find you cannot even turn landscape portrait with a keypress. You could 5 years ago, another feature gone. And now it sends user usage info to Intel, another privacy thing gone.
You think, f*it and try to use a Windows 7 disk, and the keyboard and mouse aren't recognized. So you're stuck with it.
And I benchmark the new PC, and its hardly faster for twice the price!
Intel got greedy, but a big part of their problem is they are tied to Microsoft and Microsoft got *real* greedy.
Microsoft sunk that ship, and Intel decided to go down with it.
This was clear a long time ago. Intel was making X86 mobile chips for Intel to gain market share. Not because the phone makers wanted x86 chips. It was Intel-focused, not customer focused. Microsoft did similar things with Windows 8 and that metro junk.
Recently Intel has branched out into lots of other growth businesses though, buying Movidius, Altera, and MobileEye. They're making silicon photonics chips for optical networks, DOCSIS chips for cable modems and 3D Xpoint RAM to bridge the gap between DRAM and NAND. They integrated an AMD GPU and they are building a new GPU of their own.
It’s ironic that articles like this gain traction after Intel has already turned around and started to gain traction.
i've pointed this out here on slashdot a number of times, dating back at least... six years possibly more. the first really clear signs were when ARM came out with the first dual-core ARM Cortex A9 side-by-side demonstration of running a web browser (linux desktop OS) side-by-side with a 1.6ghz intel Atom. it kept up and in some cases loaded pages before the intel processor. at the end of the demo they showed the clock rate of the ARM chip: only 600mhz.
intel was a memory company. they're proud of their heritage. they designed the world's most efficient and compact memory-efficient instruction set because memory was damn expensive. if you got more instructions into memory, you ran faster, you needed smaller caches, and your product was cheaper. ... except... decoding those instructions takes time. you now have to run the clock at twice the speed of a RISC core in order to decode those "compact" instructions into the same equivalent RISC ones. and that's where things go wrong for intel, because power consumption is a SQUARE law. if the clock rate has to be double, the power consumption is FOUR times greater.
i've made comments regularly about this: it's only because intel was putting vast sums of money into foundries, staying at least one geometry ahead (28nm when everyone else was using 40nm), that nobody really noticed or complained too much, because by being one geometry ahead you reduce power by a factor of 2. ... but they're no longer ahead, now, are they?
now that the power advantages of geometries are beginning to run out (as well as the cost being higher and the yields lower), intel's *really* in trouble, and it all boils down to the design of the instruction set.
they have one hope left: abandon x86 and start making non-x86 instruction set designs. it'll be a really *really* tough sell, but if they can do that they have a chance.
Since open source applications can simply be recompiled to any processor archtitecture.
INTeL has tried and has failed thrice on discrete graphics.
My NExT CPU is AMD chip. But Nvidia remains for graphics.
Itanium was that chance. History says legacy is better.
That's a neat idea and you might be right.
If it weren't for Compaq, then what we all think of as generic commodity PC would still just be thought of as "IBM's particular computer, which happens to be quite a bit behind most everything else." There were a fuckton of competing computers in the 1980s, most of which were quite a bit more advanced than the x86 stuff. But everything was proprietary, so even if you were in love with something, in the end you couldn't trust it to stick around (e.g. Amiga).
Who knows how things might have gone if Compaq hadn't nailed down generic commodity hardware as being what it turned out to be. Maybe we simply wouldn't have generic commodity hardware (but there might be some generic software layer or something like that), or maybe it would have ended up something completely different (e.g. 68k based?).
Well 'integration' isn't the word I'd pick, they have some lockin if they make a market x86-dependent, and so that was their goal. The assumption would be that if the mobile market became mostly x86, then sure Android would have ARM compatibility, but x86 would be optimal and no one would tolerate the crappy non-native experience. Of course, the glaring flaw is that Intel would have to *live* in that unacceptable non-native experience to begin with, and Intel was right about one thing, no one would put up with such a crappy experience.
Larabee was hubris that a lot of sort-of x86 cores would mitigate the GPU accelerated demand, because even if you couldn't be quite as quick as nvidia, you could use a familiar programming model. Problem was that Phi *also* required developers to be more careful and picky, so it wasn't like programming in x86. By the time Intel could have possibly made it easier, the world was just so used to CUDA that the market was slim. They may have better luck with AVX512 in Xeon Skylake, but who knows. It was always doomed as a GPU because they have no competency.
Another problem is being in denial, taking a long time from changing gears from 'no competitor' to 'oh, AMD is competitive again'. In the datacenter, Intel had crazy high core counts. In the desktop? quad-core, because no competitive pressure. When zen was rumored, Intel was skeptical, and when Ryzen came out they were slow to change. Compared to desktop offerings, AMD was so much better. On the server side, things are a bit more mixed (where Intel actually *has* continued to invest in meaningful advances). For example, desktop core counts have been stagnant, as were clock speeds, and no AVX512, meanwhile server chips moved on and had all those improving. AMD still has more PCIe lanes and memory channels, but it's a caveat, more like 4 processors with 2 memory channels and 16 pcie lanes each rather than 1 processor with 48 pcie lanes. This is a distinction that doesn't matter for many workloads, but for a few, it matters (the memory performance of a single threaded application is much better on intel server than AMD server).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The problem is that every f'in laymen needs to have his say, Marketing appealling to this largest stupid denominator, and management following it down this rabbit hole to appeal to the "shareholders"
F'in BS!
A really great observation. Baizuo politics seem to make companies vastly less competitive; they spend time and effort harassing and silencing natural discourse, hire people whose only function is to virtue signal on behalf of the corporation, and eventually make a work environment toxic while outright firing and shaming any who point this out.
they might be able to build a better product. Focusing so much on spying and other anti user technology is changing the way we compute. For instance - Windows 10 is untrustworthy, why? The installed forced-spying and called it telemetry. Intel installed backdoors and called it ME.
As of 11:37 EST, Intel's stock price is $50.16, and AMD's stock price is $14.61.
You are welcome on my lawn.
And the hostility towards diversity here on Slashdot is misguided and idiotic. When I see white boys from upper middle class families complain about being oppressed and how it's a meritocracy in technology, I find it hysterical that they can't see outside their little bubble and realize that they had all of their opportunities handed to them.
Yes, us half-asians(or asians), who are penalized in US(don't live in the US anyway) university admissions akin to whites and are born to poor working class families, where name brand kraft dinner was a luxury sure are 'white boys from upper middle class families.' Nothing like finding out that a university specifically penalizes you because of your race, instead of making the selection based on best candidates? Yeah, those of us who climbed up from the bottom really do like meritocracy, because we know that people got there on skill, ability, and competence. Not because they had the current trendy gender selection/sexual preference, had the right colour of skin, or some other *insert non-selective trait* that they were born with/without.
because you were smart enough to pick the right parents and genes so that you have natural aptitude in a lucrative field.
I'm not sure how you got so far in life being so stupid as to believe that a person picks their parents. Or believing that if a person truly wants to, they'll rise through ability and skill instead of moping around going "woe is me." Ever wonder why those of us who were dirt poor are the most angry at 'diversity' bullshit? Nobody has a problem if programs are open to everyone. A lot of people who worked hard for their job and skillset however are pretty pissed off when someone else coasts along because it looks trendy as fuck to the company they're working for though.
And god forbid if a company doesn't for the bullshit that girls are not as good at math and science as boys.
Uh-huh. So that's why in so many places, they also lower the aptitude and physical requirements for policing, fire fighting, military enlistment and make everyone either pick up the slack for them. Or actually endanger the lives of everyone else because they're unable to deal with the demands of the job. Funny enough the most outspoken people against this, are the ones that passed the actual requirements before all that "diversity" bullshit was being pushed. Why? Because people believe they didn't get there on ability, skill, prowess, but were handed the job because it looked good. I mean, what's it going to take? Another dead fighter pilot that would have been drummed out if they were male. Or another ship nearly sheered in half because two women had a snit, and refused to talk to each other? Or an entire fire dept., refusing to work with someone because they couldn't even carry a hose and put the people they were supposed to rescue in danger.
Om, nomnomnom...
Every single tech company in Silicon Valley depends on the success of other tech companies, in or out of the Valley.
LOL.
So wrong and so funny.
There was a really big turning point with MCA vs PCI as well. That's when it became plain that it was no longer "the IBM compatible".
When IBM couldn't force MCA as the standard it became plain that it had lost control over the direction of the design, and that we were now in a commodity hardware multivendor world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law#Near-term_limits
"Most semiconductor industry forecasters, including Gordon Moore,[93] expect Moore's law will end by around 2025.[94][95][96]"
So, it's not dead. It may be in 7 years. But, it isn't now.
Bigly you are a pathetic waste of flesh. Just go die in a corner already old man, you smell like piss and failure.
Suck a cock, n1gger
They won't die. No.
The problem is that their market is shrinking:
there are plenty of people who still need or want high performance processors.
Yup, earning millions on specific contracts to build giant HPC center every few months seems lucrative.
(What will eventually become of Intel according to this trend).
Until you realize that there are billions of people on this planet, thus billions of pocket to fill with a smartphone.
("Pocket computer" metaphor in full force. In some region (older, second hand) smartphones are the only computers that people will ever come into contact with).
Intel didn't manage to become "the x86 of smartphone/tablet/other pocket devices", despite an initial strong (pun intended) start back in the PDA era.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
That AC blames the world for him not being what he thinks he should be. He has to justify why he isn't as good as most others when he thinks he's more deserving.
There were a fuckton of competing computers in the 1980s, most of which were quite a bit more advanced than the x86 stuff.
Yes, but when the 5000 pound gorilla went with 8086, and business departments started sneaking in PCs as "office equipment", then the x86 was the way to go.
IBM published the specs, Compaq and others copied it (BTW, Compaq initial success was with a portable PC, and then they got VERY proprietary - the 1/3 height floppy drive, the non-standard power supply, etc, but they beat IBM to the 386 PC.)
What was really cool, but often forgotten, was the NEC V20 chip. I dropped one of those in my Bleeding Edge PC, and it ran 30% faster.
... there would be no Microsoft or Intel or PC market as we know it.
We can play this game all the way down to prostitution (the first business ever). Everything after that is just a cheap copy of the first whore.
You are my new hero. Spread the word. Not everyone has skill. Those who attain it shouldn't be back seat because they are white males. Those without skills shouldn't be hired/promoted for diversity. Funny how the left elites ignore Asians. Skill and non white. Oh fuck, there goes our narrative!
Eliminate the barriers and enforce the laws. No quotas. No diversity hires. That is in fact discrimination of the worst and most intellectually dishonest kind.
>> Every single tech company in Silicon Valley depends on the success of other tech companies
Not the ones that tap into the consumers themselves. (Google. Apple. Facebook. Uber. Etc.) Those companies have such market presence that they can line up quality, even name vendors (e.g., Foxconn, Intel) around them, and replace them like interchangable commodities as needed.
Remember those bad times when Intel royally messed up with the Pentium-4, which was supposed to climb up to 10GHz clock rate but never got to even 4GHz in production? Intel turned to their branch located in the zionist entity for help and in a few months' time they found a solution: head-transplant P4 cores onto the chipset-side bus structure of previous generation Pentium III CPU and voila, the new Intel Core micro-architecture was born, curb-stomping AMD CPUs as soon as it entered production. Especially in the portable field, where watts matter, AMD-powered notebook PCs remain nearly non-existent to this day.
The Tel-Aviv branch of Intel will soon figure out something to fix this another crisis and the shorters will be humbled in public. Asians vendors and developers, who are chiefly behind the current ARM CPU boom are a race of talented copiers, with a fixation on perfection - but innovation and new discovery always comes from the ashkenazi jewish mind hive, that's why they hold 2/3rd to 3/4th of all science Nobel prizes awarded thus far!
MCA is from 1987, PCI from 1992. MCA was dead long before PCI came to be. So MCA vs PCI never happened.
Definitely not. Having spent enough time in the latter, and living in the former, I can say our weather is infinitely more tolerable.
uh, jackass, the "Core" series was the Pentium M (based on the Pentium III) - it was most certainly not the P4 core. The stupid-long pipeline was the problem.
Yeah, those of us who climbed up from the bottom really do like meritocracy, because we know that people got there on skill, ability, and competence.
I am also one of those people. And I know why so many of us are so bitter about seeing handouts. We struggled, and we want to see other people struggle too. It's some kind of messed up desire for fairness, when really, we should be trying to make sure nobody else has to go through the bullshit we did to succeed. The part you missed in the above formula is actually the largest factor- luck. Get over yourself, asshole.
The use of the x86 instruction set wasn't the big issue with Larrabee. Larrabee would have been a bad idea no matter if it used ARM or MIPS opcodes instead. Using x86 didn't help, but that was just one among many issues of that architecture. The issues of the Larrabee architecture are things such as no fixed function hardware for things such as z-buffering or rasterization, not enough hardware threads to hide the memory latency, memory interface with not that much bandwidth but expensive but not that often usefull cache coherency, etc, SIMD units were not wide enough etc. Sure: Without x86 and with a simpler decoder things would have been slightly better.
Jan
EISA then
The CEO's love life and work life are too closely integrated, I heard.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
from 1990 Harvard Business Review... https://hbr.org/1990/07/reengi... Equally don't follow what has been successful if you want to be disrupted...
nothing to see here - move along
I'm also one of those people, and never once had a desire to see others struggle. I did, however, witness a lot of stupidity and bad choices. Choices for short term pleasure instead of long term gain. Having witnessed the choices being made, I now find it difficult to give a fuck about the predictable results. Go to school. Do your homework. Stay off drugs. Keep your job, even when it isn't fun, at least until you have another. Everybody has to go through bullshit to succeed, and there are no shortcuts for the vast majority. There is luck, but that is just opportunity meeting preparation, and it is the ones who always refused to prepare by cultivating skill, ability and competence that are whining about missing out on it. So, how about you getting over yourself, asshole. Nobody owes you anything.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Intel's problem is that they haven't done enough to disrupt the market with amazing technologies you'd have to see to believe, like this one startup I keep reading about in my own home town, that seems to be populated by a bunch of teenagers, has done.
I'm also one of those people, and never once had a desire to see others struggle.
You start your reply out with a lie. You know it, I know it, we all know it. It's hard to admit, so I get it.
I did, however, witness a lot of stupidity and bad choices.
How wonderful it must be to have been to have not made bad choices, or to not have had good choices still fuck you over.
Choices for short term pleasure instead of long term gain.
Ah, yes. This is why poverty exists. Idiots and their short-term pleasure, working their 60 hours a week for piddly sums while you (I presume) and I sit here with our 6 figure salaries.
Having witnessed the choices being made, I now find it difficult to give a fuck about the predictable results.
Here we go- you equate lack of success across the board with one of the reasons you've seen for it. The only thing predictable here is how the system let an asshole like you succeed where you should have fallen flat on your face for being a generalizing toolshed.
Go to school. Do your homework. Stay off drugs. Keep your job, even when it isn't fun, at least until you have another.
Speaking of vast majorities... That's precisely what the vast majority does.
There is luck, but that is just opportunity meeting preparation, and it is the ones who always refused to prepare by cultivating skill, ability and competence that are whining about missing out on it.
And it's also the people who prepared their entire lives, but that luck just never showed up.
I worked fast food for the first half a decade of my life before luck put me in a position to show that I can excel.
I worked with better people than myself. Better people than you, judging from my first impression of you.
So, how about you getting over yourself, asshole. Nobody owes you anything.
That statement shows you literally lacked the reading comprehension required to even understand my post.
You're a perfect example of someone who had the luck, and not the merit, I think.
It says 10-20 years from 2005. And we're 3 years into that range. You're exaggerating to make your point more convincing.
Intel dumped ARM (Xscale) over 10 years ago (2006), and it's not clear even with hindsight that it would have been a successful strategy for Intel to use that ARM license. It seems doubtful that an Apple-Intel alliance around Xscale would have been possible given that iPhone's development (2006-2007) likely began when Intel still had Xscale. I can assume it was explored by Apple or Intel, even if only on a whiteboard, but history shows us that Xscale wasn't used by Apple. (probably price, performance, and lack of cell modem integration)
Furthermore I predict ARM's dominance to be on a decline as the consumer industry diversify into more CPU architectures like RISC-V. But sadly I don't think this will translate into more x86 sales for Intel. Ultimately the end user want a very full featured web browser on an inexpensive device (mobile, laptop, or tablet) with a long battery life, and there are lots of ways to reach that kind of high level goal. Full time connectivity to "the cloud" is going to be the marketing mantra for devices for the next decade I believe, and not so much about the gory details of the instruction set architecture. (sometimes I wonder if people aren't stuck in the mid-1980's to mid-2000's PC industry way of thinking about MHz and CPU revision)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Intel's trying to shoehorn x86 everywhere reminds me of that scene in The Brady Bunch Movie where Mike Brady (played by Gary Cole) keeps designing every project as a clone of his house.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Historically, Intel was huge for Silicon Valley in the early days. It had the first commercial CPU on a semiconductor chip. Intel was prominent amongst the early semiconductor companies that gave Silicon Valley it's name, founded by two of the original Traitorous 8. Intel kept a big hold when it became the chip used in the PC, moving microcomputers out of the hobbyist realm, thus keeping itself highly influential and relevant even when Silicon Valley started being more about software than silicon.
And there's nothing wrong in trying to be a good corporate citizen - or even to appear to be one.
It's the 'appear to be one' that feels like the big problem in the industry. Trying to 'look good' ends up with less qualified employees *and* being patronizing toward classes of people all at the same time.
Someone who is of a particular minority that is very skilled and has really worked hard finds the position filled by the first minority hire that came along before him, because the organization is biased, but knew it hired to hire 'a' minority and wasn't too picky. This is frankly insulting to that minority group because it presumes the only way to hire is to lower standards.
Similarly with how these companies portray who is responsible for big news items. I was neck deep in a particular project that was in the news and saw a news article proclaiming that 'here are the people who made this possible'. I click to see some people I never had heard of. The company had decided to declare some seemingly random people who had nothing to do with the project at all as responsible. Why? Because it was a better diversity story. The people who were responsible were all white men. This is certainly a problem, but having token minorities to change the optics does little to fix the structural problem, it facilitates denial, and does so in an incredibly expensive and inefficient way.
Of course, this may all be the appropriate strategy in the fullness of time, as otherwise it's a chicken and egg (disenfranchised minorities think it's hopeless due to lack of examples and never try, and it's impossible to get the examples while people are thus discouraged), but it is far from a satisfying situation to watch it first hand, and unclear whether the same biases that prevented any minority hires are being reshaped to treat minority hires as more than a token effort.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Intel could have been first in mobile space, except for Microsoft repeatidly leaning on them to stick to making chips for the IBM PC, that would be IBM, 'the PC company' as they referred to them in internal emails:
.. We have entered another round of "partnership" talks with the PC company and mentioned this as an issue, but they claim thay can't fix this for us."
.. yup, it would be crazy to Intel define this the only urgent issue I can think of is defining how it boots, if we let Intel do this in a proprietary way we're screwed."
.. Overall we wil never have the same relationship with IBM that we have with Compaq, Dell and even HP because of their software ambitions .. On their side I mean JAVA and NC."
.. did 2 things that amaze me: They kept the NC specification around despite saying they would not .. They snuck in a server specification. There is some failure in communication"
.. If we don’t get Intel off of Linux internally (the failed EDA project) – we will never get the *cultural* alignment that we want'
March 1994: "IBM has a LOTUS NOTES
Dec 1996: "we have a conference call with them (intel) re NetPC today at 9
Oct 1997: "I have a critical meeting with Intel a week from Wednesday. I want to convince them that they need to stay away from Oracle NCs and work more closely with Microsoft."
Nov 1997: "IBM refused to big anything related to Backoffice. I said they to use their PCs to distribute things against us. I said they are dabbing in NCs in a way we don't like
Nov 1997: "Intel
Nov 2001: "I think we will have to live without a Chinese wall clause for the front end of the compiler
Toshiba will be astonished to know the Satellite line does not exist and has not for over a decade. Can you kindly masturbate on some other forum.
It's that they don't want to do anything else.
They hold all of the keys to x86 (you need a license from them), why would they give that up?
I highly recommend people go read about X86 on Wikipedia, it tells you all you need to know about why Intel is not going to give up on x86. And before anyone says the patents expired, that is true for the original instruction set, however there has been quite a few improvements since the patent expired. SSE, MMX, PAE, virtualization and a whole host of others have come along since then which rely on the older license (including 64bit) so unless you are part of the club, you cannot build a modern x86 processor and since Intel refuses to issue new licenses, the only way to get one is to buy or license it from someone who already has one.
When AMD starts developing something like Intelâ(TM)s MKL or NVIDIAâ(TM)s CUDA... then intel might start to get sort of in trouble. It is okay for AMD to stay agnostic but if all it takes is the use of MKL-compiled software for intel to take a lead...
And if intel/amd graphics card were easier to exploit with openCL, might be even NVIDIA could get in some trouble and GPGPU users would not have to be tied to them.
Eagle was earlier than Compaq - until the founder drove his brand-new Ferrari over a cliff.
Intel cannot postpone a crash with a truth that has been in the air for the last 20 years: x86 architecture is a beast of the past.
At once accumulated expertise on it made it win over new designs, but it is not the case anymore.
You're probably right.
I'll get the poocorn. :)
If you dig at it carefully, you will discover that Intel's "acquisition" of DEC's semiconductor properties was a case of DEC having "Intel over a Barrel" re blatant patent infringement coupled with DEC desiring to exit the chip manufacturing business. At the time, the StrongARM CPU was more capable, and significantly faster than the top-of-the-line Intel CPU. The catch was that Intel had to negotiate rights with ARM re: the StrongARM/XScale processors in order to make them (and that took 'Moore' than a year).
Damn mobile view has no preview, and the submit link right above the first row of the keyboard!
I'm happy to see Intel having problems. Intel screwed over AMD so many times, including when Intel pressured PC manufacturers that they would lose sweet deals with Intel if they even put a few AMD CPUs in any of their PC models. Intel failed with Itanium, then had to use AMD's 64 bit instruction set which was more compatible with 32 bit code. Back in the day, I learned assembly language on the Motorola 68000 (yes, I'm old!) Motorla's design was vastly superior to Intel's back then. Motorola used general purpose registers whereas Intel had special purpose registers. Motorola used a single memory map whereas Intel used segmented memory. But Intel won the PC wars with their more shrewd business maneuvers, much like Microsoft did. So it's great seeing ARM dominate mobile devices, and AMD making a big comeback on high-end multi-core server CPUs.
Otilinni missed the move to mobile. Besides some specialized hardware in the cloud, who cares if it's amd or Intel? (save for spectre meltdown)
Uh-huh. So that's why in so many places, they also lower the aptitude and physical requirements for policing, fire fighting, military enlistment and make everyone either pick up the slack for them. Or actually endanger the lives of everyone else because they're unable to deal with the demands of the job. Funny enough the most outspoken people against this, are the ones that passed the actual requirements before all that "diversity" bullshit was being pushed. Why? Because people believe they didn't get there on ability, skill, prowess, but were handed the job because it looked good. I mean, what's it going to take? Another dead fighter pilot that would have been drummed out if they were male. Or another ship nearly sheered in half because two women had a snit, and refused to talk to each other? Or an entire fire dept., refusing to work with someone because they couldn't even carry a hose and put the people they were supposed to rescue in danger.
When you said you were a "half-asian male" I didn't realise you meant that in total you amounted to about 50% of an asian male. I'm sorry that all those women made the height requirement and that you didn't.
> head-transplant P4 cores onto the chipset-side bus structure of previous generation Pentium III CPU and voila, the new Intel Core micro-architecture was born
You go it backwards: Intel Core combines the Pentium-III cuore with Pentium-4's bus side. On the other hand, it was indeed designed by the Intel Tel-Aviv bureau.
EISA then
Wrong again. EISA was a flop. It was actually MCA vs. VLB. And yes, VLB sucked rocks. That's how much people didn't want to use MCA or EISA — both of which had the same pathetic problem. To wit: configuration floppies. While Macs had NuBus and Amigas had Zorro, both with drivers in ROM and complete hardware autoconfiguration*, PCs were still dicking around with floppies for configuration and drivers. You had to put one floppy in when you installed the card, and another one in to load the driver, and keep track of them both...
* The Amiga Zorro bus was superior to NuBus not only because it used a cheap cardedge instead of an expensive and delicate multi-row connector, but also because AmigaDOS was a multitasking microkernel-based system and drivers were simply processes, which could be loaded from ROM as easily as from disk. Most NuBus cards still had drivers, except for most graphics cards.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
"They'll listen to Reason."
Just finished Snow Crash for the first time a couple weeks ago. I can't believe I wanted so long to read it, what a great book.
Wow, what a crazy story. I'd never heard of Eagle before, thanks for sharing, I just pulled up wth wikipedia page on them.
Uber relies on Google Maps, Apple relies on Intel and ARM, Google relies on Sprint/Nextel/AT&T/Comcast/etc...
The part you missed in the above formula is actually the largest factor- luck. Get over yourself, asshole.
So luck was the hardworking part? Really now. Was it luck that got you your skills? Luck that made you decide that you didn't like living dirt poor? Nope. It was the desire not to be in the same place your parents were because you saw how much suffering it caused them.
Luck is about the furthest thing from reality in the world in being an actual factor. Chance on the other hand, now that can make a play in what happens. The arrogance in believing that luck though screams that you don't think things through. Though I fundamentally pity you, because I'm an asshole. And that's all your worth.
Om, nomnomnom...
Yeah so here's the difference between the person you were replying to, myself, and you. In each case when we got knocked down by chance, or because we made a bad choice. We dusted ourselves off, tried to, or figured out what went wrong, and made another choice and learned from it. You on the other hand, got knocked down and started whining "life isn't fair." Something the both of us already learned, and instead of whining, we made the choice to do something else.
Luck is absolutely garbage mumbo-jumbo. There is chance, and chance can be modified by your own actions. You're the perfect example of someone that believes "luck is the deciding factor in life" instead of: Changing one's circumstances, being in the right place or wrong place at the right time, and to think further a head then the 10 minutes to get laid and wondering why you're paying child support for 20 years.
Om, nomnomnom...
When you said you were a "half-asian male" I didn't realise you meant that in total you amounted to about 50% of an asian male. I'm sorry that all those women made the height requirement and that you didn't.
I'm sorry that you failed the basics of grade 9 science, it would likely explain your lot in life. And having to fight against illegals pushing the cost of your janitorial services down.
Om, nomnomnom...
So luck was the hardworking part?
Not sure from where you drew that twisted ass logic to come to that conclusion. I'm pretty sure I said luck was the luck part.
Seriously, how the hell did you make it past grade school?
Was it luck that got you your skills?
Nope. It was luck that allowed me to use them.
Luck that made you decide that you didn't like living dirt poor?
Nope. It was luck that allowed me to use my skills, and pull myself out of poverty.
It was the desire not to be in the same place your parents were because you saw how much suffering it caused them.
Pretty sure that isn't a desire unique to the successful. I think the fact that you say that says a lot more about you than you realize.
I think it's the tortured logic your brain has developed to cope with the cognitive dissonance you feel inside over the knowledge that those of us in the white collar 10%+ percentiles aren't as special as luck has allowed us to position ourselves.
Luck is about the furthest thing from reality in the world in being an actual factor.
An interesting claim... One you haven't actually made any argument to support.
I have, however, already give you a counter-argument to that assertion- so keep trying. You can have all the skill in the world, but it's luck that gets you to where you can use it. Or do you really think all those kids in the third world are just lazy brown colored animals?
The arrogance in believing that luck though screams that you don't think things through.
Another claim you haven't actually backed up with any logic to speak of.
Though I fundamentally pity you, because I'm an asshole.
I find that assholes often pity their betters. I think it's another coping mechanism.
You on the other hand, got knocked down and started whining "life isn't fair."
That's a rather boneheaded interpretation of what I wrote, don't you think?
I'd say it's more accurate that to say that I dusted myself off, made it to the top 6% of income earners and then reflected upon the journey and said, "wow. life really isn't fair."
Luck is absolutely garbage mumbo-jumbo.
Followed with...
There is chance, and chance can be modified by your own actions.
I think it's clear you're not entirely familiar with the words chance and luck.
Also, anything can be modified by your actions, but the hubris displayed here regarding your apparent belief that you can overcome all odds, and that anyone who cannot obviously just didn't have what it takes is mind-blowing. You may be a skilled person, but you're certainly not intelligent.