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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.
"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.
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.
Moore's law is about transistor counts. Adding cores adds transistors.
Even this is running into a dead end: because of physics.
They can still add cores for some time, if they can improve yields. First there is a process shrink and cores shrink, then the process is improved and cores grow again. Then we get a new process...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
>> shitload of resources and inertia
Agree they have these, but both of these are working against Intel right now: the inertia is what drove them into the ditch while more nimble chipmakers were passing them by, and their ample resources are blinding them from the danger because they assume they can always write checks to get back on the right track if they ever figure it out.
See "Sears"...
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.
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.
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...
Moore's law is about transistors per unit area. Adding cores increases both. Only new manufacturing techniques to cram in more transistors will let the trend continue, and they are indeed pushing the limits of what's physically possible.
At 7nm we're talking features that are only about three dozen atoms wide. The current roadmap has 5nm production in a few years. This kind of thing is well outside my knowledge but I'm pretty confident you can't make devices smaller than a single atom, so they are rapidly approaching a wall one way or another!
=Smidge=
Guys like you are delusional and think that CPUs are continually going to get faster and faster.
Moore's Law does not say CPUs will get "faster", only that transistor density will increase.
They've done worse like spending $7.7billion on buying McAfee in 2010. To put into perspective how stupidly expensive that was, Disney paid $4billion for Marvel in 2009 and $4.04billion for Lucasfilm in 2012. Instead of spending all that money on crappy cybersecurity software which is more of a problem because of windows, Intel should have spent that money developing more user controllable security measures in the cpu and chipset such as a secure enclave, the ability to write protect the hard drive through the bios and integrating arm chips for secondary processing of passwords. Or maybe even a ARM computer that runs on Linux and has x86 chips on board for backwards compatibility like the way the ps3 used the cell processor for its main processor but also had the 'emotion engine' onboard for 100% compability running ps2 titles.
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.
It won't die, but it will need to find new markets in order to continue growing like investors demand.
Intel has a PE below 15. The S&P average is over 25. So investors aren't expecting much growth.
I don't think there is anything they can do. Eventually, they will share the x86 market with AMD about even and maybe even some additional manufacturers. And they will come under increasing pressure from ARM, or at least Intel will. AMD does make ARM chips, even if not at volume at the moment.
It is the typical way giants fail: By sleeping, sleeping, sleeping, until they find that they are not very relevant anymore.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Moore's law is about transistors per unit area. Adding cores increases both. Only new manufacturing techniques to cram in more transistors will let the trend continue, and they are indeed pushing the limits of what's physically possible.
At 7nm we're talking features that are only about three dozen atoms wide. The current roadmap has 5nm production in a few years. This kind of thing is well outside my knowledge but I'm pretty confident you can't make devices smaller than a single atom, so they are rapidly approaching a wall one way or another! =Smidge=
Let's break this down and make it simple. Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years. Simply put this is the founded definition. Also, Moore's prediction proved accurate for several decades, and has been used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development. Advancements in digital electronics are strongly linked to Moore's law: quality-adjusted microprocessor prices, memory capacity, sensors and even the number and size of pixels in digital cameras. Digital electronics has contributed to world economic growth in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Moore's law describes a driving force of technological and social change, productivity, and economic growth. For those that need a more in-depth understanding of Moore's Law go here: https://www.britannica.com/tec... Why? That we are all on the same page about the true definition of Moore's Law.
I don't think there is anything they can do. Eventually, they will share the x86 market with AMD about even and maybe even some additional manufacturers. And they will come under increasing pressure from ARM, or at least Intel will. AMD does make ARM chips, even if not at volume at the moment.
It is the typical way giants fail: By sleeping, sleeping, sleeping, until they find that they are not very relevant anymore.
Intel has not been sleeping. They have engaged in one failed project after another. There's a difference.
Why do people here insist on bringing up the SJW-altright in every article?
Why do people insist on looking the other way when a swath of political culture is causing harm to the rest of society, but really believe "they're not the baddies." Let's be honest here, western society was making a pretty hotass line towards a colour blind belief system through the 1980's, 90's and mid-00's. Then progressives and feminists decided that the most important thing in the world wasn't skill and ability, but your sex organs, declared sexual partners, and/or the colour of your skin. Then they started pushing it on everyone, and pushed hard.
If you're american, then you've already seen the fruits of this when democrats and progressive screeched that anyone who dared to disagree with Obama era policies was because they were racist. That's it. You're a racist for disagreeing. Now we've got the "if you don't follow what we tell you, you're a nazi." I have to give them credit though, their ability to drive people away and damage dangerous words to the point that they lose all meaning is great.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.
Guys like the poster think that is going to continue forever. But it won't (and hasn't).
Nobody said it will "continue forever". He just said it is not dead yet, and it isn't. Single thread CPU speed has stalled, but transistor density is still increasing.
Why do you have so much invested in insisting that "Moore's Law is dead" anyway? You go to every discussion about this topic and post the same nonsense over and over. You do the same thing in every discussion about AI or machine learning, insisting that AI isn't "real" because it doesn't match what you see in the movies. Maybe you should see a psychiatrist and find out what is driving your weird obsessions.
You sound like vegans. Sorry, but I just don't care about the drama of sex frustrated feminists and mgtows.
Avantgarde Hebrew science fiction