Intel flopped so hard on process nodes for 4 years up until Gelsinger took the reigns... it was honestly unprecedented levels of R&D failure. What happened over the 8 years prior was hedge funds and banks had saddled up on Intel stock which was paying healthy dividends due to cost cutting and "coasting". This sudden shock of "we're going to invest everything in R&D and catch back up" was news that a lot of intel shareholders didn't want to hear. They dumped the stock and the price adjusted in kind.

Intel's 18A is roughly 6 months ahead of schedule, set to begin manufacturing in the latter half of 2024. Most accounts put this ahead of TSMC's equivalent N2 node...

Fab investments have a 3 year lag on delivering value. We're only starting to see the effect of putting serious capital and focus on this, as of this year. I also think we'll see more companies getting smart about having all of their fabrication eggs in one of two baskets (samsung or tsmc) both within a 500 mile radius circle in the south china sea.

Intel has had 4 years of technical debt on it's fabrication side, negative stock pressure from the vacuum created by AMD and Nvidia, and is still managing to be profitable.

I think the market (and analysts like this) are all throwing the towel in on the one company that has quite a lot to gain at this point after losing a disproportionate amount of share value and market.

I just hope they keep Pat at the helm for another 2 years to fully deliver on his strategy or Intel will continue where it was headed 4 years ago.

From their long pipeline of future CMOS manufacturing processes with which Intel hopes to close the performance gap between them and TSMC, for now there exists a single commercial product: Meteor Lake, which consists mostly of chips made by TSMC, with one single Intel 4 die, the CPU tile.

The Meteor Lake CPU seems to have finally reached the energy efficiency of the TSMC 5-nm process of almost 4 years ago, but it also has obvious difficulties in reaching high clock frequencies, exactly like Ice Lake in the past, so once more Intel has been forced to accompany Meteor Lake with Raptor Lake Refresh made in the old technology, to cover the high-performance segment.

Nevertheless, Meteor Lake demonstrates reaching the first step with Intel 4.

If they will succeed to launch on time and with good performance, later this year, their server products based on Intel 3, that will be a much stronger demonstration of their real progress than this Meteor Lake preview, which has also retained their old microarchitecture for the big cores, so it shows nothing new there.

Only by the end of 2024 it will become known whether Intel has really become competitive again, after seeing the Arrow Lake microarchitecture and the Intel 20A manufacturing process.

N5 is interesting because it's the first process fully designed around EUV and because it was pretty much exclusive to Apple for almost two years. It launched in Apple products in late 2020, then crickets until about late 2022 (Zen 4, RTX 4000, Radeon 7000). Launches of the other vendors were still on N7 or older processes in 2020 - RTX 3000 for example used some 10nm Samsung process in late 2020. All of those were DUV (including Intel 7 / 10ESF). That's the step change we are looking at.

Improvements since have been modest, to the extent that N3 is only barely any better (c.f. the Apple M3 is... still a really great CPU, but not actually that much of an upgrade over the M2).

There's a hole for Intel to aim at now. We'll see.

[1] Also 32nm and 45nm, really. It's easy to forget now, but Intel strung together a just shocking number of dominant processes in the 00's.

Not sure where that's coming from? The released parts are mobile chips, and the fastest is a 45W TDP unit that boosts at 5.1GHz. AMD's fastest part in that power range (8945HS) reaches 5.2GHz. Apple seems to do just fine at 4GHz with the M3.

I'm guessing you're looking at some numbers for socketed chips with liquid cooling?

No liquid cooling needed for either of them, just standard 14" or 15" laptops without special cooling, or NUC-like small cases, because they do not need discrete GPUs.

Both CPUs have the same microarchitecture of the big cores.

If Intel had been able to match the clock frequencies of their previous generation, they would have done that, because it is embarrassing that Meteor Lake wins only the multi-threaded benchmarks, due to the improved energy efficiency, but loses in the single-threaded benchmarks, due to lower turbo clock frequency, when compared to the last year's products.

Moreover, Intel could easily have launched a Raptor Lake Refresh variant of i9-13900H, with a clock frequency increased to 5.6 GHz. They have not done this only to avoid an internal competition for Meteor Lake, so they have launched only HX models of Raptor Lake Refresh, which do not compete directly with Meteor Lake (because they need a discrete GPU).

During the last decade, the products made at TSMC with successive generations of their processes had a continuous increase of their clock frequencies.

On the other hand Intel had a drop in clock frequency at all switches in the manufacturing processes, at 14-nm with the first Broadwell models, then at 10-nm with Cannon Lake and Ice Lake (and even Tiger Lake could not reach clock frequencies high enough for desktops), and now with Meteor Lake in the new Intel 4 process.

With the 14-nm and 10-nm (now rebranded as Intel 7), Intel has succeeded to greatly increase the maximum clock frequencies after many years of tuning and tweaking. Now, with Meteor Lake, this will not happen, because they will pass immediately to different better manufacturing processes.

According to rumors, the desktop variant of Arrow Lake, i.e. Arrow Lake S, will be manufactured at TSMC in order to ensure high-enough clock frequencies, and not with the Intel 20A, which will be used only for the laptop products.

Intel 18A is supposed to be the process that Intel will be able to use for several years, like their previous processes. It remains to be seen how much time will pass until Intel will become able to reach again 6.0 GHz in the Intel 18A process.

Intel is shipping competitive clock frequencies on Intel 4 vs. everyone in the industry except the most recent generation of their own RPL parts, which have the advantage of being being up-bins of an evolved and mature process.

That sounds pretty normal to me? New processes launch with conservative binning and as yields improve you can start selling the outliers in volume. And... it seems like you agree, by pointing out that this happened with Intel 7 and 14nm too.

Basically: this sounds like you're trying to spin routine manufacturing practices as a technical problem. Intel bins differently than AMD (and especially Apple, who barely distinguish parts at all), and they always have.

While one reason why TSMC did not have such problems is that they have made more incremental changes from one process variant to another, avoiding any big risks, the other reason is that Intel has repeatedly acted as if they had been unable to estimate from simulations the performance characteristics of their future processes and they have always been caught by surprise by inferior experimental results compared to predictions, so they always had to switch the product lines from plan A to plan B during the last decade, unlike the previous decade when all appeared to always go as planned.

A normal product replacement strategy is for the new product to match most of the characteristics of the old product that is replaced, but improve on a few of them.

Much too frequently in recent years many Intel new products have improved some characteristics only with the price of making worse other characteristics. For example raising the clock frequency with the price of also increased power consumption, increasing the number of cores but removing AVX-512, or, like in Meteor Lake, raising the all-cores-active clock-frequency with the price of lowering the few-cores-active clock frequency.

While during the last decade Intel has frequently progressed in the best case by making two steps forward and one step backward, all competitors have marched steadily forwards.

It is not a good long term strategy: The winds of politics may change, politicians may set more terms (labour and environment), foreign market access may become politicized too (US politicians will have to sell chips like they sell airplanes on foreign trips).

So Intel will end up like the old US car makers or Boeing - no longer driven by technological innovation but instead by its relationship to Washington.

That is not a partner for creating logical systems. Very clear their current decisions are political.

Imagine what it would do if Intel became strongly associated with one side in the Israel-Palestine conflict. It could really hurt their business.

Usually business leaders are smart enough to stay out of politics.

I'm not sure what you mean by "woke disease," but consumerism involves evaluation.

Oct 7 was horrible, but it didn't come out of nowhere. Sabra and Shatila, for example (Waltz with Bashir being a very good Israeli film on the topic), and the many thousands of people killed mutilated or displaced in their usual unhelpfully disproportionate response..

What's fascinating albeit somewhat depressing is that it seems something similar happened when McDonnell merged with/took over Douglas as well: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-legal-and-moral-questi...

It will challenge your concerns

In the terms of end product - not really. Last 3-4 gens are indistinguishable to the end user. It's a combined effect of marketing failure and really underwhelming gains - when marketing screams "breakthrough gen", but what you get is +2%/ST perf for another *Lake, you can't sell it.

They might've built a foundation and that might be a deliberate tactics to get back into the race, we'll see. But i'm not convinced for now.

See there's only 2 or 3 more obvious generations of obvious die shrinks available. Beyond those generations we'll have to innovate some other way, so whoever grabs the fab market for these modes now gets a longer period to enjoy the fruits of their innovation.

Meanwhile server CPU TDPs are hitting the 400W+ mark and DC owners are looking dubiously at big copper busbars, die shrinks tend to reduce the Watts per Calculation so they're appealing. In the current power market, more efficient computing translates into actual savings on your power bill. There's still demand for better processors, even if we are sweating those assets for 5-7 years now.

I'd buy this if they'd actually built a fab, but right now this seems too-little, too-late for a producer's economy.

The rest frankly doesn't matter much. Intel processors are only notable in small sections of the market.

And frankly—as counter-intuitive as this may seem to such an investor-bullish forum—the death knell was the government chip subsidy. I simply can't imagine american government and private enterprise collaborating to produce anything useful in 2024, especially when the federal government has shown such a deep disinterest in holding the private economy culpable to any kind of commitment. Why would intel bother?

I think it's safe to say that 80BN+ in subsidies are already well in the process of being deployed. Intel, along with Samsung and TSMC, are heavily subsidized and have been so for a very long time. Any government with modest intelligence understands the gravity of having microchip manufacturing secured.

>Intel Poaches Head Apple Silicon Architect Who Led Transition To Arm And M1 Chips. Intel has reacquired the services of Jeff Wilcox, who spearheaded the transition to Arm and M1 chips for Apple. Wilcox will oversee architecture for all Intel system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs

note re-acquired.

Raja Koduri also came back to Intel (from AMD Radeon) and only recently left to dabble in VFX, as opposed to working for a competitor to Intel.

Anton Kaplanyan (father of RTX at nvidia) is at Intel now.

I think people are not checking linkedin when they make the claim that Intel's talent has been drained and there is nobody left at home. Where there is remuneration and opportunity you will find talent. I think it's safe to say no industry experts have written down Intel.

edit: first foundry customer online in New Mexico fab: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-...

- The wintel monopoly is losing its relevance now that ARM chips are creeping into the windows laptop market and now that Apple has proven that ARM is fantastic for low power & high performance solutions. Nobody cares about x86 that much any more. It's lost its shine as the "fastest" thing available.

- AI & GPU market is where the action is and Intel is a no-show for that so far. It's not about adding AI/GPU features to cheap laptop chips but about high end workstations and dedicated solutions for large scale compute. Intel's GPUs lack credibility for this so far. Apple's laptops seem popular with AI researchers lately and the goto high performance solutions seem to be provided by NVidia.

- Apple has been leading the way with ARM based, high performance integrated chips powering phones, laptops, and recently AR/VR. Neither AMD nor Intel have a good answer to that so far. Though AMD at least has a foothold in the door with e.g. Xbox and the Steam Deck depending on their integrated chips and them still having credible solutions for gaming. Nvidia also has lots of credibility in this space.

- Cloud computing is increasingly shifting to cheap ARM powered hardware. Mostly the transition is pretty seamless. Cost and energy usage are the main drivers here.

Apple has proven that Apple Silicon on TSMC's best process is great. There are no other ARM vendors competing well in that space yet. SOCs that need to compete with Intel and AMD on the same nodes are still stuck at the low margin end of the market.

Also arm isa is just isa

You seem to focus on it too much when it isnt THAT relevant.

Isa doesnt imply perf/energy characteristics

Why the fuck are shareholders often so short-sighted?

Or do they just genuinely think the R&D investment won't pay off?

https://semiaccurate.com/

has told the story for more than a decade that Intel has been getting high on its own supply and that the media has been uncritical of the stories it tells.

In particular I think when it comes to the data center they’ve forgotten their roots. They took over the data center in the 1990s because they were producing desktop PCs in such numbers they could afford to get way ahead of the likes of Sun Microsystems, HP, and SGI. Itanium failed out of ignorance and hubris but if they were true evil geniuses they couldn’t have made a better master plan to wipe out most of the competition for the x86 architecture.

Today they take the desktop for granted and make the false claim that their data center business is more significant (not what the financial numbers show.). It’s highly self-destructive because when they pander to Amazon, Amazon takes the money they save and spends it on developing Graviton. There is some prestige in making big machines for the national labs but it is an intellectual black hole because the last thing they want to do is educate anyone else on how to simulate hydrogen bombs in VR.

So we get the puzzle that most of the performance boost customers could be getting comes from SIMD instructions and other “accelerators” but Intel doesn’t make a real effort to get this technology working for anyone other than the Facebook and the national labs and, in particular, they drag their feet in getting it available on enough chips that it is is worth it for mainstream developers to use this technology.

A while back, IBM had this thing where they might ship you a mainframe with 50 cores and license you to use 30 and if you had a load surge you could call you up and they could turn on another 10 cores at a high price.

I was fooled when I heard this the first time and thought it was smart business but after years of thinking about how to deliver value to customers I realized it’s nothing more than “vice signaling”. It makes them look rapacious and avaricious but really somebody is paying for those 20 cores and if it is not the customer it is the shareholders. It’s not impossible that IBM and/or the customer winds up ahead in the situation but the fact is they paid to make those 20 cores and if those cores are sitting there doing nothing they’re making no value for anyone. If everything was tuned up perfectly they might make a profit by locking them down, but it’s not a given at all that it is going to work out that way.

Similarly Intel has been hell-bent to fuse away features on their chips so often you get a desktop part that has a huge die area allocated to AVX features that you’re not allowed to use. Either the customer or the shareholders are paying to fabricate a lot of transistors the customer doesn’t get to use. It’s madness but except for Charlie Demerjian the whole computer press pretends it is normal.

Apple bailed out on Intel because Intel failed to stick to its roadmap to improve their chips (they’re number one why try harder?) and they are lucky to have customers that accept that a new version of MacOS can drop older chips which means MacOS benefits from features that were introduced more than ten years ago. Maybe Intel and Microsoft are locked in a deadly embrace but their saving grace is that every ARM vendor other than Apple has failed to move the needle on ARM performance since 2017, which itself has to be an interesting story that I haven’t seen told.

You must mean, performance relative to Intel, not absolute performance. Clearly Qualcomm has improved Snapdragon over time as have a number of other Android SOC vendors.

But I wonder if it's even true, have ARM vendors other than Apple failed to move the needle on performance (let's call performance single thread geekbench) relative to Intel? If someone is up for tracking down all the numbers I'd read that blog post. :)

Indeed, Apple has shown not just once but multiple times that they'll happily blow up their entire development ecosystem, whether it's software (Mac Finder vs. MacOS X) or hardware (68k, PPC, Intel, and now ARM). I think Intel didn't expect Apple to switch architectures so quickly and thoroughly and got caught flat-footed.

However China is now a full fledged dictatorship. I'm not sure you can count on them being a rational actor on the world stage.

They can do a lot of damage, but would also get absolutely devastated in return. They are food, energy insecure and entirely dependent on exports after all.

I just don’t think it’s very likely for just about any leader putting themselves into the position you are describing. This is a reoccurring narrative in western media, and I’m not here to defend dictators, but i feel like reality is less black and white than that.

Many of the "crazed leaders" we are told are acting irrational, often do not. It’s just a very, very different perspective, often bad ones, but regardless.

Let me try to explain what I mean: during the Iraq war, Saddam Hussein was painted as this sort of crazed leader, irrationally deciding to invade Kuwait. But that’s not the entire truth. Hussein may have been an evil man, but the way the borders of Iraq were re-drawn, Iraq was completely cut off from any sources of fresh water. As expected, their neighbors cut off their already wonky water supplies and famine followed. One can still think it’s not justified to invade Kuwait over this, but there’s a clear gain to be had from this "irrational" act. Again, not a statement of personal opinion, just that there IS something to be had. I’m not trying to say that i am certain that Hussein had the prosperity of his people at heart, but i do think that it isn’t entirely irrational to acknowledge that every country in human history is 3 missed meals away from revolution. That’s not good, even if you are their benevolent god and dictator for lifetime(tm).

Russia "irrationally" invading the Ukraine may seem that way to us, but let’s see. Russias economy is just about entirely dependent on their petrochem industry. Without, their are broke. The reason why they still can compete in this market is their asset of soviet infrastructure and industry. A good majority of USSR pipelines run through the Ukraine. I’m not saying it’s okay for them to invade, but i can see what they seek to gain and why exactly they fear NATO expansion all that much.

I personally don’t see a similar gain to be had from China invading Taiwan, at least right now. They have lots to lose and little to gain. Taiwans semiconductor industry is useless without western IP, lithography equipment and customers. There are even emergency plans to destroy taiwans fabs in case of invasion. And that’s beside the damage done to mainland China itself.

But as i stated, this may very well change when they get more desperate. Hussein fully knew the consequences of screwing with the wests oil supply, but the desperation was too acute.

I just don’t buy irrationality, there’s always something to be had or something to lose. It may be entirely different from our view, but there’s gotta be something.

none of those claims are anything but proven, historical facts by the way.

Wanna lose your appetite? The leadership in charge of the described operations in Vietnam gleefully talked about their management genius. They implemented kīll quotas.

this list also is everything but exhaustive.

In the geography which with I am familiar, Iraq has two incredibly famous rivers and the Persian Gulf is actually salt water.

> Russia "irrationally" invading the Ukraine may seem that way to us, but let’s see.

Invading one of their largest neighbors and ruining their relationship with a nation they had significant cultural exchange and trade with (including many of their weapons factories) is irrational.

But Russia's leaders didn't want a positive neighborly relationship they wanted to conquer Ukraine and restore the empire. Putin has given speeches on this comparing himself to the old conquering czars.

> Russias economy is just about entirely dependent on their petrochem industry. Without, their are broke.

True enough

> The reason why they still can compete in this market is their asset of soviet infrastructure and industry.

Much of the equipment is western and installed in the post Soviet period.

> A good majority of USSR pipelines run through the Ukraine.

Then they probably shouldn't have invaded in 2014? Almost seems like they made a bad irrational choice. They had other pipelines that bypassed Ukraine like NS1 and NS2 which didn't enter service due to the war

> I’m not saying it’s okay for them to invade, but i can see what they seek to gain

Please explain what they tried to gain. Ukraine wouldn't have objected to exports of gas through Ukraine if not for the Russian invasion and they already had pipelines that bypassed Ukraine.

> and why exactly they fear NATO expansion all that much.

They don't fear NATO expansion, they disliked it because it prevented them from conquering or bullying countries with threats of invasion. They've taken troops of the NATO border with Finland (and didn't even invade Finland when Finland joined NATO). Russia acknowledged the right of eastern European nations to join NATO and promised to respect Ukraine's sovereignty and borders.

> I personally don’t see a similar gain to be had from China invading Taiwan, at least right now. They have lots to lose and little to gain. Taiwans semiconductor industry is useless without western IP, lithography equipment and customers. There are even emergency plans to destroy taiwans fabs in case of invasion. And that’s beside the damage done to mainland China itself.

The fabs are a red herring, they're largely irrelevant. If China invades (which I hope doesn't happen) it will not be because of any economic gains. There are no possible economic gains that would justify the costs of a war. If they invade it will be for the same reason that Russia did, because of extreme nationalism/revanchism and trying to use that extreme nationalism to maintain popularity among the population.

When you're saying "Putin invaded Ukraine irrationally" you're implicitly projecting your own value system and worldview onto him.

Let's take goals. What do you think Putin's goals are? I don't think it's too fanciful to imagine that welfare of ordinary Russians is less important to him than going down in history as someone who reunited the lost Russian Empire, or even just keeping in power and adored. It's just a fact that the occupation of Crimea was extremely popular and raised his ratings, so why not try the same thing again?

What about the worldview? It is well established that Putin didn't think much of Ukraine's ability to defend, having been fed overly positive reports by his servile underlings. Hell, even Pentagon thought Ukraine will fold, shipping weapons that would work well for guerrilla warfare (Javelins) and dragging their feet on stuff regular armies need (howitzers and shells). Russians did think it'll be a walk in the park, they even had a truck of crowd control gear in that column attacking Kyiv, thinking they'll need police shields.

So when you put yourself into Putin's shoes, attacking Ukraine Just Makes Sense: a cheap&easy way to boost ratings and raise his profile in history books, what not to like? It is completely rational — for his goals and his perceived reality.

Sadly, people often fall into the trap of overextending their own worldview/goals onto others, finding a mismatch, and trying to explain that mismatch away with semi-conspiratorial thinking (Nato expansion! Pipelines! Russian speakers!) instead of reevaluating the premise.

(But yeah, clearly his actual goal was to increase his personal prestige. Is that not common knowledge yet?)

China is facing a deflating real estate bubble, but they still managed to grow the last year (official sources are disputed but independent estimates are still positive).

China is in a world of hurt, but the government is trying desperately to hide how bad it actually is. If this continues for a few more months, it will be an existential situation for their economy.

[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-31/china-hom...

[2] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-31/china-sto...

[3] - https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/foreign-direct...

edit: one also should keep in mind that the Chinese real estate market is entirely different in its importance to its populations wealth. "Buying" real estate is pretty much the only sanctioned market to invest your earnings. They still pretend to be communist after all.

Are there any dam-having countries for which this isn't the case?

[1]: https://www.ispsw.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/718_Lin.pdf

"In this case, the Three Gorges Dam may become a military target. But if this happens, it would be devastating to China as 400 million people live downstream, as well as the majority of the PLA's reserve forces that are located midstream and downstream of the Yangtze River."

Also what does "400 million people live downstream" even mean? There's ten million people living downstream of this dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Dam_(Troy), and ten million more living downstream of the various Mississippi dams and so on.

1) Intel is up 100% from ten years ago when it was at $ 23. All that despite revenue being flat/negative, inflation and costs rising and margins collapsing.

2) Intel is up 60% in the last 12 months alone.

Doesn't look to me like they throwing the towel at all.

> (samsung or tsmc) both within a 500 mile radius circle in the south china sea.

Within 500 mile radius of great power competitor, perhaps. The closest points on mainland Taiwan and Korea are 700 miles apart. Fabs about 1000 miles, by my loose reckoning.

Not clear about what the role of activist hedge funds is here but Intel's top shareholders are mutual funds like Vanguard which are part of many people's retirement investments. If an activist hedge fund got to run the show, it means that they could get these passive shareholders on their side or to abstain. It would have meant those funds along with pension funds, who should have been in a place to push back against short term thinking, didn't push back. These funds should really be run much more competently given their outsized influence, but the incentives are not there.

(dropping molten tin 1000 times a second and then shooting it with a laser just to get a lamp that can bless you with the hard light you need for your fancy fine few nanometers thin shadows? sure, why not, but don't forget to shoot the plasma ball with a weaker pulse to nudge it into the shape of a lens, cheerio.

and you know that all other parts are similarly scifi sounding.

and their middle management got greedy and they were bleeding talent for a decade.)

You're right: AMD wasn't competitive for an incredibly long time and ARM wasn't really meaningful for a long time. That's the perfect situation for some MBAs to come into. You start thinking that you're wasting money on R&D. Why create something 30% better this year when 10% better will cost a lot less and your competitors are so far behind that it doesn't matter?

It's not that Intel should have seen AMD coming or should have seen ARM coming. It's that Intel should have understood that just because you have weak enemies today doesn't mean that you have an unassailable castle. Intel should have been smart enough to understand that backing off of R&D would mean giving up the moat they'd created. Even if it looked like no one was coming for their crown at the moment, you need to understand that disinvestment doesn't get rewarded over the long-run.

Intel should have understood that trying to be cheap about R&D and extract as much money from customers wasn't a long-term strategy. It wasn't the strategy that built them into the dominant Intel we knew. It wouldn't keep them as that dominant Intel.

Their third employee that later went on to become their third CEO and guide Intel from the memory to processor transition literally coined the term and wrote a book called "Only the Paranoid Survive" [1]. It's inexcusable that management degraded that much.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Only_the_Paranoid...

After all, Apple and ARM came from the idea to have better end user products around softer factors than shear CPU power. Since Intel‘s products aren’t highly integrated Phones nor assembled computer, Intel had no stake directly.

It is complex.

ARM literally came from “we need a much better and faster processor” and “how hard can this be?” [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#1971%E2%...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture_family

AMD bet BIG on the software industry leaning in heavily on massive thread-counts over high throughput, single-threaded usage... But it never happened so the cores tanked.

It was never a secret WHY that generation of core sucked, and it was relatively clear what AMD needed to do to fix the problem, and they were VERY vocal about "doing the thing" once it became clear their bet wasn't paying off.

Why did that generation of core (Bulldozer) suck?

What was it that AMD needed to do to fix the problem?

(Links to relevant stories would be sufficient for me!)

https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/01/22/bulldozer-amds-crash-m...

https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/01/24/bulldozer-amds-crash-m...

---

From a consumer perspective, Bulldozer and revisions as compared to Skylake and revisions were:

+ comparable on highly multi-threaded loads

+ cheaper

- significantly behind on less multi-threaded loads

- had 1 set of FPUs per 2 cores, so workloads with lots of floating point calculations were also weaker

- Most intensive consumer software was single or a very small number of thread focused still (this was also a problem for Intel in trying to get people to buy more expensive i7s/i9s over i5s in those days)

1.Bulldozer had a very long pipeline akin to a Pentium 4. This allows for highclocks but comparatively little work being done per cycle vs their competition. Since clocks have a ceiling around 5GHz they could never push the clocks high enough to compete with intel. 2.They used a odd core design with 1 FPU for every 2 integer unit instead of the normal 1:1 that we have seen on every x86 since the i486. This leads to very weak FPU performance needed for many professional applications. Conversely it allowed for very competitive performance on highly threaded integer applications like rendering. This decision was probably under the assumption APUs would integrate their GPUs better and software would be written with it in mind since a GPU easily out does a CPUs FPU but it requires more programming. This didn't come to be. 3. They were stuck using Global Foundries due to previous contracts when they spun it off requiring AMD use GloFlo. This became a anchor as Gloflo fell behind market competitors like TSMC. Leaving AMD stuck on 32nm for a long while, until gloflo got 14nm and eventually AMD got out of the contract between zen 1-2.

bonus: Many IC designers have bemoaned how much of bulldozers design was automated with little hand modifications which tends to lead to a less optimized design. 3. 3.

Bulldozer seemed to be designed under the assumption heavy floating point work would be done on the GPU (APU) which all early construction cores had built in. But no one is going to rewrite all of their software to take advantage of the iGPU that isn't present in existing CPUs and isn't present in the majority of CPUs (Intel) so it sort of smelt like Intel's itantic moment, only worse.

I think they were desperate to see some near term return on the money they spent on buying ATI. ATI wasn't a bad idea for a purchase but they seemed to heavily overpay for it which probably really clouded management's judgement.

It was process failures. Their fabs couldn't fab the designs. Tiger lake was what? 4 years late?

Intel never "crushed" ARM. Intel completely failed to develop a mobile processor and ARM has a massive marketshare there.

ARM has always beaten the crap out of Intel at performance per watt, which turned out to be extremely important both in mobile and data center scale.

>Arm now claims to hold a 10.1% share of the cloud computing market, although that's primarily due to Amazon and its increasing use of homegrown Arm chips. According to TrendForce, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was using its custom Graviton chips in 15% of all server deployments in 2021.

https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/09/23/arm-holdings-data-...

I can get a top of the line Xeon Gold basically next day with a incredibly high quality out of band management from a reputable server provider. (HP, Dell).

Ampere? Give it 6 months, €5,000 and maybe you can get one, from Gigabyte. Not known for server quality.

(yes, I'm salty, I have 4 of these CPUs and it took a really long time to get them while costing just as much as AMD EPYC Milan's).

Amazon has its own ARM CPUs on AWS, and you can get them on demand, too.

Xeons and EPYCs are great for "big loads", however some supercomputer centers also started to install "experimental" ARM partitions.

The future is bright not because Intel is floundering, but there'll be at least three big CPU producers (ARM, AMD and Intel).

Also, don't have prejudices about "brands". most motherboard brands can design server-class hardware if they wish. They're just making different trade-offs because of the market they're in.

I used servers which randomly fried parts of their motherboard when see some "real" load. Coming one morning and having no connectivity because a top of the line 2 port gigabit onboard Ethernet fried itself on a top of the line, flagship server is funny in its own way.

I'm guessing this has increased since 2021. I've moved the majority of our AWS workloads to ARM because the price savings (it mostly 'just works'). If companies are starting to tighten their belts, this could accelerate even more ARM adoption.

[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/14/google_prepares_its_o...

They certainly tried selling their chips below cost to move into markets ARM dominated, but "contra revenue" couldn't save them.

> Intel Corp.’s Contra-Revenue Strategy Was a Huge Waste of Money

https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/21/intel-corp...

Pretty certainly, Intel is improving, and of course should not be written off. But they did get themselves into a hole to dig out from, and not just because the 5nm process was really hard to get working.

And it's not like they didn't notice either. Apple literally asked intel to supply the chips for the first iPhone, but the intel CEO at the time "didn't see it".

https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/16/4337954/intel-could-have-...

> "The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do... At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought."

In that circumstance, I think most people would have made the same decision.

It’s not like they couldn’t afford it and taking chances is important

I'm pretty sure most people here panned the iPhone after it came out, so it's not as if anyone would have predicted it prior to even being told it existed.

FWIW I don't buy his explanation anyway. Intel at the time had zero desire to be a fab. Their heart was not in it. They wanted to own all the IP for fat margins. They have yet to prove anything about that has changed despite the noise they repeatedly make about taking on fab customers.

In that circumstance, I think most MBAs would have made the same decision.

Fixed that for you

The CPUs were indeed horrible, and would've caused a lot of pain if the projects had actually continued. (source: I was working on the software side for the early Nokia intel prototypes)

[1] https://www.gottabemobile.com/meego-powered-nokia-n9-to-laun...

I think at the time that article got published we didn't even have the intel devboards distributed (that is a screen and macroboards, way before it starts looking like a phone). We did have some intel handsets from a 3rd party for meego work, but that was pretty much just proof of concept - nobody ever really bothered looking into trying to get the modem working, for example.

What became the N9 was all the time planned as an arm based device - exact name and specs changed a few times, but it still pretty much was developed as a maemo device, just using the meego name for branding, plus having some of the APIs (mainly, qt mobility and QML) compatible with what was scheduled to become meego. The QML stuff was a late addition there - originally it was supposed to launch with MTF, and the device was a wild mix of both when it launched, with QML having noticeable issues in many areas.

Development on what was supposed to be proper meego (the cooperation with intel) happened with only a very small team (which I was part of) at that time, and was starting to slowly ramp up - but massive developer effort from Nokia to actually make a "true" meego phone would've started somewhere mid-11.

And a few years prior to that Intel made the most competitive ARM chips (StrongARM). Chances are that an Intel chip would have powered the iPhone had they not scrapped their ARM division due to “reasons”

DEC had started developing ARM chips as they concluded it was a bad idea to try and scale down their alpha chips to be more energy efficient.

Then, after the success of these ARM chips in the blackberry and most of the palm PDAs as well as MP3 players and HTC smartphones, Intel sells it off, so it could focus on trying to make its big chips more energy efficient, making the mistake DEC avoided.

iPhone was a defining moment, but at the time it was completely obvious that smartphones would be a thing, it's just that people thought that the breakthrough product would come from Nokia or Sony-Ericsson (who were using ARM SoCs from TI and Quallcomm respectively). Selling off the ARM division would not have been my priority?

So it's a string of unforced errors. Nevertheless, Intel remains an ARM licensee, they didn't give that up when selling StrongARM, so it seems some people still saw the future..

I thought this was interesting enough to track down more of the backstory here, and found this fascinating article:

https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

Page 60, hard breaks added for readability:

Baum: Apple owned a big chunk of it, but when Apple was really having hard times, they sold off their chunk at quite a profit, but they sold off the chunk. And then-- oh, while Newton was going on, some people from DEC came to visit, and they said, “Hey, we were looking at doing a low power Alpha and decided that just couldn’t be done, and then looked at the ARM. We think we can make an ARM which is really low power, really high performance, really tiny, and cheap, and we can do it in a year. Would you use that in your Newton?” Cause, you know, we were using ARMs in the Newton, and we all kind of went, “Phhht, yeah. You can’t do it, but, yeah, if you could we’d use it.”

That was the basis of StrongARM, which became a very successful business for DEC. And then DEC sued Intel. Well, I worked on the StrongARM 1500, which was a very interesting product. It was an ARM and a DSP kind of highly combined. It was supposed to be like video processing using set top boxes, and things like that. And then we finished that project and our group in Palo Alto, we were just gonna start an Alpha project.

And just then it was announced that DEC was-- no. No. Intel, at that time, Intel, DEC sued Intel for patent violations, didn’t go to them and say, “Hey, pay up or stop using it.” They just sued them. Intel was completely taken by surprise. There was a settlement. The settlement was you have to buy our Microelectronics Division and pay us a whole pile of money, and everything will go away.

So they sold the Microelectronics Division, which we were part of, except for the Alpha Design Group, 'cause they didn’t think that they could sell that to Intel and have the SEC approve, 'cause the two can conflict. So I went away on vacation not knowing whether I would be coming back and working for Intel, or coming back working for DEC. And it turned out they decided to keep the Alpha Design Group, so I was still working for DEC. Except the reason for the lawsuit was Compaq wanted to buy DEC, but didn’t want to buy ‘em with this Fab and Microelectronics Division. So by doing this, they got rid of the Microelectronics Division, and now they could sell themselves to Compaq.

Trying to breathe as Intel was pushing their head under water.

We saw AMD come back after their lawsuit against Intel got through and Intel had to stop paying everyone to not use AMD.

No, but ARM should've rung many bells.

Intel poured tons of billions in mobile.

Didn't understood the future from smartphones to servers was about power efficiency and scale.

Eventually their lack of power efficiency made them lose ground in all their core business. I hope they will get this back and not just by competing on manufacturing but architecture too.

The writing was on the wall 6 years ago; Intel was not doing well in mobile and it was only a matter of time until that tech improved. Same as Intel unseating the datacenter chips before it. Ryzen I will give you is a surprise, but in a healthy competive market, "the competition outengineered us this time" _should_ be a potential outcome.

IMO the interesting question is basically whether Intel could have done anything differently. Clay Christianson's sustaining vs disrupting innovation model is well known in industry, and ARM slowly moving up the value chain is obvious in that framework. Stratechery says they should have opened up their fabs to competitors, but how does that work?

The problem is that Intel has had a defensive strategy for a long time. Yes, they crushed many attempts to breach the x86 moat but failed completely and then gave up attempts to reach beyond that moat. Mobile, foundry, GPUs etc have all seen half-hearted or doomed attempts (plus some bizarre attempts to diversify - McAfee!).

I think that, as Ben essentially says, they put too much faith in never-ending process leadership and the ongoing supremacy of x86. And when that came to an end the moat was dry.

They should have been worried about their process leadership for a long time. IIRC even the vaunted 14nm that they ended up living on for so long was pretty late. That would have had me making backup plans for 10nm but it looked more like leadership just went back to the denial well for years instead. It seemed like they didn't start backport designs until after Zen1 launched to me.

Crushed by Intel's illegal anticompetitive antics?

Look at Japan generally and Toyota specifically. In Japan the best award you can get for having an outstanding company in terms of profit, topline, quality, free-cash, people, and all the good measures is the Deming Award. Deming was our guy (an American) but we Americans in management didn't take him seriously enough.

The Japanese to their credit did ... ran with it and made it into their own thing in a good way. The Japanese took 30% of the US auto market in our own backyard. Customers knew Hondas, Toyotas cost more but were worth every dollar. They resold better too. (Yes some noise about direct government investment in Japanese companies by the government was a factor too, but not the chief factor in the long run).

We Americans got it "explained to us." We thought we were handling it. Nah, it was BS. But we eventually got our act together. Our Deming award is the Malcolm Baldridge award.

Today, unfortunately the Japanese economy isn't rocking like it was the 80s and early 90s. And Toyota isn't the towering example of quality it once was. I think -- if my facts are correct --- they went too McDonalds and got caught up in lowering price in their materials, and supply chain with bad effects net overall.

So things ebb and flow.

The key thing: is management through action or inaction allowing stupid inbred company culture to make crappy products? Do they know their customers etc etc. Hell, mistakes even screw-ups are not life ending for companies the size of Intel. But recurring stupidity is. A lot of the times the good guys allow themselves to rot from the inside out. So when is enough enough already?

Had Intel adopted the molten tin of EUV, the cycle of failure would have been curtailed.

Hats off to SMIC for the DUV 7nm which they produced so quickly. They likely saw quite a bit of failed effort.

And before we discount ARM, we should remember that Acorn produced a 32-bit CPU with a 25k transistor count. The 80386 was years later, with 275k transistors.

Intel should have bought Acorn, not Olivetti.

That's a lot of mistakes, not even counting Itanium.

ARM would have been much more influential under Intel, rather than pursuing the i960 or the iAPX 432.

Just imagine Intel ARM Archimedes. It would have crushed the IBM PS/2.

Whoops.

Seriously, even DEC was smart enough.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM

Intel had StrongARM though. IIRC they made best ARM cpus in the early 2000s and were designing their own cores. Then Intel decided to get rid of it because obviously they were just wasting money and could design a better x86 mobile chip…

Coincidentally, ARM1 and 80386 were both introduced in 1985. I'm a big fan of the ARM1 but I should point out that the 386 is at a different level, designed for multitasking operating systems and including a memory management unit for paging.

Then fastest single core and multi core x86 cpus that money can buy will go to databases and similar vertically scaled systems.

That's where you can put up the most extreme margins. It's "winner takes all the margins". Beeing somewhat competitive, but mostly a bit worse is the worst business position. Also...

I put money on AMD when they were taking over the crown.

Thank you for this wakeup call, I'll watch closely if Intel can deliver on this and take it back. I'll habe to adjust accordingly.

And Sandy Bridge all but assured AMD wouldn't be relevant for the better part of a decade.

It's easy to forget just how fast Sandy Bridge was when it came out; over 12 years later and it can still hold its own as far as raw performance is concerned.

You should probably have some intel (haha) on ARM and AMD chips. They didn't care.

Why? It's monopoly business tactics, except they didn't realize they weren't Microsoft.

It's not like this was overnight. Intel should have watched AMD like a hawk after that slimeball Ruiz was deposed and a real CEO put in charge.

And the Mac chips have been out, what, two years now, and the Apple processors on the iPhones at least 10?

Come on. This is apocalyptic scale incompetence.

My understanding is that 5nm has been and continues to be "problematic" in terms of yield. The move to 3nm seems to not be afflicted by as many issues. There is also a massive drive to get more volume (and a die shrink will do that), due to the demands of all things ML.

I suspect that TSMC's move here is a bit more nuanced than the (valid) point that the article is making on this step...

I think TSMC learned from Intel's downfall more than Intel. I don't see any industry traction from IFS. They can research any new technology they want. Without wafer orders it's a recipe for a quick cash burn..

You can also see the lasting popularity of 7nm-class nodes in consumer products. For example, RDNA3 uses 5nm for the core parts (GCD), but the peripheral parts (the memory chiplets/MCDs) are built on 6nm, and the monolithic low-end parts (RX 7600) are even fully built on 6nm.

They got lazy and sat on their laurels when AMD was struggling and they didnt view ARM as a threat. TSMC was a probably a joke to them...until everyone brought out killer products and Intel had no response to them. They could have been way ahead of the pack by now but they decided to harvest the market instead of innovating aggresively. Right now they're worth less than $200bn, which is less than half of Broadcom or TSMC, its 30% less than AMD and 10% of Nvidia. Is it intrisically worth that little? Probably not, I think its a buy at this price.

Putting aside whether the statement is considered true or not, buying McAfee under the guise of the kind of security meant when talking about silicon is... weird, to say the least.

Famously they divested their ARM-based mobile processor division just before smartphones took off.

The new CEO, as the article mentions, seems to have a lot more of a clue. We just hope he hasn't arrived too late.

  a lot that can be critiqued about that period.

https://youtu.be/gnZ9cYXczQU

Wasn't that AMD (perhaps also AMD)? Qualcomm Adreno GPUs are ATi Radeon IP, hence the anagram.

I remember very well as back then I was working in University porting Linux to an Intel XScale development platform we had gotten recently.

After I completed the effort, Android was released as a public beta and I dared to port it too to that Development Board as a side project. I thought back then Intel was making a big mistake by missing that opportunity. But Intel were firm believers in the x86 architecture, specially on their Atom Cores.

Those little Intel PXA chips were actually very capable, I had back then my own Sharp Zaurus PDA running a full Linux system on an Intel ARM chip and I loved it. Great performance and great battery life.

Kind of like Decca Records turning down The Beatles.

I think Netburst mostly came from a misguided place where Intel thought that clock frequency was in fact the holy grail (and would scale far beyond what actually ended up happening), and that all the IPC issues such as costly mispredicts could be solved by e.g. improving branch prediction.

It's embarassing when they go to market and there's no way to say it's faster than the other guy. Currently, they need to pump 400W through the chip to get the clock high enough.

But perf at 200w or even 100w isn't that far below perf at 400w. If you limit power to something like 50w, the compute efficiency is good.

Contrast that to Apple, they don't have to compete in the same way, and they don't let their chips run hot. There's no way to get the extra 1% of perf if you need it.

The difference in performance for 95% of what I do is zero. I even run some (non-AAA) Windows games via crossover, and that's driving a 1440p 165hz display. All while it sits there consuming no more than about 35w (well, plus a bit for all my USB ssds, etc) and I've never seen the thermals much past 60c, even running nastive-accelerated LLMs or highly multithreaded chess engines and the like. Usually sits at about 40c at idle.

It's exactly what almost 40 year old me wants out of a computer. It's quiet, cool, and reliable - but at the same time I'm very picky about input devices so a-bring-your-own peripherals desktop machine with a ton of USB ports is non-negotiable.

Regarding other plans, QPI and UPI for cache coherent FPGAs were pretty infeasible to do at the sluggish pace that they need in the logic fabric. CXL doesn't need a close connection between the two chips (or the companies), and just uses the PCIe lanes.

FPGA programming has always been very hard, too, so the dream of them everywhere is just not happening.

Maybe Habana Labs?

I can't really tell if it's working out for Intel, but I do hear them mentioned now and then.

Haven't heard much about successful Google acquisitions lately though.

Apple does really well on its rare acquisitions, but they aren't very public as they get successfully absorbed. PA Semi, Intrinsity, more I can't remember.

ATi and Xilinx have by all accounts worked out really well for AMD.

But I guess thats the problem - I had to provide an example

Had Intel figured out hyperthreading security and avoided all the various exploits that later showed up …

However, they underperform greatly compared to competitors' cards with similar die areas and memory bus widths. For example the Arc A770 is 406mm^2 on TSMC N6 and a 256-bit bus and performs similarly to the RX 6650XT which is 237mm^2 on TSMC N7 with a 128-bit bus. They're probably losing a lot of money on these cards.

I applaud Intel for providing fully capable drivers at no additional cost. Combined with better availability for purchase they are competing in the VDI space.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/discre...

I wish Pat well and I think he might be the only who could save the company if it's not already too late.

Sourced: worked with many ex-Intel people.

POSTSCRIPT: I have seen from the inside (not at Intel) how a politically motivated acquisition failed so utter spectacularly due to that same internal power struggle. I think there are some deeply flawed incentives in corporate America.

And acqu-hired Jensen as CEO.

Prior to the ATI acquisition nvidia actually had been the motherboard chipset manufacturer of choice for AMD cpus for a number of years.

There were and are exactly zero third parties licensing nvidia IP to build competing GPU products.

https://corp.mediatek.com/news-events/press-releases/mediate...

like it’s of course dependent on what “build competing products” means, but assuming you mean semicustom (like AMD sells to Sony or Samsung) then nvidia isn’t as intractibly opposed as you’re implying.

regulators can be dumb fanboys/lack vision too, and nvidia very obviously was not spending $40b just to turn around and burn down the ecosystem. Being kingmaker on a valuable IP is far more valuable than selling some more tegras for a couple years. People get silly when nvidia is involved and make silly assertions, and most of the stories have become overwrought and passed into mythology. Bumpgate is… something that happened to AMD on that generation of gpus too, for instance. People baked their 7850s to reflow the solder back then too - did AMD write you a check for their defective gpu?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iLWkNPTyg2k

Here's one examples but there's a pile of them.

https://twitter.com/PGelsinger/status/1751653865009631584

I guess Intel does need the help of a higher power at the stage.