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points by sebmellen 3 days ago | 0 comments

Lisa is a beast!

Also Intel decided to not improve for a long time. They were just happy collecting rent and protecting margin. Only the paranoid survive. Intel used to be a memory company and they pivoted cause Andy grove could see what was coming.

[–] toast0 3 days ago

Intel didn't decide not to improve. Their CPU R&D has a long pipeline and they made the wrong prediction on tech (10nm), which resulted in a decade long pipeline stall. They're just about through that now, we'll see if they've got their groove back in the next few generations.

Before the 10nm issues, they were making consistent IPC improvement every generation, and although core counts were pretty stagnant for consumers, they would add a couple cores every generation on top Xeon skus. Maybe they could have done bigger changes with more time between, but it was nice being able to expect new server CPUs every 12-18 months that were meaningfully better.

[–] fc417fc802 3 days ago

> they made the wrong prediction on tech (10nm), which resulted in a decade long pipeline stall

I don't think their node problems were anywhere near that simple. You also left out the part where AMD moved to chiplets while intel stubbornly remained monolithic for quite a while. And a whole list of other missteps.

[–] tester756 3 days ago

Not really - 10nm node was too ambitious and failed cuz of that.

[–] Tuna-Fish 3 days ago

It wasn't just that. Intel could have survived a failed node, or a few of them. Certainly wouldn't be their first.

Krzanich "optimized" the company for profit, by cutting out things he considered to be excess. Including a lot of their irreplaceable validation & verification talent, that AMD instantly snapped up. The lack of validation resources is directly responsible for the failures of many key Intel products during his tenure and later, because major bugs that could have been spotted earlier slipped through, and then resulted in horrible delays and even cancellations. He then spent the surplus of the company on 30 major acquisitions, of which only two were in any reasonable degree successful.

There are CEOs who have destroyed more value than Krzanich, but not many.

[–] selimthegrim 3 days ago

As someone who was working in validation around 2012 or so you would be hard pressed to think of Intel treating them as "talent"

[–] yborg 3 days ago

Cheating on his wife with one of his subordinates probably didn't help sharpen his focus.

[–] close04 3 days ago

AMD benefited greatly from Intel's self inflicted wound: laying on their laurels thinking the leverage they had with OEMs and inertia will carry them through the hard patch like it did in their P4 times.

Intel stopped advancing in 2014-2015 for a long time. They flopped on the fabrication side, they stuck to the 2-4 core CPUs and charged an arm and a leg for anything with more than that. This gave AMD an opening with their cheap and yet still decently fast higher core count CPUs.

[–] chrisgarand 3 days ago

Also, they spent a long time suppressing AMD by bribing, and strong-arming their partners during the first cycle of AMD beating Intel (Athlon series): https://www.eetimes.com/intel-accepts-order-to-stop-unfair-t... Later on: https://www.rbbecon.com/news/article/commission-imposes-e106...

[–] close04 3 days ago

That’s the leverage I was mentioning. That’s what worked for them in Pentium days and thought will just work again. It helped a lot that AMD had a compelling product to sell.

[–] p_l 3 days ago

They used the same tricks when AMD landed useful 64bit mobile CPUs (turion X2 series and the like). But by zen era even big box retail is selling and models

[–] chrisgarand 3 days ago

I understand, I wanted to showcase the specific anti-competitive behavior that they were forced to pay for.

[–] expedition32 3 days ago

AMD did come up with a really good product. Their Ryzen chips beat anything Intel could muster.

[–] emuljetina 3 days ago

AMD was held back by their fabs, breaking off from global foundries did so much from them too