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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

Intel was disrupted, for sure. Basically, I'm left wondering if there was some key brain-drain that occurred to Intel. Back in grad school in the mid 90's, most of the profs thought that Intel would collapse under the weight of the x86 ISA, but one prof knew people in Intel and told me about their roadmap going out to 2010, with plans for kicking butt. All of that played out! This shows amazing foresight. However, in recent years, Intel seems to have gotten itself painted into a corner with regards to die sizes, while AMD has strategically shifted to combining chips with smaller die sizes to increase yields and increase margins with more competitive pricing.

"Interposers, Chiplets and...ButterDonuts?" -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3kGSbWFig4

Something has happened with Intel, which has lost its vaunted intelligent "paranoia."

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When I worked for Intel in 2005-2007, a lot of the workforce joined near the beginning, and planned to make their career at Intel. Most of those people probably retired in the last few years.

After two years, I was still "the new guy."

They also totally goofed mobile, as the article explains. Everyone knew mobile would be a big deal; it was "obvious." Even Moore's law predicted mobile. (Every 18 months the number of transistors you can fit in a given area doubles = every 18 months you can make the same chip use half the space.)

Why did they goof mobile? I think the article explains the symptoms well, but even I have trouble explaining "why" given that everyone could see mobile coming.

In 2003, Intel was able to reinvent its CPU design center in response to the previous iteration of PC miniaturization (the laptop market was ready to explode, while desktops were slowing down). They did this by running a skunkworks design project in Intel's Israel division (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_M). After the Israeli engineers were able to show how their design fixed Pentium 4's architectural issues, it became the basis for all successful Intel processors for the next decade.

Intel did great in process technology and the ecosystem around their chips. They were extremely well positioned to grab the smartphone market. Contrary to popular belief, x86 is entirely capable of the TDPs required by mobile phones. The Core m3 has a configurable TDP under 4W while making none of the compromises of Atom. It might have taken another skunkworks project to cut some modules and bring it down to the milliwatt range, but it could have been done. Intel simply allowed itself to be outmaneuvered out of the smartphone market, by complacency and unwillingness to lower the "tax". That worked fine for a decade, but now they're seeing the side effects of the resulting brain drain.

>The Core m3 has a configurable TDP under 4W

No. This is best to say a safety measure: going over 4w over 5 seconds? turning on deep throtlinng.

Real engineering datasheets you get as a client tell very clearly that TDP of Y line chips is 17w.

Intel chips at such wattages are just a lot of dark silicon.

Your analysis is wrong.

The Core m3 launched nearly 10 years too late tho. They didn't have anything near 4w in 2007.

> Why did they goof mobile? I think the article explains the symptoms well, but even I have trouble explaining "why" given that everyone could see mobile coming.

Okay, so exactly how do you sell:

"Hey, we need to get in on this mobile thing. It's an order of magnitude more chips, but instead of margins of 30 dollars per chip, we'll only receive ... get this ... 30 cents. Isn't that a great idea?"

"30 cent mobile chips will replace most most of your 30 dollar chip market, by not getting in the market you're giving a competitor a massive leg up"

Kinda like saying "why should this big company named Sears care about this little company named Amazon"

If profits are going away, there's no point in cutting your throat prematurely. You might as well milk your customers while you can.

Intel didn't make the transition the last time until it was against the wall:

https://anthonysmoak.com/2016/03/27/andy-grove-and-intels-mo...

Intel hit a huge performance/power bump in the early 00s with the pentium 4 architecture. If it wasn’t for Intel Israel and the more pragmatic core architecture, they might have been unable to recover very nicely in the latter part of that decade.

> Intel seems to have gotten itself painted into a corner with regards to die sizes, while AMD has strategically shifted to combining chips with smaller die sizes

This line has a "Moore's law ended" marked all over it. One player expected it, the other didn't.

AMD has basically always been behind Intel in process, so they couldn’t count on that to get them to the top, they had to do something else.

Intel has always been on top so they had less incentive to prepare for that. As Ben thompson said in his article Intel just assumed they could keep going without running into process shrink problems of the magnitude they have.

For FIFTY YEARS, the corpses of those who predicted the demise of Moore's Law and were wrong have littered the graveyard of semiconductor companies.

Intel survived because they bet on Moore's Law--while DEC and IBM could get 30-40% more performance out of good design, Intel could just wait 6 months. That eventually crushed the companies that could do excellent VLSI design.

Suddenly, now that Moore's Law finally broke, everybody needs VLSI designers back. However, those designers are all gone--dead, retired, or so screwed over by management that they are never coming back.

I know a lot of people in their late 40's to early 60's from that industry and they all have similar sentiment: "I will run a hot dog stand before working in a semiconductor company ever again."

Interesting.

Couldn't younger people learn good VLSI design? I guess they would need mentors though to help them get up to speed quickly.

Things surrounding VLSI design are a remarkable amount of tribal knowledge that isn't written down.

Things like: "Why don't you tie a pass transistor to a storage node directly to a long bus?" killed at least 3 microprocessor designs (that I know of).

There are a million things like this, and none of them are worth writing down since they are of zero use to anyone outside of the industry/company and often are specific to design techniques or fabrication lines.

Samsung moved almost 100 engineers to Boston in order to try to second source manufacturing for the Alpha, had DEC engineers who were happy to help them, and still was only marginally successful.

In VLSI, 6 nines means you still have 200 failing transistors on your 200 million transistor chip.

Weren't their "plans for kicking butt" in the mid 90s largely based on Itanium?

They had to do with how Intel was going to turn the inside of their x86 chips into something resembling RISC chips.

Um, they spent a gigabuck and drove DEC and HP out of the market.

I'd say that kicked butt.

HP saw that they couldn't compete with PA against Power, MIPS, Sparc, and Alpha. So they threw in with Intel to develop Itanium in order to be competitive. Intel saw the lucrative server market. Too bad Intel took too long to ship Merced (the first Itanic) At least we got the C++ ABI out of it?

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