And they still didn't fix it.
What's going on with Intel? Like they're going all in with lying in benchmarks against AMD and straight up forgetting what has been reported as security issues.
>Company is dying and has no way to turn itself around.
>Culture is a "go along to get along" / don't rock the boat. Most workers are very passive. Inclusive culture focused on internal "networking" rather than winning. A lot of make work going on, probably 25% extra headcount
>Middle and upper management are in direct revolt against CEO and his plans. During my orientation (2nd quarter 2013) my orientation meeting was about how the CEO is wrong on his plans.
>Advice to Management
>Not much you can do. These problems are the result of near monopoly on PC CPUs for 20 years. This place is what Hewlett-Packard was probably like in 2000 (with the printer monopoly), the collapse is coming, but without starting over there is no way to fix it.
Interestingly, that printer monopoly seems to be doing fine today, given how I have to go to hp.com to get drivers for my Samsung printer.
e.g. I recently found a datasheet of an IC in an amateur radio gear, it were really the glorious days. Those chips with an HP logo (or a Motorola logo) are really cool.
> The INA series of MMICs is fabricated using HP’s 25 GHz f_max, ISOSAT™-I silicon bipolar process which uses nitride self-alignment, submicrometer lithography, trench isolation, ion implantation, gold metallization and polyimide intermetal dielectric and scratch protection to achieve excellent performance, uniformity and reliability.
Around 2000s, the EE & semiconductor department became an independent company, Agillent, and later Keysight.
I think the last major innovation at HP was probably memristor that was supposed to be the next evolution of digital logic and storage, and HP claimed that it was developing a memristor computer system. Unfortunately, it failed to materialize.
Not trying to besmirch or minimize early HP by comparing to Google -- probably better to use Musk/SpaceX or something -- but IMO this is the key takeaway that doesn't seem widely discussed. Innovative companies have innovative leaders with expert-level knowledge in their technical specialties. At some point, the MBAs take over, attempt to put it on autopilot, and it's all downhill from there.
You don't, not if you're a small investor. You go index and hedge your bets that they're not all going to rot at the same time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Watson_Jr.
>Although the initiative, and as such much of the credit for the birth of the information revolution, must go to Tom Jr., considerable courage was also displayed by his then aging father who, despite his long commitment to internal funding, backed his son to the hilt; reportedly with the words "It is harder to keep a business great than it is to build it."
However, at some point any company is probably bound to promote wrong people, who will end up promoting/hiring the wrong people under them, eventually completely changing the course of the business.
It seems like the death of a company is inevitable.
Which, from a higher perspective, is good. As it breaks down monopolies and give way to more innovative new companies.
By putting the burden of scheduling parallelism on the compiler, does the EPIC design avoid speculative execution vulnerabilities, or did Intel implement Itanium with the same flaws?
They’ve split up into companies that are widely successful in each of their individual fields.
The rebranding I’ll never understand is Fujitsu -> Socionext.
I have to look it up... This is stupid. If I see a Fujitsu chip on a board, I know the brand and may find it interesting. But if I see a Socionext chip, I'll think it's some random U.S. startup from California.
I think there's a reason - Wikipedia says it's a joint venture of Fujitsu and Panasonic, so it makes sense for them to give it a new name, and it's common for these Japanese companies to choose a English name for global business (in the same way that NEC becomes Renesas due to the two reasons).
But what a terrible name!
But the interesting parts have been spun out like: Agillent and Keysight.
HP Enterprise was also spun out.
I'm sure no one intended to mislead, but organisationally Intel just isn't designed to fix bugs. It doesn't have a process to respond to issues.
Ultra-simplified bookkeeping interpreted through the lens of too much coke nearly destroyed them. The dotcom bubble was a very strange time.
Instead of focusing on a PR war and scrambling to salvage one fire after another, Intel needs to produce a strategy that will keep them in the game by actually providing value -- not by twisting the hands of big corps for lucrative long-term contracts.
The Key Goals for the past 4 years if not longer were to ship 10nm with respectable yield. Which as closing of 2019 still didn't happen.
So I am not even sure what they were focused on.
Meanwhile it became clear that a decent part of Intel's per core advantage was because of massive shortcuts they took, notably security wise, and so fixing those security holes takes away the performance.
In that situation, I doubt management at Intel is eager to take out yet another one of their shortcut. Intel needs a win, but they are not at all in the state of mind necessary to achieve one...
The assumption being that they could in the time given, but are sitting on their hands?
Or incompetence in as "they weren't capable of doing it"?
The latter is very probable. The former could underestimate the difficulty of such fixes...
Incompetent can mean "as to the particular project context" (i.e. they could be great engineers that din't manage to deliver the fixes for this issue), or "as to their general professional capacity" (i.e. they are lesser engineers).
Big difference.
I'm assuming this is referencing the "intentionally misleading benchmarks" piece in servethehome. It's worth reading the follow up, in which the author discovers their biggest complaint (older version doesn't have avx2 enabled by default on zen2) was not an issue because Intel manually enabled avx2.
https://www.servethehome.com/update-to-the-intel-xeon-platin...
AMD has its fair share of issue in their own self published benchmarks, but at least when third party publish they're not forced to cripple other companies' chips.
There was a good bit of time where Opterons where everywhere on servers, including things like the whole Sun x86 line. At one gig we had datacenters full of IBM blade servers stuffed with dual Opteron boards; they were a big success in the market. I know at one point another gig's non-US folks had significant installed base of AMD-based Fujitsu servers.
Didn't see as much on the desktop/laptop side, though I did carry a AMD-based Thinkpad for a short while. Apparently HP sold a successful, low-end, AMD-based business desktop.
YMMV...I think it's a matter of 'I haven't seen any tigers in my back yard, therefore I doubt they exist'.
But it does seem that adoption is growing again, with recent performance figures and the attractive price point.
The only bad period was where AMD Opteron gained a big market share in servers while Intel was doing Pentium 4 Netburst crap.