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Comment by woofie11 | Hacker News Reader

I think one more issue is support. If I want a chip from TI, Analog Devices, etc., I fill out a web form and get a sample. If I want to talk to an engineer, I place a phone call. If I want to order a dozen of a part, I go to Digikey. If I want a datasheet, it's online.

Intel won't give you the time of day unless you're HP or Dell. That's optimal for capitalizing on old markets, but it means it's never in new markets. It always starts at a disadvantage. It's not that Intel never has chips startups want to use; it's that it's impossible to engineer with most of them.

By the time a product has enough marketshare for Intel to care, they need to displace an existing supplier.

This means they could never really diversify outside of PCs.

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This is a point where I would have to disagree. While their early access programs are generally restricted to larger customers, you can apply to join other schemes (called Docs and Docs+ as far as I remember) where they will assign you an account manager and a dedicated platform application engineer to help you with your design-in process.

I worked at a small start-up producing COM-HPC boards for companies who wanted to keep their servers in-house, as opposed to using cloud infrastructure. We weren't purchasing any more than maybe 500 CPUs of their upcoming platform. Despite that, they supplied 1:1 tech support, reference schematics/layouts, a reference validation platform with which to test our design on, and 1000's of documents including product design guides and white papers. This all came about by just contacting Intel's developer account support and filling in a few forms.

We also produced the same product with AMD hardware and the difference was night an day. Say what you will about their production difficulties and roadmaps, their engineering support is years ahead of AMD.

I wasn't comparing to AMD.

I've had few enough interactions with AMD that I can't pass judgement, but from the few I've had were consistent with your assessment. AMD was a complete black hole. My interactions with Intel were lightyears ahead of AMD.

But Intel, in turn, was lightyears behind Analog, Linear, Maxim, TI, and most other vendors I've dealt with (this was before Analog gobbled Linear and Maxim up).

XMG (a gaming laptop brand) even publicly announced that AMD would not meet their request for validation samples of Ryzen 5800 and 5900 CPUs. CPUs that have been launched and are shipping to other customers already.

https://www.reddit.com/r/XMG_gg/comments/n4i3x2/update_threa...

If AMD at at 100% production capacity, why would they want to increase demand? Surely supplying validation samples could only hurt AMD in that situation (technical costs, disappointing the customer when the customer want to shift to production).

A business can always use more demand, even if all they use it for is raising prices.

> why would they want to increase demand?

1. It's not mostly about the demand, but about maintaining good working relations with systems manufacturers.

2. Increased demand is not a daily thing. Positive reviews and manufacturer interests would likely hold for a while, effecting the next production planning cycle or what-not.

3. Counteract effects quelling demand.

4. They could theoretically avoid letting prices drop if demand is strong.

It really depends on who the targeted customers are. I remember inquiring on some TI lines and being told by the rep that unless you’re a customer anticipating 1M+ units, that chip really isn’t available.

Is that one thousand, or one million?

This was a while ago, but I recall it as one million.

Intel and AMD are both like that, and it makes me wonder how much space they have opened up for ARM. I would love a small x86 SoC if it came with the same level of support that an NXP or TI ARM chip has, but they don't.

I wonder how a small outfit like UDOO manages to design around an AMD embedded part then. The boards are out there and they work, but I have no idea how the negotiations happened.

My impression is that if you are an open source project (especially one with a few already existing designs), you can actually get some design support from large companies. This is especially true if you either meet the right person in marketing at those companies or know someone on the inside. The Raspberry Pi uses chips from a very user-hostile company (Broadcom) because they started as a side project by a few engineers at Broadcom.

> Intel and AMD are both like that, and it makes me wonder how much space they have opened up for ARM.

Arguably, this is what led to the creation of ARM. Acorn wanted to make a computer with a 286, but Intel ignored them, so they decided to build their own RISC based CPU, the "Acorn RISC Machine".

I would make a good movie or netflix series.

> If I want to talk to an engineer, I place a phone call. If I want to order a dozen of a part, I go to Digikey. If I want a datasheet, it's online.

I notice you didn't list Broadcom... And bullshit can you call an engineer. Submit a support case through some online portal maybe. Zero chance they are giving you a direct line to their engineers.

Yah they are all like that, in the arm space outside of really low end devices and the rk3399 they won't even give you minimal register docs for standard devices. I had problems at the previous place trying to build a PCIe device where the minimum to to even get the most minimal of documentation was 100k units. Sure you could buy the parts from digikey but they were useless because the public docs were little more than footprints and high level whitepaper like feature matrices.

And everything you detailed there is solely a management issue.

They could devote a market segment to support that as a long term emerging market support aspect of their business, but it's clear that short term hit-strike-price-for-execs has been the dominant management mode for quite some time.

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