Hacker News Reader

Comment by Spooky23 | Hacker News Reader

Another possibility is that the market is changing. The age old Xeon/Core/“binned low end” model may not be viable anymore as hyperscale cloud providers start to rule and people don’t care about CPUs as a differentiator. Add in COVID chaos and the answers are unclear.

Hell I just replaced thousands of older desktops with slower laptop chips — nobody noticed. Frankly, I only bought new devices because of Microsoft’s bullshit Windows 11 requirements.

The guaranteed cash flow train is slowing down, which makes setting billions of dollars on fire with high risk fab processes a big deal.

Intel had to adapt like this in the early 90s when memory became a commodity. We’ll see if they make it.

View on HN

> Hell I just replaced thousands of older desktops with slower laptop chips — nobody noticed.

This is certainly plausible if these were mostly Office users but how confident are you that you'd know if they did notice? Most of the large IT departments I've interacted with would post glowing self-evaluations while the users had plenty of complaints and/or were doing their real work on personal devices. Depending on how the business is structured and the relationships, this can be hard to measure without a fair amount of effort — I've heard people say they weren't going to report something because they didn't think it was worth the effort or they were sure that the IT people would notice and fix it.

The shift to the cloud has turned computers into glorified terminals again. For terminals CPU power is a lot less important than for a personal computer.

Have to disagree here. Cloud apps (in a form of web apps) demand more CPU performance, not less! Apart from specialized apps that really do a lot of computing (rendering, modelling, model-training) that can easily be done in cloud, most apps are slower (or functionally constrained) if they're moved to cloud and used as web app. Think Office 365 suite - every app of the suite is either slower as web app, or functionally constrained.

For me personally, web apps only got fast when I got a computer with M1 processor.

I understand the argument but I don't think that's enough – even on a recent Intel laptop CPU, you'll be hearing the fans if you have more than one of Outlook, Teams, etc. active or any enterprise security software even if most of the data is being stored on the cloud. Something like iOS or ChromeOS is a lot closer to delivering on that idea in my experience.

> I understand the argument but I don't think that's enough – even on a recent Intel laptop CPU, you'll be hearing the fans if you have more than one of Outlook, Teams, etc. active or any enterprise security software even if most of the data is being stored on the cloud.

Google Docs runs well on a Chromebook. As does MS Office online. The modern desktop has really turned into a terminal - it's jut using HTML & JS and works... pretty well.

Yeah, that’s why I said Office users — the core experience isn’t bad at all any more. It’s usually other apps which are pushing CPU limits notably. A big one recently has been video conferencing since a lot of schools didn’t used to need that at all, much less large classes entirely online.

Video conferencing works really well on a $200 Chromebook or $100 tablet.

Indeed, WordPerfect, word, excel, etc, all worked just fine on a pentium chip of the day. Yes there was always something faster but really… it was just fine.

We invested on memory. Shitty electron apps like Teams chug ram!

> Hell I just replaced thousands of older desktops with slower laptop chips — nobody noticed. Frankly, I only bought new devices because of Microsoft’s bullshit Windows 11 requirements.

Big enterprises think like that yeah, because they can't get their crappy Dell Inspirons to new employees anymore.

Personally I just had to get a Ryzen laptop replacement temporarily because Lenovo took too long to repair my thinkpad. And the result was delightful. Better sound, fantastic compile times, beautiful screen for half the price of my thinkpad. Next time I'll get a cheap Ryzen and if it breaks just buy a replacement device instead of relying on a pro intel enterprise device with crappy overpriced enterprise service.

Agreed - but that’s a problem for Intel, as they need enterprises to lap up those shitty Dell laptops to keep the throughput going!

NYC Public Schools buy like 200,000 computers a year. A decade ago, it was probably 50% higher due to faster refresh cycles. There are a lot more big dumb enterprise endpoints than you might think. When I sold computers in college to commercial customers, the average refresh was 30-40 months. Now it’s closer to 60.

Yes, the market is changing -- on all fronts for Intel. Many people talk about this being a tech problem, really its more like the logic at companies when you hold a close to monopoly position -- why invest tons of R&D dollars when you can just increment more slowly and make the same money.. So they end up with a loss of tech leadership when they easily could have had it. The biggest mistake that Intel appears to have made was their failure to bring up the new 13nm EUV processes at the same rate as TSMC -- probably they were hoping it would fail, but it did not. Now TSMC has done a couple of nodes with EUV and they have some customers that are spending tons of money right now like Apple, AMD, nvidia, qualcomm, etc and now TSMC is flush with cash and have a strong runway in front of them -- its like TSMC is already in execution mode while Intel is still trying to get things working. Intel basically thought, hey lets see how long we can milk our big cloud customers with $2000 processors and only minor improvements. Those customers realized they could hire a chip team themselves and build their own processor for the amount of money they were paying Intel each year, so they did that. So they got attacked on the enterprise side by their own customers making their own chips like Amazon and Google, the consumer side by AMD just throwing lots of cores at the problem -- and Apple dumping x86 in their laptops -- and soon to be others, and they essentially have nothing in the mobile space. So they went from being dominant 10 years ago to being 2nd place in multiple of their core businesses. Clear failure of leadership to realize they need to maintain technical supremacy otherwise they will not be able to charge the prices they want to charge. Now their competitors are shipping chips with 64 cores and Intel's plan to uber slowly release 16 cores, then 20 cores, 24 cores, etc over a 8 year period or whatever their plan was is blown up..

I'm still bullish on $AMD to break much further into the enterprise space. So many AWS instances still run on Xeons. That's slowly changing, especially now with stuff like Graviton , but I think AMD can go much higher just on enterprise.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com