An Interview with Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
This basically summarizes why Intel is in so much trouble. They can execute well for the next 10 years and they are still hosed - they used to be practically the only supplier (AMD wasn't doing well) of the by far most used architecture in servers (and clients), and sold to 100s of thousands of customers, none of who could push them around. Now there are several architectures and several suppliers and the buyers are bigger and more concentrated than ever. They are just lucky the server market has been growing while the big cloud providers built out. It's not going to be a pretty 10 years to 2032... selling those x86's in 2032 won't be so.. high margin.
For 20 years they could have afforded to. Now it may be too late. If they try I don’t think the market would punish them for it.
And in fact they are famous for killing their cash cow (memory) and focusing on the new thing (microprocessors) in the 80s under Grove. They have fallen far.
Other big companies, like Google, have this problem and haven’t made efforts to address it.
x86 would be more competitive in the mobile space if Intel had offered efficient chips. Is the instruction set the biggest blocker that prevented this? Or is it the licensing model? Perhaps if Intel had licensed their architecture and instruction set to others, like ARM does, they would be in a better position?
ARM's licensing model get's a lot more eyes on instructions sets and chip designs. It allows big companies like Apple come in and run the show, licensing just the instruction set. Why wasn't Intel working with large customers with an interest in custom x86 designs? In hindsight it seems presumptuous to assume there is no x86 talent outside Intel/AMD.
Really impossible to know how much the actual instruction set is holding Intel back without being on the inside.
I do think that Intel has executed badly on the ISA front too. Let’s not forget that x64 wasn’t an Intel design (how much did they spend on Itanium) and they’ve messed around with AVX-512 which just seems to eat die area and power.
By contrast Arm managed to get its customers switched over to 64 bit seamlessly and has left most of their awkward legacy behind.
I get where he's going with this but if you're ever on the other side interacting with a vendor you should be very careful about what, if at all you disclose that their competitors are doing. Vendors notice what they learn from your teams and if they know it is leaky they will not disclose things that make the technical side easier.
At a past gig we used the be the central point of contact for our vendors because we kept a strict firewall on the technical side between different product lines and SoCs.
The first instinct of most engineers when you're trying to evaluate something or get the best performance is to say "X does Y, why don't you do Y" or "X does Y, how can we get similar results" and you've just disclosed something and that vendor will notice. On the flip side if you build up that trust and are known to not disclose you can be read in on things that normally wouldn't be shared. This can be incredibly valuable when you're trying to close on a key technical issue under schedule/time constraints.
Only mentioning this because I wish someone had clued me in earlier in my career. I only learned after my friend in opsec called me out for my loose lips.
Even then though there's ways to approach it that don't disclose. You can set KPIs that you expect to hit and talk through how they plan too approach it from their side. If something is known in the public you can reference it although I generally prefer not to.
Depending on what part of the industry you're in some vendors prefer not to patent and keep approaches internal so discussion of certain aspects can be pretty sensitive.
This is especially true at big tech, as Ben covers them often.
There's still a lot of interesting analysis but my opinion of the newsletter has soured over time.
It is. On the other hand, a not insignificant part of his job is talking to journalists, industry analysts, financial analysts, etc. Doesn't mean just anyone can drop an email and get an interview but, although I haven't spoken with Pat for quite some time, I had 1:1s with him (and did a little work for him) when he was CTO.
What a world.
Edit: corrected typo.
Hmmm. I might take issue with that statement. While the author of Stratechery doesn't seem to have any public numbers, from https://stratechery.com/about/
"Stratechery has subscribers from over 85 different countries, including executives in both technology and industries impacted by technology, venture capitalists and investors, and thousands of other people interested in understanding how and why the Internet is changing everything."
Hmmm. "Thousands"? So let's round up and call it 10k.
From the BLS, approximately 178k Computer Programmers in 2020 in the US: https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes151251.htm Just programmers, just in the US.
So 10k is ~5% of programmers in the USA. That's not a 'large' number in my understanding, and that ignores everyone outside of the USA and everyone who is in tech in the USA but not a programmer.
It's hard to find global numbers from a reliable source, but googling around indicates that there are millions of people in the tech sector worldwide.
I've read that for the original iPhone Steve Jobs was in talks with Intel to produce a low power x86 chip. Intel said no. The silicon landscape would be very different if that had happened.