Comment by NovaDudely | Hacker News Reader

Comment by NovaDudely | Hacker News Reader

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For about 20 years I had the mantra of "Don't bet against Intel". A good example of this was in the early 90's when all the hype from the Apple fans about PowerPC and the end of x86 by the year 2000. The hype was real but Intel was just quietly saying "we have a road map and we will go well beyond what people expect" and then Intel did it - while PPC slowly faded away (for various reasons).

Everytime someone predicted the end of Intel - they just kept knocking out of the park when least expected. Thinking going from Pentuim 4 Prescott to Intel Core series for instance. Side note - At least the Prescott was vaguely ambitious!

But the last decade has not been great for Intel. That engineering prowess has faded a little. Their new GPU stuff is neat and very forward thinking but it is still a wait and see on that. But when it comes to their other elements, it feels like they have just been doing the same thing with very minor tweaks for far too long now.

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Another aside, it is same theoretical greatness doesn't always translate to market greatness. If it worked like that we would probably all be using PowerPC machines in some degree. A wonderful ISA!

I visited some scientific VLSI/EDA conferences some 20 years ago. Intel was everywhere, both in sponsoring as in real participation. Apple was literally nowhere. I wonder if this has changed.

Idk about conferences but Apple sponsored some architecture courses when I was at Berkeley, and I ended up interning on an Apple hardware team due to connections made at a big hiring event they hosted on campus.

What year?

>Their new GPU stuff is neat and very forward thinking but it is still a wait and see on that.

That ball's in our (the consumers') court, actually. They are priced aggressively, about what video cards cost before the mining and now "AI" craze. They are competently capable, software teething pains notwithstanding.

So will Intel ARC succeed? We as consumers now have to answer. I can't tell which way the arrow is leaning right now, though software devs don't appear interested in accomodating them like Nvidia and AMD.

It is hard to tell. If Intel sticks with it and keeps the price low while still aggressively moving towards future needs - they could become a decent 3rd player.

That they have no DX11 or below legacy combined with some interesting performance profiles especially at the higher resolution areas leads me to think they are looking at where the market needs will be in 2-3 year from now. It seems like higher resolutions doesn't hamper performance are much as one would really expect. It is still way behind Nvidia and AMD but there is a lot of potential there.

I have seen a few people on youtube who benchmark cards who have made the wise choice to not touch these yet and wait for the second generation. That way they can come in when things are more stable and not have a cloud hanging over their head.

If Intel is to treat it like Microsoft did with Xbox and give it a few years to mature - it could be huge. They could also just drop it in a year or two and it just becomes a technical curiosity that we will look back on like "Remember when Inter did that?". Sort of like the i960 processors. Something really neat but a dead end for them.

I remember than in 2017 there were rumors that Intel was developing a novel microarchitecture from scratch to beat AMD and it should be out in 2020, did any of that pan out?

Think it had more to do with Intel partnering with Microsoft and Windows taking over the PC market in the 90s.

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