Hacker News Reader

Comment by wslh | Hacker News Reader

It is always the time to read again the book "Only the Paranoid Survive" [1] where Andy Grove, CEO of Intel at the book time, has a specific chapter about RISC/CISC.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Only_the_Paranoid...

View on HN

Could you please expand the chapter about RISC/CISC?

That is the chapter 6: "Signal" or "Noise". The core wisdom here is that it is obviously difficult to separate signal from noise. I would say that now in 2023 is probably even more difficult because the data flow has increased while the mental/group focus has declined.

In that chapter, Andy Grove recognized the merits of both technologies, they even developed RISC chips. The preference for CISC was maintaining compatibility of the 386 line of extremely successful microprocessors recognizing that following another technology was resource intensive and against the extremely popular and fruitful 386 line of business.

The analysis is clear.

Really, that's just meet your customer where they're at.

One more thing, indeed the book addressed the problem we see today with Intel, ARM, and mobile devices: he call them 10X forces and inflection points. Obviously Intel hasn't recognized the concepts clearly defined in the book.

BTW, I think this is a book recommended to any entrepreneur since it addresses atemporal concepts and you return to the book anytime you gain more experience to clarify your experiences.

The paranoid culture doesn’t seem to have served Intel very well for the past 10-15 years.

Do they still have it? He left around the turn of the century so it seems like a better argument would be that having an immensely profitable company puts you at risk of having caretaker CEOs who will be optimizing for Wall Street analysts rather than success.

A better target would be Itanium: that was in his era and showed the danger of picking the wrong gamble. They wanted a proprietary platform which couldn’t be copied by AMD, Cyrix, etc. but they staked the whole exercise on a highly speculative CPU design and made a number of horrible tactical errors like trying to screw a few million in compiler licensing out of developers at the time when their multi-billion bet-the-company investment crucially depended on developers porting to a chip which was critically dependent on having the best compiler. Being paranoid about preventing competition lead them to be shockingly cavalier about their plans being robust.

> highly speculative CPU design

Heh. Nice

Intel has embraced the complacent culture for 30 years. Perf/watt is meaningless, phones won’t be a big market, nothing can displace x86 in the datacenter, nobody else can fab like we do…

The paranoid culture cannot predict the future.

BTW Andy was not the CEO in times of this inflection point.

Isn't it because it had ceased to exist before these troubles began? Grove has left Intel 19 years ago, and cessed to be its CEO 25 years ago.

it is, ever since he left, intel is anything but paranoid

Sounds to me like they weren't paranoid enough

The ones that were lead by Andy Grove wasn't there at Intel.

i think we're forgetting Intel's backdoor https://hackaday.com/2023/04/12/disabling-intels-backdoors-o...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com