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Comment by Sparkyte | Hacker News Reader

Intel has always been an echo chamber of fiscal earnings and cutting corners to appease investors. For the longest time they stagnated on Mac hardware improvements because it would cost money, they would not have lost Mac as a business customer if they continued to innovate.

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Also they should have had a policy of "not one transistor for the national labs" and "not one transistor for hyperscalers", particularly because anything they do to appease hyperscalers just saves them money that they'll spend on their custom silicon transition.

There's something prestigious about HPC but the story of how commercial data processing went parallel in the oughts shows how out of touch the HPC community is.

In the meantime Intel has botched the deployment of SIMD, slowplaying to the point where maybe 7 or 8 years from now some mainstream software might support AVX512, maybe. Somebody should be tarred and feathered for introducing the idea that features should be fused off for all but the highest paying customers. If the customer is not paying for the fused off functionality, the shareholders are. It sounds really ruthless and avaricious and might impress some business analysts as a form of vice signalling but it's pure waste.

Right it is wasteful. The reason some businesses are so successful is that they look at the common denominators rather than trying to perpetuate worth. Fewer variants and don't wall off features. AMD did this for the longest period getting back on it feet, but I am seeing a failure of them continuing down this path. They need to stop making variants and focus on 3 or 4 sets of consumer processors.

Yep, “too many SKUs” killed off the consumer HDD a few years faster than it had to die. If these companies had focus groups that reached out to ordinary people they’d realize it sounds absolutely incredible to most people that you need one hard drive for a 3-5 bay NAS, another for a 6-9 bay NAS, another if you are recording from video cameras.

Even if there was a real benefit from optimizing firmware and saving a few cents with cheap washers for drives in a low vibration environment there is a much more certain cost in that you have to qualify the firmware, risk introducing errors, etc. I can imagine that Best Buy might have been able to stock one model of high capacity HDD but no way were they going to stock more colors of WD drive than there are on the rainbow flag. That lack of product sense locked manufacturers out of the retail market.

(Makes me think of the cringe monthly hard drive roundup in Anandtech where an enterprise drive produced in huge numbers in a single SKU would usually be $80-100 cheaper than prosumer drives that, according to the spec sheet, consumed about 0.5W less and were about 3db quieter… And I have plenty of those enterprise drives still spinning after all these years, the only time I think about the noise is when the machine boots and the drives emit a throaty chirp that makes me think of a Ferrari spooling up.)

> " Somebody should be tarred and feathered for introducing the idea that features should be fused off for all but the highest paying customers. If the customer is not paying for the fused off functionality, the shareholders are."

This is very well put.

While I've always understood the economic motivation for margin optimization and the technical reality that CPU wafers aren't very granular, fundamentally, it's a long-term losing idea to intentionally fab gates that don't add end-user value. While it may work in the shorter-term, when it becomes the plan of record (as opposed to fixing a one-gen design or product mix error) it signals a shift to prioritizing value extraction over value creation.

Even more simply, their goal stopped being making the best product at the best price. Features that were fused off could have made their products better for no extra manufacturing cost. Your business is broken when you view your products as being too featureful as a cost.

that’s silly. Everyone in this industry fuses off features, AMD included.

Ryzen Pro APUs have disabled ecc support for example. Consumer RX 7000 gpus have crippled DisplayPort feature support/bandwidth. Consumer Hawaii had gimped FP64 to segment the pro cards.

At a certain point these practices are just so broad and banal that it’s unremarkable.

Current investor strategy is immediate gains no long term investment because that is deemed risky. Because they want to buy in and bail when they've doubled their investment.

Incidentally that is exactly the reason why ECC memory isn’t standard. Intel reserved it for only the highest paying customers.

"they would not have lost Mac as a business customer if they continued to innovate"

I'm not entirely sure this is true. I mean, I guess it depends on whether one expected Intel to be able to make not just a decent chip for PCs/laptops, but also one for phones & tablets. Once Apple started dabbling in its own chips for the iPhone and iPad, it seemed inevitable that they'd expand that to their macOS systems too. Apple has been a rough customer to please for chip designers/manufacturers, I'm not sure any company could've satisfied them with a general-purpose chip.

If they played their cards right as the top dog ~20 years ago, they could have perhaps ended up with the relationship with Apple that TSMC does today.

1. Intel didn't have big fabs 20 years ago, so they didn't have anything to offer Apple that would resemble TSMC's partnership.

2. There's no money in designing licensed CPU cores as a middleman for a company that drives margins so low they're associated with suicide nets and forced labor.

3. If TSMC is lost due to Chinese aggression (which is a non-zero chance), Apple is left fabless and has to choose between importing Samsung silicon at-cost or partnering with Intel.

Might take them a few years to update their software to run on the Samsung stack.

What are they going to do without all the auxiliary processors they build in?

Or do they have a team which has their software working on other people's silicon in case their supply chain get blown up?

Also, importantly, how hard will the US government be taxing imports and propping-up Intel? I think that an anti-Apple and pro-Apple administration would both want them to stop shipping jobs offshore. There's a tariff knob that can be adjusted until only Intel (or GlobalFoundries, lmao) are feasible choices, and if the US wants their Intel investment recouped then they may well push for that kind of deal.

Personally, I find the "samurai's honor" shit where one company avoids another to be childish and stupid. If you make Apple's board choose between ending their grudge-match or blowing up their margins, I don't think they'll care much either. Or maybe I'm wrong, and the 2027 iPhone is manufactured with 24nm wafers intended for the Toyota Prius.

> Intel didn't have big fabs 20 years ago,

They had leading edge ARM chips though. If Apple used XScale (i.e. the default choice had Intel not decided to get rid of it due to "reasons") for the iPhone that would have significantly reduced the likelihood of them developing competitive chips themselves.

Also 20 years? Samsung was still making Apple's chips back in 2014.

> 2. There's no money in designing licensed CPU cores as a middleman for a company that drives margins so low they're associated with suicide nets and forced labor.

Is Apple significantly or at all worse than their competitors in this regard? In any case only reason Apple is designing their own chips is because there weren't any decent options for their use cases available on the market (and Intel only has itself to blame for that...)

Companies that are built on engineering eventually become subsumed by soul-sucking profit sucking bonus sucking middle management types that just plop themselves in their big huge hierarchy and destroy the company long-term with inertia and apathy.