Give an engineering company to a marketing department and what did you expect the outcome to be ? surprise surprise Bob Swan is not Elon Musk. but its not just Bob Swan, intel has been run by the same corporate sales force mentality that has destroyed orcale. but thats just my opinion. I am sure someone thinks Oracle is never been better
No you are right about your Oracle comparison and analysis! The fundamental problem is that Intel, a tech company, is currently run by MBAs who do not have even the most basic understanding of what matters in this bleeding edge, high capital investment industry: Process excellence is what it is all about! Without that it does not matter how well you can design a CPU etc. For a MBA it is simply too attractive to make short term profit off of the 14nm process and leverage the market lock in position (that Intel has or is looking slowly slip away from) as long as possible. To make things worse executive compensation equity plans reinforce this behavior, driving them to maximize net profit short term. In this business, short term is a few years and we are now finally coming to the end of this "milking 14nm+++++" strategy. In short: you need an engineer at the top of a high tech company who understands deeply what Intel needs and what strategically drives intel’s long term success, who does the right thing even if it hurts a quarter or 2 and invest in the long term. Andy Grove famously said: “Only the paranoid survives” and for the last few Intel has just not been paranoid enough but has been dominated by executives who are blinded by next few quarters of profit and corresponding executive pay.
In the end it is of course the board’s fault or rather the long term strong investors fault (who vote for who should be on the board). They should have fixed the executive level before it got to this situation.
As a parallel Microsoft went through roughly a decade or so with a sales guy at the top (Steve Balmer) and flat share price as a consequence. So Bill G. was convinced that the “next CEO of Microsoft shall be an engineer” so when the time comes, sure enough, in comes Satya N. (a distinguished engineer at MS). He does what needs to be done, stock price takes off and the rest is history.
On the contrary, since roughly the 90nm days, the process has become less and less important, and that's why Intel has been able to compete despite their 10nm and 7nm woes (compare that to the late 1990s; what if Intel's 250nm (Katmai) and 180nm (Coppermine) process had been delayed for 3+ years, and they would have been forced to compete with Klamath (at up to 300MHz) against Thunderbird (at up to 1400MHz)?). However, the fact that Intel tightly couples their microarchitecture implementations to processes means that process delays also delay their microarchitecture innovations, and then, yes, designing better microarchitectures does not help them; OTOH, this tight coupling probably gives them a clock speed advantage (compare Zen 1 clock speed to Skylake++ clock speed in 2017, both on 14nm).
Process became the primary driver of performance with 22nm. Past there, cost/transistor started rising, area scaling started slowing dramatically, power density (capping peak performance) started increasing dramatically, the gate oxide thickness limit meant voltage hit 1v and stopped dropping, and practical frequency limits capped at 5GHz (either overclocked, or now mainstream parts). With the exception of situations where perf/watt is paramount (mobile and laptop), the larger the process you can get away with the better.
Nadella couldn't do shit to the Windows Phone he fucked it up even worse by making the Chevron WinPhone hack that could make a lot like Android type freedom during the old days a big edge over the competition and the store for applications. He was yapping "mobile first", and MS nuked it by C&D and closing all of it beleving in their utopia like Nokia's management which was not beleiving in their engg of Maemo but putting all eggs into that sellout trojan horse Elop.
And later he copied that Adobe's As a Service and stamped onto Windows with firing the Chief of Windows and dissolving that OS division, they make money because he also copied Amazon by Azure. He is just a puppet for the BOD. They have that monopoly grip due to the x86 and Wintel dominance as no other OS could be put into hands of the people thus they have that high stock boost, Win10 is pure cancer, every Tuesday there's a patch and they experiment on Home and Pro for Enterprise quality updates, they are forcing heavy telemetry into the OS and 6 month feature releases with insane bugs.
Intel on the other hand ruined by BK and the whole corporate structure internally, they also started to pander woke political trash because, California, that degenerate place can never forget how awful it is, with radical extremist laws now like mandated Senate Bill 826 and other BS nonsense. Firing BK not because of his failure but MeToo was horrible card. And now made a bean counter as CEO to appease investors. This company also lost Jim Keller perhaps too soon, since he does leave the companies once he is done but with Intel it was too soon esp given how excl. AT's Ian interviews were glowingly positive.
Intel has to get their shit right by hiring proper people who are fit for the goddamned job not a quota and have a long term plan, they have money but money cannot put R&D and success it's a hardwork and patience path not virtue signalling trash like how this weak CEO was doing after what is happening in US.
your post is as badly written as it is wrong... I don't like Microsoft one bit but they are making the right moves for their shareholders, that's for sure.
There are so many errors in what you say about MS that it's hard go through them all except to say you are wrong. For example: Steve B. was responsible for the phone fiasco 100%. One of Satya's first action after becoming CEO was to write off the whole catastrophic Nokia acquisition (I think the write off was $10B). Steve had persisted with his phone strategy for years even when the whole phone division was clearly sinking (huge loss leader for years). AND indeed the Nokia acquisition is why Steve B. had to go in the end. Bill G. made sure it was a graceful exit but nonetheless Nokia was the last straw. Azure is a much older that you may think. MS started to develop it more than 10 years ago. If anything there is significant migration of employees (also executives) from MS to Amazon that took lot of that thinking with them… so it’s wrong that MS somehow copied AWS. If anything MS understood cloud early but because of the misguided priorities they did not give it enough focus (distractions like Nokia, aQuantive acquisition other wacko initiatives that have the organization flip flopping chasing the latest shiny thing - I’ve seen it first hand) until Satya took over and refocused the company on cloud. I could go on for hours. But the best proof you are wrong is just to look at MS share price comparing the 14 years with Steve B. as CEO (share price 2000: $40 -> 48 when he retired) with the years with Satya ($48 - > $200). It’s pretty stunning. Don’t’ know enough about the internals of Intel to comment on that. But I do know MS internals!
I used to drive my car on Nokia snow tires. Then around the time they split out the unprofitable parts of Nokia (cell phones) from the profitable parts (everything else) they started making the tires in Russia and I switched to Blizzaks.
Cost/transistor was the primary driver before multiple patterning had to be engaged.
But for a few years now power efficiency (in executing operations in a loop) is EVERYTHING, including even desktops. It is the BY FAR the most limiting factor both on supply side, and on cooling side. And shorter signal lines mean not just shorter local latencies, but less power dissipation everything else being equal.
That is why the physical memory architecture with DIMMS being in a separate place on a motherboard should have long been abandoned. At the very least, switch to SODIMM slots on the CPU package itself (4 sides, 4 slots), radically simplifying MB design and reducing latencies while allowing lower signal voltages.
They can put memory on package but that will impact thermals.
They can't put memory slots on the package without making the package a board. By the time they make it a board it's literally the exact same thing it is today on the motherboard, literally the first hop out of the CPU socket. Memory latencies have nothing to do with the current layout. The only way to improve that would be to go do a different type of memory, HBM on package as an L4, something like that. DDR5 does show promise, splitting the channels won't directly help the latency but giving 4 channels will give twice the chance of not having to wait on the memory that's in the middle of another process.
"capped at 5GHz (either overclocked, or now mainstream parts)". There used to be a clear distinction, but after Zen was released Intel could no longer compete in IPC so they started overclocking their mainstream parts, which they still do. This is why their TDP values have gone through the roof.
sure, they compete by clocking higher at higher top, but it gives them the crown (well in some situations) and i guess that is what matters. Amd couldn't clock their cpus higher even when allowing tdp to blow so intel has at least some advantage there. If they had brought a newer arch to 14nm 3 years ago and another last year the world would have looked different: amd would be well behind. Certainly bad management at Intel to take the risk assuming your process never delays (...), but given the delays the gap is surprisingly small....
1) Intel 14nm is really not directly comparable to GloFo 14nm (Intel's process is markedly superior). 2) Zen's clock speed deficits are partially a result of the design of the architecture, which is why Zen+ only provided incremental improvements on that front even though it was much more heavily tailored to 14nm.
You're certainly right that it's not just the manufacturing process that makes a good CPU, though.
"Zen's clock speed deficits are partially a result of the design of the architecture" Only partially, but we don't know how partially. Still, everything else being equal smaller nodes beyond a certain point result in lower clocks. If Zen 2 had been fabbed with TSMC's highest transistor density at 7nm (~97 MTr/㎟) its clocks would have been even lower (while its energy efficiency would be even higher).
I think it's fair to say that almost all of Zen's clock limits are architecture.
FX and Sandy Bridge could hit 5GHz on 32nm. Ivy Bridge didn't seem to hit it as often, Broadwell was almost a no show on the desktop, Skylake would hit 5.1GHz pretty consistently.
There's pretty much no argument that Global Foundries 14nm was outclassed by Intel but their 14nm should have been better than their own 32nm process.
I do agree in one respect tho, it seems we're hitting a point where clock speed limits are getting lower. Increasing IPC tends to have that result.
AMD couldn't possibly just "fabbed with TSMC's highest transistor density at 7nm", routing alone wouldn't allow it. MAking some sacrifices AMD could potentially squeeze 70-80MT in, but that's about it.
Intel's 14nm++ is superior for sure, but it's not "markedly" anything. 12LP is already better than the original Intel 14nm and competing quite well with 14nm+ while achieving actual higher density.
"since roughly the 90nm days, the process has become less and less important, and that's why Intel has been able to compete despite"
Anton, that's very much "so far so good" thinking. Intel is cruising on velocity built up five years ago, but that can't continue much longer.
- Along dimension 1 we have AMD. Still executing well, mainly limited by how many wafers TSMC can make for them. Poor AMD. But wait. isn't Huawei, a, uh, fairly large, TSMC customer going to have to stop using them soon? Seems like that's going to open up a whole lot more capacity for an enthusiastic little Intel competitor.
- Along dimension 2 we have Graviton2, and Amazon's proof, growing every day, that there's a substantial pool of data warehouse work that runs better (cheaper and/or faster) on ARM. And Graviton2 is still mainly a learning chip! Cortex X1/Graviton 3 will be out in what, a year or less... Meanwhile for other companies envious of Amazon's situation there are Altra and TX3.
- Along dimension 3 we have Apple Silicon. And while Apple numbers are a small part of Intel's sales, Apple and AWS have given a whole new impetus to porting all sorts of infrastructure code (your MySQL, your zlib, your zend, ...) to ARMv8. And not just to port it now, but to work hard on serious optimization.
All of these are waves that have only crested in the past few months. But crested they have. Now we wait to see the fallout over the next few years...
In Intel's case as a volume producer, process is incredibly important because it is the decider of how much a part costs to manufacture.
This is why AMD is able to beat them on price, just like they were when their process was more advanced during the K6\Athlon era with incredibly advanced Motorola\IBM manufacturing technologies using a smaller process and gold interconnects in scalable manufacturing. They made those chips cheap and sold them cheap, really crushing Intel's credibility as a top performance chip producer during the P4 era.
Of course it would take 20 years for AMD to repeat that, particularely because of the damage done by Intel's strong-arm competitive tactics that locked them out of various OEM's.
It appears to me that marketing and MBAs have overridden any sense of risk management in the core critical process technology arm at Intel.
Risk assessments of the move to 10nm would have flagged the 2.7x density aim as very high risk. The engineers might have said 'we think it can be done', and marketing/MBAs clearly said 'do it!' but there was nobody to say 'engineers always say they can do things! we shouldn't just base the entire business' future on that'.
If Intel had aimed for 2x with 10nm it very well might have been ready a lot earlier. 7nm would probably be ready to go now.
TSMC clearly look to see what is achievable with the technology they have and the timelines they have - this is why 5nm is 1.8x. But they will be shipping millions of 5nm chips to consumers this year via Apple, Huawei, etc.
I'm happy to pile on MBAs as much as anyone, but it seems like MBAs just can't win here. Other commenters blame the MBAs for not letting engineering have their way. You are blaming them for letting engineers have their way. In the past when Intel was more engineering led, you would think the overconfidence problem would be worse, but they did fine.
The far more interesting question is what led to the overconfidence with 10nm, how did that get approved all the way up the chain, and what really went wrong on the technical side. Would love to hear from someone on the inside at some point.
"MBA vs. engineer" is a false dichotomy; plenty of engineers get an MBA at various points in their careers. Intel's problem is that reorganizations decided that "middle management" was worthless, but those are precisely the people that are have enough knowledge and experience to ask serious questions of engineering teams while being able to translate and filter that up to the C-suite.
It's been seen time and time again that getting rid of that layer - frequently corporate veterans who've spent 10, 20+ years at the company and REALLY know its values - is great for cutting costs short term but ends up hollowing out the brain trust in the long term.
Yeah I dont think it is about letting the engineers do what they want or not but about having contingencies in place. They had no plan for failure and if you fail to plan you plan to fail ;-)
Hear hear! MBAs would never understand the core asset of any high-tech company - its engineers, and as such wrong people and incompetent ideas bubble up to the top.
No one decided to milk 14nm. They tried to gain more density than the normal jump going from 22nm to 14nm and it bit them in the ass. They tried to gain more again going from 14nm to 10nm knowing how much trouble they had with the first gen 14nm.
I don't know what the issues with 7nm are but I can make a few guesses. Part of the issue is they haven't figured out how to work properly at the 10nm level so they can't apply that knowledge to 7nm. These things are done in parallel to degree but they are also depending on learning from the previous version. Can't do that if the previous version doesn't work right.
They're going to have to admit that the gains from shrinking are going to be less from here on and it's only going to get harder.
The voltages aren't dropping any more but the traces are, which is going to increase heat and resistance, which is going to roll itself into more heat and resistance...
They're going to have to look at the problem differently.
True but he's been an executive at Intel since 2016, i.e. as EVP and such AND of course it is not just him! As i wrote is it's him and people around him, the people who put them there and the culture they promote. My argument was a general statement about who drives the company and that's never one person it's the board and ultimately the big investors who control the board - as I wrote above.
But he basically continued the exact same path as his predecessor! Compare with say Satya, or Steve's return, or even Lisa Su. Where were the communications saying "we cannot continue with business as usual? We have to restructure everything. It will be tough, but there is no choice"?
All we got was "everything is perfect and it will be even more perfect going forward, just you wait and see".
The paradox of Intel is that it is doing well financially in a time when it has been failing technologically. Like Fatboy Slim they say "We're Number One, Why Try Harder?" but the world has changed and they are trashed by ARM on volume, AMD on performance and value, etc.
They need to get back to "only the paranoid survive" like they used to be if they want to survive. Now it seems the more they fail the better the earnings, and that will not go on forever.
Here is the real reason why Intel is failing miserably while AMD, NVIDIA and TSMC are doing exactly the opposite and thriving.
Intel's fab has a big ongoing cultural problem and is an albatross around Intel's neck. Unfortunately Bob Swan inherited a trail of cronies in TMG (TD) management chain from the previous head of TMG who was unceremoniously "retired". Nothing significant has changed in last 2 years for TMG. The list is long.. SVP heading overall PTD, yield VP, 10nm yield manager - who oddly has kept his job/promoted in spite of behavioral issues and consistently poor performance - all Rennsaeler grads btw (some kind of favoritism going on there as well) , litho manager calling shots in 10nm, process integration manager in charge of COAG,.....
The CEO needs to force Intel's Chief "Engineering" Officer Murthy to fix this colossal mess somehow. This is not an easy task - perhaps he can begin by demoting all managers in TD organization by couple of levels enmasse to weed out cronies who will automatically leave since now they would have to start doing some real engineering work.
If this is deemed to be too big a problem to be fixed, the CEO would be left with no choice but to sell off Intel's fabs and manufacturing unit to the highest bidder (Glofo/Samsung/SMIC?) ASAP. Perhaps he could use the proceeds of the sale to buy one of ARM/Nvidia/AMD/Qualcomm to help keep Intel relevant in the long term.
I’m curious if you think Bob or the BoD has the backbone to make wholesale changes in the C Suite anytime soon? The CEO and Board work for the shareholders.
I have honestly never seen this many downgrades and bad press on a company. Reminds me of Nokia. Friday was a wholesale vote of no confidence.
Part of the problem is that with investors hardly looking past this quarter's profits, there's little appetite at the board level until profits fall. Intel's had no issues selling all the 14nm chips it can produce, so there's been no pressure for a shakeup.
Of course, by the time there's a material impact on Intel's finances, it'll almost be too late - it'd take 2/3 years at a MINIMUM to get things back on track once competent management was in place.
I mean its very much possible as their CEO was an EVP and CFO at intel before becoming CEO, which means he oversaw the past few years including the shift of R&D towards data centric while neglecting process problems and firing thousands of employees. At the time they were able to get away with it as AMD's CPU architecture was terrible but after they repaired it with Zen and TSMC ramped up 7nm all of Intel's node problems suddenly became a huge liability.
And pursuing (and spending money and good will of employees) "diversity and inclusion" instead of hiring and promoting simply the best without any racist and sexist considerations.
Pfff all this whining of incompetent white boys about actually having to compete on merit instead of getting there through the old boys network is getting tiring. Yes. You lost your advantage. Just having testosterone and a big mouth isn't enough to win over more competent women. Live with it and put in some effort instead of complain all day about the unfairness of it all.
And yes that is what is happening. A company that has 90% white male engineers didn't get there by promoting and hiring the most competent but the most loud and overconfident ppl. Esp in management.
Indeed, the right way to fix that is to hire and promote on actual merit, not on confidence, but that is hard so many organizations pick the second best, compensating with diversity programs to get a culture change and make it easier to move from "loudmouth" to a merit based system. And boy do the loudmouths, who were used to hide their incompetence, complain.
But hey, we will get there, hopefully before you retire.
@peevee - weird that you're suddenly upset about "special advantages" for women, but apparently fine with the well-documented ones that have existed for white middle-class males for centuries now.
Hammer, nail, head. It's always a chuckle when people try to cite the deliberate undoing of racism/sexism as some sort of racism/sexism in and of itself.
If they actually looked into how this works in practice - i.e. disambiguating CVs from people's identities until the last possible moment - they'd see how fully of shit their complaints are. But they don't, because that requires effort.
The fundamental thing is that Intel has always been a manufacturing company. Their advantage was sometimes in design, but it was ALWAYS in fabrication. They were better at it than everyone and they were able to use it to run the competition into the ground. That is clearly not who they are anymore, and it's just strange to watch.
We need to see the implications of this. The US is losing the main company with fab remaining and the two top players are now near China. In Taiwan and in Korea. This means losing strategic dominance for the US which is now a country on decline
I think some people fail to see the broad implications of this. The US is losing strategic dominance on a main industry which is chipmaking while the two new lead makers are now in Korea and Taiwan, which means close to China The US is on the decline
Here’s a hypothetical. Let’s say China ratchets up comments that Taiwan is a part of China (which it has repeated stated). After what they are doing in HK, how can the US allow Intc to outsource its bleeding edge tech to TSMC? You basically would have a failure point for Apple, amd, Nadia and Intc in Taiwan.
Let’s see how trump and buddies in the senate respond.
My assumption is it would lead to a situation where we can't stand idly by and speak meaningless words of support and worthless statements of condemnation. We would be forced to support Taiwan against a foreign invader, because to do otherwise would be devastating for american businesses.
Interested in anyone's thoughts on whether this is an issue of "Intel can't do 7nm" or "Intel can't do their designs/architecture at 7nm"? I mean, is there a chance that their designs can't be done by anyone at 7nm and that a redesign/rearchitecting is in order?
Intel tech is years ahead of all and always was, check out advancements on quantum Horse RIDGE II than neruphorbic chip and many more they are way in front of all...
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azfacea - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
Give an engineering company to a marketing department and what did you expect the outcome to be ? surprise surprise Bob Swan is not Elon Musk. but its not just Bob Swan, intel has been run by the same corporate sales force mentality that has destroyed orcale. but thats just my opinion. I am sure someone thinks Oracle is never been betterazfacea - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
steve jobs on why companies fail:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmFlOd0MGZg
SystemsBuilder - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
No you are right about your Oracle comparison and analysis! The fundamental problem is that Intel, a tech company, is currently run by MBAs who do not have even the most basic understanding of what matters in this bleeding edge, high capital investment industry: Process excellence is what it is all about! Without that it does not matter how well you can design a CPU etc.For a MBA it is simply too attractive to make short term profit off of the 14nm process and leverage the market lock in position (that Intel has or is looking slowly slip away from) as long as possible. To make things worse executive compensation equity plans reinforce this behavior, driving them to maximize net profit short term. In this business, short term is a few years and we are now finally coming to the end of this "milking 14nm+++++" strategy.
In short: you need an engineer at the top of a high tech company who understands deeply what Intel needs and what strategically drives intel’s long term success, who does the right thing even if it hurts a quarter or 2 and invest in the long term.
Andy Grove famously said: “Only the paranoid survives” and for the last few Intel has just not been paranoid enough but has been dominated by executives who are blinded by next few quarters of profit and corresponding executive pay.
In the end it is of course the board’s fault or rather the long term strong investors fault (who vote for who should be on the board). They should have fixed the executive level before it got to this situation.
As a parallel Microsoft went through roughly a decade or so with a sales guy at the top (Steve Balmer) and flat share price as a consequence. So Bill G. was convinced that the “next CEO of Microsoft shall be an engineer” so when the time comes, sure enough, in comes Satya N. (a distinguished engineer at MS). He does what needs to be done, stock price takes off and the rest is history.
Intel shareholders take note and act.
AntonErtl - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
On the contrary, since roughly the 90nm days, the process has become less and less important, and that's why Intel has been able to compete despite their 10nm and 7nm woes (compare that to the late 1990s; what if Intel's 250nm (Katmai) and 180nm (Coppermine) process had been delayed for 3+ years, and they would have been forced to compete with Klamath (at up to 300MHz) against Thunderbird (at up to 1400MHz)?). However, the fact that Intel tightly couples their microarchitecture implementations to processes means that process delays also delay their microarchitecture innovations, and then, yes, designing better microarchitectures does not help them; OTOH, this tight coupling probably gives them a clock speed advantage (compare Zen 1 clock speed to Skylake++ clock speed in 2017, both on 14nm).edzieba - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
Process became the primary driver of performance with 22nm. Past there, cost/transistor started rising, area scaling started slowing dramatically, power density (capping peak performance) started increasing dramatically, the gate oxide thickness limit meant voltage hit 1v and stopped dropping, and practical frequency limits capped at 5GHz (either overclocked, or now mainstream parts). With the exception of situations where perf/watt is paramount (mobile and laptop), the larger the process you can get away with the better.Quantumz0d - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
Nadella couldn't do shit to the Windows Phone he fucked it up even worse by making the Chevron WinPhone hack that could make a lot like Android type freedom during the old days a big edge over the competition and the store for applications. He was yapping "mobile first", and MS nuked it by C&D and closing all of it beleving in their utopia like Nokia's management which was not beleiving in their engg of Maemo but putting all eggs into that sellout trojan horse Elop.And later he copied that Adobe's As a Service and stamped onto Windows with firing the Chief of Windows and dissolving that OS division, they make money because he also copied Amazon by Azure. He is just a puppet for the BOD. They have that monopoly grip due to the x86 and Wintel dominance as no other OS could be put into hands of the people thus they have that high stock boost, Win10 is pure cancer, every Tuesday there's a patch and they experiment on Home and Pro for Enterprise quality updates, they are forcing heavy telemetry into the OS and 6 month feature releases with insane bugs.
Intel on the other hand ruined by BK and the whole corporate structure internally, they also started to pander woke political trash because, California, that degenerate place can never forget how awful it is, with radical extremist laws now like mandated Senate Bill 826 and other BS nonsense. Firing BK not because of his failure but MeToo was horrible card. And now made a bean counter as CEO to appease investors. This company also lost Jim Keller perhaps too soon, since he does leave the companies once he is done but with Intel it was too soon esp given how excl. AT's Ian interviews were glowingly positive.
Intel has to get their shit right by hiring proper people who are fit for the goddamned job not a quota and have a long term plan, they have money but money cannot put R&D and success it's a hardwork and patience path not virtue signalling trash like how this weak CEO was doing after what is happening in US.
jospoortvliet - Monday, July 27, 2020 - link
your post is as badly written as it is wrong... I don't like Microsoft one bit but they are making the right moves for their shareholders, that's for sure.SystemsBuilder - Monday, July 27, 2020 - link
There are so many errors in what you say about MS that it's hard go through them all except to say you are wrong.For example: Steve B. was responsible for the phone fiasco 100%. One of Satya's first action after becoming CEO was to write off the whole catastrophic Nokia acquisition (I think the write off was $10B). Steve had persisted with his phone strategy for years even when the whole phone division was clearly sinking (huge loss leader for years). AND indeed the Nokia acquisition is why Steve B. had to go in the end. Bill G. made sure it was a graceful exit but nonetheless Nokia was the last straw.
Azure is a much older that you may think. MS started to develop it more than 10 years ago. If anything there is significant migration of employees (also executives) from MS to Amazon that took lot of that thinking with them… so it’s wrong that MS somehow copied AWS. If anything MS understood cloud early but because of the misguided priorities they did not give it enough focus (distractions like Nokia, aQuantive acquisition other wacko initiatives that have the organization flip flopping chasing the latest shiny thing - I’ve seen it first hand) until Satya took over and refocused the company on cloud. I could go on for hours. But the best proof you are wrong is just to look at MS share price comparing the 14 years with Steve B. as CEO (share price 2000: $40 -> 48 when he retired) with the years with Satya ($48 - > $200). It’s pretty stunning. Don’t’ know enough about the internals of Intel to comment on that. But I do know MS internals!
PaulHoule - Friday, July 31, 2020 - link
I used to drive my car on Nokia snow tires. Then around the time they split out the unprofitable parts of Nokia (cell phones) from the profitable parts (everything else) they started making the tires in Russia and I switched to Blizzaks.peevee - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
Cost/transistor was the primary driver before multiple patterning had to be engaged.But for a few years now power efficiency (in executing operations in a loop) is EVERYTHING, including even desktops. It is the BY FAR the most limiting factor both on supply side, and on cooling side. And shorter signal lines mean not just shorter local latencies, but less power dissipation everything else being equal.
That is why the physical memory architecture with DIMMS being in a separate place on a motherboard should have long been abandoned. At the very least, switch to SODIMM slots on the CPU package itself (4 sides, 4 slots), radically simplifying MB design and reducing latencies while allowing lower signal voltages.
0ldman79 - Sunday, July 26, 2020 - link
They can put memory on package but that will impact thermals.They can't put memory slots on the package without making the package a board. By the time they make it a board it's literally the exact same thing it is today on the motherboard, literally the first hop out of the CPU socket. Memory latencies have nothing to do with the current layout. The only way to improve that would be to go do a different type of memory, HBM on package as an L4, something like that. DDR5 does show promise, splitting the channels won't directly help the latency but giving 4 channels will give twice the chance of not having to wait on the memory that's in the middle of another process.
dotjaz - Monday, July 27, 2020 - link
You forgot EM wave travels at limited speed, a typical wiring would add 2-3nspeevee - Monday, July 27, 2020 - link
Today the package is already a board. The chip itself takes a tiny part of the space since after 8080 or so.Santoval - Sunday, July 26, 2020 - link
"capped at 5GHz (either overclocked, or now mainstream parts)".There used to be a clear distinction, but after Zen was released Intel could no longer compete in IPC so they started overclocking their mainstream parts, which they still do. This is why their TDP values have gone through the roof.
jospoortvliet - Monday, July 27, 2020 - link
sure, they compete by clocking higher at higher top, but it gives them the crown (well in some situations) and i guess that is what matters. Amd couldn't clock their cpus higher even when allowing tdp to blow so intel has at least some advantage there. If they had brought a newer arch to 14nm 3 years ago and another last year the world would have looked different: amd would be well behind. Certainly bad management at Intel to take the risk assuming your process never delays (...), but given the delays the gap is surprisingly small....Spunjji - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
1) Intel 14nm is really not directly comparable to GloFo 14nm (Intel's process is markedly superior).2) Zen's clock speed deficits are partially a result of the design of the architecture, which is why Zen+ only provided incremental improvements on that front even though it was much more heavily tailored to 14nm.
You're certainly right that it's not just the manufacturing process that makes a good CPU, though.
Santoval - Sunday, July 26, 2020 - link
"Zen's clock speed deficits are partially a result of the design of the architecture"Only partially, but we don't know how partially. Still, everything else being equal smaller nodes beyond a certain point result in lower clocks. If Zen 2 had been fabbed with TSMC's highest transistor density at 7nm (~97 MTr/㎟) its clocks would have been even lower (while its energy efficiency would be even higher).
0ldman79 - Sunday, July 26, 2020 - link
I think it's fair to say that almost all of Zen's clock limits are architecture.FX and Sandy Bridge could hit 5GHz on 32nm. Ivy Bridge didn't seem to hit it as often, Broadwell was almost a no show on the desktop, Skylake would hit 5.1GHz pretty consistently.
There's pretty much no argument that Global Foundries 14nm was outclassed by Intel but their 14nm should have been better than their own 32nm process.
I do agree in one respect tho, it seems we're hitting a point where clock speed limits are getting lower. Increasing IPC tends to have that result.
dotjaz - Friday, July 31, 2020 - link
AMD couldn't possibly just "fabbed with TSMC's highest transistor density at 7nm", routing alone wouldn't allow it. MAking some sacrifices AMD could potentially squeeze 70-80MT in, but that's about it.dotjaz - Friday, July 31, 2020 - link
Intel's 14nm++ is superior for sure, but it's not "markedly" anything. 12LP is already better than the original Intel 14nm and competing quite well with 14nm+ while achieving actual higher density.name99 - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
"since roughly the 90nm days, the process has become less and less important, and that's why Intel has been able to compete despite"Anton, that's very much "so far so good" thinking. Intel is cruising on velocity built up five years ago, but that can't continue much longer.
- Along dimension 1 we have AMD. Still executing well, mainly limited by how many wafers TSMC can make for them. Poor AMD. But wait. isn't Huawei, a, uh, fairly large, TSMC customer going to have to stop using them soon? Seems like that's going to open up a whole lot more capacity for an enthusiastic little Intel competitor.
- Along dimension 2 we have Graviton2, and Amazon's proof, growing every day, that there's a substantial pool of data warehouse work that runs better (cheaper and/or faster) on ARM. And Graviton2 is still mainly a learning chip! Cortex X1/Graviton 3 will be out in what, a year or less...
Meanwhile for other companies envious of Amazon's situation there are Altra and TX3.
- Along dimension 3 we have Apple Silicon. And while Apple numbers are a small part of Intel's sales, Apple and AWS have given a whole new impetus to porting all sorts of infrastructure code (your MySQL, your zlib, your zend, ...) to ARMv8. And not just to port it now, but to work hard on serious optimization.
All of these are waves that have only crested in the past few months. But crested they have.
Now we wait to see the fallout over the next few years...
Samus - Saturday, July 25, 2020 - link
In Intel's case as a volume producer, process is incredibly important because it is the decider of how much a part costs to manufacture.This is why AMD is able to beat them on price, just like they were when their process was more advanced during the K6\Athlon era with incredibly advanced Motorola\IBM manufacturing technologies using a smaller process and gold interconnects in scalable manufacturing. They made those chips cheap and sold them cheap, really crushing Intel's credibility as a top performance chip producer during the P4 era.
Of course it would take 20 years for AMD to repeat that, particularely because of the damage done by Intel's strong-arm competitive tactics that locked them out of various OEM's.
psychobriggsy - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
It appears to me that marketing and MBAs have overridden any sense of risk management in the core critical process technology arm at Intel.Risk assessments of the move to 10nm would have flagged the 2.7x density aim as very high risk. The engineers might have said 'we think it can be done', and marketing/MBAs clearly said 'do it!' but there was nobody to say 'engineers always say they can do things! we shouldn't just base the entire business' future on that'.
If Intel had aimed for 2x with 10nm it very well might have been ready a lot earlier. 7nm would probably be ready to go now.
TSMC clearly look to see what is achievable with the technology they have and the timelines they have - this is why 5nm is 1.8x. But they will be shipping millions of 5nm chips to consumers this year via Apple, Huawei, etc.
martinw - Saturday, July 25, 2020 - link
I'm happy to pile on MBAs as much as anyone, but it seems like MBAs just can't win here. Other commenters blame the MBAs for not letting engineering have their way. You are blaming them for letting engineers have their way. In the past when Intel was more engineering led, you would think the overconfidence problem would be worse, but they did fine.The far more interesting question is what led to the overconfidence with 10nm, how did that get approved all the way up the chain, and what really went wrong on the technical side. Would love to hear from someone on the inside at some point.
sing_electric - Saturday, July 25, 2020 - link
"MBA vs. engineer" is a false dichotomy; plenty of engineers get an MBA at various points in their careers. Intel's problem is that reorganizations decided that "middle management" was worthless, but those are precisely the people that are have enough knowledge and experience to ask serious questions of engineering teams while being able to translate and filter that up to the C-suite.It's been seen time and time again that getting rid of that layer - frequently corporate veterans who've spent 10, 20+ years at the company and REALLY know its values - is great for cutting costs short term but ends up hollowing out the brain trust in the long term.
jospoortvliet - Monday, July 27, 2020 - link
Yeah I dont think it is about letting the engineers do what they want or not but about having contingencies in place. They had no plan for failure and if you fail to plan you plan to fail ;-)peevee - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
Hear hear!MBAs would never understand the core asset of any high-tech company - its engineers, and as such wrong people and incompetent ideas bubble up to the top.
0ldman79 - Sunday, July 26, 2020 - link
Milking 14nm isn't a strategy.10nm didn't work for years.
No one decided to milk 14nm. They tried to gain more density than the normal jump going from 22nm to 14nm and it bit them in the ass. They tried to gain more again going from 14nm to 10nm knowing how much trouble they had with the first gen 14nm.
I don't know what the issues with 7nm are but I can make a few guesses. Part of the issue is they haven't figured out how to work properly at the 10nm level so they can't apply that knowledge to 7nm. These things are done in parallel to degree but they are also depending on learning from the previous version. Can't do that if the previous version doesn't work right.
They're going to have to admit that the gains from shrinking are going to be less from here on and it's only going to get harder.
The voltages aren't dropping any more but the traces are, which is going to increase heat and resistance, which is going to roll itself into more heat and resistance...
They're going to have to look at the problem differently.
Peskarik - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
Dude, Intel was down the drain BEFORE Bob Swan joined as CEO.SystemsBuilder - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
True but he's been an executive at Intel since 2016, i.e. as EVP and such AND of course it is not just him!As i wrote is it's him and people around him, the people who put them there and the culture they promote.
My argument was a general statement about who drives the company and that's never one person it's the board and ultimately the big investors who control the board - as I wrote above.
sing_electric - Saturday, July 25, 2020 - link
Damn, 4 years at the company and he still hasn't overseen a successful process shrink across all their flagship CPU lines...name99 - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
But he basically continued the exact same path as his predecessor!Compare with say Satya, or Steve's return, or even Lisa Su.
Where were the communications saying "we cannot continue with business as usual? We have to restructure everything. It will be tough, but there is no choice"?
All we got was "everything is perfect and it will be even more perfect going forward, just you wait and see".
Spunjji - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
Elon Musk's no Elon Musk in the standards of this assessment, either. 😬PaulHoule - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
The paradox of Intel is that it is doing well financially in a time when it has been failing technologically. Like Fatboy Slim they say "We're Number One, Why Try Harder?" but the world has changed and they are trashed by ARM on volume, AMD on performance and value, etc.They need to get back to "only the paranoid survive" like they used to be if they want to survive. Now it seems the more they fail the better the earnings, and that will not go on forever.
name99 - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
Don't forget Boeing...Whether you're AOC or Trump, you're correct that the bulk of the US 1% have a LOT to answer for.
joejohnson293 - Saturday, July 25, 2020 - link
Here is the real reason why Intel is failing miserably while AMD, NVIDIA and TSMC are doing exactly the opposite and thriving.Intel's fab has a big ongoing cultural problem and is an albatross around Intel's neck. Unfortunately Bob Swan inherited a trail of cronies in TMG (TD) management chain from the previous head of TMG who was unceremoniously "retired". Nothing significant has changed in last 2 years for TMG. The list is long.. SVP heading overall PTD, yield VP, 10nm yield manager - who oddly has kept his job/promoted in spite of behavioral issues and consistently poor performance - all Rennsaeler grads btw (some kind of favoritism going on there as well) , litho manager calling shots in 10nm, process integration manager in charge of COAG,.....
The CEO needs to force Intel's Chief "Engineering" Officer Murthy to fix this colossal mess somehow. This is not an easy task - perhaps he can begin by demoting all managers in TD organization by couple of levels enmasse to weed out cronies who will automatically leave since now they would have to start doing some real engineering work.
If this is deemed to be too big a problem to be fixed, the CEO would be left with no choice but to sell off Intel's fabs and manufacturing unit to the highest bidder (Glofo/Samsung/SMIC?) ASAP. Perhaps he could use the proceeds of the sale to buy one of ARM/Nvidia/AMD/Qualcomm to help keep Intel relevant in the long term.
HomelessHardware - Saturday, July 25, 2020 - link
I’m curious if you think Bob or the BoD has the backbone to make wholesale changes in the C Suite anytime soon?The CEO and Board work for the shareholders.
I have honestly never seen this many downgrades and bad press on a company. Reminds me of Nokia. Friday was a wholesale vote of no confidence.
sing_electric - Saturday, July 25, 2020 - link
Part of the problem is that with investors hardly looking past this quarter's profits, there's little appetite at the board level until profits fall. Intel's had no issues selling all the 14nm chips it can produce, so there's been no pressure for a shakeup.Of course, by the time there's a material impact on Intel's finances, it'll almost be too late - it'd take 2/3 years at a MINIMUM to get things back on track once competent management was in place.
SunLord - Sunday, July 26, 2020 - link
Intel is where Boeing was in the mid 2000sSpunjji - Friday, July 31, 2020 - link
100% agreed with this. The rot has set in, it's just not "visible" on the profit/loss accounts yet.aratuk - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
It is remarkable, the time it's taken to hear from Intel even the first inkling of a 10nm part rated more than 25W TDP. Still in the hazy future.And c'mon guys, I seriously doubt it's taken Intel this long to build out the 10nm process because of who the CEO is.
whatthe123 - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
I mean its very much possible as their CEO was an EVP and CFO at intel before becoming CEO, which means he oversaw the past few years including the shift of R&D towards data centric while neglecting process problems and firing thousands of employees. At the time they were able to get away with it as AMD's CPU architecture was terrible but after they repaired it with Zen and TSMC ramped up 7nm all of Intel's node problems suddenly became a huge liability.peevee - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
And pursuing (and spending money and good will of employees) "diversity and inclusion" instead of hiring and promoting simply the best without any racist and sexist considerations.jospoortvliet - Monday, July 27, 2020 - link
Pfff all this whining of incompetent white boys about actually having to compete on merit instead of getting there through the old boys network is getting tiring. Yes. You lost your advantage. Just having testosterone and a big mouth isn't enough to win over more competent women. Live with it and put in some effort instead of complain all day about the unfairness of it all.jospoortvliet - Monday, July 27, 2020 - link
And yes that is what is happening. A company that has 90% white male engineers didn't get there by promoting and hiring the most competent but the most loud and overconfident ppl. Esp in management.Indeed, the right way to fix that is to hire and promote on actual merit, not on confidence, but that is hard so many organizations pick the second best, compensating with diversity programs to get a culture change and make it easier to move from "loudmouth" to a merit based system. And boy do the loudmouths, who were used to hide their incompetence, complain.
But hey, we will get there, hopefully before you retire.
peevee - Monday, July 27, 2020 - link
If you have to have special advantages given to you for hiring and promoting, you are not a "more competent woman".Spunjji - Friday, July 31, 2020 - link
@peevee - weird that you're suddenly upset about "special advantages" for women, but apparently fine with the well-documented ones that have existed for white middle-class males for centuries now.Spunjji - Friday, July 31, 2020 - link
Hammer, nail, head. It's always a chuckle when people try to cite the deliberate undoing of racism/sexism as some sort of racism/sexism in and of itself.If they actually looked into how this works in practice - i.e. disambiguating CVs from people's identities until the last possible moment - they'd see how fully of shit their complaints are. But they don't, because that requires effort.
TristanSDX - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
They mentioned Alder Lake, but not Rocket Lake. Maybe RL is cancelled, because current Comet Lake sells very well.Meteor2 - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
Rocker Lake was never more than a rumour. Believe rumours at your perilDeicidium369 - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
Rocket Lake has been in the slides for ages - and is the 2nd CPU to support the new socket 1200. Far more than a rumorhttps://hothardware.com/news/intel-11th-gen-rocket...
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/it-turns-out-int...
Meteor2 - Saturday, July 25, 2020 - link
Slides presented by Intel staff to journalists or stakeholders?Colin1497 - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
The fundamental thing is that Intel has always been a manufacturing company. Their advantage was sometimes in design, but it was ALWAYS in fabrication. They were better at it than everyone and they were able to use it to run the competition into the ground. That is clearly not who they are anymore, and it's just strange to watch.Spunjji - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
There's a lot of "expected" in that slide 👀RU482 - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
This presentation....what is the Intel document number? sure seems to contradict a lot of dates that moved in the July roadmap announcementRyan Smith - Saturday, July 25, 2020 - link
That is from Intel's Q2 earnings presentation.https://s21.q4cdn.com/600692695/files/doc_financia...
MDD1963 - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
"The successor to Tiger Lake now has an official launch window of the second-half of 2021. *2H 2021? I'll just assume that mean's Dec 7th....
(Only 4-5 years late....excellent!)
Teo7272 - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
We need to see the implications of this.The US is losing the main company with fab remaining and the two top players are now near China.
In Taiwan and in Korea.
This means losing strategic dominance for the US which is now a country on decline
Teo7272 - Friday, July 24, 2020 - link
I think some people fail to see the broad implications of this.The US is losing strategic dominance on a main industry which is chipmaking while the two new lead makers are now in Korea and Taiwan, which means close to China
The US is on the decline
HomelessHardware - Saturday, July 25, 2020 - link
Here’s a hypothetical. Let’s say China ratchets up comments that Taiwan is a part of China (which it has repeated stated). After what they are doing in HK, how can the US allow Intc to outsource its bleeding edge tech to TSMC? You basically would have a failure point for Apple, amd, Nadia and Intc in Taiwan.Let’s see how trump and buddies in the senate respond.
Lord of the Bored - Sunday, July 26, 2020 - link
My assumption is it would lead to a situation where we can't stand idly by and speak meaningless words of support and worthless statements of condemnation.We would be forced to support Taiwan against a foreign invader, because to do otherwise would be devastating for american businesses.
yeeeeman - Saturday, July 25, 2020 - link
After alder lake meteor lake will follow. It's PCH will be made on tsmc 6nm process.mattbg - Monday, July 27, 2020 - link
Interested in anyone's thoughts on whether this is an issue of "Intel can't do 7nm" or "Intel can't do their designs/architecture at 7nm"? I mean, is there a chance that their designs can't be done by anyone at 7nm and that a redesign/rearchitecting is in order?Arian - Saturday, December 19, 2020 - link
Intel tech is years ahead of all and always was, check out advancements on quantum Horse RIDGE II than neruphorbic chip and many more they are way in front of all...