These were actually pretty good questions. I would've loved to see a question if Intel will ever return to Arm, after StrongARM & XScale in the early 2000s.
On technical vs financial: I wonder, if Bob Swan said "technical" because he knew a question came from Ian Cutress, Senior Editor at AnandTech. 😅 Nonetheless, I hope that's true. Intel's reputation has been severely bruised and it will likely never heal back to its former monopolistic glory, I think, versus the-nearly-identical-story a decade ago with Prescott (with IPC instead of fabrication).
So, I hope these open-ended interviews (relatively speaking) with senior Intel executives becomes more common: kudos to whatever marketing executive approved this. Even famously-guarded Apple did *many* interviews after the M1 release, some nearly an hour long with 1:2 YouTube podcast-style.
Of course, this interview comes on the heels of new product launches, so if 10nmSF flops again for desktops, then we'll see if Intel will come out of the cave--half-joking.
Intel continues betting in the wrong technologies and that's due to the mismanagement of maybe 70 people that drags the performance of the other 70K (and decreasing) engineers.
The current debacle was brought by using the same-old approaches to try to achieve very lofty goals. From choosing which semiconductor technologies to apply to the execution of Exa-scale projects Intel bet in the same old approaches and it is being surpassed by its competitors in every metric (as things are right now AMD is scheduled to deliver the Frontier 1.5 ExaFLOPS supercomputer before Intel is even half ready to deploy its 1 ExaFLOP Aurora system).
Those errors come from the Krzanich era but so far Swan has shown little appetite for change.
Yet another defensive response that isn't actually replying to the stated criticism.
"as things are right now AMD is scheduled to deliver the Frontier 1.5 ExaFLOPS supercomputer before Intel is even half ready to deploy its 1 ExaFLOP Aurora system" vs. "looks to me like AMD's Frontier hardware will be a generation behind this."
Who cares if it's a "generation behind" something that's a day late and a dollar short?
I think the point of AMX is to waste a lot of die area so it is easier to cool the chip. Like SIMD instructions you are going to face a fractured market where the support costs for handling the 2.8% of people who have one set of instructions and 1.7% of people who have another set of instructions makes it likely that the instructions won't get used most of the time -- so Intel might as well fuse them off so that you are guaranteed to get the power and thermal benefits of having dead space on the die.
If you picked up a linear algebra textbook you might think people GEMM a lot in scientific computing but in real life they just don't. AMX might help for AI inference in 2021 but probably by 2025 people will be using sparse binary representations or 4-bit ints or who knows what. (e.g. gate the carries with a mask and it's easy to make an added that adds variable length packed bits)
Then they insult our intelligence by renaming OpenCL to "OneAPI" and think we'll be fooled into thinking it's better.
They aren't going to listen to us but someday they'll have to listen to the bankruptcy judge.
By business software you are talking about pirated copy of office from 2005 that cant be recompiled?? "business software" why wouldnt it be recompilable ?? most business software is web based already. many google/amazon services are being served right now, from ARM CDNs and ARM RDS instances.
Again, a small issue, but I am fully aware of everything in your response and it is not an answer to my question.
What I was referring to was sometime ago Intel tied the product names to the core architecture names. A new core architecture would have a new base name and updates to the core would share the same base name. Ivy Bridge was an update to Sandy Bridge. Haswell was a new architecture and when it was updated, the name was Broadwell. Then of course all of the Lakes up until recently were updates of Skylake.
That is what I was asking about, why this time around when they launched a new architecture with the new naming scheme Sunny Cove, why the product names didn’t switch to variations of Cove in the same vein as what they had been doing previously.
Intel has lost the talent war. All the best CPU engineers are out of the company due to extreme talent malpractice and bad product management . Tier 1 talent at the grassroots level does not go to Intel anymore. No matter which high flying exec you hire if you don’t go back to the basics of simply hiring the best and brightest at all levels, and having proper technical management instead of PowerPoint pushers and kool aid drinkers, it’s there for the taking. Kudos to Lisa, compared to this CEO, simply no comparison.
Intel CEO barely pulls down more than her for 20B NET INCOME. She's making HOW much for her company? <1B NET INCOME.
You are right, there is no comparison. He is killing it, and that's the bottom line...LOL. In 2yrs we'll be laughing again about how AMD blew it again. They wasted 3yrs getting market instead of making net INCOME, and now making net income is about to get MUCH harder Q1 and worse Q4. Make all the NET INCOME you can in the next 12 month AMD, time is running out on your stock. At some point you have to make more then your Q4 2009 1B+ net income quarter (not year, I said QUARTER). They haven't done it since.
see macrotrends.net punch in AMD (intel, nvidia etc, compare!).
Still trying to figure out how 1. (Getting rid of fabs) even became a discussion point. The 14/10nm fabs are doing fine, they're making great profit and are definitely an Intel advantage, would be monumentally short sighted to get rid of it, quite a bit different from AMD's case where they were permanently late to market where most other foundries were fine.
Sure they are "keeping the fabs" they already have.
It's not at all credible at this point that there is going to be a 7nm process. When I hear they are going to outsource at TMSC it makes me feel that Intel might still be in business in 10 years, when they talk about making their own chips they have a lot to prove right now.
They've got to put the people who got the idea to fuse off functionality in dunce caps out in front of the headquarters. (It's a crime against engineering -- we work hard to deliver functionality to the end user and managers just take it away; Intel pays to fab those transistors and they are wasted when fused off, $'s of production money are wasted; you *might* be able to make it back by overcharging a few people, just like the airlines *might* (but don't) make back the $5 saved by a coach passenger because a first class passenger paid $1000)
i think Intel has to buy a license for 10 and 7nm as they are burning way too much cash, getting nowhere, and being left behind technically. they need to pivot and do this so they can learn what they are doing wrong, and grow from it.
So basically Intel f*cked up for a long time and their chokehold on the industry combined with the fact that they have no competitor kept their ass on their laurels for a decade.
"Whichever way you slice it this was a very interesting call about Intel and the company’s future." After I read the whole thing, I thought: I want my time back. That's how dull and uninformative the whole thing was.
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ikjadoon - Monday, January 11, 2021 - link
These were actually pretty good questions. I would've loved to see a question if Intel will ever return to Arm, after StrongARM & XScale in the early 2000s.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale
On technical vs financial: I wonder, if Bob Swan said "technical" because he knew a question came from Ian Cutress, Senior Editor at AnandTech. 😅 Nonetheless, I hope that's true. Intel's reputation has been severely bruised and it will likely never heal back to its former monopolistic glory, I think, versus the-nearly-identical-story a decade ago with Prescott (with IPC instead of fabrication).
So, I hope these open-ended interviews (relatively speaking) with senior Intel executives becomes more common: kudos to whatever marketing executive approved this. Even famously-guarded Apple did *many* interviews after the M1 release, some nearly an hour long with 1:2 YouTube podcast-style.
Of course, this interview comes on the heels of new product launches, so if 10nmSF flops again for desktops, then we'll see if Intel will come out of the cave--half-joking.
JayNor - Monday, January 11, 2021 - link
What 10SF desktop have they announced?lmcd - Monday, January 11, 2021 - link
Alder Lake?Deicidium369 - Monday, January 11, 2021 - link
SF is Tiger LakeESF is Golden Cove
bwhitty - Monday, January 11, 2021 - link
Alder Lake now confirmed for Enhanced 10SF.Arsenica - Monday, January 11, 2021 - link
Intel continues betting in the wrong technologies and that's due to the mismanagement of maybe 70 people that drags the performance of the other 70K (and decreasing) engineers.The current debacle was brought by using the same-old approaches to try to achieve very lofty goals. From choosing which semiconductor technologies to apply to the execution of Exa-scale projects Intel bet in the same old approaches and it is being surpassed by its competitors in every metric (as things are right now AMD is scheduled to deliver the Frontier 1.5 ExaFLOPS supercomputer before Intel is even half ready to deploy its 1 ExaFLOP Aurora system).
Those errors come from the Krzanich era but so far Swan has shown little appetite for change.
JayNor - Monday, January 11, 2021 - link
"same-old approaches"Aurora combines:
Sapphire Rapids ... 10esf, pcie5, cxl, ddr5, AMX tiled matrix processing, Golden Cove cores
Xe-HPC ... 16 tile GPU with HBM, Rambo Cache
looks to me like AMD's Frontier hardware will be a generation behind this.
Deicidium369 - Monday, January 11, 2021 - link
6 x 16 tiles GPU - each 65535 CoresEach HPE/Cray Sled is 2 x Sapphire Rapids and 6 x Xe-HPC (393,216 cores total)
Spunjji - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link
Yet another defensive response that isn't actually replying to the stated criticism."as things are right now AMD is scheduled to deliver the Frontier 1.5 ExaFLOPS supercomputer before Intel is even half ready to deploy its 1 ExaFLOP Aurora system"
vs.
"looks to me like AMD's Frontier hardware will be a generation behind this."
Who cares if it's a "generation behind" something that's a day late and a dollar short?
PaulHoule - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link
AMX?I think the point of AMX is to waste a lot of die area so it is easier to cool the chip. Like SIMD instructions you are going to face a fractured market where the support costs for handling the 2.8% of people who have one set of instructions and 1.7% of people who have another set of instructions makes it likely that the instructions won't get used most of the time -- so Intel might as well fuse them off so that you are guaranteed to get the power and thermal benefits of having dead space on the die.
If you picked up a linear algebra textbook you might think people GEMM a lot in scientific computing but in real life they just don't. AMX might help for AI inference in 2021 but probably by 2025 people will be using sparse binary representations or 4-bit ints or who knows what. (e.g. gate the carries with a mask and it's easy to make an added that adds variable length packed bits)
Then they insult our intelligence by renaming OpenCL to "OneAPI" and think we'll be fooled into thinking it's better.
They aren't going to listen to us but someday they'll have to listen to the bankruptcy judge.
azfacea - Monday, January 11, 2021 - link
x86 in 2021 LUL. I heard A76 uses a quarter of the transistors as a skylake core. wow.Get rdy 4 RK3588.
lmcd - Monday, January 11, 2021 - link
About 1/4 the performance in Intel's typical workloads, too. It'll be a big deal if the X1 gets close to an Intel Core product. A77 isn't there.Spunjji - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link
"About 1/4 the performance in Intel's typical workloads"--citation needed--
lmcd - Wednesday, January 13, 2021 - link
Oh, I don't know, anything Windows that won't be recompiled? So the entirety of business software, basically?azfacea - Wednesday, January 13, 2021 - link
By business software you are talking about pirated copy of office from 2005 that cant be recompiled?? "business software" why wouldnt it be recompilable ?? most business software is web based already. many google/amazon services are being served right now, from ARM CDNs and ARM RDS instances.azfacea - Wednesday, January 13, 2021 - link
it was meant to be @lmcdDeicidium369 - Monday, January 11, 2021 - link
and 1% of the installed software baseThe Hardcard - Monday, January 11, 2021 - link
Did I miss the discussion on why the processors with Cove cores don’t have Cove names. Tiny issue to be sure, but am I the only one curious?Deicidium369 - Monday, January 11, 2021 - link
They can call it what they want - you will never buy a CPU called "Rocket Lake" It will be called an 11900K for the top SKUThe can name them after Peanuts or characters from LotR
The Cove names denote the new post Skylake architecture... Cove=arch / Lake=product
The Hardcard - Monday, January 11, 2021 - link
Again, a small issue, but I am fully aware of everything in your response and it is not an answer to my question.What I was referring to was sometime ago Intel tied the product names to the core architecture names. A new core architecture would have a new base name and updates to the core would share the same base name. Ivy Bridge was an update to Sandy Bridge. Haswell was a new architecture and when it was updated, the name was Broadwell. Then of course all of the Lakes up until recently were updates of Skylake.
That is what I was asking about, why this time around when they launched a new architecture with the new naming scheme Sunny Cove, why the product names didn’t switch to variations of Cove in the same vein as what they had been doing previously.
Spunjji - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link
To obscure their weird mixed-architecture generations and general lack of progress.Deicidium knows this but doesn't like it, hence the deflection.
arkhamasylum87 - Monday, January 11, 2021 - link
Intel has lost the talent war. All the best CPU engineers are out of the company due to extreme talent malpractice and bad product management . Tier 1 talent at the grassroots level does not go to Intel anymore. No matter which high flying exec you hire if you don’t go back to the basics of simply hiring the best and brightest at all levels, and having proper technical management instead of PowerPoint pushers and kool aid drinkers, it’s there for the taking. Kudos to Lisa, compared to this CEO, simply no comparison.TheJian - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link
Intel CEO barely pulls down more than her for 20B NET INCOME. She's making HOW much for her company? <1B NET INCOME.You are right, there is no comparison. He is killing it, and that's the bottom line...LOL. In 2yrs we'll be laughing again about how AMD blew it again. They wasted 3yrs getting market instead of making net INCOME, and now making net income is about to get MUCH harder Q1 and worse Q4. Make all the NET INCOME you can in the next 12 month AMD, time is running out on your stock. At some point you have to make more then your Q4 2009 1B+ net income quarter (not year, I said QUARTER). They haven't done it since.
see macrotrends.net punch in AMD (intel, nvidia etc, compare!).
Spunjji - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link
Christ on a bike...Qasar - Thursday, January 14, 2021 - link
just another pointless pro intel rant from TheJian, nothing new at all.RSAUser - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link
Still trying to figure out how 1. (Getting rid of fabs) even became a discussion point. The 14/10nm fabs are doing fine, they're making great profit and are definitely an Intel advantage, would be monumentally short sighted to get rid of it, quite a bit different from AMD's case where they were permanently late to market where most other foundries were fine.yeeeeman - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link
this guy really needs to go. he doesn't have a vision, he doesn't have engineering excellence and talent, he just has an appetite for Intel's moeny.yeeeeman - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link
Why Intel investors are still keeping him is beyond me...I am guessing they are also a bunch of idiots who pursue profit and only profit.PaulHoule - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link
Sure they are "keeping the fabs" they already have.It's not at all credible at this point that there is going to be a 7nm process. When I hear they are going to outsource at TMSC it makes me feel that Intel might still be in business in 10 years, when they talk about making their own chips they have a lot to prove right now.
They've got to put the people who got the idea to fuse off functionality in dunce caps out in front of the headquarters. (It's a crime against engineering -- we work hard to deliver functionality to the end user and managers just take it away; Intel pays to fab those transistors and they are wasted when fused off, $'s of production money are wasted; you *might* be able to make it back by overcharging a few people, just like the airlines *might* (but don't) make back the $5 saved by a coach passenger because a first class passenger paid $1000)
nunya112 - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link
i think Intel has to buy a license for 10 and 7nm as they are burning way too much cash, getting nowhere, and being left behind technically. they need to pivot and do this so they can learn what they are doing wrong, and grow from it.DanD85 - Tuesday, January 12, 2021 - link
So basically Intel f*cked up for a long time and their chokehold on the industry combined with the fact that they have no competitor kept their ass on their laurels for a decade.mentor07825 - Wednesday, January 13, 2021 - link
Ex-CEO now! That was fast.bug77 - Thursday, January 14, 2021 - link
"Whichever way you slice it this was a very interesting call about Intel and the company’s future."After I read the whole thing, I thought: I want my time back. That's how dull and uninformative the whole thing was.
But kudos for the tech talent trap ;)