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| ▲ | brookst 7 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Intel’s test for new business ideas has always been: will it make $1B in the first year? It leads to mistakes like you mention, where a new market segment or new entrant is not a sure thing. And then it leads to mistakes like Larrabee and Optane where they talk themselves into overconfidence (“obviously this is a great product, we wouldn’t be doing it if it wasn’t guaranteed to make $1B in the first year”). It is very hard to grow a business with zero risk appetite. You can’t take risky high return bets, and you can’t acknowledge the real risk in “safe” bets. | | |
| ▲ | twoodfin 6 days ago | parent | next [-] | | If Intel had a server SKU with fully integrated, competitive performance GPU cores that work with CUDA + unified memory, they’d sell billions worth in a day to the CSPs alone. Sounds like they will someday soon. There will always be giant, faraway GPU supercomputer clusters to train models. But the future of inference (where the model fits) is local to the CPU. | |
| ▲ | actionfromafar 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Larrabee could have grown into something very cool if they had not dropped it and made it available on the open market, donated to universities and so on. Transputer vibes. | | |
| ▲ | keyringlight 7 days ago | parent | next [-] | | I think for Larrabee it was intel experimenting to find other markets for their Atom cores, and if there was market for it they needed to have the tenacity to cultivate it. Similar to how nvidia took huge amounts of time establishing GPGPU, CUDA, then machine learning, through to reaping the rewards over the past few years. 2010-2011 was also the time that AMD were starting to moan a bit about DX11 and the higher level APIs not being sufficient to get the most out of GPUs, which led to Mantle/Vulkan/DX12 a few years down the road. Intel did a bit regarding massively parallel software rendering, with the flexibility to run on anything x86 and implement features as you liked, or AMD's efforts for 'fusion' (APU+GPU, after recently acquiring ATi) or HSA which I seem to recall was about dispatching different types of computing to the best suited processor(s) in the system for it. However I got the impression a lot of development effort is more interested in progressing on what they already have instead of starting in a new direction, and game studios want to ship finished and stable/predictable product, which is where support from intel would have helped. | |
| ▲ | brookst 7 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It’s entirely possible that Larrabee could have been the platform for Transformers. Maybe, maybe not. But certainly Intel wasn’t willing to wait for the market. Didn’t make $1 billion instantly; killed. |
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| ▲ | bflesch 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > will it make $1B in the first year? It's typical corporate venturing and reporting to a CFO. Google is not much better with them cutting their small(er) projects. |
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| ▲ | dlcarrier 7 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Console makers only get trivial modifications. ASRock sold a cryptocurrency miner, the BC-250, with the PS5 APU, and it works just like any of their other APUs, albeit with limited driver support. | | |
| ▲ | fidotron 7 days ago | parent [-] | | The BC250 does not use a PS5 APU, it uses another APU which has the same CPU core. By that measure the Cell in the PS3 and the Xenon of the XBox 360 were the same, or any AMD Jaguar device is a PS4. This relates to the Intel problem because they see the world the way you just described, and completely failed to grasp the importance of SoC development where you are suddenly free to consider the world without the preexisting buses and peripherals of the PC universe and to imagine something better. CPU cores are a means to an end, and represent an ever shrinking part of modern systems. | | |
| ▲ | dlcarrier 6 days ago | parent [-] | | There's almost no chance it isn't using rejected PS5 APU dies. It has fused off two of the eight CPU cores, as well as 12 of the 36 GPU compute units, but otherwise has the exact same specifications. The one customization Sony did get, the use of GDDR6 RAM, is still present. It also exhibits the same very short-lived mix of Zen 2 with RDNA 2 and has the same die size and aspect ratio. |
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| ▲ | mschuster91 7 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > they have turned down various console makers The problem is, console manufacturers know precisely how much of their product they anticipate to sell, and it's usually a lot. The PlayStation 5 is 80 million units so far. And at that scale, the console manufacturers want to squeeze every vendor as hard as they can... and Intel didn't see the need to engage in a bidding war with AMD that would have given them a sizable revenue but very little profit margin compared to selling Xeon CPUs to hyperscalers where Intel has much more leverage to command higher prices and thus higher margins. > they turned down Apple on the iPhone Intel just was (and frankly, still is) unable to compete on the power envelope with ARM, that's why you never saw x86 take off on Android as well despite quite a few attempts at it. Apple only chose to go for Intel with its MacBook line as PowerPC was practically dead and offered no way to extract more performance, and they dropped Intel as soon as their own CPUs were competitive. To get Intel CPUs to the same level of power efficiency that M-series CPUs have would require a full rework of the entire CPU infrastructure and external stack, that would require money that even Intel at its best frankly did not have. And getting x86 to be power effective enough for a phone? Just forget it. > Clearly the threat of an Arm or RISC-V finding itself fused to a GPU running AI inference workloads has woken someone up, at last. Actually, that is surprising for me as well. NVIDIA's Tegra should easily be powerful enough to run the OS for training or inference workload. If I were to guess, NVIDIA wants to avoid getting caught too hard on the "selling AI shovels" train. | | |
| ▲ | philistine 7 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Apple did not want their x86 chips, they wanted their Xscale stuff. Apple went to Intel to get chips, the power envelope was appealing to Apple. Intel was the one to say no. | | |
| ▲ | tmzt 7 days ago | parent [-] | | Right. But of course, intel was busy spinning off their Xscale business to Marvell. If they had seriously invested in it, they could have owned the coming mobile revolution. They did push hard on their UMPC x86 SoCs (Paulsbo and derivatives) to Sony, Nokia, etc. These were never competitive on heat or battery life. | | |
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| ▲ | burnte 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | > And at that scale, the console manufacturers want to squeeze every vendor as hard as they can... and Intel didn't see the need to engage in a bidding war with AMD that would have given them a sizable revenue but very little profit margin compared to selling Xeon CPUs to hyperscalers where Intel has much more leverage to command higher prices and thus higher margins. And so that gave AMD an opening, and with that opening they got to experiment with designs, tailor a product, get experience and industrial marketshare, and they were able to continue to offer more and better products. Intel didn't just miss a mediocre business opportunity, they missed out on becoming a trusted partner for multiple generations, and they handed market to AMD that AMD used to be a better market competitor. | | |
| ▲ | mschuster91 6 days ago | parent [-] | | > and they handed market to AMD that AMD used to be a better market competitor. AMD isn't precisely a market competitor. The server and business compute market is still firmly Intel and there isn't much evidence of that changing unless Apple drops M series SoCs to the wide open market which Apple won't do. Intel could probably release a raging dumpster fire and still go strong, oh wait, that's what they've been doing the last few years. AMD is only a competitor in the lower end of the market, a market Intel has zero issue handing to AMD outright - partially because a viable AMD keeps the antitrust enforcers from breathing down their neck, but more because it drags down per-unit profit margins to engage in consoles and the lower rungs and niches. | | |
| ▲ | burnte 6 days ago | parent [-] | | > The server and business compute market is still firmly Intel and there isn't much evidence of that changing This is not true anymore, as it IS changing, and very rapidly. AMD has shot up to 27.3% of the server market share, which they haven't had since the Opteron days 20 years ago. Five years ago their server market share was very small single digits. They're half of desktops, too. https://www.pcguide.com/news/no-amd-and-intel-arent-50-50-in... |
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| ▲ | mrheosuper 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | >To get Intel CPUs to the same level of power efficiency that M-series CPUs have would require a full rework of the entire CPU infrastructure and external stack, that would require money that even Intel at its best frankly did not have Intel, at one of its lowest low, still come up with lunar lake, which is not as efficiency as Apple M, but still, quite impressive. I bet if they were focus on mobile when they are at their peak, they could come up with something similar to Apple M | |
| ▲ | JustExAWS 6 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The PlayStation 5 is 80 million units so far. 80 million in 5 years is a nothing burger as far as volume. | | |
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