"Renduchintala was one of several key hires from outside Intel, which had been famous in Silicon Valley for developing and promoting talent from within. He was hired as part of a strategy to go after broader markets than the central processing units, or CPUs, the company became known for in the PC era."
I feel like this will go down in history as one of technology's most expensive decisions (that's not a knock on Renduchintala as much as it's my own astonishment at Intel thinking they were safe as recently as 2015).
I'm also a bit saddened by this. It confirms what we all suspected but what I secretly hoped wasn't true.
Intel for over a decade coyly hinted they had aces up their sleeves that would already have been played if they faced more competition. Graphene got kicked around in conversations for a while and then when that turned out to be a no go they talked about black phosphorus.
So after all that, aside from marginal tweaks and pretty meager die shrinks here and there, they were doing.. nothing?.. for ten years?
I mean, trying and failing isn't the same as doing nothing. But regardless, necessity is the mother of invention, so I'm sure they'll figure something out. They have 20b of cash (1/4 of AMD's total market cap) and their profits are damn good.
Make no mistake, Intel is very much aware this is a do or die situation, and I expect them to deploy all the resources at their disposal to fight both AMD and ARM. They don't have much debt and can borrow heavily and at great rates if necessary.
Why is it do or die just because they can't make faster CPUs? AMD can't make them either. It's the end of an entire era technologically. We all knew this day would come.It's a hard problem that requires a whole new paradigm probably. Hopefully both AMD and Intel will have enough money to keep doing research by trying and failing with various radical approaches or we may never see faster CPUs again. Why would they need to worry about ARM? That is low power mobile devices, a sector they got out of a while ago.
Because ARM is coming (has come) to the server (eg Ampere, Graviton). x86 was a moat around a server product with high margins. Now they have lost the process lead and there is the possibility of using ARM on the server that business is very vulnerable.
Apple is moving to ARM, and ARM is very much beginning to make inroads in the data center space. ARM is a big threat to x86 (so to both Intel and AMD).
Linpack is the "legacy" benchmark on pure FLOPs throughput. But HPCG is the more realistic benchmark that better tests the interconnects.
HPCG is a sparse-matrix, which more accurately represents many HPC problems. Linpack is a bit of a legacy, but still represents dense-compute pretty well.
Its still a GFLOPs / TFLops style measurement, but HPCG has a LOT more data movement.
> "Renduchintala was one of several key hires from outside Intel, which had been famous in Silicon Valley for developing and promoting talent from within."
Which was, IMO, one of the reasons why I left Intel. I interned there and did a 2-year stint.
What I saw was a culture where almost everyone who was there began their career at Intel, or at least joined very early in their career. No one was really aware of what the rest of the industry did.
In a way, Intel used to be a FAANG, but became a victim of its success as a great place to work. The culture was so insular that they lost touch with the rest of the field.
I feel like this will go down in history as one of technology's most expensive decisions (that's not a knock on Renduchintala as much as it's my own astonishment at Intel thinking they were safe as recently as 2015).
I'm also a bit saddened by this. It confirms what we all suspected but what I secretly hoped wasn't true.
Intel for over a decade coyly hinted they had aces up their sleeves that would already have been played if they faced more competition. Graphene got kicked around in conversations for a while and then when that turned out to be a no go they talked about black phosphorus.
So after all that, aside from marginal tweaks and pretty meager die shrinks here and there, they were doing.. nothing?.. for ten years?