Share buybacks really brought a lot of shareholder value
To be honest, I still don’t understand how share buybacks are legal, but what do I know?
They were historically restricted as stock manipulation but in 1980s as everything else it got de-regulated because fuck the plebs
How about you fix that bad batch of CPU’s or at least admit to it instead of blaming game developers?
At the same time, he acknowledged that Intel’s CPUs are uncompetitive in high-end desktops. To improve the competitive positions of Intel’s high-performance CPUs, Tan said Intel plans to re-enable simultaneous multithreading (SMT) to P-cores in client processors.
This will help with MT but not ST, which is arguably far more important for day to day use cases.
The vast majority of foundry revenue came from Intel’s internal use, with external customer sales flat, at just $22 million.
I knew Intel didn’t have any “flagship” clients, but I didn’t realize their external foundry services made a mere $22 M per quarter.
I never thought I’d find it sad to see Intel struggle.
They’ve been leading production since Intel was founded in 1968, using the Noyce monolithic IC concept.
It’s hard to say exactly when Intel lost the lead, but I figure it was around 2018, and it’s so weird that with all the money and effort Intel has put into it, they still struggle so much to catch up!
Intel was always a bastion of strength, and even when hard pressed by the competition, they used to always come back, and dominate the competition.
That is until they first completely failed to compete against Arm on mobile, then they failed to keep up with TSMC on production, and finally they failed to keep up with AMD in basically all levels of X86.
Arm and AMD were 100% due to arrogance and lack of foresight, they could so easily have prevented both of those, but were absolutely demolished by their exclusive focus on highest possible profit margins, that they failed to improve their products in times when they had record profits.
But still they had an amazing run for almost exactly half a century, but I don’t think Intel can ever come back to their prior position.That is until they first completely failed to compete against Arm on mobile
Intel even had a jumpstart with ARM with acquiring the StrongARM CPU from DEC when it went under. I owned a number of devices with “Intel StrongARM” CPUs in them. Then Intel evolved XScale in 2002. I owned one of those devices too. Then Intel decided “this ARM thing isn’t going anywhere” and sold their entire ARM holdings to Marvel semiconductor. Its pure hubris on Intel’s part.
Here’s an article from 2005 talking about the industry at the time and Intel’s floundering in the mobile space. source
For those that may have forgotten, the original iPhone came out in 2007, which most would agree ushered in the modern mobile phone era.
I Absolutely agree. But I didn’t even know that Intel took over StrongArm, I only remember hearing the name, but not what it was actually used for.
Funny because the Alpha ended up with Compaq/HP, who ended up killing the superior Alpha to pursue the giant failure that was Itanium.
The nu7mber of blunders were insane!this ARM thing isn’t going anywhere
AFAIK Intel thought small devices meant low performance, and had to be cheap, so they thought the profit margins would be tiny.
It was such a humongous misreading of the market!The Intel failure against Arm was obvious already with the OLPC, Intel made the netbook concept with Asus to compete against that on tiny laptops.
And they basically tried to muscle Arm out of the market with shenanigans like “supporting” projects that chose Intel over Arm.
But quickly when smartphones became a thing, it became obvious how bad the X86 Atom was, and X86 lost everything in mobile.First they ignored ultra mobile, then they tried to move the concepts for higher end devices where Intel could better compete with for instance Netbook, and finally they tried to compete head on, and failed miserably.
I was so frustrated that I couldn’t get an Arm based laptop that could run Linux. It would have been amazing back in 2005.
I was so frustrated that I couldn’t get an Arm based laptop that could run Linux. It would have been amazing back in 2005.
What you’re asking for here actually DID become available in about 2009…and I got one. The experience was…not great.
That was a stupid concept, I remember their videos with the french accent. Kudos to them for giving it a try though, but they tried to do too much.
Obviously what I wanted was for a proper company like Asus/MSI/Lenovo making a netbook based on Arm instead of Intel.
Or even a minor company making something sensible like the Intel based Asus Netbook that came out in 2007. Arm should have been out BEFORE intel, because they had better technology for it and Intel did not, and original Netbooks based on Linux were very popular. Popularity actually took a dive initially when Netbooks swtched to the phased out Windows XP. Because Windows sucked really really bad for netbook.And I hoped a standard could arise for “desktop” Arm like existed for the PC standard. Texas Instruments announced it with Freescale, but nothing ever came of it, and AFAIK TI sold off Freescsale.
So no a proper Linux netbook was never made, that competed directly with X86 netbooks. Despite they could have had more than twice the battery life for the same performance. Why Arm never bothered to make such a standard, I will never understand.
And why such a standard remains missing in the market is also strange IMO?Apple has shown that an Arm platform can be way superior to X86 on laptop. Still it’s crickets from the PC industry and Arm?
I don’t know about sad, but I am definitely not happy that we have less competition in x86 and semiconductor foundries. TSMC’s dominance in many ways reinforces the position of market leaders.
I personally would prefer if there were 5-6 competitive x86 CPU manufacturers (including ones not based in the US) and multiple fabs.
As the saying goes, “Never say never!” 15 years ago, no one would have thought that TSMC would reach such a level of dominance.
I personally would prefer if there were 5-6 competitive x86 CPU manufacturers (including ones not based in the US) and multiple fabs.
x86 is an overly complicated dead-end. It was great for its day, but the base 8086 instruction set is just out of date.
ARM showed that decoupling CPU architecture from an x86 monopoly allowed growth and innovation. Now, just everyone switching from x86 to ARM would be a repeat of the same problem with one body controlling it. I’m seeing RISC-V being the real future. Anyone can make a RISC-V chip. Its an open architecture. No need to pay a licensing fee to AMD/Intel or to ARM Holdings.
I am personally not believer in the magical capabilities of ARM. It has its pros it has its cons.
The magic of ARM is that there are more than just 2 licensees (technically 3 if you discount the 32-bit only licensee that was Cyrix).
With ARM, we have dozens of ARM implementations with each licensee focusing on their core strength, compute power, low power consumption, media rich processing, high density computing, extremely low cost, embedded systems, etc. This was the sin that AMD/Intel did to us by only allowing them to provide CPU solutions, and only when they felt like it.
Is that really true though?
I believe there are only two high performance cores with ARM (Apple M series and ARM’s own X series), real-world benchmarks for Oryon are shit.
In terms of smartphone SoCs, you’re stuck with Qualcomm or Apple A series.
There is honestly not that much choice even though there may be many licensees.
And with ARM building out their own SoC, you’re going to have even more challenges with openness moving forward.
I think you’re only looking in the retail space.
Check out the Datacenter grade ARM CPUs like:
Ampere with their 192 core ARM CPUs.
Google Axion with their 72 core CPUs and more than 576B of addressable RAM.
Amazon Graviton 4 with its 96 core CPUs.
x86 is an overly complicated dead-end.
I 100% agree.
It was great for its day,
No actually it never was. It was always a clumsy mess. The only reason IBM picked the X86, was because Intel also made the cut down i8088, that only had an 8 bit data-bus, which made the system easier and cheaper to make. And they also didn’t want it to be too powerful, so it could compete with more expensive IBM systems.
The X86 was excruciatingly slow compared to the competition. Even with the financial strength and developments Intel had available, it was still behind when Intel transitioned to 32 bit with the i80386.
The modest Arm with a tenth the transistors was 4-5 times faster than a full fledged 33 Mhz fully 32 bit 80386DX!
Motorola MC68000 In a Macintosh was about twice as fast at half the clock. And could do MIDI without problems, while the theoretically way more powerful i80386DX had problems executing the MIDI interrupts fast enough, even with extra fast ports installed for it!
Today X86 is considered pretty good on the desktop, because all the competition has disappeared. Alpha, Motorola, Sparc, MIPS, PowerPC.
X86 was never very good compared to any of those. It just enjoyed the benefit of the Wintel monopoly on desktop systems.We got the worst OS with MS-Dos and later Windows, and we got the worst architecture with X86.
I think you’re looking at it from a pure technological view, but that is only half equation.
No actually it never was. It was always a clumsy mess. The only reason IBM picked the X86, was because Intel also made the cut down i8088, that only had an 8 bit data-bus, which made the system easier and cheaper to make.
The “cheaper to make” was the part that made it pretty good for its day.
Market penetration and ubiquity were key factors in the overall advancement of computing around the world. The explosion of progress occurred when there was mostly one computing architecture, and that writing software for it would mean a huge market with a long life. Most importantly, long enough to make back your initial investment and earn healthy profit.
The modest Arm with a tenth the transistors was 4-5 times faster than a full fledged 33 Mhz fully 32 bit 80386DX!
And with that performance advantage, why is it x86 continued to advance selling more and more units eventually becoming the standard for desktop and server computing? Market penetration.
Back then hardware and software ecosystems were closed. You could learn on a Wang, but that made you useless on VAX. Your SunOS on Sparc knowledge wouldn’t help you very much on Silicon Graphics IRIX on MIPS.
Contrast that with your DOS knowledge on IBM 5150 was almost identical Compaq Deskpro.
Today X86 is considered pretty good on the desktop, because all the competition has disappeared. Alpha, Motorola, Sparc, MIPS, PowerPC. X86 was never very good compared to any of those.
Most of those architectures you mention were workstation, server, or mainframe class CPUs and not desktop. Again, from a purely technical view, sure, they were better, but how good is a CPU that you can never afford to buy?
Even the Motorola (68000 series) and later the PowerPC (for desktops 601 etc) were only in computers that were far more expensive than their equivalent x86 counterparts. It wasn’t for a lack of computing power, but rather those brands wanted exclusive control of their hardware and would crush any attempt to make clones lowering the pricepoint. That did NOT serve the end users or the market, which is largely why I think they failed.
We got the worst OS with MS-Dos and later Windows, and we got the worst architecture with X86.
We got a single CPU architecture and OS compatibility for almost 40 years. If we hadn’t, we would have taken much longer to evolve to where we are today of being able to change out the underlying CPU with lighter weight changes for OS support. Today Linux will run on nearly every CPU architecture including the common x86, ARM, and now even RISC-V. It would have been a much longer path had we had multiple dominant computing architectures all vying for resources.
I remember standing in front of a wall of boxed video games sorting through them, getting excited to see a title, only to see it wasn’t for my platform. Tandy, Apple II, Atari, TI, Commodore, and all the various iterations in between! A game written for Commodore PET couldn’t run on Commodore VIC-20, and the VIC-20 game couldn’t run on the Commodore 64. X86 changed all that. The same game that ran on the 8088 could run on the 286, 386, 486, Pentium, etc. We needed all of that to get where we are today.
The “cheaper to make” was the part that made it pretty good for its day.
No it didn’t, it was so slow it wasn’t faster than 8 bit CP/M systems at the time. The original PC had very little advantage from being 16 bit, and everybody else went directly from 8 to 32 bit. But IBM was bigger than everybody else combined back then, and their support and the arrival of cheaper clones, made it an industry standard disregarding the platform was horrible, but because it was well supported.
And with that performance advantage, why is it x86 continued to advance selling more and more units eventually becoming the standard for desktop and server computing? Market penetration.
I already wrote that Intel was protected by the Wintel monopoly, later when mobile became a much bigger market, that monopoly did NOT help Intel, And Intel spend as much as Arms entire revenue on pushing Atom for an entire decade, and even had the production advantage back then. And despite that Intel was not able to compete against Arm, on platforms like Android that actually had X86 compatibility.
Most of those architectures you mention were workstation, server, or mainframe class
No, Arm was in desktop, but the company did not have the clout to compete.
Motorola was in Macintosh, Atari and Amiga.
PowerPC was in Macintosh and Playstation 3.That the others were workstation and server does not change that among them all, Intel was inferior in every way.
I don’t understand how you can argue a point that X86 was ever any good, have you ever tried programming assembly on it and on any of the competitors?
Have you ever compared systems from back then on how well they actually worked? For sure the PC was awful. AND MS-DOS was the worst OS in existence at the time.
With Microsoft copying CP/M but removing security features, that has made MS-DOS and Windows the least protected and easiest systems to infects with viruses, causing a decades long nightmare.Have you ever compared systems from back then on how well they actually worked? For sure the PC was awful. AND MS-DOS was the worst OS in existence at the time.
Yes, I lived through that period and have firsthand experience.
Most of those architectures you mention were workstation, server, or mainframe class
No
I think you missed the part of my post where I called out PPC 601 and Moto 68000 in desktops. PPC was also in workstation and server grade machines including IBM iSeries Midrange systems.
I don’t understand how you can argue a point that X86 was ever any good, have you ever tried programming assembly on it and on any of the competitors?
You’re still arguing technical superiority, when that isn’t the primary factor for folks that bought computers. Consumers didn’t want to throw away their entire computer and software library when going to the next iteration of a company’s product. PC Clones made PC computing affordable. Commodore with its Amiga fought against its only clone Atari ST. Apple quickly squashed any Mac clone makers. These companies got greedy because they wanted to sell hardware at a premium price and control their entire ecosystems, just like they before on prior platforms. They starved their pipeline of younger/poorer customers that would eventually be able to afford the premium products. PC had no such issue and won the computing war of the 80s and 90s.
The reason I never expected it to be sad, is that I thought if Intel was weakened it would open up for more competition instead of less. Much like when IBM lost the PC monopoly, it made room for many competitors.
So I think we are pretty much in the same corner with regard to wanting more competition. If Intel goes away, AMD will have a monopoly in the X86 market, and Arm will have a monopoly on mostly everything else except compute.
In that scenario I think AMD will lose, and we will have only Arm left as a major player for CPU/SOC, and Nvidia for AI.
