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Shift Left Is the Tip of the Iceberg

(semiengineering.com)
172 points yatrios | 1 comments | 19 Nov 24 14:06 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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hinkley ◴[19 Nov 24 15:17 UTC] No.42184326[source]▶
> Optimization strategies have shifted from simple power, performance, and area (PPA) metrics to system-level metrics, such as performance per watt. “If you go back into the 1990s, 2000s, the road map was very clear,”

Tell me you work for Intel without telling me you work for Intel.

> says Chris Auth, director of advanced technology programs at Intel Foundry.

Yeah that’s what I thought. The breathlessness of Intel figuring out things that everyone else figured out twenty years ago doesn’t bode well for their future recovery. They will continue to be the laughing stock of the industry if they can’t find more self reflection than this.

Whether this is their public facing or internal philosophy hardly matters. Over this sort of time frame most companies come to believe their own PR.

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talldayo ◴[19 Nov 24 15:48 UTC] No.42184775[source]▶
Intel has had a few bad years, but frankly I feel like they could fall a lot lower. They aren't as down bad as AMD was during the Bulldozer years, or Apple during the PowerPC years, or even Samsung's early Exynos chipsets. The absolute worst thing they've done in the past 5 years was fab on TSMC silicon, which half the industry is guilty of at this point.

You can absolutely shoot your feet off trying to modernize too quickly. Intel will be the laughingstock if 18A never makes it to market and their CPU designs start losing in earnest to their competitors. But right now, in a relative sense, Intel isn't even down for the count.

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buildbot ◴[19 Nov 24 16:10 UTC] No.42185024[source]▶
Intel has failed pretty badly IMO. Fabbing at TSMC might actually have been a good idea, except that every other component of arrow like is problematic. Huge tile to tile latencies, special chiplets that are not reusable in any other design, removal of hyperthreading, etc etc. Intel’s last gen CPU is in general faster than the new gen due to all the various issues.

And that’s just the current product! The last two gens are unreliable, quickly killing themselves with too high voltage and causing endless BSODs.

The culture and methods of ex-Intel people at the management level is telling as well, from my experiences at my last job at least.

(My opinions are my own, not my current employers & a lot of ex-Intel people are awesome!)

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1. hangonhn ◴[19 Nov 24 17:03 UTC] No.42185632[source]▶
Fabbing at TSMC is an embarrassing but great decision. The design side of Intel is the revenue/profit generating side. They can't let the failures of their foundries hold back their design side and leave them hopelessly behind AMD and ARM. Once they've regained their shares of the server market or at least stabilized it, they can start shifting some of their fabbing to Intel Foundry Services, who are going to really suck at the beginning. But no one else is going to take that chance on those foundries if not Intel's design side. The foundry side will need that stream of business while they work out their processes.