Shift Left Is the Tip of the Iceberg

> 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.

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.

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!)

We'll see, I mostly object to the "vultures circling" narrative that HN seems to be attached to. Intel's current position is not unprecedented, and people have been speculating Intel would have a rough catchup since the "14nm+++" memes were vogue. But they still have their fabs (and wisely spun it out to it's own business) and their chip designs, while pretty faulty, successfully brought x86 to the big.LITTLE core arrangement. They've beat AMD to the punch on a number of key technologies, and while I still think AMD has the better mobile hardware it still feels like the desktop stuff is a toss-up. Server stuff... glances at Gaudi and Xeon, then at Nvidia ...let's not talk about server stuff.

A lot of hopes and promises are riding on 18A being the savior for both Intel Foundry Services and the Intel chips wholesale. If we get official confirmation that it's been cancelled so Intel can focus on something else then it will signal the end of Intel as we know it.

>> successfully brought x86 to the big.LITTLE core arrangement.

Really? I thought they said using e-cores would be better than hyper threading. AMD has doubled down on hyper threading - putting a second decoder in each core that doesn't directly benefit single thread perf. So Intels 24 cores are now competitive with (actually losing to) 16 zen 5 cores. And that's without using AVX512 which Arrow Lake doesn't even support.

I was never a fan of big.little for desktop or even laptops.

In nearly every generation of Intel chip where I needed to care about whether hyperthreading was a net positive, it was either proven to be a net reduction in throughput, or a single digit improvement but greatly increased jitter. Even if you manage to get more instructions per cycle with it on, the variability causes grief for systems you have or want telemetry on. I kind of wonder why they keep trying.

I don’t know AMD well enough to say whether it works better for them.