Uncle Sam shouldn't own Intel stock

My intel powered workstations from 2008 have chips that are more than decent enough for modern computing.

But in reality, they gave up on R&D, Missed Apple mobile chips and then put a lot of MBAs in top leadership positions to make their financial schemes work. Those schemes did not work and they were left without technical leadership. When they got the tech leadership, the board just gave up and fired him and brought in a chop shop CEO to part intel out.

For some reason, the US admin thinks this is a good buy. You probably would too, if you bankrupted multiple casinos.

Intel is going the way of SunBeam, Sears and Toys r Us. The board failed to stop that. And failure attracts more failure.

> put a lot of MBAs in top leadership positions to make their financial schemes work.

Has it ever worked?

It usually does until it doesn’t, then stops working really fast. GE and Boeing are recent examples.

So it never actually works, the momentum from before just hides the fact and makes it seem that it works until it doesn’t.

Depends what you consider "modern computing"; I wouldn't like to try Rust development on a 2008 machine, let alone things like path tracing.

I have a Core 2 Quad machine around from 2008 for nostalgia reasons and retro computing, and even with a modern lightweight Linux on it, it's definitely not enough for modern computing unless what you consider modern computing is writing text documents and viewing websites ... slowly, and for that it's extremely wasteful since it has a 95W TDP while a 2W modern smartphone/tablet can do that even faster and more efficient, plus it's also portable.

Having to do any kind of 2025 type of work on it would be testing my patience to the extremes because all SW and media has grown in size and/or complexity(AV1 encoding, etc) requiring faster CPU, GPU, storage and RAM for the optimum experience. The only things that run fast on it are period accurate Linux 2.6 and Windows XP with websites form 2008, but I wouldn't call that modern computing.

Computers have gotten night and day faster and especially more efficient since 2008, pretending otherwise would be in bad faith.

It works splendidly for all those MBA's with golden parachutes.

It seems we need a system where these failures are visible earlier. If you consider the current economy a strategy game, our game dynamics incentivise bad short-term optimisation.

We can blame the MBAs, but we really should see how we can propose a better system. And then convince people of that.

Okay okay, I give up already.

It works for long enough to ride on the rise of the stock, and cash out.

I’m not sure if that’s true.

The current lowest speced Mac can absolutely dominate my previous 2012 2x20c ivy bridge era Xeon tower. And on top of that, the power and heat are drastically less with the new machine.

The only reason a system of this era even kept up is the years Intel just didn’t do anything that was that much better and because of ram and pci express expansion which allowed for upgraded faster storage and faster gpus.

These days I can get better performance in a system that I can hold in my palm (Apple m4, amd ryzen ai 9) that doesn’t produce enough heat to keep my entire room toasty in the winter.

Watch this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7PVZixO35c

New computers aren't as much faster as benchmarks would lead you to believe. If your code relies on unpredictable branches, dependept memory accesses in a tight loop, or very tight feedback loops inside computations, new CPUs won't have that much of an edge.

as a counterpoint, I did all of my rust contributions including creating rustdoc on a $300 walmart laptop w/2GB RAM my parents got me in december 2007. you just work differently when that’s your tool :)

Intel never in any way gave up on r&d, their main problem was failing to get their new tech working, and a couple of had bets.

The random acquisitions and board leadership didn't help intel but r&d had plenty of money poured in

>But in reality, they gave up on R&D, Missed Apple mobile chips and then put a lot of MBAs in top leadership positions to make their financial schemes work.

How do you know it?

We often fail to realize how cutthroat the chip business is and how many bad decisions away from oblivion all players are. It’s just that Intel is more exposed to those risks because it’s both design and foundry making risky bets.

OTOH, if TSMC makes a couple bad bets in a row, all their 500 clients will be in deep trouble.

I'm writing rendering engines, so quite up to speed on how fast CPUs and GPUs are, where the bottlenecks are etc :) In fact I worked on the latest Cinebench as part of Redshift dev.

Ah sorry, didn't mean to sound so haughty, I really just quickly type these comments off before I start my workday, really should give more thought to sounding a bit more tactful.

It's really cool they you get to meet people like you here in the comments :)

However I think the video raises an interesting point - I imagine you're an expert on modern CPU optimization, and spend quite a bit of time thinking about cache access patterns, exposing instruction-level parallelism to the CPU and other such gory bits without which your code wouldn't be running as fast on modern CPUs.

Most of us regular folks however don't really write code like that, and I think for that sort of code, I don't think modern CPUs run as much faster than an ancient Core 2 Duo, as benchmarks would suggest, but we can expect results somewhat more like in the video I linked.

Congrats on your work getting used in Cinebench, but I can't help but ask you - what's your thoughts on your work getting used to basically benchmark every CPU under the sun by tech reviewers, who then make recommendations on whether to buy that CPU or another one. Looping back to the previous point, I think your code has quite likely very different performance characteristics than the sort of generic stuff most people end up running, and this sort of benchmarking creates an incentive for manufacturers to crank out CPUs that are good at running hyper-optimized path tracing code, while ignoring real-world performance. What are your thoughts on that?

Ofcourse Intel was printing money for a while.

Long term? No. But what Westerner cares about long term?