Counterpoint: Intel SSDs have been going strong since at least 2008.

Countercounterpoint: I was recently hiring a firmware engineer and my recruiter handed me not one, not two, but three resumes from the same SSD engineering group.

So maybe not as strong anymore?

Recently as in recent few months? I wonder if new CEO is about the axe their SSD line.

This was last summer.

The NAND business was awful last summer (and last year overall), so I'm not surprised.

Fun fact: Intel uses them in place of bribe^^ uh, I mean as a reward to volume re-sellers for meeting sale goals, and during specific SKU promotions (buy cpu +MB, receive free SSD).

And if you know what you're doing and have a rep at Synnex or Ingram thats willing to play along, you can really get things cranking.

I sold over 2 million dollars worth of Intel SSDs to Amazon customers in the span of a week once. Intel was running an extremely nebulously defined promo for 'new' customers where resellers could get 90% off disty price on enterprise SSD.

I uploaded all the eligibles SKUs to amazon at like 15% off list, wrote up some really gross python scripts to manage orders between amazon and synnex and to submit the deal registrations, and then hit my 6 months sales quota in an afternoon.

The double bonus was 6 months later when I then registered for all the backend spiffs. The backend rebate on some of this stuff sometimes exceeded 10% of list price. To date it's the only deal I've ever put together that had more than 100% gross margin.

Well played, but I'm genuinely not understanding why Intel would do this. If there's consumer demand for their SSDs at 15% off list (as you experimentally demonstrated), why would Intel run a distributor promo that offers 90% (what!) off the even lower disty price? Did somebody just have a KPI of units shifted to hit?

Because "The Channel' sales model provides all sorts of strange incentives from vendor reps through to end users. Everyone is playing everyone off everyone.

Lets say there's two solutions that would solve my end users problem equally well. Both have list prices of 10K, both have normal disty cost of 7K, but brand X is running a promo where I get a 50% off front end discount from disty, but brand y is not.

Now I call the customer up and let them know that not only is brand X the best solution, but because of my great relationship with brand x I've secured them a 20% discount off list.

So now the customer is getting what they need cheaper and I've got more margin in the deal, which is what my commision is calculated out of.

So essentially when vendors do this they're not trying to make things cheaper for the customer to increase demand, they're trying to make sure that their products put the most money in sales people's pockets so that sales people will push their stuff the hardest.

Though on this specific occasion I was following the letter (or lack thereof) of the promotion, but certainly not the spirit. Grabbing existing demand vs generating new demand.

The entire purpose is so that they can juice up the numbers for when they announce quarterly numbers.

For the kind of executives that stay at a company like Intel, the only thing they care about is the company’s stock price, and they’ll do anything to keep it high, even if it’s at the expense of what quite literally is destroying or directly hemorrhaging in the long term to the company itself. It’s how you end up with crazy situations like this.

I actually got scolded by the Intel rep for this one. Mostly she was mad that there was no way they'd let a loophole like the one I abused go through again next year, so her YoY numbers were gonna be awful.

At the height of Intel bribery scandal Intel was directly transferring $750 Million per quarter back to DELL.

Marketing Rebates.

I like Intel SSDs, often these cost a little more but have better 99% latency than competitors. If an Intel Inside sticker meant an Intel SSD rather than Atom or some other hunk of junk, that sticker would mean something.

If you go to microcenters website you can search for SSDs based on their controller chip. Specific controllers and large heatsinks seem to be what's next for the PCIe 4 SSDs that claim 5GB/s or more.

Define "strong". I've never actually seen one.

They would rather sell them in bulk...to bulk buyers...for scale reasons. They average around 10% of the market. They were nukber three days n volume and two in revenue for a long time. Still float around that point

https://www.statista.com/statistics/412158/global-market-sha...

https://blocksandfiles.com/2019/06/03/ssd-revenue-and-shipme...

They exist on Newegg. You can buy one. I have one.

I have a few. For certain applications they're excellent.

For which applications would they be better than any other brand?

Datacentre-type applications where you need a relatively inexpensive server-grade drive.

For example, the P4610 is a great deal for a mixed-use drive.

My builds going back to 2011 have had Intel SSDs in them

Would your definition include "I've seen one"?

It's rather like proving a negative. If they were really popular, chances are I'd have seen one by now - but I haven't. That doesn't mean they aren't popular, but it reduces the odds.

The 660p SSDs are some of the best selling consumer SSDs on sites like Newegg. Here's their best selling list if you're curious: https://www.newegg.com/Internal-SSDs/SubCategory/ID-636?name...

Otherwise, Intel SSDs have quite a bit of share in the datacenter space. If you haven't seen them before, that's likely because you're not an enterprise customer.

You're right, I'm not an enterprise customer. Thanks for the Newegg link.

Lets see.

(Someone else already mentioned SSD.)

* Intel GPU. Work quite well on Linux for the past 10 years (albeit not ace 3D performance due to hardware limitations)

* Intel WLAN. Work great on Linux. They even worked in a time where almost no other FOSS drivers for WLAN were around.

* Intel LAN. Work great on Linux. Great performance.

I'm not at all a fan of Intel. Their x86-64 CPUs are overpriced compared to AMD's Ryzen and Threadripper. But the above three? I would not run away from these; on the contrary.

It's not that the products are poor but that Intel has a long and proud tradition of killing any product that is not directly related to x86.

Intel GPU started with i740 (a stand-alone AGP card), which is the last stand-alone GPU they made... and that was 1998 or so.

Their networking chipsets were a result of Intel's own x86 motherboard business, especially in the server arena. Intel also bought out companies in the late 90s/early 2000s to build their stand-alone network appliance business (routers, firewalls, SSL accelerators, etc) only to prompt kill that off when x86 started stumbling thanks to the P4 and AMD's competition.

Even then, Xeon Phi had a fairly limited run. I hope they're in it for the long haul with Xe.

> hope they're in it for the long haul with Xe

Hope aside, is there any reason to believe this time is different, and that Intel is serious about GPUs?

I have this picture in my mind of Charlie Brown, Lucy, and a football.

It feels like the same as with Google products.

To paraphrase the common saying, "Insanity is trusting Intel over and over again with new products, and expecting different results"

Although the CPU hasn't been improved much, Intel has improved its iGPU quite a lot and now outperforms the current Ryzen mobile. [1]

I think it is natural for Intel to start making dGPU to replace popular mainstream mobile GPU such as nVidia MX250. And that's what Intel's new DG1 starts from.

[1]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/15213/the-microsoft-surface-l...

Well, not really iGPU, those low res benchmarks relies more on CPU, and Icelake is quite far ahead of 1st Gen Zen. Not to mention it is an 14nm product and not even priced at the same segment.

The coming Ryzen Mobile with Zen 2 and Power Optimised Vega will do far better.

Fair point, but what I mean is Intel is probably at a good time to make its own dGPU for mobile, just to clarify.

Only the paranoid survive era Intel would be treating the receding x86 monopoly and rise of GPGPU as an existential threat. Xe would be treated as a top priority and not be allowed to fail.

The guys in charge now? Who the fuck knows. They seem good at making immense amounts of cash from yesterday's defacto monopoly, not so much at setting up tomorrow's.

>Only the paranoid survive era Intel would be treating the receding x86 monopoly and rise of GPGPU as an existential threat.

Not really. GPGPU is not an existential threat to Intel, even now neither Nvidia or AMD are hurting Intel much. But TSMC is an existential threat, even with the recent rumours of splitting up Intel Fabs, it is all too late.

It's the two in combination that I believe to be an existential threat. nVidia is succeeding at entrenching CUDA as a standard, just as Intel's x86 grip is loosening and processors are becoming commodities.

This leaves nVidia in a great position to commoditize their compliments, offering high performance ARM CPUs (like Amazon is offering) for a tiny margin just to fuck with Intel. And it really would. Versions with nVidia GPUs in the cache hierarchy (HBM) are just the icing on the cake.

Intel smartly got out of the memory business because it didn't want to join a race to the bottom fabbing commodity transistors, but there's a good chance that's in their not so distant future.

And yeah, TSMC is a pretty big threat too... I was ignoring 10nm as part of this, because we don't have any data yet as to whether it represents a permanent shift in Intel's ability to compete on fabrication. I personally doubt that. But it is possible.

> They seem good at making immense amounts of cash from yesterday's defacto monopoly, not so much at setting up tomorrow's.

Well said.

The Xe is supposed to power Aurora, the next big DOE supercomputer.

Wasn't "Roadrunner" powered by Cell? What's Cell doing these days?

Cell was a PowerPC variant, which is still doing ok as the POWER series of CPUs. The Summit supercomputer[1] used POWER9 and is the fastest supercomputer in the world.

If you go speak to IBM and you have an interesting app you can get time on a POWER9 server to see how well it runs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summit_(supercomputer)

Calling Cell a PowerPC is a bit of a stretch. The only reason to use the Cell was the SPEs, which had their own custom SIMD instruction sets. The PowerPC core was just there for coordination.

Any work you put in to optimizing your code for the Cell would be completely thrown out if you brought it to another POWER architecture. At that point you might as well have hopped over to x86, ARM, CUDA, Xeon Phi, the Connection Machine, whatever.

So they'll make 50,000 of them for that purpose.

Xeon Phi was supposed to power Aurora too, until it got delayed by 3 years and redesigned.

I was at one of the GDCE Intel sessions in 2009 when Larrabee was supposed to take over the world.

The problem in the GPU space is that so far Intel has always under delivered in tooling and performance.

I guess at least one can be happy that by being the underdog they play nice with FOSS community, as it tends to happen.

Man, Larrabee was really cool! I wish that something had become of the software-defined pipeline thingy that let them add support for new graphics API's- IIRC they added DX9 or Vulkan or some other pipeline support to the card after it was made.

Now I want to get one, or a Phi or something from that era.

Intel have implementations of other instruction sets for their GPUs, don't they? And have done for years?

Intel had the i740 GPU in 1998. Poor performance and cancelled after 2 years. I don't know what you would call its internal instruction set.

Intel was going to release Larrabee, their GPU based on x86, in 2010 but cancelled it because of poor performance.

All of Intel's integrated GPUs are adequate for desktop use and light gaming but they have poor performance compared to any Nvidia or AMD GPU. I don't know what you would call their internal instruction set.

We will see how Intel's new Xe GPU does. I'm predicting that they will cancel it in 2 years because of poor performance.

Essentially Larrabee was released as Xeon Phi - the 1st cards even had video interfaces exposed.

Or even if Xe performance is reasonably good they'll still cancel it in 2 years because Intel.

i740 was fixed function pipeline, no instruction set.

I presume it still had an instruction set, just that the driver did it for you.

Back in the early days of consumer 3D graphics accelerators, there was no such thing as a shader program and GPUs were not Turing-complete. You had to pick from among the texture blending modes that your GPU natively supported. Some GPUs exposed an interface that was basically a large portion of the OpenGL 1.x state machine, implemented in hardware.

You had that already in computers like the Amiga where you would arrange a memory region with set of operations that you wanted to do, enable DMA and let the blitter carry along doing the job on its own.

Likewise with 16 bit game consoles with their sprite engines.

Those GPUs are (crappy) part of x86 chips, not separate products. Let's see if Intel's discrete GPUs last more than two years.

And usually followed by Webminars on how to take advantage of GPA to actually make titles perform in an acceptable way.

When the only tool you have is a rusty hammer made from an alloy of plutonium and Chinese pot metal...

My friend calls pot metal Chinesium instead. :)