You're right: AMD wasn't competitive for an incredibly long time and ARM wasn't really meaningful for a long time. That's the perfect situation for some MBAs to come into. You start thinking that you're wasting money on R&D. Why create something 30% better this year when 10% better will cost a lot less and your competitors are so far behind that it doesn't matter?
It's not that Intel should have seen AMD coming or should have seen ARM coming. It's that Intel should have understood that just because you have weak enemies today doesn't mean that you have an unassailable castle. Intel should have been smart enough to understand that backing off of R&D would mean giving up the moat they'd created. Even if it looked like no one was coming for their crown at the moment, you need to understand that disinvestment doesn't get rewarded over the long-run.
Intel should have understood that trying to be cheap about R&D and extract as much money from customers wasn't a long-term strategy. It wasn't the strategy that built them into the dominant Intel we knew. It wouldn't keep them as that dominant Intel.
Their third employee that later went on to become their third CEO and guide Intel from the memory to processor transition literally coined the term and wrote a book called "Only the Paranoid Survive" [1]. It's inexcusable that management degraded that much.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Only_the_Paranoid...
After all, Apple and ARM came from the idea to have better end user products around softer factors than shear CPU power. Since Intel‘s products aren’t highly integrated Phones nor assembled computer, Intel had no stake directly.
It is complex.
ARM literally came from “we need a much better and faster processor” and “how hard can this be?” [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Apple_Inc.#1971%E2%...
AMD bet BIG on the software industry leaning in heavily on massive thread-counts over high throughput, single-threaded usage... But it never happened so the cores tanked.
It was never a secret WHY that generation of core sucked, and it was relatively clear what AMD needed to do to fix the problem, and they were VERY vocal about "doing the thing" once it became clear their bet wasn't paying off.
Why did that generation of core (Bulldozer) suck?
What was it that AMD needed to do to fix the problem?
(Links to relevant stories would be sufficient for me!)
https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/01/22/bulldozer-amds-crash-m...
https://chipsandcheese.com/2023/01/24/bulldozer-amds-crash-m...
---
From a consumer perspective, Bulldozer and revisions as compared to Skylake and revisions were:
+ comparable on highly multi-threaded loads
+ cheaper
- significantly behind on less multi-threaded loads
- had 1 set of FPUs per 2 cores, so workloads with lots of floating point calculations were also weaker
- Most intensive consumer software was single or a very small number of thread focused still (this was also a problem for Intel in trying to get people to buy more expensive i7s/i9s over i5s in those days)
Bulldozer seemed to be designed under the assumption heavy floating point work would be done on the GPU (APU) which all early construction cores had built in. But no one is going to rewrite all of their software to take advantage of the iGPU that isn't present in existing CPUs and isn't present in the majority of CPUs (Intel) so it sort of smelt like Intel's itantic moment, only worse.
I think they were desperate to see some near term return on the money they spent on buying ATI. ATI wasn't a bad idea for a purchase but they seemed to heavily overpay for it which probably really clouded management's judgement.
1.Bulldozer had a very long pipeline akin to a Pentium 4. This allows for highclocks but comparatively little work being done per cycle vs their competition. Since clocks have a ceiling around 5GHz they could never push the clocks high enough to compete with intel. 2.They used a odd core design with 1 FPU for every 2 integer unit instead of the normal 1:1 that we have seen on every x86 since the i486. This leads to very weak FPU performance needed for many professional applications. Conversely it allowed for very competitive performance on highly threaded integer applications like rendering. This decision was probably under the assumption APUs would integrate their GPUs better and software would be written with it in mind since a GPU easily out does a CPUs FPU but it requires more programming. This didn't come to be. 3. They were stuck using Global Foundries due to previous contracts when they spun it off requiring AMD use GloFlo. This became a anchor as Gloflo fell behind market competitors like TSMC. Leaving AMD stuck on 32nm for a long while, until gloflo got 14nm and eventually AMD got out of the contract between zen 1-2.
bonus: Many IC designers have bemoaned how much of bulldozers design was automated with little hand modifications which tends to lead to a less optimized design. 3. 3.
It was process failures. Their fabs couldn't fab the designs. Tiger lake was what? 4 years late?
Pretty certainly, Intel is improving, and of course should not be written off. But they did get themselves into a hole to dig out from, and not just because the 5nm process was really hard to get working.
And it's not like they didn't notice either. Apple literally asked intel to supply the chips for the first iPhone, but the intel CEO at the time "didn't see it".
https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/16/4337954/intel-could-have-...
> "The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do... At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought."
In that circumstance, I think most people would have made the same decision.
It’s not like they couldn’t afford it and taking chances is important
I'm pretty sure most people here panned the iPhone after it came out, so it's not as if anyone would have predicted it prior to even being told it existed.
In that circumstance, I think most MBAs would have made the same decision.
Fixed that for you
FWIW I don't buy his explanation anyway. Intel at the time had zero desire to be a fab. Their heart was not in it. They wanted to own all the IP for fat margins. They have yet to prove anything about that has changed despite the noise they repeatedly make about taking on fab customers.
The CPUs were indeed horrible, and would've caused a lot of pain if the projects had actually continued. (source: I was working on the software side for the early Nokia intel prototypes)
[1] https://www.gottabemobile.com/meego-powered-nokia-n9-to-laun...
I think at the time that article got published we didn't even have the intel devboards distributed (that is a screen and macroboards, way before it starts looking like a phone). We did have some intel handsets from a 3rd party for meego work, but that was pretty much just proof of concept - nobody ever really bothered looking into trying to get the modem working, for example.
What became the N9 was all the time planned as an arm based device - exact name and specs changed a few times, but it still pretty much was developed as a maemo device, just using the meego name for branding, plus having some of the APIs (mainly, qt mobility and QML) compatible with what was scheduled to become meego. The QML stuff was a late addition there - originally it was supposed to launch with MTF, and the device was a wild mix of both when it launched, with QML having noticeable issues in many areas.
Development on what was supposed to be proper meego (the cooperation with intel) happened with only a very small team (which I was part of) at that time, and was starting to slowly ramp up - but massive developer effort from Nokia to actually make a "true" meego phone would've started somewhere mid-11.
And a few years prior to that Intel made the most competitive ARM chips (StrongARM). Chances are that an Intel chip would have powered the iPhone had they not scrapped their ARM division due to “reasons”
DEC had started developing ARM chips as they concluded it was a bad idea to try and scale down their alpha chips to be more energy efficient.
Then, after the success of these ARM chips in the blackberry and most of the palm PDAs as well as MP3 players and HTC smartphones, Intel sells it off, so it could focus on trying to make its big chips more energy efficient, making the mistake DEC avoided.
iPhone was a defining moment, but at the time it was completely obvious that smartphones would be a thing, it's just that people thought that the breakthrough product would come from Nokia or Sony-Ericsson (who were using ARM SoCs from TI and Quallcomm respectively). Selling off the ARM division would not have been my priority?
So it's a string of unforced errors. Nevertheless, Intel remains an ARM licensee, they didn't give that up when selling StrongARM, so it seems some people still saw the future..
I thought this was interesting enough to track down more of the backstory here, and found this fascinating article:
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
Page 60, hard breaks added for readability:
Baum: Apple owned a big chunk of it, but when Apple was really having hard times, they sold off their chunk at quite a profit, but they sold off the chunk. And then-- oh, while Newton was going on, some people from DEC came to visit, and they said, “Hey, we were looking at doing a low power Alpha and decided that just couldn’t be done, and then looked at the ARM. We think we can make an ARM which is really low power, really high performance, really tiny, and cheap, and we can do it in a year. Would you use that in your Newton?” Cause, you know, we were using ARMs in the Newton, and we all kind of went, “Phhht, yeah. You can’t do it, but, yeah, if you could we’d use it.”
That was the basis of StrongARM, which became a very successful business for DEC. And then DEC sued Intel. Well, I worked on the StrongARM 1500, which was a very interesting product. It was an ARM and a DSP kind of highly combined. It was supposed to be like video processing using set top boxes, and things like that. And then we finished that project and our group in Palo Alto, we were just gonna start an Alpha project.
And just then it was announced that DEC was-- no. No. Intel, at that time, Intel, DEC sued Intel for patent violations, didn’t go to them and say, “Hey, pay up or stop using it.” They just sued them. Intel was completely taken by surprise. There was a settlement. The settlement was you have to buy our Microelectronics Division and pay us a whole pile of money, and everything will go away.
So they sold the Microelectronics Division, which we were part of, except for the Alpha Design Group, 'cause they didn’t think that they could sell that to Intel and have the SEC approve, 'cause the two can conflict. So I went away on vacation not knowing whether I would be coming back and working for Intel, or coming back working for DEC. And it turned out they decided to keep the Alpha Design Group, so I was still working for DEC. Except the reason for the lawsuit was Compaq wanted to buy DEC, but didn’t want to buy ‘em with this Fab and Microelectronics Division. So by doing this, they got rid of the Microelectronics Division, and now they could sell themselves to Compaq.
Intel never "crushed" ARM. Intel completely failed to develop a mobile processor and ARM has a massive marketshare there.
ARM has always beaten the crap out of Intel at performance per watt, which turned out to be extremely important both in mobile and data center scale.
>Arm now claims to hold a 10.1% share of the cloud computing market, although that's primarily due to Amazon and its increasing use of homegrown Arm chips. According to TrendForce, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was using its custom Graviton chips in 15% of all server deployments in 2021.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/09/23/arm-holdings-data-...
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/14/google_prepares_its_o...
I can get a top of the line Xeon Gold basically next day with a incredibly high quality out of band management from a reputable server provider. (HP, Dell).
Ampere? Give it 6 months, €5,000 and maybe you can get one, from Gigabyte. Not known for server quality.
(yes, I'm salty, I have 4 of these CPUs and it took a really long time to get them while costing just as much as AMD EPYC Milan's).
Amazon has its own ARM CPUs on AWS, and you can get them on demand, too.
Xeons and EPYCs are great for "big loads", however some supercomputer centers also started to install "experimental" ARM partitions.
The future is bright not because Intel is floundering, but there'll be at least three big CPU producers (ARM, AMD and Intel).
Also, don't have prejudices about "brands". most motherboard brands can design server-class hardware if they wish. They're just making different trade-offs because of the market they're in.
I used servers which randomly fried parts of their motherboard when see some "real" load. Coming one morning and having no connectivity because a top of the line 2 port gigabit onboard Ethernet fried itself on a top of the line, flagship server is funny in its own way.
I'm guessing this has increased since 2021. I've moved the majority of our AWS workloads to ARM because the price savings (it mostly 'just works'). If companies are starting to tighten their belts, this could accelerate even more ARM adoption.
They certainly tried selling their chips below cost to move into markets ARM dominated, but "contra revenue" couldn't save them.
> Intel Corp.’s Contra-Revenue Strategy Was a Huge Waste of Money
https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/04/21/intel-corp...
So much of Intels decline reeks of arrogant MBAs.
Trying to breathe as Intel was pushing their head under water.
We saw AMD come back after their lawsuit against Intel got through and Intel had to stop paying everyone to not use AMD.
Had Intel adopted the molten tin of EUV, the cycle of failure would have been curtailed.
Hats off to SMIC for the DUV 7nm which they produced so quickly. They likely saw quite a bit of failed effort.
And before we discount ARM, we should remember that Acorn produced a 32-bit CPU with a 25k transistor count. The 80386 was years later, with 275k transistors.
Intel should have bought Acorn, not Olivetti.
That's a lot of mistakes, not even counting Itanium.
ARM would have been much more influential under Intel, rather than pursuing the i960 or the iAPX 432.
Just imagine Intel ARM Archimedes. It would have crushed the IBM PS/2.
Whoops.
Seriously, even DEC was smart enough.
Coincidentally, ARM1 and 80386 were both introduced in 1985. I'm a big fan of the ARM1 but I should point out that the 386 is at a different level, designed for multitasking operating systems and including a memory management unit for paging.
Intel had StrongARM though. IIRC they made best ARM cpus in the early 2000s and were designing their own cores. Then Intel decided to get rid of it because obviously they were just wasting money and could design a better x86 mobile chip…
Look at Japan generally and Toyota specifically. In Japan the best award you can get for having an outstanding company in terms of profit, topline, quality, free-cash, people, and all the good measures is the Deming Award. Deming was our guy (an American) but we Americans in management didn't take him seriously enough.
The Japanese to their credit did ... ran with it and made it into their own thing in a good way. The Japanese took 30% of the US auto market in our own backyard. Customers knew Hondas, Toyotas cost more but were worth every dollar. They resold better too. (Yes some noise about direct government investment in Japanese companies by the government was a factor too, but not the chief factor in the long run).
We Americans got it "explained to us." We thought we were handling it. Nah, it was BS. But we eventually got our act together. Our Deming award is the Malcolm Baldridge award.
Today, unfortunately the Japanese economy isn't rocking like it was the 80s and early 90s. And Toyota isn't the towering example of quality it once was. I think -- if my facts are correct --- they went too McDonalds and got caught up in lowering price in their materials, and supply chain with bad effects net overall.
So things ebb and flow.
The key thing: is management through action or inaction allowing stupid inbred company culture to make crappy products? Do they know their customers etc etc. Hell, mistakes even screw-ups are not life ending for companies the size of Intel. But recurring stupidity is. A lot of the times the good guys allow themselves to rot from the inside out. So when is enough enough already?
And Sandy Bridge all but assured AMD wouldn't be relevant for the better part of a decade.
It's easy to forget just how fast Sandy Bridge was when it came out; over 12 years later and it can still hold its own as far as raw performance is concerned.
You should probably have some intel (haha) on ARM and AMD chips. They didn't care.
Why? It's monopoly business tactics, except they didn't realize they weren't Microsoft.
It's not like this was overnight. Intel should have watched AMD like a hawk after that slimeball Ruiz was deposed and a real CEO put in charge.
And the Mac chips have been out, what, two years now, and the Apple processors on the iPhones at least 10?
Come on. This is apocalyptic scale incompetence.
Crushed by Intel's illegal anticompetitive antics?
Then fastest single core and multi core x86 cpus that money can buy will go to databases and similar vertically scaled systems.
That's where you can put up the most extreme margins. It's "winner takes all the margins". Beeing somewhat competitive, but mostly a bit worse is the worst business position. Also...
I put money on AMD when they were taking over the crown.
Thank you for this wakeup call, I'll watch closely if Intel can deliver on this and take it back. I'll habe to adjust accordingly.
The problem is that Intel has had a defensive strategy for a long time. Yes, they crushed many attempts to breach the x86 moat but failed completely and then gave up attempts to reach beyond that moat. Mobile, foundry, GPUs etc have all seen half-hearted or doomed attempts (plus some bizarre attempts to diversify - McAfee!).
I think that, as Ben essentially says, they put too much faith in never-ending process leadership and the ongoing supremacy of x86. And when that came to an end the moat was dry.
They should have been worried about their process leadership for a long time. IIRC even the vaunted 14nm that they ended up living on for so long was pretty late. That would have had me making backup plans for 10nm but it looked more like leadership just went back to the denial well for years instead. It seemed like they didn't start backport designs until after Zen1 launched to me.
The writing was on the wall 6 years ago; Intel was not doing well in mobile and it was only a matter of time until that tech improved. Same as Intel unseating the datacenter chips before it. Ryzen I will give you is a surprise, but in a healthy competive market, "the competition outengineered us this time" _should_ be a potential outcome.
IMO the interesting question is basically whether Intel could have done anything differently. Clay Christianson's sustaining vs disrupting innovation model is well known in industry, and ARM slowly moving up the value chain is obvious in that framework. Stratechery says they should have opened up their fabs to competitors, but how does that work?
No, but ARM should've rung many bells.
Intel poured tons of billions in mobile.
Didn't understood the future from smartphones to servers was about power efficiency and scale.
Eventually their lack of power efficiency made them lose ground in all their core business. I hope they will get this back and not just by competing on manufacturing but architecture too.