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...
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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?
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.