Aside from the x86 monopoly that would create, I don't think Intel has much of value to AMD at this point other than the fabs (which aren't delivering). IMHO if Intel is failing, let them fail and others will buy the pieces in bankruptcy. This would probably benefit several other companies that could use 22nm and up fab capacity and someone could even pick up the x86 and graphics businesses.

BTW I think at this point the graphics business is more valuable. Even though Intel is in 3rd place there are many players in the SoC world that can use a good GPU. You can build a SoC with Intel, ARM, or RISC-V but they all need a GPU.

Restoring Intel's foundry lead starting with 18A was central to Pat's vision and he essentially staked his job on it. 18A is supposed to enter production next year but recent rumors is that it's broken.

I have next to zero knowledge of semiconductor fabrication, but “Continued Momentum” does sound like the kind of corporate PR-speak that means “people haven't heard from us in a while and there's not much to show”.

I also would never have realized the 20A process was canceled were it not for your comment since this press release has one of the most generous euphemisms I've ever heard for canceling a project:

“One of the benefits of our early success on Intel 18A is that it enables us to shift engineering resources from Intel 20A earlier than expected as we near completion of our five-nodes-in-four-years plan.”

And despite this total failure they spent many tens of on stock buybacks https://ycharts.com/companies/INTC/stock_buyback no less than ten billions in 2014 and in 2018-2021 over forty billions. That's an awful, awful lot of money to waste.

I think at this point no one believes Intel can deliver. So news or not..

Intel finally seem to have got their act together a bit with OneAPI but they've languished for years in this area.

At least for Intel, that is just not true. Intel's DPC++ is as open as it gets. It implements a Khronos standard (SYCL), most of the development is happening in public on GitHub, it's permissively licensed, it has a viable backend infrastructure (with implementations for both CUDA and HIP). There's also now a UXL foundation with the goal of creating an "open standard accelerator software ecosystem".

I decided that I have to start looking at Apple's AI docs

Apple will sell you a machine with 48GB of memory for thousands of dollars but plenty of people can't afford that, and even then the GPU is soldered so you can't just put four of them in one machine to get more performance and memory. The top end 40-core M4 GPUs only have performance comparable to a single A770, which is itself not even that fast of a discrete GPU.

For whatever reason, people just delete these tools from their minds, then claim Nvidia still has a monopoly on CUDA.

And yet still the popcorn gallery says "there no [realistic] alternative to CUDA." Methinks the real issue is that CUDA is the best software solution for Nvidia GPUs, and the alternative hardware vendors aren't seen as viable competitor for hardware reasons, and people attribute the failure to software failures.

Is there?

10 years ago, I burned about 6 months of project time slogging through AMD / OpenCL bugs before realizing that I was being an absolute idiot and that the green tax was far cheaper than the time I was wasting. If you asked AMD, they would tell you that OpenCL was ready for new applications and support was right around the corner for old applications. This was incorrect on both counts. Disastrously so, if you trusted them. I learned not to trust them. Over the years, they kept making the same false promises and failing to deliver, year after year, generation after generation of grad students and HPC experts, filling the industry with once-burned-twice-shy received wisdom.

When NVDA pumped and AMD didn't, presumably AMD could no longer deny the inadequacy of their offerings and launched an effort to fix their shit. Eventually I am sure it will bear fruit. But is their shit actually fixed? Keeping in mind that they have proven time and time and time and time again that they cannot be trusted to answer this question themselves?

80% margins won't last forever, but the trust deficit that needs to be crossed first shouldn't be understated.

It certainly seems like there's a "nobody ever got fired for buying nvidia" dynamic going on. We've seen this mentality repeatedly in other areas of the industry: that's why the phrase is a snowclone.

Eventually, someone is going to use non-nvidia GPU accelerators and get a big enough cost or performance win that industry attitudes will change.

On paper, yes. But how many of them actually work? Every couple of years AMD puts out a press release saying they're getting serious this time and will fully support their thing, and then a couple of people try it and it doesn't work (or maybe the basic hello world test works, but anything else is too buggy), and they give up.

Do you have experience with SYCL? My experience with OpenCL was that it's really a PITA to work with. The thing that CUDA makes nice is the direct and minimal exercise to start running GPGPU kernels. write the code, compile with nvcc, cudaed.

OpenCL had just a weird dance to perform to get a kernel running. Find the OpenCL device using a magic filesystem token. Ask the device politely if it wants to OpenCL. Send over the kernel string blob to compile. Run the kernel. A ton of ceremony and then you couldn't be guarenteed it'd work because the likes of AMD, Intel, or nVidia were all spotty on how well they'd support it.

SYCL seems promising but the ecosystem is a little intimidating. It does not seem (and I could be wrong here) that there is a defacto SYCL compiler. The goals of SYCL compilers are also fairly diverse.

No, I bought a Nvidia card and just use CUDA.

> OpenCL had just a weird dance to perform to get a kernel running...

Yeah but that entire list, if you step back and think big picture, probably isn't the problem. Programmers have a predictable response to that sort of silliness. Build a library over it & abstract it away. The sheer number of frameworks out there is awe-inspiring.

I gave up on OpenCL on AMD cards. It wasn't the long complex process that got me, it was the unavoidable crashes along the way. I suspect that is a more significant issue than I realised at the time (when I assumed it was just me) because it goes a long way to explain AMD's pariah-like status in the machine learning world. The situation is more one-sided than can be explained by just a well-optimised library. I've personally seen more success implementing machine learning frameworks on AMD CPUs than on AMD's GPUs, and that is a remarkable thing. Although I assume in 2024 the state of the game has changed a lot from when I was investigating the situation actively.

I don't think CUDA is the problem here, math libraries are commodity software that give a relatively marginal edge. The lack of CUDA is probably a symptom of deeper hardware problems once people stray off an explicitly graphical workflow. If the hardware worked to spec I expect someone would just build a non-optimised CUDA clone and we'd all move on. But AMD did build a CUDA clone and it didn't work for me at least - and the buzz suggests something is still going wrong for AMD's GPGPU efforts.

Impossible. GPGPU runtimes are too close to hardware, and the hardware is proprietary with many trade secrets. You need support from GPU vendors.

BTW, if you want reliable cross-vendor GPU, just use Direct3D 11 compute shaders. Modern videogames use a lot of compute, to the point that UE5 even renders triangle meshes with compute shaders. AMD hardware is totally fine, it’s the software ecosystem.

An x86 monopoly in the late 80s was a thing, but not now.

Today, there are sufficient competitive chip architectures with cross-compatible operating systems and virtualization that x86 does not represent control of the computing market in a manner that should prevent such a merger: ARM licensees, including the special case of Apple Silicon, Snapdragon, NVIDIA SOCs, RISC-V...

Windows, MacOS and Linux all run competitively on multiple non-x86 architectures.

Incorrect, we have an even greater lack of x86 vendors now than we did in the 80s. In the 80s you had Intel, and they licensed to AMD, Harris, NEC, TI, Chips & Technologies, and in the 90s we had IBM, Cyrix, VIA, National Semi, NexGen, and for a hot minute Transmeta. Even more smaller vendors.

Today making mass market x86 chips we have: Intel, AMD, and a handful of small embedded vendors selling designs from the Pentium days.

I believe what you meant was that x86 is not a monopoly thanks to other ISAs, but x86 itself is even more of a monopoly than ever.

C&T had some super-386 chips that apparently barely made it to market (38605DX), and the Cyrix 5x86 (most of a 6x86) is substantially different from the AMD one (which is just a 486 clock-quadrupled)

I think you're off by 20 years on this. In the 80s and early 90s we had reasonable competition from 68k, powerpc, and arm on desktops; and tons of competition in the server space (mips, sparc, power, alpha, pa-risc, edit: and vax!). It wasn't till the early 2000s that both the desktop/server space coalesced around x86.

It seems almost like the forces that are pushing against these long-term trends are focused more on trying to figure out how to saturate existing compute on the high-end, and using that to justify drives away from diversity and vertical integrated cost/price reduction. But there are, long-term, not as many users who need to host this technology as there are users of things like phones and computers who need the benefits the long-term trends provide.

Intel has acted somewhat as a rock in a river, and the rest of the world is finding ways around them after having been dammed up for a bit.

A lot of companies killed off their in-house architectures and hopped on the Itanium bandwagon. The main two exceptions were Sun and IBM.

Intel had just wiped the floor with x86 servers, all the old guard Unix vendors with their own chips were hurting. Then Intel makes the rounds with a glorious plan of how they were going to own the server landscape for a decade or more. So in various states of defeat and grief much of the industry followed them. Planned or not, the resulting rug pull really screwed them over. The organs that operated those lines of businesses were fully removed. It worked too well, I am going to say it was on accident.

Intel should have broken up its internal x86 hegemony a long time ago, which they have been trying since the day it was invented. Like the 6502, it was just too successful for its own good. Only x86 also built up the Vatican around itself.

> intended so they're not making an effective argument

To be fair I'm really struggling to somehow connect the "x86 monopoly in the late 80s" with the remainder of their comment (which certainly makes sense).

By that standard if we exclude mobile x86 has a much stronger monopoly these days than in 1985. Unless we exclude low end PCs like Apple II and Commodore 64.

In 1990 x86 had ~80%, Apple ~7%, Amiga ~4% (with the remainder going to lowend or niche PCs) so again not that different than today.

Sadly with the rise of laptops with soldered-in-everything, and the popularity of android/iphone/tablet devices, I share some of layer8's worries about the future of the relatively open PC architecture and hardware ecosystem.

We are really lucky that such a diverse and interoperable hardware platform like the PC exists. We should not discount it, and instead appreciate how important it is, and how unlikely for such a varied and high-performance platform to emerge again, should the PC platform die.

All the use cases, except gaming PC, have "less serious" solutions in Linux/ARM and Linux/RISCV today, where I would argue there is more interoperability and diversity. Those solutions get better and closer to "serious" x86 solutions every day.

Will they be roughly equivalent in price/performance in 5 years... only time will tell but I suspect x86 PC is the old way and it's on it's way out.

https://herecomesthemoon.net/2024/11/two-factions-of-cpp/

There are a lot of pre-compiled binaries floating about that are depended on by lots of enterprise software whose source code is long gone, and these are effectively locked to x86_64 chips until the cost of interoperability becomes greater than reverse engineering their non-trivial functionality.

"two factions" is only discussing source compatibility.

And then in the 2000s after AMD64 pretty much destroyed all competing architectures and then in the 2010s Intel itself effectively was almost a monopoly (outside of mobile) with AMD being on the verge of bankruptcy.

Could also be Intel and Micron. Then you end up with full stack devices with Intel CPUs and Micron RAM and storage, and the companies have partnered in the past.

Maybe they should follow AMD's lead and spin off the foundry business.

Samsung still has a fairly competitive process and could make x86 CPUs to put in their own tablets and laptops without having the OEM and Intel get into a fight about margins if they're the same company. And with the largest maker of Android devices putting x86 CPUs into them, you get an ecosystem built around it that you wouldn't when nobody is using them to begin with because Intel refuses to price competitively with ARM.

Wintel was a duopoly which had some power: Intel x86 has less dominance now partly because Windows has less dominance.

There are some wonderful papers on how game theory and monopoly plays out between Windows and Intel; and there's a great paper with analysis of why AMD struggled against the economic forces and why Microsoft preferred to team up with a dominant CPU manufacturer.

Part 1, combine branch predictor with the instruction trace cache to be able to detect workloads, have specific licenses for say Renderman, Oracle or CFD software.

Part 2, add a mesh network directly to the CPU, require time based signing keys to operate. Maybe every chip just has starlink included.

Part 3, In an BWM rent your seats move, the base CPU is just barely able to boot the OS, specific features can be unlocked with signed payloads. Using Shamir secrets so that Broadcom AND the cloud provider are both required for signing the feature request. One can rent AVX512, more last level cache, ECC, overclocking, underclocking.

The nice part about including radios in the CPUs directly means that updates can be applied without network connectivity and you can geofence your feature keys.

This last part we can petition the government to require as the grounds of being able to produce EAR regulated CPUs globally.

I think I'll just sell these patents to Myhrvold.

But didn't IBM do things like this for years with mainframes?

The best they could do with the GFX business is a public execution. We've been hearing about terrible Intel GFX for 15 years and how they are just on the cusp of making one that is bad (not terrible). Most people who've been following hardware think Intel and GFX is just an oxymoron. Wall Street might see some value in it, but the rest of us, no.

What does an OS need a GPU for?

My current laptop only has integrated Intel GPU. I'm not missing Nvidia, with its proprietary drivers, high power consumption, and corresponding extra heat and shorter battery life...

An 8K 32bpp framebuffer is ... omg 126MB for a single copy. I was going to argue that a software rasterizer running on vcache would be doable, but not for 8k.

For 4k, with 32MB per display buffer, it could be possible but heavy compositing will require going out to main memory. 1440p would be even better at only 15MB per display buffer.

For 1440p at 144Hz and 2TB/s (vcache max), best case is an overdraw of 984 frames/frame

I was doing a11y work for an application a few months back and got interested into the question of desktop screen sizes. I see all these ads for 4k and bigger monitors but they don't show up here

https://gs.statcounter.com/screen-resolution-stats/desktop/w...

And on the steam hardware survey I am seeing a little more than 5% with a big screen.

Myself I am swimming in old monitors and TV to the point where I am going to start putting Pepper's ghost machines in my windows. I think I want to buy a new TV, but I get a free old TV. I pick up monitors that are in the hallway and people are tripping on them and I take them home. Hypothetically I want a state-of-the-art monitor with HDR and wide gamut and all that but the way things are going I might never buy a TV or monitor again.

If the above-linked website uses data reported by the browser, I wonder how this scenario might be taken into consideration (or even if such a thing is possible)

A complex desktop web form with several pages, lots of combo boxes, repeating fields, etc. I cleaned up the WCAG AA issues and even the S, but the AAA requirement for click targets was out of scope but had me thinking that I wanted to make labels (say on a dropdown menu bar) as big as I reasonably could and that in turn got me thinking about how much space I had to work with on different resolution screens so I looked up those stats and tried to see what would fit in which constraints.

The PC I'm typing this on has two 27in 4k screens. I'm sitting so that I look at them from about 75cm away (that's 2.5 feet in weird units).

I archive most of my video files in 720p, because I genuinely don't see that big of a difference between even 720p and 1080p. It is definitely visible, but usually, it does not add much to the experience, considering that most videos today are produced to be watchable on smartphones and tablets just as much as cinema screens or huge TVs. I only make an exception here for "cinematic" content that was intended for the very big screen. That does not necessarily mean movies, but also certain YouTube videos, like "Timelapse of the Future": https://youtube.com/watch?v=uD4izuDMUQA - This one hits differently for me in 4K vs. just 1080p. Having to watch this in just 720p would be tragic, because its cinematography relies on 4K's ability to resolve very fine lines.

So why would I make a point to have both my screens be 4K? Because where else do you look at fine lines a lot? You're looking at it right now: Text. For any occupation that requires reading a lot of text (like programming!), 4K absolutely makes a difference. Even if I don't decrease the font size to get more text on screen at once, just having the outlines of the glyphs be sharper reduces eye strain in my experience.

“Ubuntu 7.10 is the first version of Ubuntu that ships with Compiz Fusion enabled by default on supported hardware. Compiz Fusion, which combines Compiz with certain components developed by the Beryl community, is a compositing window manager that adds a wide range of visual effects to Ubuntu's desktop environment. The default settings for Compiz enable basic effects—like window shadows and fading menus—that are subtle and unobtrusive. For more elaborate Compiz features, like wobbling windows, users can select the Extra option on the Visual Effects tab of the Appearance Preferences dialog.”

MacOS in 2000 was still old MacOS, with no compositing at all. The NeXT derived version of MacOS was still in beta, and I tried it back then, it was very rough. Even once OSX shipped in 2001, it was still software composited. Quartz Extreme implemented GPU compositing in 10.2, which shipped in 2002.

Windows finally got a composited desktop in Vista, released in 2007. It was GPU accelerated from day one.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Aero

It actually separates the OS from the GPU. Before WDDM your GFX device driver was the only software that could use GFX acceleration. After WDDM the GPU is another "processor" in your computer that can read and write to RAM and the application can use the GPU in user space any way it wants, and then the compositor can to the same (in user space) and in the end all the OS is managing communication with the GPU.

For that approach to work you need to have enough fill rate that you can redraw the screen several times per frame. Microsoft wanted to have enough they could afford some visual bling, but Intel didn't give to them.

Which is far more powerful than the ones that caused problems almost two decades ago.

As people noted, most of your GUI is being rendered by it. Every video you watch is accelerated by it, and if it has some compute support, some applications are using it for faster math at the background (mostly image editors, but who knows).

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2008-03-27-nvidia-drivers-responsib...

It wasn't fully WDDM compatible for a quite minor (overall) part, but the performance were awful anyway and lack of running in the full WDDM mode (ie Aero) also didn't help too, partly because running in Aero was faster.

not sure about it. i had friends with discrete GPUs at the time and they told me that vista was essentially a gpu-stress program rather than an OS.

at the same time, compiz/beryl on linux worked beautifully on intel integrated gpus, and were doing way cooler things than vista was doing at the time (cube desktops? windows bursting into flames when closed?).

I'm a bit sad that compiz/beryl is not as popular anymore (with all the crazy things it could do).

The problem with the "use the GPU in a SoC" proposition is everyone that makes the rest of a SoC also already has a GPU for it. Often better than what Intel can offer in terms of perf/die space or perf/watt. These SoC solutions tend to coalesce around tile based designs which keep memory bandwidth and power needs down compared to the traditional desktop IMR designs Intel has.

In the mean time, AMD/ARM already won phones, table and game consoles.

Server purchasing decisions aren’t made by everyday people. Intel’s roadmap in that space slipped year for year for at least 10 of the last 15 years.

That leaves Intel with the fraction of the non-mac laptop market that’s made up of people that haven’t been paying attention for the last ten years, and don’t ask anyone who has.

Don't forget laptops. Intel has been terrible on laptops due to their lack of efficiency. AMD has been wiping the floor with them for years now.

2024 is the first year that Intel has released a laptop chip that can compete in efficiency. I hope Intel continues to invest in this category and remain neck and neck with AMD if we have any hope of having Windows laptops with decent battery lide.

Anyway, in my questions for her about what she really cares about in a new laptop, power efficiency was not a concern of hers. She does not care about efficiency at all. All she cared about was a good enough screen (2560x1440 or better), and a fast CPU to run the new Photoshop features, and the ability to move it from one location to another (hence the need for a laptop instead of a desktop). I'd wager that for most people, the fact that it's a portable computer has nothing to do with how long the battery lasts away from an outlet. She can transport the computer to another location and plug it in. There are very few situations that require extended use away from an outlet, and even in an airplane, we often see 120V outlets at the seats. There's really no use case for her that puts her away from an outlet for longer than an hour or two, so efficiency is the least of her concerns in buying a new laptop.

So we went with a new Dell laptop with the Intel i9-13900HX, which beats the Apple M4 Max 16 Core in terms of overall performance in CPU benchmarks. I would have looked at an AMD based laptop, but the price on this Dell and the performance of the i9 were great, it was $999 on sale. It's got a decent enough screen, and we can easily upgrade the RAM and storage on this laptop.

I doubt she'd even care if the new laptop didn't have a battery at all, so long as she can easily stuff it in a bag and carry it to another location and plug it in. I feel the exact same way, and I recently bought a new (AMD based) laptop, and power efficiency was not a thing in my decision making process at all. The battery lasts a few hours, and that's plenty. I don't get a hard-on for battery life, and I'm not really sure who does. Are these people dancing around with their laptops and simply can't sit still and plug it in?

Handed the wife M2 Macbook Air and she's thrilled how little she has to plug it in. She goes weeks between charges sometimes.

Not trying to invalidate or lessen your complaint (which I completely agree with) but want to make sure you are aware of OpenCore Legacy Patcher. It's a little hacky by nature but can give some extra life to that machine: https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.ht...

Evidently, that leaves Intel the majority of the market.

A friend who worked in film post production was telling me about similar rare but annoying problems with Mx Apple computers. I feel like their are verticals where people will favor x86 chips for a while yet.

I am not as close to this as I was when I actually programmed games (oh so long ago!) so I wonder if this is just the point of view of a person who has lost touch with trends in tech.

I think this is partly because big OEMs doubt (used to doubt?) AMD’s ability to consistently deliver product in the kind of volume they need. Partly it’s because of Intel’s historically anticompetitive business practices.

> Multiple reports, citing sources at laptop OEMs, have covered what is said to be poor support, chip supply, and communication from AMD with its laptop partners, leading to generally poor execution. Chip consultancy firm AC Analysis says AMD's shift of focus to AI and data centers has led to a "'Cold War ice age' in relationships with OEMs," leading to a loss of trust from its partners.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/amds-laptop-oems-...

That's because Intel bribed OEMs to use only Intel chips

IIRC their data center CPU revenue was about even this quarter so this is a bit deceptive (i.e. you can buy 1 large CPU instead of several cheaper ones).

"When it comes to servers, AMD's share totaled 24.2%"

and

"Intel, of course, retained its volume lead with a 75.8% unit market share."

Ignoring ChromeOS, and assuming 100% of windows and linux is x86 (decreasingly true - the only win11 I’ve ever seen is an arm VM on my mac) and 100% of Mac is arm (it will be moving forward), that puts arm at 20% of the PC market.

Interpolation from your numbers puts intel at 64% (with a ceiling of 80% of PC; 25% of consumer computing devices unless windows makes a comeback).

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share

Windows:

Intel: 64.23%

AMD: 35.71%

Linux:

Intel: 30.15%

AMD: 69.85%

Let them die. Maybe we'd actually see some new competition?

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/intels-7-86-billion-subsidy-0...

Doubt.

Neither of the companies is particularly competitive on either processor or GPU architecture nor fabrication.

A merger of those entities looks like nothing but a recipe for further x86 stagnation and an even quicker death for the entities involved imho.

In particular I cannot see what's good in it for AMD. The fabs have no use/clear path forward. Their processors/gpu either match our outmatch the Intel offering.

A Broadcom/Apple takeover of Intel sounds much more reasonable.

Out of curiosity, what would make Intel interesting to Apple? Apple already acquired Intel's modem business and they have their own CPU and GPU.

Yes Congressman, we agree to take over Intel fabs if you agree to drop this antitrust nonsense. And we would like our $20B from Google back too.

But I'm just speculating.

Apple currently really enjoys being on the very latest process node. It's not a given that they could match or improve on that with their own fab (Sure, there is a lot of VLSI design and materials experience, but that does not automatically translate into a state of the art process, and is unlikely to contain the magic ingredient to get Intel back on top).

And in the unlikely case it SHOULD work, that will only invite further regulatory headaches.

Just speculating.

I can, but it's not technical. Intel has a huge advantage in several markets, and has strong relationships with many OEMs like Dell. Intel, even though their market cap is now a fraction of AMD's, still has a huge lead in marketshare in OEM systems and servers. (Several other posts in this thread have real numbers.)

If AMD bought out Intel, it would now get all of that, and be able to push all these OEM and server customers into AMD's solutions instead.

Who is then? Apple is of course still ahead in lower power chips. But Apple is not in the the desktop/workstation/server market and there are hardly any alternatives to AMD or Intel there.

e.g. M2 Ultra Apple's fastest "desktop" CPU is slower than the 14700K you can get for $350. Seems pretty competitive...

Doubtful that is the issue with Intel's track record. Curious when we will know if 18A is competitive or not.

> If 18a is not ready I think the best case scenario for Intel is a merger with AMD. The US Govt would probably co-sign on it for national security concerns overriding the fact that it creates an absolute monopoly on x86 processors. The moat of the two companies together would give the new combined company plenty of time to ramp up their fabs.

No way other countries would allow that. If A-tel (Amd-inTEL) can not sell to the EU the merger will not happen.

What the EU gonna do then? Stop buying computers? Perform rapid continental ARM transition for mythical amount of money?

Apple has made it fairly obvious, even if it was not already with smartphones and chromebooks, that Arm is a viable, realistic, and battle-tested alternative for general purpose computing. Windows 11 even runs on Arm already.

It would not happen "tomorrow" - this would be years in court if nothing else. This would give Dell/HP/Lenovo/whoever plenty of time to start building Arm laptops & servers etc for the European market.

And who knows what RISC-V will look like in a few more years?

The EU has done a bunch of stupid anti-consumer shit in tech already (hello cookie warnings that everyone now ignores), so I would not be surprised if this happened.

> Perform rapid continental ARM transition for mythical amount of money?

And what is Intel + AMD going to do? Not sell CPUs in Europe?

Seize or terminate their patents and copyrights. Issue arrest warrants for criminal evasion. Compulsory licensing of x86 to a European design firm immunized by EU law.

> Perform rapid continental ARM transition

Yes.

Windows is on ARM. Apple is on ARM. AWS and Ampere make decent ARM servers. You have decent x86 user-space compatibility on ARM laptops. That is all users want.

I doubt it will cost 'mythical amounts of money'. Most users use a web browser and an office suite. I doubt they will know a difference for a while.

My eyes rolled so far back I hurt myself.

Please provide some examples of where the EU has been able to do a fraction of what you listed to large, US based firms in the past.

Looking at the future, if you want a trade war and an excuse for the new US administration to completely neglect NATO obligations this is a great start.

Provide an example of where a large firm decided to ignore EU law and go ahead with a merger that the EU objected to.

No-one wants the nuclear option, on either side. But if anyone ever tries to call the EU's bluff, they may find out the EU wasn't bluffing at all.

not sure what a "grown" semiconductor fab is but follow this link and sort by location https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat... The number of homegrown companies with fabs is greater than 1

it would create so much loses not just by security but also effect on economy would be so high

but intel going bankrupt would change market permanently

I'm not convinced of this. Fabs are incredibly expensive businesses. Intel has failed to keep up and AMD spun off their fabs to use TSMC.

There is also ARM knocking at the door for general computing. It's already gaining traction in previously x86 dominated markets.

The model for US based fabbing has to include selling large portions of capacity to third party ASIC manufacturers, otherwise I see it as doomed to failure.

I know anecdotes aren't data, but I was talking with a colleague about chips recently and he noticed that converting all of his cloud JVM deployments to ARM machines both improved performance and lowered costs. The costs might not even be the chips themselves, but less power and thermal requirements that lowers the OpEx spend.

IT departments are not going to stop buying x86 processors until they absolutely are forced to. Gamers are not going to switch unless performance is actually better. There just isn't the incentive to switch.

> IT departments are not going to stop buying x86 processors until they absolutely are forced to.

IT departments are buying arm laptops, Apple's.

And there is an incentive to switch, cost. If you are in AWS, you can save a pretty penny by adopting graviton processors.

Further, the only thing stopping handhelds from being arm machines is poor x86 emulation. A solvable problem with a small bit of hardware. (Only non-existent because current ARM vendors can't be bothered to add it and ARM hasn't standardized it).

Really the only reason arm is lagging is because the likes of Qualcomm have tunnel vision on what markets they want to address.

About corporate laptops, do you have evidence to show that companies are switching to Macbooks from HP/Dell/ThinkPads?

They are similar. Particularly because developing on a corporate hardware with an ARM processor is a surefire way to figure out if the software you write will have issues with ARM in AWS.

That's pretty much the entire reason x86 took off in the server market in the first place.

> About corporate laptops, do you have evidence to show that companies are switching to Macbooks from HP/Dell/ThinkPads?

Nope. Mostly just anecdotal. My company offers devs the option of either an x86 machine or a mac.

Also Qualcomm's GPUs are pretty shit (compared to Intel's and AMDs or Apple's)

Plenty of them are buying Macbooks. It's definitely a small percentage of the worldwide market, but not entirely insignificant either.

That's the question that remains to be seen.

Of course these days more and more of that is moving the the cloud and all IT needs to a web browser that works. Thus making their job easier.

This was the point I was going to make. While not completely dead, the days of desktop applications are quickly coming to a close. Almost everything is SAAS now or just electron apps which are highly portable.

Even if it's not saas or electron, the only two languages I'd do a desktop app in now-a-days is C# or Java. Both of which are fairly portable.

The world outside of the SV tech bubble runs on Excel.

1. Excel now-a-days is mostly just an electron app. That's what the office 365 conversion was effectively.

2. MS has supported ARM platforms for quite some time now. [1]

[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/office-windows-11-arm-starts-...

[2] http://www.emulators.com/docs/abc_arm64ec_explained.htm

And google sheets in my opinion is not good for complicated stuff - the constant lag..

We mostly email links to spreadsheets running in cloud. So it really doesn't matter what your OS is any more from an excel perspective, as long as your computer can run a modern browser you are good.

It is like a toy version of the standalone app.

Also it sucks with lists, pivot tables...

Maybe in the coming Great Depression of 2025, people will think differently and start looking at cheaper alternatives.

> If you need to use Excel at work, you need x86 since Excel for Mac is a gutted toy

The nominal cost of Excel was not the topic being discussed. It was the cost of using Excel for MacOS rather than Excel for Windows.

Almost no one needs the Windows specific features of Excel, so almost no one needs to give up using macOS just because of Excel.

What's this based on? Surely the proportion of desktops that need to be more powerful than anything Apple is doing on ARM is very small. And surely Apple isn't 5 years ahead?

Apple can force the transition. It is not so straightforward on Windows/Linux.

Massively lower power consumption and way less waste heat to dispose of.

Literally the two biggest concerns of every data centre on earth.

Market forces have traditionally pushed Intel and AMD to design their chips for a less efficient part of the frequency/power curve than ARM vendors. That changed a few years ago, and you can already see the results in x86 chips becoming more efficient.

I say, diversity rules!

[1]: https://research.ibm.com/blog/northpole-llm-inference-result...

Talos is the exception that proves the rule, sadly.

They did realize the tactical error, so I'm hoping Power11 will reverse the damage.

Giving life support to dinosaurs isn't how you create a competitive economy.

He's also 63. Has plenty of money to survive the rest of his life. Has eight grandchildren. There's so much more to life than business. What's to say he doesn't want to simply enjoy life with more connection and community to loved ones around him?

I don’t know much about this guy but it’s reasonable to assume that any C-level exec will hold on to the position for dear life until they are forced out.

The Juggling Act: Bringing Balance to Your Faith, Family, and Work

https://www.amazon.com/Juggling-Act-Bringing-Balance-Family/...

I don't know. Frank Slootman's retirement from Snowflake earlier this year was certainly not celebrated by any significant stakeholders. I'd imagine at some point someone like Frank realizes that they are worth more than Tim Cook, they consider that they're in their mid-60s, and they decide the remaining time they have on earth might be better spent in other ways.

Every person in the workforce, no matter how ambitious or how senior, is forced into the calculus of money and power vs. good years remaining. I expect the rational ones will select the balance point for themselves.

News: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/12/02/intel-ceo-pat-gelsinger-is-o...

Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger ousted by board

Worse (for Intel) what can happen is Intel HP-isation - splits and sells.

But there is a lot of good news for them in cpu world: another B's granted, military buys Intel, new no-HT arch. And 80 bit memories like in Multics, can be true virtualisation on x86.

Even if x86 is dead Intel still have fabs - AMD can soon print in them :)

But that multigeneration refreshes are still a mistery - is it Intel's problem or maybe something else eg. simply someone have a some patent ? :>

Look at what Pat did to VMware. He's doing the exact same thing at Intel. He came in, muddied the waters by hiring way too many people to do way too many things and none of them got done appropriately. Pat is a huge part of the problem.

I had the unfortunate pleasure of watching him not understand, at all, VMware's core competency. It was a nightmare of misunderstanding and waste in that company under his leadership.

Intel turned into even more of a laughing stock under Gelsinger. I say: good riddance. He burned time, capital and people at both VMware and Intel. He's a cancer as a CEO.

This implies that he was pushed out, rather than chose to retire. I can't see anything in the article to suggest this, do you have another source?

Oh man, the risk in that is extreme. We are moving away from x86 in general, but wow, that's... a big jump in risk.

Does this mean that Intel's fabs should split for Global Foundries, and the Intel design team should go to AMD?

Sure they won't allow Intel to be bought by a foreign company, but surely everyone would much rather see Intel being bought by literally any other company than AMD and Nvidia.

They already do networking, photonics, GPUs, high speed interconnects, and CPUs. They are planning on selling their FPGAs (the Altera acquisition) to Lattice.

The only things left are their fab ops, thunderbolt/usbc, wifi, and ble.

Their fab ops would take over a decade of heavy investment to catch up to TSMC or Samsung and idk if even Nvidia is ambitious enough to take that on.

Wifi and BLE could be good additions if they wanted to branch out their mellanox portfolio to wireless. Thunderbolt/USB C also might be worthwhile.

But that IP is probably going to be cheaper to buy piecemeal so idk if it's worth it to buy the whole company outright.

So if Intel sells, everyone is fucked until whoever buys can renegotiate the terms of the agreement. And if that's Nvidia, they could just sit dead on the IP and starve AMD of the bulk of their CPU revenue (which is what is keeping the company solvent). And requiring they keep the agreement they currently have would mean requiring AMD to give Nvidia a pretty detailed look at the AMD secret sauce which would increasingly push AMD into the red until they become insolvent, again leading to a Nvidia monopoly.

The US government as well as the EU will not allow that to happen so however things slice, ownership of the x86 ISA patents would not be going to Nvidia.

[0]https://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/amd-clar...

They'll barely allow Nvidia to acquire anybody at this point, no matter how small. See recent EU response to Run:ai. Intel would be considered 100x worse.

Huawei is trying to make establish domestic Ascend/MindSpore ecosystem, but they are limited by the SMIC process (~7nm). Amount of defects is allegedly rather high, but they are the only "official" game in town (other than smuggled NVIDIA cards or outsourced datacenters in Middle East).

Well they obviously would..

Also EU has promised various significant subsidies to Intel. They obviously has fabs in Ireland and building one in Germany and perhaps even Poland..

If not, look up e.g. Microsoft 's purchase of Activision, both US companies.

I heard they’re building a iOS / android replacement. Think of the vertical integration!

I’m picturing a boot-looping cargo plane full of hummers dropping like a stone — doesn’t get much more vertically integrated than that. Think of all the layers they can eliminate.

I can see them wanting certain parts of the business (GPU mainly) but on a whole it doesn't make a lot of sense.

I don't see Intel as a single entity being valuable to any US business really. You're essentially buying last years fall line, theres very little use for Intel's fabs without a huge amount being spent on them to get them up to modern standards.

It'll all come down to IP and people that'll be the true value.

The only way it happens is if it is kept separate kind of like the Beats acquisition. Apple lends some chip designs to Intel and Apple starts fabricating their chips on Intel fabs, but otherwise the companies operate independently.

Even then there is zero indication that Apple would ever want to do their own manufacturing.

One of the reasons where Intel "let" AMD compete in the x86 space is US Gov requirements for being able to source chips from two vendors at least

What could go wrong?

If you take that away, it becomes irrelevant (like many other ARM-based processors that struggle to be a good product because of compatibility).

Apple has a promising path for x86 liberation, but it is not there yet.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S138376212...

It's not the only ARM CPU with TSO support though, some server platforms also do it.

Also, can you name these other platforms?

Also, can you back up the information about most users not leveraging Rosetta?

https://share.transistor.fm/s/124f8bc4

> Also, can you name these other platforms?

Fujitsu A64FX, and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver

> Also, can you back up the information about most users not leveraging Rosetta?

Well I couldn't tell you that, but most people just use web browsers.

If most people just use web browsers, why so much effort has been put on Rosetta 2? Sounds very wasteful.

Also, A64FX seems to agree with my statement that an ARM with some x86 spice makes a better product than just an ARM.

And, if we're talking about making ARM mainstream, Raspberry Pi did more for the platform than Apple and deserves to get the good reputation.

It's mostly something that was needed in the first few years so you could run Chrome and Photoshop, but those have been ported now. It's mostly useful for running WINE but that's not super common outside games.

That said, a binary recompiler has a lot of uses once you have one: https://valgrind.org

What you're saying is exactly what I'm saying. Having that x86 translation layer helped them sell macs. It doesn't matter if it is not needed now (it is needed now, otherwise it would have been removed).

So, yes. Apple has a popular new band in town. But they still need to play some x86 covers to sell tickets.

As I said, they have a good plan, but they're _not there yet_.

When they'll be? When x86 translation is not shipped anymore. It's rather simple.

If this happens, couldn’t they force them giving out licenses as a condition? The licensing thing has been such an impediment to competition that it seems like it’s about time anyway.

Why would AMD want a merger? They aren't a charity, and certainly don't need the distraction.

Even if Intel gets bought out, it'll be in pieces. Nobody wants to enter the x86 market, but there may be smaller segmenrs of the business that can help an ARM based business, or someone looking to get into GPU's.

If the ISA patent licenses opened up, that might not be the case. When the topic comes up, it's more about Intel shutting down license transfers, so naturally companies have avoided x86.

Why would Intel "fold"? Their revenue is still 2x higher than AMDs... I mean obviously they are not doing great but its silly to say something like that at this point.

Having a sole supplier for CPUs is a bad strategy.

- A token legal remnant of Intel, with 0 employees or properties, might suffice to keep that license ticking.

- If the stakes appeared to be "or America will lose it's ability to make computers", then the government might find a judge willing to sign off on just about any sort of counterfactual, "because national security".

The struggling companies with totally rotten management like to bring such "stars" (pretty shrewd people who built themselves a public image of supposedly talented engineers who got promoted into higher management on their merits) - Yahoo/Meyers come to mind as another example - who de-facto finish the destruction of the company while management rides the gravy train.

I think a merger with Nvidia would be more likely given the antitrust issues that a merger with AMD would bring up.

At least in theory, a fully independent, split/spun out standalone fab removes this concern.

That said - what does Intel have to offer the top players here? Their fabs are being state of the art. And what's the standalone value of post-spin fabless Intel if their chip designs are as behind as their fabs?

This certainly presents a conundrum for US policy since we need fabs domestically for national security reasons, but the domestically owned ones are behind.

I can’t imagine fabs have that level of automation. It’s not like sending a file to your printer. It’s a multi month or year project in some cases to get your design produced. There’s many humans involved surely.

AMD/NVIDIA are in same business as Intel and have same pool of customers.

Oh no no no no. Oh hell no. For now, we need competition in the x86 market, and that would kill it dead. Imagine Intel re-releasing the Core 2 Quad, forever.

>Gelsinger, who resigned on Dec. 1, left after a board meeting last week during which directors felt Gelsinger's costly and ambitious plan to turn Intel around was not working and the progress of change was not fast enough, according to a person familiar with the matter. The board told Gelsinger he could retire or be removed, and he chose to step down, according to the source.

I "predicted" this three months ago (really, it was inevitable), but gave it 1-6 months.

Now for the what-happens-next popcorn. In a normal world, they would go bankrupt, but this is very much not a normal world.

However, I think the fab and design should be separate companies, with separate accountability and goals/objectives. There is just too much baggage by keeping them coupled. It doesn't let either part of the company spread their wings and reach their full potential when they are attached at the hip. From the outside perspective, that is the thing that Pat has seemingly been focused on, keeping it together, and its why people have lost faith in his leadership.

I also don't think that from a investment / stock standpoint that accelerating the depreciation / losses related to restructuring on the most recent quarter was a wise decision, since what Intel really needed was a huge win right now.

That's the best exit case for the shareholders. It's the worst case for Intel's employees, customers and partners.

> would probably co-sign on it for national security concerns

This is equally laughable and detestable at this point in history. My personal security is not impacted by this at all. Weapons manufacturers honestly should not have a seat at this discussion.

> overriding the fact that it creates an absolute monopoly on x86 processors.

Yet this isn't a problem for "national security?" This is why I find these sentiments completely ridiculous fabianesque nonsense.

Dropping Pat will alleviate their feeling of having to do "something."

As for M&A, it wouldn't just have to be approved at the DoJ. And the Chinese will never ever approve of it (but would have to). If they do a transaction without approval from the CMA, it would be like a nuclear financial war.

I think it's high time to gut intel into parts, a la GE. Sell the Fabless to QCOM or BCOM. Sell the Fabs of one by one to GF, Tower, UMC or even tsmc. Find a PE firm for the leading edge and reconstrue it with significant rnd credits as a kind of Bell labs 2.0.

Or something like that.

My guess is not 18A being delayed. It is simply not getting any / enough customer on board. And you cant simply spend tens of billions innovate to 18A, only to realise you dont have a customer to even recoup half the cost. Especially when TSMC is playing their card right. Which I know they will.

Getting into foundry business will always be difficult. And the benefits of using 18A with Intel, even if it was on schedule and 6-12 months ahead of TSMC, does not out-weight that TSMC will always be cheaper due to tooling familiarity etc, and even at the same cost, TSMC will have better volume to get go simply due to its size, and even with the same volume, TSMC is pure play, while working with Intel would mean a potential of IP theft. And even after ALL that, on a hypothetical Intel Foundry only, a lot of packaging and testing for your chip are all located in East Asia.

What I wrote above is essentially the same thing when I wrote it on Anandtech or SemiWiki 10+ years ago. The time when I got death threat from Intel Fan boys about TSMC becoming number one foundry overtaking Intel. Nothing has changed. Had Intel started working on it in 2014 / 2015, when Intel still has the CPU monopoly where it could used those profits to fund and change direction, Intel would be in a much much better position.

Unfortunately all those board wanted was dividends and buy back.

Yes. Fuck All Intel's board members.