Anne O. Nymous (not.delete@this.real.address) on January 27, 2023 12:09 am wrote:
> Chris G (chrisg.delete@this.chrisg.com) on January 26, 2023 5:02 pm wrote:
> > I thought this quote from the NY Times article was interesting: “She also determined that Intel had
> > scheduled more products than its engineers and customers could easily handle. So she streamlined that
> > product road map, including pushing back a successor to Sapphire Rapids to 2024 from 2023.”
> >
> > In other words, Xeon Emerald Rapids is also delayed again. Emerald Rapids is just Sapphire Rapids with
> > some more errata fixed, a 17% increase in DRAM bandwidth and a 25% increase in intersocket bandwidth
> > on the same process technology. It could be that the complexity of x86 and the hairball of their numerous
> > instruction set extensions is just too much for anyone to deal with. I would also guess a big part of
> > Intel’s problem is poor management. Andy Grove was probably the best technology manager of all time
> > but that was a long time ago. Now the type of innovation
> > we get from Intel is renaming the process technology
> > from Intel 4 to Intel 3 because a name with a smaller number must surely be better.
>
> You know that Pat Gelsinger became CEO of intel just ~ 2 years ago? It takes time to change things,
> so maybe give the gentleman a bit more time to pull things around (well possible he might fail
> given the "institutional inertia" of a behemoth company like intel, but he might prevail, but we
> only know after giving the whole exercise enough time to play out one way or the other).
>
> Now, it looks pretty clear that intel was resting on its laurels for too long and
> the whole 10nm process cluster-fsck certainly did not help, but not sure whether
> all is doom and gloom, it is still a pretty rich and resourceful company...

Outsiders obviously have to work with limited data; we can't prove anything, we can just point to patterns and say what they suggest to us.

Having said that, I compared Pat with Steve Job's return to Apple, or even Satya's first two years. Both made it clear in their first year that it was no longer business as usual, that things had to be shaken up and changed.
Conversely I don't see Pat as doing anything similar. Steve, for example, dealt with complexity (of a different sort, sure) by dramatically pruning the product line. But Pat has done nothing similar. Intel differentiators (whether AVX512 or accelerators) are used as a market segmentation mechanism, not as a way to grow the ecosystem.
IMHO the fundamental problem with Intel is that engineers are not in charge. Finance controls one set of decisions, marketing controls another. Steve or Satya would have dealt with this by dramatic changes in those core areas; but Pat retains the dividend, in spite of everything, and retaining the marketing control (engineer effort spread over finely differentiated product segmentation, far too much making promises and setting schedules before it's known what is possible). Compare how Intel and AMD comport themselves in this respect.

It's easy to mock Intel or complain for tribal reasons. The problem is, it's just as easy to do so for good, grounded, data-based reasons.