It's the end when the bean-counters are in charge, right ?

#bofh

If so, they will be doomed. Intel's biggest woes have been in operations, ergo they should nominate someone with strong track record in understanding and executing silicon operations. See the fruit company as an example, Tim Cook has COO background.

They really need someone of the same calibre as Lisa Su to turn things around.

Not sure Su would help that much - much of Intel's problems come from the foundry, which is not something AMD has had to worry about in a long, long time.

I think the problem is not any foundry, but having a CEO who can find someone to run the foundry.

But both Gelsinger and the rest of the C-Suite will have nice fat bank balances, bonuses & share options.

What happens further down the food change is not really of interest to them. Intel have lost their way, for whatever reason and should have had a good clear out of the board about 5 years ago.

What happens further down the food change is not really of interest to them.

100%. Consider anyone in a position like this and of a similar age. Plenty of money to have a very, very comfortable retirement. It's up to the next generation to decide what happens next.

On the one hand it makes me a bit jealous but on the other I'd do exactly the same thing if I was in his shoes.

I do often wonder whether people would give a shit about their "principles" if they were offered 100 million to not have any.

"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them... well, I have others."

As I am very fond of saying, a principle is not a principle until it has cost you money (or something else of significant value). Until then, it's just an opinion, and every sucker out there has a buttload of those.

GJC

I do often wonder whether people would give a shit about their "principles" if they were offered 100 million to not have any

I'll bite : I think I'd make a counter-offer at 10 million and keep my principles. 10 millions are more than I could reasonably spend, I'd have to think hard how to waste such amount of money

I've drafted you a letter of resignation. Gives you the chance to say that you're jumping before you're pushed, although obviously we're gonna be briefing that you were pushed, sorry.

And the statement released "by" Gelsinger should actually be called the statement prepared by the corporate communications department in the name of Gelsinger, who was kicked out as the scapegoat for this quarter's bad results. Ever notice how every departure from a C-suite job is accompanied by almost exactly the same statements from the kickee and the board?

AMD bros, we finally won...

[AC because I work there]

Be careful what you wish for. If the death of Intel means everyone goes AMD, great. If it means everyone decides to accelerate the shift to ARM, not so much…

Asked uninflected: what's wrong with the shift to ARM?

To somebody on the software side of the industry, it looks like ARM is competitive for performance while being better for battery life and comes with the huge advantage of being customisable by the customer because of its different IP arrangement. Naive as that may be.

Not the AC you asked but ARM is more locked down, which is why if you want to install Linux on an ARM device you need a custom image made for that device whilst with x86 you can just use a generic installer.

ARM and RISC-V hand a lot more control over to the device manurfacturer.

Arm isn’t more locked down. PC-BSA will solve that problem for PC just as SBSA solved it for server.

You will get generic images that boot everywhere eventually :-)

Arm isn’t more locked down. It's less standardized, and thus more open. There is no Wintel monopoly that defines how each device must work.

And that has pros and cons.

Orig AC here: I meant from AMD’s x86 business perspective.

There are a couple of 2020 Intels rattling around in my house but almost everything else is already ARM.

Competition is the name of the game. AMD cannot sit on its laurel even though, frankly they are far ahead of intel at this point. They have a new challenger in the name of ARM to contend with. They have time since Qualcomm just faltered their entry, but others will follow MediaTek/Nvidia.

The real issue is that if Intel dies and everyone shifts to AMD then AMD being just another profit obsessed corporation will start behaving like Intel. That they don't now is only because it's one of their competetive edges.

AMD fans should want Intel to stick around as a competitive player.

With less competition, AMD can push up their prices.

'Kicking' Pat Gelsinger has left Intel, Mike Magee 1 has passed away... 2024 is really starting to make me feel old....

1 Thought it was a shame that didn't get a mention on 'el reg.

Agreed! What wonderful days those were for The Register and Mike's next endeavor.

Despite their money, size, domination and being the designer of the PC CPU, Intel never managed to be a genuine innovator, like AmD or ARM, or even Motorola going far enough back. Every iteration was a bolt on the existing design, maintaining compatibility with software that hardly anybody cared about, or should have cared about.

It's sad to see a key figure in the industry ejected as an offering to the investor gods, he did a lot of good, if not ultimately taking the correct decision about 25 years ago. I await his autobiography, it will be a fascinating read.

Agree. They were kind of a victim of the x86 instruction set and architecture. They actually did an amazing job to take it as far as they have. But the idea that a modern 2024 processor absolutely must be able to run software written in 1979 is kind of stupid. But that straitjacket wasn't really of Intel's making - it was market forces that dictated that. But now they seem to be a victim of it. Companies such as ARM and RICK V have had the benefit of a clean sheet. Intel didn't get that luxury. They did create other processors over the years that were not x86 based, but none of them gained traction.

As a desktop user, I am thrilled that the Intel chips of today can still run old programs, stuff written before "Hello World" was bloated into gigabytes of crud by "modern" development practices. I am pissed that Windows 10+ cannot run old code that Windows 7 could run. I do understand how most servers, with a narrow task, can be limited to recently-compiled binaries, but the desktop track benefits from all the backwards compatibility.

One could also argue that Intel could have innovated in its own garden by switching to a RISC architecture (Arm for example) and have it emulate x86 instructions for older software. Well, what Apple did with the Mx processors that beat the s***it out of x86 : whta prevented Intel to experiment down that road ? Comfort and monopoly.

So no pity here

Intel could have innovated in its own garden by switching to a RISC architecture

And they could have called it "Itanium" and "IA-64".

I wonder how successful that would have been in the market?

And they could have called it "Itanium" and "IA-64"

did they run native x86 software ? Think not : [1]Emulation to run existing x86 applications and operating systems was particularly poor

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itanium

You can write macOS code, compile it for ARM and x86, and run both on an ARM silicon Mac. The Intel version will automatically be translated from Intel to ARM assembler code using Clang.

The result runs typically at 80% of the speed of an ARM processor. So thats at most the penalty: 20% slower after translating assembler code.

Intel processors are just not very fast. If you look at performance per Watt they don’t come close to Apples ARM implementation. There are people who use Apple Silicon because it runs Intel code at same speed for much less power.

The predecessor (Swan) had a tough ride, not being his fault they had to reheat Sky-lake,lake lake lake lake, and similarly, though alder lake isn't attributable to Gelsinger it seemed they had the auspices of being on the right track. They have competitive core products (but have to use TSMC to get them). These are big changes to the model that I think I'd argue made intel's past success.

I have to wonder if anyone other than someone like Gelsinger could have pushed them to that - or if we're now back to pumping stock with buybacks, than expensive fabs & development like 10yr ago when they seemingly spent the investment on there instead, and they'd otherwise be inheriting now.

not a good sign for intel.

but at least they get a $8bn performance bonus from Sam (yeah i'm sure they're 'not allowed' to buy their own stock, or sell for magic beans, like anyone will be around to answer for that). I await to see if they now double down on financial rather than product engineering. I don't know that i'm hopeful, the only reason I can think of to kick Gelsinger is they didn't want to stay that course.

I reject the notion that each iteration of x86 being a bolt-on to an existing design eliminates any possible innovation, necessarily ignoring any potential contribution by Intel to the various strides in superscalar, speculative and out-of-order execution over the decades.

You're also ignoring Intel's often-commanding lead in process and its frequent attempts to branch out — the i960 was fairly decent and reasonably popular, and the Itanium was at least a big swing. A big swing and a big miss. But they tried.

The Itanic was pretty innovative, though a complete flop.

But wasn't it an HP design?

A company that lost it's mojo. Agilent is the real HP.

But yes, Itanic was an innovative flop, maybe because HP didn't understand CPU or Compiler design well enough?

Hell, Keyspan is the real HP by now. Agilent just does the bio products, which came later. But both HPs are shadows of the former company, destroyed by a bad BoD and incompetent CEO.

In the late 1970s, I toured HP's Corvallis, Oregon, USA facility. Among other things, they'd made a to-scale, twelve-foot-tall version of their HP-32E calculator. The giant version was fully functional, AND, had that great clicky-feeling tactile feedback when you pressed the keys.

Their HP 2000 and HP 3000 miniconputers will live on in SIMH.

The iAPX-432 was very innovative. Too bad Intel couldn't get it working well enough, quickly enough.

Itanium flopped because it wasn't backwards compatible.

There was very little wrong with the actual chips, and basically nothing wrong with the design.

But it couldn't run the software people wanted to run, so it died.

Itanium lacked a very good C compiler

"Intel never managed to be a genuine innovator, like AmD or ARM, or even Motorola going far enough back."

Really? The Pentium Pro was sufficiently innovative to make "x86" compdtitive with RISC (and wipe out most if the RISCs over the next decade). Itanium was also innovative, just wrong. In response, I'll credit AMD with having the guts to step up to an empty plate and deliver Amd64.

But ARM and Motorola? Haven't you got to go back to the 1980 to see their innovations?

Mind you, I'll happily concede that my examples are a qusrter of a century old. Where's the innovation in modern CPU design? Should I be ignoring CPUs entirely and looking for innovation in GPU design? But if I did, would I even find anything there that isn't 20 years old?

The reason the x86 survived was because it was faster than its competitors and it was compatible.

The 286 beat the 432, the Pentium 3 and 4 beat the Itanium. I don't know about the i960, it had great floating point.

The same goes for 486 vs 68040. The DEC Alpha chips were slightly faster than Pentiums, but very expensive.

- The only thing we're any good at is x86. Nothing else we try seems to work.

- Guys, guys, I've got a plan. Let's remove the x86 guy, surely that will surely improve the situation.

Guys, Guys, I have a plan. Let Copilot run the company!

The unfortunate juxtaposition of the subtitle and "Breaking Intel" at the start of the article.

What's he up to these days? I'm sure he's got a ready drafted memo he can send to the company on his first day at the office - may need some minor edits here and there, but nothing major

...their latest CPUs have been getting rave reviews. Something shifted in the right direction. They seem to be powerful whilst also power efficient.

But in which segment of the market would you say they are the leaders?

In servers, Epyc is way ahead of Xeon

In workstations, Threadripper is way ahead of Xeon-W

In gaming, it is a bit more balanced and subject to opinion, but Ryzen is certainly competitive

In mobile, Apple is way ahead. If you want to run Windows, Apple is probably still ahead, but AMD and Qualcom are certainly competitive

In regular desktop, it is a dying market, and a 10-year-old CPU from any manufacturer is perfectly adequate so it really comes down to price.

Also compare Intel (or AMD) Chrome Books with ARM ones.

They have growth. PC workstations/Laptops (rather than Servers) are becoming office only purchases. PC Gaming is a niche.

>>. PC Gaming is a niche.

It's one back of a niche. PC gamers spend big bucks on high-end gear (CPU, multiple GPUs, overkill power supplies, displays, etc.) And every few years, do it all again, whereas a regular desktop or laptop lasts a decade or more.

Gaming is 80 billion a year...