tzeshan

fred1 said:

I wonder how much the Kia name will affect the whole image of the Apple car. Kia may be a fine producer of cars, I don’t know, but I believe it”s seen as producing inexpensive cars for the lower sector of the market. Even if Apple has full control of every aspect of the design and manufacture, will people be able to disassociate it from the Kia brand?

GeorgeBMac said:

Happy_Noodle_Boy said:

robaba said:

Happy_Noodle_Boy said:

“ The previously dominant processor giant is slipping into obscurity fast, and the new CEO hopes the company can change course soon.”

That is some grade A hyperbole. Intel certainly has some issues and is facing challengers in a way that it hasn’t in some time. That said they are still the dominant player in the processor world and are nowhere near obscurity. Their closest rival, AMD, doesn’t do anywhere close the volume that intel does. 

What Apple is doing is largely irrelevant to Intel since Apple doesn’t sell their chips to the broader market. So even though Apple Silicone can out perform Intel it is only relevant to the Apple ecosystem which is just a tiny fraction of the broader chip market. 

Your shot was on target but somehow you still missed the mark.  Yes, nobody can match Intel’s volume, but they have sub-par products.  This makes them the purchase of last resort—you buy it ‘cause you have no other option.  This is not a long-term sustainable position.  TSMC is rapidly building out new silicon foundries in various locations around the world, perhaps even Phoenix Az.  Within 10 years the Taiwan manufacturer will have significantly eclipsed Intels production capacity, with the bulk of that being the new, ultra-lucrative sub 7nm processes. 

Intel used to be king of two inter-related fields, micro-processor design and manufacturing process.  Both these leads have evaporated as the industry stumbles around, seemingly incapable of extricating themselves from o long series of critical mistakes.  These have been well documented gambles that never paid off, but management has continued to double down on them regardless of the outcomes.  This is why we have how many derivations to their 14nm process node—yes, the 10nm process exists but has absolutely horrible number of rejected parts making it almost unusable thus the exploding levels of binned chips they offer at 10nm.  Have you noticed that they actually had to BACKPORT Rocketlake due to the failure to execute Icelake?  Likewise the ‘lakes series of designs are going nowhere—their primary focus of development being tweaks to allow higher frequency and over locking at the expense of ridiculous power draw and heat issues and integrated graphics to act as a bulwark against AMD.

is it possible to turn this ship around?  Possible, but not probable.  If it were just an issue of straightening out process it would be one thing, and they are actually starting this with the shift to EUV at huge cost of $$, time, and engineering know how.  The problem is they need to scrap virtually everything they’ve worked on the last 10 years or so...that’s huge and it means that most of their engineering staff also need to re-specialize in a hurry.  But at the same time as this massive switch in production is going on, the design team faces their own quandary—how to maintain backward compatibility while increasing performance without chasing the higher frequency will-o-the-wisps.  They need to find a way to get more operations done per clock-tick rather than squeeze more clock ticks out of the hardware.  If they can’t do this then each successfully smaller node will only give them minimal performance benefit.  They could look at designing specialty cores to run legacy code, but designing gates to redirect code sections might be impossible given how intertwined the legacy code is with modern calls.  They will also need MS to support this at the os level since that’s where so much of the cruft resides.

TL:dr...it can be done, but success is much more likely if they went all in on the number 13 at the roulette wheel.

My comments were about the line in the article I quoted as it was inaccurate for two reasons:

1. Intel still holds a dominant market position. I didn’t claim they would do so for forever, and your post is lately forward looking. 

2 That they would quickly fade into obscurity. That isn’t going to happen unless Microsoft moves Windows off of x86. Could happen but it’s not going to happen in the near future. 

Note, AI has since walked back their claims in their article to better reflect reality and it now reads:

” The previously dominant processor giant is slipping behind competitors rapidly, and the new CEO hopes the company can change course soon.”

Falling behind the competition is significantly different than slipping into obscurity. 

Agreed!  except, a minor point:

Microsoft has a history or not picking sides -- they even helped Apple by opening Office up to the Mac. 

I suspect that they will fully open Windows to ARM processors as they become more prevalent.  So far, except for the failed Windows Phone they haven't had much reason to.

kknopp01 said:

Elon Musk figured out how to do it in America from scratch, without Apple's money.  Now he's the world's richest man.  Why can't Apple be that smart?