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Over at www.semiaccurate.com they are discussing - in unfavourable terms - the launch by Intel of the 'Comet Lake' series of CPUs:
Intel LogoLast week Intel launched their '10th Gen' CPUs, a self-inflicted wound that shouldn't have been released. If you think SemiAccurate is being a bit harsh here, ask yourself why Intel birthed this debacle in the first place.
[...]
But performance is why we are mocking Intel over this ‘family’. The company split out the Ice and Comet briefings so as to minimize comparisons and uncomfortable questions between the two. As we pointed out in our earlier article on Ice there were vague comparisons between the two ranges but no actual data. Intel even unethically hid the SKUs they were testing.
This time was more of the same, absolutely zero charts comparing this ‘generation’ to the last, or even to itself. All we got was a slide saying, “up to 16% better overall performance vs. previous gen”. That may sound great but, err, 6 cores vs 4 should get one a 50% higher performance or at least something closer to 50% than 0%, right? Don’t forget the faster memory on the new Comet devices which should get you a big chunk of that 16% alone. That level of sleaze is expected but we didn’t expect Intel to be outright unethical. Again. Actually we kinda did but we honestly hoped they wouldn’t do it again.
Yup that 16% max increase when going from a 6C i7-10710U to a 4C i7-8565U was bad. The fact that they compared a 25W 10710U to a 15W 8565U and buried that fact in the fine print is unacceptable. We once again call for the idiots responsible to be fired, not that Intel will do anything, it seems this sort of behavior has become acceptable at big blue. It still isn’t right.
Read the story and see if you agree.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Tuesday August 27 2019, @05:59PM (11 children)
Not a CPU expert by any stretch, but could this be from eliminating predictive execution vulnerabilities?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 27 2019, @06:07PM (9 children)
No. It's because, as per GP, Intel have gone to war with themselves, and lost.
Ostensibly yes, Intel is losing a war to AMD. AMD has better multi-core design, doesn't need to rely on is own (outdated) fabbers, and is a leaner company overall after years of playing 2nd fiddle to big blue.
But in reality, Intel lost to itself. It's chip designs haven't moved at all in nearly a decade and were not going to prior to the Ryzen launch. Intel rested on its laurals and now needs to play major catchup... but, its probably can't. You can't just turn around on a decade of stagnation at a major blue-chip (pun intended) and pretend like you can re-gear the company for a major competitive technology race. Intel will need to fight not only AMD, but itself, and it's probably going to lose.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 27 2019, @06:17PM (4 children)
Don't bet on it. They were in this exact same position with AMD over power efficiency back in 2005 and by 2007 they were back on-par and by 2008 they had crushed AMD again.
It's pretty impressive what can be done with a spare $3B in cash laying around: https://www.gurufocus.com/term/CashAndCashEquivalents/INTC/nbsp%25253Bnbsp%25253BCash%252BAnd%252BCash%252BEquivalents/Intel%2BCorp [gurufocus.com]
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(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 27 2019, @07:01PM (2 children)
I still wouldn't bet against Intel, but things are different now.
Intel used illegal practices last time, it's doubtful they'd get away with them this time.
Also, back then Intel could just throw out their design and start from scratch with what their mobile division had.
I don't think they have such a "Plan B" to fall back on now.
And then there's all the non-technical issues.
Intel got so used to being a high-margin business, there's almost certainly all kinds of overhead and waste that you tend to acquire when you can afford it.
It's very hard to go back to being successful at lower margins again.
And it's far too easy and likely to involve firing people. Which comes with a huge risk of picking the wrong ones AND demotivating the rest, causing a downward spiral.
I guess we'll see what Intel manages to do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 27 2019, @07:19PM (1 child)
Yes, I agree. From their public statements I suspect some very sick culture at intel. The engineers are overrun by marketers and accountants. It doesn't matter how many genius chip designers you pay in that case.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 28 2019, @11:31AM
The difference is, while marketing made promises engineers had to meet, they at least had engineer executives running things at the upper levels.
Since the late 1990s, the company has been run primarily by MBAs, accountants, and marketing types, all of whom have made 'bottom line decisions' at the expense of control of the market (excising all those 'low profit' microcontroller and memory parts.), fragmenting the market by stabbing their oem chipset partners in the back with the pentium and above chipsets while not giving their partners accurate documentation until the last minute, and finally stopping all sublicensing of their bus architecture and related parents in the early 2000s leading to only VIA, ALi, and maybe one other company producing intel compatible products, forcing AMD to move their processors to the Alpha bus (which eventually lead to their move to hypertransport and an integrated memory controller 2 generations before Intel did.)
Intel's decline has largely coincided with America's decline. Too many MBAs, too many cuts to the push up shareholder value, not enough hard looks at the administration or who was being cut or underfunded to ensure that future problems or reduced profitability could be shored up in another market.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 28 2019, @03:16AM
It's also worth considering that AMD overpaid for ATI when they purchased it in 2006, which was a massive problem for them for a few years in terms of not really having much money to spend on other things while that was paying off. This time around, AMD seems to be ahead and doesn't have the drag that comes from overpaying for acquisitions. On top of that, Intel has already been busted more than once for antitrust violations, they might try it again, but in the totality, I doubt they'll have much luck when they're not able to produce enough chips to fill the void.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by HiThere on Tuesday August 27 2019, @06:23PM (2 children)
When did Intel become "big blue"? In my memory that was always IBM.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Tuesday August 27 2019, @08:42PM
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 27 2019, @09:10PM
IBM is such a withered shadow of its former self it can no longer hold a primary color as its trade name.
The Wintel hedgemony (CPM ripoff DOStel hedgemony at the time) invited IBM to play in the consumer PC market, and crushed them for their efforts.
IBM seems to have recovered their former market niche, which used to make them the pre-eminent computer company of the world, but the rise of the digital consumer electronics market has made those old Big Iron customers into something of a buggy whip fetish club by comparison.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday August 27 2019, @11:00PM
Suspect this might indeed be the case. Especially since they didn't seem to outright mention the issue. Lets think it through. Supposedly the performance loss was double digit in many cases. So lets say 15%. So take the baseline performance from the previous generation. If this announcement is claiming a 16% gain from that baseline, and with the patches integrated from launch, that is a pretty good speedup. If they are claiming the performance gain vs the fielded version of previous gen with the patches, a 16% gain pretty much means they spent this whole generation just making up the lost ground. But because their marketing dept doesn't want to talk about the past problems it leaves them trying to get people excited about a small performance bump. Had they pitched it as 30% faster than the previous generation after bug patching, it would have looked good but reminded customers of the bug and got them worried how much performance this generation will drop as its bugs come to light.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday August 27 2019, @06:14PM
Not entirely - if they really did eliminate predictive execution vulnerabilities you might expect minor hit in some benchmarks, but even the software patches weren't too drastic.
I was particularly displeased with Ubuntu updating their released kernels in the 14.04 series with predictive execution vuln patches... I was involved in patching up some Mesa driver messes, and what I ran into was the kernels packaged with 14.04.0, 14.04.1 and I think also 14.04.2 were dated AFTER the release date of the overall package. Further, the gcc compilers in those releases were NOT patched, so when you went to recompile the kernels from source, you'd have to update gcc just to get the kernel to compile. I mean, sure, please do release security patches and updates in your LTS branches, just make it the next 14.04.x patch NOT go digging into the released ones and changing them - sheesh.
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