As toxic as Brian Krazinich was, you can’t really blame one person for the problem at Intel. Yes, he and Murthy initiated the layoffs. But then the orders were executed by mid/senior management. They are the ones who have used reviews/promos/bonuses as political weapons for as long as I ever worked there (over a decade). It was natural that the 2016 layoffs at Intel eviscerated the technical contributors while keeping the politicians, ass-kissers and powerpointers in place.
As far as I can tell Pat Gelsinger has not changed anything. The same hacks who ruined Intel are all still there, moving up the managerial ranks. Makes sense because Pat came from that culture… he practically defined it.
There’s another side to the Intel 10nm process debacle. Intel designers and architects have relied on a process and manufacturing advantage for years to overwhelm any problems they had. One of the consequences is the death of any kind of post-mortem accountability: if your product is guaranteed to make billions of dollars no matter what, why point any fingers? Management basked in the money stream. Engineers who toed the line were promoted up. Dissenters were beaten down.
This toxic environment might still be going on now if Intel maintained their process advantage… the 10nm debacle exposed the design/arch teams: their people-manager emperors had no clothes.
LOL I remember working on Cannonlake A0. The dozen (not plural) parts we got passed sort but all bricked. Turns out the PLL was randomly losing lock due to variation alone. Also the analog designers refused to run timing checks on digital control logic (if we just match the layout it would work amirite?)
I left a year after that... tbh don't see things getting any better from talking to friends. We'll see.
This will age poorly. Performance king at unconstrained power is utterly irrelevant from a financial point of view, and requires very little engineering effort to boot: shoving amps into a package until it breaks is the job of a junior engineer frankly. The rapidly dying PC/DIY market will not save Intel.
The metrics that matter financially are performance/power and performance/area, and Intel is worst-in-class in both metrics in both CPU and GPU right now.
I worked in chip design at Intel for over a decade. In the 2016 culling, I noticed they laid off a ton of smart people, but all the terrible management and fake-it-til-you-make-it engineers survived. I left very soon afterwards. I suspect the 2022 massacre will be along the same lines. Intel as an organization is not just finished, it is terminally toxic and incapable of being fixed.
LOL yeah. He lured a bunch of his old buddies from retirement with fat packages as if those old Intel-lifer hacks had any fresh ideas to contribute. Pat is literally an Intel swamp creature that somehow managed to pass himself off as some kind of tech genius despite not having been in a technical role at Intel since the 286, after which he was fast-tracked into management.
I worked in Pat's org years ago and neither he nor his lieutenants had any talent other than fighting Intel political battles.
Less cache, much smaller OOO window, AVX-512. E-core is an area play so Intel can score some multi-thread benchmarketing wins on integer heavy code that don’t have larger memory/cache footprints, don’t require much speculative depth, and naturally have high amounts of ILP. They completely fall flat on plenty of workloads. And the way Intel runs them is absurd: 10+ watts per e-core just to eek out a MT win is pure absurdity.
Until Intel has a p-core that isn’t grossly obese, they have no option but to spam e-cores just to make powerpoint slides.
LOL. Anyone who works in chip design would know much M1/M2 changed the hardware game. It is actually the dabbler enthusiast talking about how power/perf isn’t important because his LED-laden shitbox has a wall plug (muh absolute performance) that doesn’t grasp how utterly irrelevant DIY builders are in the market. Just look at the relative sales of servers, laptops and desktop and see what we care about.
Not a single second of thought is ever spent by the architects/designers on optimizing “absolute performance”. We only care about perf/area and perf/watt. It is the marketing teams that try to hype up gamer performance. Overclocking/high voltage performance requires the engineering knowledge of a freshman intern: go raise the voltage/freq, run the test program, make a SKU.
Source: worked on CPU/GPU arch/design for 20 years, including at Intel.
Intel fanboys whine about Apple/Intel CPU comparisons, here is their answer.
The takeaway from the story: connecting a bunch of shitty chiplets together makes a shitty SoC. Except this time, Intel paid TSMC a buttload of money to make their shitty design.
They know it matters, they just don’t have the competence to do it since they promoted a bunch of toadies and charlatans into their technical leadership, and also outsourced a ton of technical work to “low cost geo” so managers can brag about cutting costs.
It isn’t. TSMC has multiple customers lined up with the volume required to ramp these processes to high volume, Intel only has their own designs and whatever foundry customers willing to be an Intel guinea pig.
TSMC also has extensive experience with these machines compared to Intel.
Pat is just making shit up and hoping their stock price doesn’t crater even more.
As far as I can tell Pat Gelsinger has not changed anything. The same hacks who ruined Intel are all still there, moving up the managerial ranks. Makes sense because Pat came from that culture… he practically defined it.