[Info-vax] Chip-head news (2018-12-xx)

[johnwallace4 at yahoo.co.uk]

On Thursday, 13 December 2018 12:27:12 UTC, Neil Rieck  wrote:
> If you told me 20-years ago that our industry would down to just two CPU architectures, I would have laughed. And yet, here we are. On top of that, Intel seems to be under pressure from ARM (who would have seen that one coming?) so I provide this recent article for your amusement but you should ignore or skip over the head line.
> 
> https://www.cnet.com/news/intel-3d-chip-stacking-could-get-you-to-buy-a-new-pc/
> 
> Neil Rieck
> Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
> http://neilrieck.net

Intel HQ this week does seem to have admitted 'misleading' 
the audience about the success of their 10nm process and 
products in the last few years:

""We have humble pie to eat right now, and we're eating it," 
Murthy Renduchintala, Intel's chief engineering officer, said 
yesterday. "My view on [Intel's] 10nm is that brilliant 
engineers took a risk, and now they're retracing their steps 
and getting it right." 

reported at e.g.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/12/12/intel_architecture_future/
and
https://www.pcworld.com/article/3327503/computers/intel-kicks-off-a-new-focus-on-engineering-as-it-puts-the-rocky-10nm-year-behind-it.html
and hopefully elsewhere in due course.
Haven't seen it on Bloomberg yet; they're probably still busy
hiding from their self-induced Supermicro fallout.
(It's kindof in the CNET article but without the detail).

Anyone who's been following Intel's 10nm tale will know that 
Intel's 10nm shrink has been having a bit of a rocky time for 
rather more than a year or two. See e.g. Charlie Demerjian at 
semiaccurate.com :

https://www.semiaccurate.com/2015/01/15/analysis-intels-broadwell-financial-struggles/
(and occasional related articles since then).

For those who don't know Charlie Demerjian, he was talking 
about fundamental vulnerabilities with Intel's built-in Management 
Engine for years, with Intel denying everything until a few months 
ago (shortly after the Intel CEO sold all the shares he legally
could)...

https://www.semiaccurate.com/2012/05/15/intel-small-business-advantage-is-a-security-nightmare/

https://semiaccurate.com/2017/05/01/remote-security-exploit-2008-intel-platforms/
etc

Also interesting to note, in the context of switching Intel's
10nm strategy off and back on again, in public, is that chip 
architect Jim Keller (ex AMD and elsewhere) joined Intel 
earlier this year:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Keller_(engineer)#Career

Maybe Jim persuaded Intel HQ that not only did they foul 
up by supporting the IA64 moneypit, but that Intel also
needed to rethink 10nm x86-64 (and related) too.

In many cases, from Hypertransport onwards where Jim went 
one way and Intel HQ went the other, the technical winner 
was Jim, but the short term market winner wasn't Jim. 
Presumably something to do with $$$$ and vested interests.

Maybe Intel HQ are finally getting the message that if 
there's no revenue from volume mobile and negligible 
revenue from volume desktop/server, there's not going to 
be much money to fund next generation Xeon successor
developments (where Intel traditionally had their
saleable and highly profitable premium price product).