The strife of Brian: Why doomed Intel boss's ex86 may not be the real reason for his hasty exit The sudden and shocking resignation of Intel CEO Brian Krzanich this week over a long-ago affair with a subordinate – banned under company rules – has led to much mirth among Register readers. "Sounds like he took 'Intel Inside' a bit too literally," quipped SVV. "Talk about taking the wrong branch," a computer architecture …
Maybe it's time that chip-zilla starts acknowledging the CAUSE of sales slumps in the x86 world: MICROSOFT.
Windows "Ape" and Win-10-nic, along with the lack of "the appearance of" Moore's Law improvements (today's computer is no longer 50% faster than last year's model), have basically motivated people to hang onto their existing gear, and just make the kinds of improvements that include more RAM and larger hard drives. No longer does that "new, shiny" machine, laptop, or whatever, give you reason ENOUGH to abandon what you already have for the "new, shiny".
That's because Micro-shaft has RUINED the 'new PC' market by RUINING WINDOWS.
More than enough El Reg articles pointed this out. Sales slumped for "Ape" while 7 boxen still ran off of the shelves, until you could no longer buy them.
It wasn't slabs, smartphones, or overpriced "Surface" laptops that people wanted. People wanted a computer that they did NOT perceive as running SLOWER or giving them LESS freedom to do what they wanted with it. And that includes the SLURP, the ADS, the FORCED UPDATES, and the 2D FLUGLY.
So if Intel wants to sell CPUs, they should invest in Linux and the BSD's. They should make sure that Linux and the BSD's support their newest stuff, make sure that the most popular software is properly ported to RUN on these computers, that open source equivalents have ALL of the features that business want, and maybe do a LITTLE promotion of the same.
If they do, they'll succeed where MICRO-SHAFT has FAILED.
Micro-shaft is in "shoot own foot" mode with the way they're flopping and twitching around and spinning in-place instead of heading in a direction that leads towards more success. If Intel continues to hitch THEIR wagon to Micro-shaft's "star", they'll be in for the SAME kinds of FAIL.
Or, is Micro-shaft just letting them devalue enough to BUY them?
COME ON, Intel, time to step up to the plate, PROMOTE LINUX, and hit a HOME RUN! Or, as appropriate, kick the game-winning goal!
@Bombastic Bob - Chipzilla made their bed. It looked good for many years. But as time passes, markets change and decisions made many years ago can be a longer term albatross. Chipzilla can fix the problem but is would mean untangling themselves with Slurp. Also, it would mean not being dependent on OS manufacturer to drive the market for new kit. But it would also mean they would need to recognize the device market has fundamentally changed; phones are more apt to be bought on a shorter time frame that PCs.
"phones are more apt to be bought on a shorter time frame that PCs."
very true, so that's why Qualcomm and Broadcom and other ARM-makers are building those. So is Intel, actually, but I don't know how much Intel silicon is going into phones these days.
Slabs were a bubble market but new phones come out all of the time. I still use a "dumb" one but it's got a low-power ARM in it, probably.
The whole slab/phone vs PC thing though is completely misreading the market. Slabs and phones are their own thing and have their own lifecycle. People really aren't buying phones INSTEAD of PCs. But without some compelling reason to get a new phone, don't people hang onto their old ones? Same idea I think.
I'd consider a new laptop if they all didn't have Win-10-nic on them... [I just wish it were easier to fix my OLD one, which has a bad motherboard - capacitors, probably]
"phones are more apt to be bought on a shorter time frame that PCs."
That's because the OS support is so crap.
Imagine if MS dropped support for an OS every 2 years and forced you to buy new hardware (of the same architecture, but new) to get your security patches.
If you go back twenty years, this isn't far off the mark. A new machine 20 years ago probably was significantly better in ways that end-users (not OS vendors) cared about. Since then, a bog-standard PC has been more or less good enough and the "desk-life" has risen to 5 years or more. Neither hardware nor software vendors have really adapted to that reality very well. There's been very little innovation to try to create new incentives to upgrade. We've seen GPUs turn up, but multiple processors aren't really taking over much of the compute (beyond the embarrassingly parallel parts). We've seen flash turn up and caches get bigger, but no changes to the big, flat, shared address space model.
Now look at phones. For years they've been getting better in ways than mere users can appreciate. We've played with different screen sizes and added all sorts of sensors to play with. More recently, however, the "innovation" seems to be more about protecting the vendors in a market where the incentive to upgrade is fading, just like PCs twenty years ago. We've seen the death of the removable battery, which makes phones useless after a couple of years unless you have a set of special screwdrivers and a few tubes of glue to re-assemble your device. We've also seen increasingly hostile support lifecycles, which make phones insecure after a couple of years, which is unfortunate timing given that security scares do now seem to be considered newsworthy by the mainstream media.
In response, we've seen the slow build-up of projects like CyanogenMod (and now Lineage OS), which make those old phones usable again. We now have 1.6 million active installations of Lineage and I imagine that very few of those will be going back to paying vendor prices for the latest hardware. A 2- or 3-year-old phone is basically good enough for most people and will be for the next few years. (Not for you, dear reader, but "most" of the few billion other phone users are folks like your parents or your non-geeky friends who just want something to make phone calls, send texts, and do Facebook. They are *very* undemanding.) Worse, much worse for the phone vendors, is that unlike Linux and WINE, the Lineage UI *is* stock Android and *does* actually run all your existing apps. Once you've switched, there is almost no on-going support cost, so we really could reach a critical mass of "people who already use it and are willing to help their friends get off the treadmill".
So yeah, if phone vendors want a vision of the future -- imagine how Microsoft would feel if Linux/WINE reached the point where you could just install it and forget that it wasn't Windows 7.
I've been hearing that this year will be the year of Linux et al every year since the 1990s and it still ain't happening. Can't believe that you can really put the blame on Wintel though - maybe the real reason is that the Linux platforms (and there are a lot of them) are really niche products.
As the article points out Chipzilla has issues and they're not going to be resolved by going BSD,
That will only work is they invest in a complete build of Linux that doesn’t suck on it’s easy of use.
Let me make it clear, if you need to open terminal, IT WILL NOT WORK FOR 99.999999% if humans.
See Android for the amount of effort needed to make a unix version people friendly.
Oh no ! IF only I had read this 20 years ago I could have avoided all of the satisfaction I have had running Linux on the desktop and servers as a home user and an IT professional. As a Windoze user as well I have never had a single day of frustration from such an outstanding product. If only ! Linux is not, has not, been without it's problems and frustrations but just from the performance aspect it has been well worth it. I must have lost five years of my life waiting for a Microsoft OS to actually go do something. Admittedly at home I am not much of a power user any more but have found Firefox and Thunderbird in the main to be more than usable. Libreoffice could be better, but for my purposes it more than suffices. And then we get to the good stuff like docker and containers and VMs and remote desktops. As for having to use the Terminal, that is a plus for me not a minus, but I take your point. However, I would still argue that 80-90% of what the average user needs to do can be done from a GUI and not the command line. As for the usual twaddle about the cost of Linux is your own personal time required to make it work, then all I can say is that you must never have experienced a serious Windows failure of any sort. I have been saved by Linux many a time when my Windoze machine(s) have trashed their file systems. Admittedly the biggest Linux problem is the proprietary apps, but even that can be mitigated to a certain degree. In short a top class OS let down by vendors too afraid to get their apps running under Linux. Oh and I almost forgot about not having to burn between 5 and 50 percent of my precious processors running anti virus scanners. I have never to my knowledge on all of my Linux systems over the years ever had a virus. Horses for courses.
Intel already supports Linux (and BSDs) to varying degrees, it won't help, because their CPU + chipset + firmware stacks are trivial to crack remotely and locally so they are not fit for use for multiuser applications - which happens to cover the vast majority of their target market.
"their CPU + chipset + firmware stacks are trivial to crack remotely and locally so they are not fit for use for multiuser applications"
not so 'trivial' in real life. POSSIBLE, yes, but I always assume that all of the time. Besides, what ELSE are you going to do your (potentially insecure) web surfing with? A PDP-11?
(practice 'safe surfing' - NoScript, non-windows host, non-MS browser, non-privileged login)
"not so 'trivial' in real life. POSSIBLE, yes"
You are correct they are also possible, and I judge them to be trivial because I've been able to download a bit of code or read a paper and try them out at home without any special equipment beyond a Xeon inside a box as the victim. I'm not even an expert on this stuff, but as an amateur I have been able to fully crack Xeon boxes remotely or locally for *most* of the last decade or so that I've been taking a passing interest.
Ignoring or trivializing the problem will only help the crooks in the long run. Nor will "Safe Browsing" as long as the hardware remains fundamentally insecure.
Carry on Bob.
Intel and MS are made for each other because their flagship products are totally overburdened with decades of backwards-compatibility cruft topped off with ill-conceived crap dreamt up by marketeers rather than engineers. Time for something fresh and new (no, Itanic was rotten from the outset and xnix is 20 years older than Windows). Then we can have Moore's Law back again, at least in terms of performance, if only for a short while.
That would have done it. Even discussing it publicly would be anathema.
Netflix comms boss Jonathan Friedland sacked over 'N-word'.
Mr Hastings detailed two instances when Mr Friedland was said to have used the offensive term.
The first incident was at a meeting with the public relations team to discuss sensitive words. However, a few days later the term was used again - this time at a meeting of black employees at the company.
Immediate stoning ensued.
"what on Earth is an N-word in this context? A noun?"
It's a pejorative term beginning with 'N' that generally refers to black slaves back in the 1800's when slavery was still legal. Often found in Mark Twain books like "Huckleberry Finn" where it was commonly used to refer to black slaves (note that the theme of that particular book was FREEING a slave named Jim, so Mark Twain really wasn't a racist after all). If I quoted the actual word here I'd probably get a ban.
"so Mark Twain really wasn't a racist after all"
In fact he was completely the opposite. It isn't even marginally appropriate to complain that an author used certain words nearly a century before anybody decided that such words were abusive or improper.
One problem with reading Twain, though, is that sometimes he engages in sustained irony which goes over the heads of some of his readers. Thus one of his pieces in which he suggests that black people should all be killed off because that is kinder than what white people will do to them. See also Jonathan Swift.
"using all sorts of circumlocutions to avoid saying "the black guy" "
I was picking up a friend from LAX, and my host gave me a ride. She asked what he looked like, and I said (without thinking) "he's a big black fella".
She corrected me, saying that he was a "large African American fella".
I pointed out that his grandparents had come to the UK from Trinidad, so he was neither African nor American, but he was most definitely black.
She really couldn't wrap her head around that you couldn't just substitute black and African-American.
Mind you, that was pretty minor compared to trying to buy a pack of smokes with a hangover. The gay chap at the bodega thought I was being deliberately offensive....
"I pointed out that his grandparents had come to the UK from Trinidad, so he was neither African nor American, but he was most definitely black."
I love it. I've worked with two guys from Trinidad and both of them have expressed a dislike for Jamaicans. I do wonder how that would play out in a US context. Heads exploding, I guess.
It's a pejorative term beginning with 'N' that generally refers to black slaves back in the 1800
It is a word that originally meant human from the areas around the river Niger.
Since we all come from Africa and our common ancestors passed the area, so were humans from the Niger river at some point, we can almost all (Except, of course, Africans that never migrated north) be called by that Name. I think that one should take a good look at context ... USian, British, Texan, or even French can be derogatory, depends on context. Sacré bleu! Excuse my French. If no generalizations were made in this guy's comments, all should be fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A9gritude
Actually, there is a problem on wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A9gritude
Where they claim nègre is not derogatory and here wikipedia claims the contrary (excuse my French):
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/N%C3%A8gre
Maybe they should make up their mind ...
"Maybe they should make up their mind "
The French article is quite clear and says that "nègre" (standalone) has become derogatory over the course of years while terms like "art nègre" have not. I believe it's used in the Asterix books but I'm too lazy to go and check, and the portrayal of black men in Asterix would not, I'm sure, be allowed nowadays.
> The French article is quite clear and says that "nègre" (standalone) has become derogatory over the course of years
Yep. In fact, it always was derogatory, what has changed is the social acceptability of racism and discrimination.
"Yep. In fact, it always was derogatory"
I think that is an overstatement and context is very important. From Wikipedia:
"La Revue nègre est un spectacle musical créé en 1925 à Paris. Par son succès et la personnalité de Joséphine Baker qui en est l'étoile montante, elle permet entre autres une diffusion plus large de la musique de jazz et de la culture noire en Europe."
I don't think that the title was intended as derogatory in any way; in fact the Revue established Baker as a French superstar and national icon.
> I don't think that the title was intended as derogatory in any way;
Oui et non, ça faisait partie d'un contexte dans lequel le racisme était tellement institutionnalisé qu'il cesse d'être aperçu comme étant dénigrant. Mais voyons, un "nègre" est, par sa connotation, un esclave.
Oublie wikipedia et essaie de trouver un texte contemporain où on parle de personnes noires dans un contexte social ou culturel élevée (disons, des diplomatiques ou des scientifiques) en leur appelant "nègres".
"I must be stupid, but what on Earth is an N-word in this context? A noun?".
I think this clip should explain that well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7k_8EEkNRA
Larry Wilmore On Use Of N-Word at White House Correspondents' Dinner
The first incident was at a meeting with the public relations team to discuss sensitive words.
I guess I don't get it. They were discussing "sensitive words".. how can you discuss the word without using it at least once with something like "let's talk about this word..."
Context doesn't matter to the offence culture. You can even get sacked if you don't use the N word at all, but say something that sounds similar to uneducated ears - see not one, but repeated examples here . I can understand why somebody would be wary.
see not one, but repeated examples here . I can understand why somebody would be wary.
I think I'll go have a stiff drink after reading that. The complainers are supposedly educated people but haven't a clue about the language. The snowflakes or make that just "flakes" get offended just because it "sounds similar to". When is the next ship leaving earth?
Jerome K Jerome (he of the 'Three Men in a Boat' fame) once described an embarrassing moment in Germany where his English tourist was trying to buy a cushion from a shop run by three girls, using the word "kuss" (kiss) when he should have used the word "kissen" (cushion)
If Intel is stumbling with 10nm, I would have blamed EUV, not multiple patterning, since the fab that was first to market with a 10 nm process - or was it 7 nm? - did so with an early iteration that had no EUV, only multiple patterning.
Ah, yes, I see I was thinking about the recent articles about how TSMC was shifting to volume production of 7nm earlier than expected - but their 7nm+, which will use EUV, is coming later.
Article is right, 'feature size' doesn't mean much, it is what it says: the smallest distinguishable feature, the actual components are a whole lot bigger.
And yield ain't what it used to be since per-transistor cost started going up instead of down, a particular problem for Intel since their profitability depended on spawning smaller versions of their high-end product at cheaper prices.
There's a good thing to come out of this, since software developer's machines stopped getting faster they've optimised for platforms approximating mine - I've not had to upgrade CPU for six years now.
they recently laid off 5% of their workforce.
I agree with the comment about windows. W10 is a big turn off to an awful lot of people. I know a good number who have not only gone back to W7 but are not upgrading their kit.
Intel are also in danger of losing Apple as a customer with their chip delays. I'm sure that there are good number of people inside Apple's Chip Team that are well prepared to replace the Intel in all their future Mac's with their own ARM processors.
Intels engineers need a good kicking or they'll soon have no job to go to.
If AMD can get their chips right why can't Intel?
Intels engineers management need a good kicking or they'll soon have no job to go to.
FTFY -- It's probably not the engineers. They design what they're told to design by management. If they cock up the design then again, it's management problem to deal with.. either a fix or different engineer(s).
Ironically, A female cannot be fired at Intel today based on below expectations work but the CEO can be fired for personal activity 5-10 years ago (he was promoted after having and ending the affair). Check with official Intel HR policies and you will see this is true. I hope he was fired for poor actual performance and this is just a smokescreen
The problem is, Intel is still a PC company, but it thinks it is a data company.
If you analyse revenues and profits, they almost entirely come from processors for PCs and servers (datacenter is trendier).
Based on this, what did Krzanich do since promoted at the helm?
A. Ignore the main business, resulting in Intel not only loosing its manufacturing edge, but imminently being inferior to the competition.
Intel's answer to Spectre and Meltdown was a disgrace, and the company still hasn't a solid plan for new Spectre & Meldown -proof chips.
B. Spend his time on crap: fashiony wearables, trendy chief creative officiers singers, tech du jour drones: do you spot a trend here?
C. The zero consistency guy: launching projets and killing them 6 to 12 monthes after. Just look at the disgusting history of Intel offerings for makers/IoT. Intel had a golden opportunity to leverage its brand and image to grab a sizeable share of a market with way too many chips, way too many development platforms, zero security. Instead, it offered no support to the few betting on its chips, and changed its story every six months.
It always amazed me that Intel never tried to come clean with its architecture. Their cpu's go back to 8086, the Intel processor handbook is 4811 pages (https://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/managed/39/c5/325462-sdm-vol-1-2abcd-3abcd.pdf). Compared to this, the "Principles of operation" from IBM on the 360 and 370 mainframe CPU architecture is 1150 pages (http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=isg26480faec85f44e2385256d5200627dee&aid=1).
An all clean, just x86-64 capable CPU with reduced transistor counts and higher frequencies, something gamers would kill for ?.
Since Intel is such a big powerful company, why did they leave the whole graphics market to NVIDIA, up to a level of embarrassing them selves with the terrible Ïntel Integrated Graphics" chips who's abysmal performance made many new laptops look bad from the start.
They missed out on the whole mobile market.
Intel was never hostile to Linux, like AMD used to be. Their chip sets always run fine. So lets hope they will be good, Intel provided the foundation for the success of Linux, even in times over 90% of their cpu's would be running windows.
But it still happens – and is so commonplace, the biz's HR department has a set of procedures for dealing with such situations.
Surely any organisation the size of Intel would have procedures for this kind of thing*. It'd be much worse to invent policy on the hoof.
*My employer does, you can even enter employee relationships into a system alongside declaring other things like gifts from vendors, interests in other businesses etc.
Having an actual system is a great step. What comes afterwards is the tough work of consistent, transparent enforcement. My org has a decent system and policies but my team is in morale hell right now due to a problem of different spanks for different ranks.
We lost a good team member due to fraternization, while two members of our senior leadership are routinely and publicly involved in offshore drilling and navel exploration activities. I'm unimpressed.
Sexual harassment and even victimization are real problems in many organizations. Sometimes strong remedies are needed. But if the real problem with the CEO is performance and the board uses his sexual indiscretions as an excuse to force him out, we've got a problem - their actions greatly undermine legitimate use of the anti-harassment tools.
If you want to sack a guy because of nonperformance, have the guts to say so and act.
Don't have the guts? Take up gardening and grow a pear.
If you want to sack a guy because of nonperformance, have the guts to say so and act.
'tis not so easy and all that.
The CEO will always have a contract with his employer, likely the board. Parts of that contract would have been written by his own lawyers, which are probably quite competent. Therefore, If Intel wants to sack the CEO over "nonperformance", they will probably have to be quite specific on how the contract specified "performance" and how the CEO did not perform or they will be sued for breach of contract and whatever else is lying around for the CEO-side lawyers to gouge some flesh from.
The sacking team also have lawyers, equally competent. To get rid of the CEO, they will look at whatever they can find do to get around the "barriers" designed into his contract. This is what they found.
If one is worried about "undermine legitimate use of the anti-harassment tools", one should maybe blame the CEO in question because - in just about all of the leadership sackings I have observed - they always make an offer to the person involving something given in return for the leader seeking "new opportunities", "spending more time with the family", "seeking a different direction in life" - Or Else.
Presumably what happened is that they guy tried to play hard-ball, refused to fall on his sword as it were, then the Intel "relocation team" executed on the "Or Else" / blackmail part of their "amicable solution" offer.
When "they" want you to leave, your best strategy is to negotiate the deal! "They" will always find something in the end.
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