Pat Gelsinger promises Intel can go back to the future – in memo to staff shared with world+dog After completing nine years as CEO of VMware last week, Pat Gelsinger on Tuesday started work in the same job at Intel and prioritized delivering on promises and innovating quickly. Gelsinger expressed nostalgia for the chip maker's glory days in a memo to Intel employees that Chipzilla saw fit to share with the world. In the …
Yep and in my humble opinion Intel should milk out the X86 platform
And surprise the world with a Intel range of top notch risc-v based system on a chip
Which are target at vertical market . (automotive, mobile, medical, etc)
with specific added modules like AI, GPU, integrated modems (give these specific add-ons modules a specific marketing name like they did with Core 3, 5 etc )
and start backing chips for OEMs like TSMC does for VW, Bosch, Nvidia, Sony, AWS, AZURE etc
Speaking as a programmer, this sounds like a horrendous idea, at least for the PC market.
End-users would buy the PC and implicitly choose the features in the CPU. *Then* they'd buy my software. Then they'd find that they'd bought the wrong CPU. Then it would be my problem.
Hitherto, Intel have made pretty much every CPU feature (at some performance level) available on pretty much every chip they sel of a given generation and each generation preserves the features from previous ones. (Yes, I'm typing this on a Xeon box that lacks any kind of Intel GPU, so I'm aware of the edge cases in this line of argument.) That has meant that I've been able to "demand" support for MMX, SSE, AVX and their ilk over the years and customers have been largely oblivious to this "requirement".
As an engineer, this offends my sense of minimalism, but the economics of CPU making seems to be "pay squillions for the first one, all the rest are free", with such variants as there are emerging from QA rather than intentional manufacture, so (happily for my programmer self) I don't expect Intel to take up your suggestion.
Intel is where it is today because they had made a lot of poor decisions. They assumed that "wintel" would keep the gravy coming in and arrogantly assumed that the smaller companies like AMD and ARM would not dent their profits. Their foundry errors has put them back years and has allowed AMD to make larger inroads than they would like into their server markets. Even laptops with AMD are appearing. On mips per buck and power consumption AMD is winning a lot of new business while Intel rehashes chipsets into confusing products to try and keep sales going. Add to that the number of companies they have bought and sold in an almost desperate attempt to win sales in the next "big thing".
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