Disposing of 'Intel Inside'

[mbpark]

VPro is the marketing name for their built-in hypervisor, which will allow you to run multiple OSes at once.

AMD has the same technology, code-named Pacifica.

In other words, these chips will have the same functionality IBM's old mainframes did in the 1970's.

Part of the plan, apparently, is to run one OS as the base, trusted OS, and then run Windows or Linux on top of that. This, combined with EFI, has big-brotherish potential.

However, for those of us who want to run multiple OSes, this means that you'll be able to run Xen, VmWare, Parallels, or your choice of software and run multiple operating environments at native speed.

Who is to say that Microsoft won't take something small and stable, such as Singularity (their research OS), and use that as the root OS to prevent you from doing things?

Heck, if I were MS, I'd have something booting up in EFI that's non-legacy such as Singularity or a custom build of OpenBSD (they already ship large chunks of it in UNIX Services for Windows), have that OS simulate a BIOS, and then load Vista on top of that. "Instant" circumvention of people attempting to do things via the HW by BIOS traps. And, AMD and Intel support it.

Otherwise, on Intel vs. AMD here....Intel does have one good division which designed the Pentium M, and may have worked on its successors, which will come out this year. Intel Israel may have saved their butts by reworking an already existing architecture (the P6) instead of starting from scratch (the P4).

I may be a little off on this, but remember the last time this happened? Intel designed a new chip from scratch, and after cutting their losses, released a new chip which was based off of the old one in some way.

Oh yeah, it happened twice . We call them the i432 and i960. The i432 or whatever it was called was eclipsed by the 386, and the i960 was eclipsed by the 486 and Pentium.

Intel's biggest failure has been the Itanium. After billions upon billions of dollars, and hiring many of the best compiler people in the business, they've only succeeded in hitting the niche markets. It is also not x86 compatible, and apparently is incredibly hard to program for. The only Itaniums I have heard of run HP-UX or Linux.

AMD, on the other hand, took an existing design, worked with it to include HyperTransport links on the chip, and made something which was less expensive to manufacture and had a lower cost for SW development by supporting already-existing tools and environments.

Intel tried to go with the bigger and faster route. AMD just made it incredibly attractive to have an Opteron.

[tw]

According to EE Times, vPro and Viiv are limited functions that don't transport well across the product line. This so different from a productive Intel that once created a roadmap for PC advancement (DIB) that included new video standards, PCI bus (that includes PnP abilities), North/South bridge with memory interface, USB, hardware functions that made sleep and hibernate possible, and even banged Sony Toshiba heads together so violently as to create a single DVD standard.

An industry analyst says, "vPro is not being well-received by the Pc channel partners as it adds undue cost and complexity to the enterprise market". This would be consistent with so many changes announced by Otellini that sound more like rebranding and no technical innovation. These are characteristics also found in AT&T when it started a 20 year self maculating process to cost control itself to death.

Intel's problems first became apparent when AMD introduced HyperTransport - and Intel did not even have anything in planning and eventually came out with 3GIO.

Intel remained in denial about NAND non-volatile memory. It remained with NOR technology and is said to be losing money. Recently it teamed with Micron to play catchup in the NAND market - too late. But Intel is now said to be separating memory production from processor production - step one in selling off its memory business. If true, then all this promise from Intel for OVC memory may have been mythical.

One shocking hint that Intel management does not get it. Intel intends to create a new architecture every two years instead of every four. Reminds me of another American IC manufacturer who decreed a new IC every week would make a market leader. Therefore they introduced numerous ICs that disappeared - nobody wanted them. But on spread sheets analysis, this was a perfect solution. How could the accountants have gotten it wrong? Maybe they had no idea what innovation was?

Intel's problem is not that others 'catch-up' with Intel architectures within four years. The problem is that Intel's architects since and including the P4 had pathetic designs. Since the limits of transistors (gates that are only 3 atoms thick) have created a brick wall, the Intel crown jewel (semiconductor manufacturing advances) have little room to keep advancing. This brick wall and a superior architecture is why AMD with less manufacturing abilities have now created superior high end processors.

Yes, Intel's crown jewel does mean Intel can do more with less power / less heat. But this crown jewel by itself no longer can make Intels faster than AMDs.

IOW a 'new architecture every two years' says Intel's new MBA boss does not get it. He does not understand where the problem lies and instead implements an MBA 'numbers' solution. This myopia also explains why Intel had to cancel some almost completed single core processor designs - because management finally listened to technical people too late. Intel's architecture blindly stuck to a single core design when they long ago should have realized a problem created by architectures that just were not competitive.

And then there is this blind allegiance to Itanium long after they should have had a 64 bit Pentium to fall back on. Readers of Tracey Kidder's "Soul of a New Machine" will appreciate how major this paragraph is.

Finally even long time Intel user, Dell, has finally conceded to AMD processors. Whereas Intel still has a low power Centrino dominance, Intel has lost its title in server application - high end processors - 32 bit processors that don't have the speed, no 64 bit Pentium, and the flawed Itanium that long ago would be canceled if not protected by HP.

BTW, one symptom demonstrates why Intel lost that title - Hyper Transport created by AMD and used by numerous other processor and sysetm companies such as Transmeta, Apple Computer, Cisco, PMC Sierra, Sun Microsystems, Broadcom, and NVIDIA. AMD is now doing what many years ago is what Intel did.

[mbpark]

TW,

The "Yamhill" 64-bit Pentiums are out there. AMD was first with them on the market, however, as Intel tried to artificially push the Itanium with HP. They had the 64-bit Pentium long before, but MBAs wanted the Itanium chip. As of now, I hardly hear about an Itanium implementation that isn't either HP-UX or Linux. Vendors are having massive trouble moving their code from PA-RISC to Itanium, and unless there's a major performance increase, they don't.

vPro is for desktop and server chips, and is a response to try and get Linux to do what VMWare does already. Xen, the next generation of VMWare, and other virtualization products build off of it. AMD, however, has their own implementation, and vendors are going to have to support both.

The Opteron is eating Intel's server lunch. It costs less than the Xeon or Itanium, and does more. Intel put their head in the sand. AMD has some innovation issues as well (the next generation of chips, K9 or K10), but they're taking market share because they are delivering what customers want at low prices.

[tw]

Intel has a long history of promoting products that fail. It comes with the industry that Intel is in. Some of the many processor lines attempted and failed include i860 series, i960, 80x9x series, and DSP processors. In each case, Intel management stuck with them until it was clear the line was not going to be successful. Two lines that did succeed were the 80x86 series and the Harvard architecture that ended with the roundly successful 8051.

Intel also dabbled in processors for cell phone. The mScale series may be a new successful market. Their attempts in MIPs were not.

Other product lines pioneered or marketed in the Intel line were bubble memory, dynamic RAM, static RAM, non-volatile NOR memory, modem chipsets, Ethernet technology, Expanded/Extended memory standards, USB technology, and various software packages. Intel created standards for plugNplay, PCI Bus, AGP video standards, and so many other concepts that were Intel product and industry standards. Intel literally created standards for all type semiconductor memory. Many of these businesses by themselves would have been primary and successful product lines in other companies. Any yet these same successes have only been secondary businesses in Intel.

So what, besides Pentium and mScale, is part of Intel's future? Strangely, Intel's new (alternative) product lines don't even appear to be consistent with Intel's past history. I just don't know of any new products that could be as successful as the 8051 line, USB standards, or non-volatile memory. Previously when a product line was maturing, then Intel sold off that product line while it was still marketable. They probably should have been selling off the memory business long ago OR developed alternative for the failing NOR EEPROM business. Instead, Intel did nothing - very uncharacteristic of Intel. These symptoms repeatedly suggest a top management that does not have a viable grasp of a primary management function - the strategic objective. To have a grasp requires that management come from where the work gets done - as Grove, Noyce, and Moore did.

Obviously early efforts by the new management leaves me unimpressed and in dread - similar to my early criticisms of John Young and Carly Fiorina.

[Maui Nick]

I just did a little research on this.

The Register, the UK tech publication, reported that Intel lost half of a percentage point of market share going from the last quarter of 2005 to the first quarter of 2006. However, AMD was up less than a third of a percentage point in that same time period, with Transmeta and VIA picking up the remainder of Intel's great, overwhelming loss.

However, increased sales of x86 laptops help to boost Intel's market share in an area where it already has an overwhelming advantage, and AMD's new Turion is a laptop battery killer. AMD used a little sleight-of-hand to make it appear that the Turion is superior to the Pentium M, but failed to mention to anybody that it did not compare similar systems. In other words, the Turion's perceived advantage is bupkis.

Speaking of laptops ... As the Register noted elsewhere, Intel's Centrino brand covers not only the laptop processor, but the computer's logic board and the wireless rig and is a stronger marketing proposition then a brand focused solely on the processor.

And some final notes about market share: Intel now owns 100% of the marketplace for processors in new Apple Macintosh computers. Oh, by the way ... Intel still holds 81.7 percent of the world's processor market share for x86-based computers.

So, um, what was it you were complaining about, exactly?

[Undertoad]

You're talking about Intel's past and present. tw is talking about their future.

[Maui Nick]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

You're talking about Intel's past and present. tw is talking about their future.

Seems like he's being Chicken Little to me.

[mbpark]

True about the laptop and Apple markets, however AMD just signed up the biggest customer of all, Dell. They already have IBM and HP as customers. In the segment of the market where the margins are very high, AMD is making major inroads.

Intel spent billions on the Itanium and ended up having to issue processors based on AMD's x64 instruction set (the Yamhill processor) to keep up.

This reminds me of when IBM was king, and Compaq shipped the first 386-based PCs. Intel may have the market now, but that doesn't mean so for the future. Oftentimes decisions made for the long term a few years back come back to bite you in the future. This is esp. true for Intel. While Conroe and the new chips may be excellent chips, they may be a stopgap that shows less innovation in future designs.

Intel's Israel division basically handed them the Centrino, Core, Core Duo, and Core 2 Duo chips because they utilized sound engineering practice and built on proven technology, while the rest of the company pushed NetBurst, which was not so sound .

What I believe that TW is saying is that Intel's misstep with Netburst, which lasted approx. 7-8 years, and their dalliance with Itanium, which has lasted much longer, may have shifted valuable engineering resources away from much more practical long-term projects.

AMD has come in with a long-term plan for x86-64, and now has the backing of the major hardware and software vendors, including Microsoft, Red Hat/IBM (since IBM Global Services is providing a large chunk of their enterprise support), Novell, EMC (and VMWare), HP, Oracle, and many of the major Open Source operating systems. They also did not lock up their interconnect technology (HyperTransport) in licenses and costs.

Intel, on the other hand, has waffled incredibly on this front, esp. with Itanium, NetBurst, and the x64 extensions. CIO-level people are beginning to see this, and it is damaging.

It's going to really hurt HP first with the Itanium decisions. The current PA-RISC to Itanium transition involves a very complex migration to Itanium, as binaries from PA-RISC don't run very well on Itanium. This means that you have to re-qualify the software you utilize on Itanium, and possibly purchase new licenses for Itanium, which cost a lot of money. By the time you factor in what you pay for performance, those Opteron boxes seem a lot more attractive just on price alone. When you also realize you can utilize the same staff and tools to maintain hardware across the enterprise for your large-scale applications (SAP, Peoplesoft, Exchange, Oracle) as you do for your middle-tier and departmental applications, you also see the power of what AMD has brought to the market.

The big companies that buy truckloads of this stuff see this, and also have a much higher profit margin on what they buy. I think Dell actually loses more money than they say on their consumer PCs due to the fact that they can charge much higher margins for their business lines to make up for it. The overall cost of equipment is not just in the equipment, but how much power and manpower it takes to provide a certain amount of computing power to get the job done for the customer. AMD's solution provides a very large amount of power at a very low cost per watt for the large-scale applications, and scales out to a very large scale once reserved for non-x86 chips. They also have backward compatibility which has been tested back to DOS 2.11 with the AMD64 chips, and will support unmodified versions of Windows on their chips. You can run what you already have on their chips without the cost of upgrading the applications as well.

Intel doesn't have a long-term plan for that scenario. People like tw and I, who work within those parameters, understand what is brought to the table by both parties. If a proposal from a vendor comes across my desk requiring a very large amount of hardware to be purchased, vs. a solution which is more sane in the hardware, software, and infrastructure requirements, the latter will always win.

[jaguar]

NetBurst gave AMD a window and they've done a damn fine job of taking advantage of that but Conroe, Woodcrest & merom are shaping up very well indeed & AMD still haven't sorted their supply problems.

Of course they eventually will, and Intel will with any luck (hey, I'm in Apple hardware these days, I want Intel to make some nice stuff) continue kicking ass with the new gear. That should result in one very competitive market that we, as consumers benefit from. Awesome.

[tw]

Early speculation suggested Intel would divest its memory division. Instead, on Jun 6, 2006 from CBSMarketWatch is a different part of Intel that may be divested. Intel spent up to $9billion to create this group that may sell for $1billion:

Intel Corp. is in talks with several private investment firms and rival chipmakers to sell all or part of its struggling communication-chip businesses ...

Intel's communications group, which was split apart during a realignment of the company early last year, contributed $5 billion in sales in 2004 -- or 15% of Intel's total revenue that year. But it also posted an operating loss of $791 million. ...

Intel's push into the market for chips used in networking gear, cell phones and other devices has been a disappointment. During the late 1990s, the company spent more than $9 billion in cash and stock to beef up its line of communications-related products.

Intel is expected to hold onto its business that makes wireless chips used to connect laptop computers to the Internet, a market that has helped Intel post double-digit sales growth last year.