How Qualcomm Tried and Failed To Steal Intel's Crown Jewel 106
An anonymous reader shares an article from Bloomberg: In early November, Qualcomm Chairman Paul Jacobs stood on a stage in the heart of Silicon Valley and vowed to break Intel's stranglehold on the world's most lucrative chip business. The mobile internet and cloud computing were booming and the data centers running this digital economy had an insatiable thirst for computer servers -- and especially the powerful, expensive server chips that Intel churns out by the million. Qualcomm had spent five years and hundreds of millions of dollars designing competing processors, trying to expand beyond its mobile business. Jacobs was leading a coming-out party featuring tech giants like Microsoft and HP, which had committed to try the new gear. "That's an industry that's been very slow moving, very complacent," Jacobs said on stage. "We're going to change that."
Less than a year later, this once-promising business is in tatters, according to people familiar with the situation. Most of the key engineers are gone. Big customers are looking elsewhere or going back to Intel for the data center chips they need. Efforts to sell the operation -- including a proposed management buyout backed by SoftBank -- have failed, the people said. Jacobs, chief backer of the plan and the son of Qualcomm's founder, is out, too. The demise is a story of debt-fueled dealmaking and executive cost-cutting pledges in the face of restless investors seeking quick returns -- exactly the wrong environment for the painstaking and expensive task of building a new semiconductor business from scratch. It leaves Qualcomm more reliant on a smartphone market that's plateaued. And Intel's server chip boss is happy.
Less than a year later, this once-promising business is in tatters, according to people familiar with the situation. Most of the key engineers are gone. Big customers are looking elsewhere or going back to Intel for the data center chips they need. Efforts to sell the operation -- including a proposed management buyout backed by SoftBank -- have failed, the people said. Jacobs, chief backer of the plan and the son of Qualcomm's founder, is out, too. The demise is a story of debt-fueled dealmaking and executive cost-cutting pledges in the face of restless investors seeking quick returns -- exactly the wrong environment for the painstaking and expensive task of building a new semiconductor business from scratch. It leaves Qualcomm more reliant on a smartphone market that's plateaued. And Intel's server chip boss is happy.
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In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. There's no one else challenging Intel for supremacy - unless AMDs EPYC architecture does the job?
Re:Intel blew their credibility (Score:5, Interesting)
AMDs 7nm Epycs promise to be truly epic while the current 12nm ones are already good value. AMD supposedly only has a 1% share of the server market right now, but there is a whole lot of evaluating going on. I can imagine 15-20 share of that lucrative market by this time next year.
Now what we have is AMD+TSMC vs Intel. I'm not betting on Intel in the long run. I'll repeat my prediction that Intel has no choice in the long run but to follow AMD's leave and go fabless. Now... the emerging TSMC fab monopoly, that's something to worry about. On balance, not as bad as the traditional Wintel monopoly, but still bad. Keep in mind that the lithography equipment business had been a near total monopoly enjoyed by ASML for years now, and that has somehow worked. It's beyond me why that works.
We haven't heard the last of the ARM server effort. Intel dodged a bullet this time by pure accident. There will be more barbarians at the gate, not necessarily Qualcomm, but they are hardly out of the game.
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Intel has slept very long and was happy to gauge its customers with inflated prices. AMD is at least 5 years ahead of Intel now, probably more. Ideal situation would be if longer-term they basically have roughly equal market shares to keep each other honest. What Intel does when they have no competition, we already know. There is no reason to assume a dominant AMD would be much batter.
Re:Intel blew their credibility (Score:4, Interesting)
How is AMD 5 years ahead? The only thing they have over Intel seems to be their "infinity fabric" interconnect architecture, allowing them to make efficient multi-die packages. It's good, but I can't imagine that's 5 years worth of advancement.
Other than that, AMD is in the same ballpark as Intel, maybe a little bit behind. That's still impressive, real competition after all these years, however AMD better not fall asleep now that they have (hopefully) woken up Intel if they don't want to get passed again.
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AMD has similar architectural issues to deal with. The epic EPYC PSP problem is still a mind-numbing issue. AMD has pretty much buried it under the rug, not that Intel's Meltdown/Sceptre efforts have been successful.
Qualcomm (or others) could turn RISC designs into something really useful, but there's a cart-and-horse problem that Oracle/Sun, IBM, Moto, Apple, and others know too well.
Phone and IoT/industrial IoT are still growth areas. Remember that the telcos are going to try to obsolete your entire kit w
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Qualcomm (or others) could turn RISC designs into something really useful, but there's a cart-and-horse problem that Oracle/Sun, IBM, Moto, Apple, and others know too well.
All modern processors are internally RISCy, so no. There is no problem. Everyone is using RISC designs. Did you mean to say ARM?
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No, the Intel/AMD/others x86-x64 familes are CISC processors, no matter the handling underneath. It came to pass that the layers underneath were recently shown to have exposed RISC core access, but such access is disabled so far as most all humans are concerned.
The instruction set vs execution over clock cycles that determines the practical difference. ARM is based on the 6502 instruction set, adapted for larger memory models and in some cases, math, depending upon the implementation. I consider the ARM fam
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No, the Intel/AMD/others x86-x64 familes are CISC processors, no matter the handling underneath.
I didn't say otherwise, so you don't get to open with "No," there. I said they were internally RISC, and they are. It's a fact.
It came to pass that the layers underneath were recently shown to have exposed RISC core access,
Completely, totally, and in all other ways irrelevant. RISC won where it made sense for RISC to win, inside the processor. CISC won where it made sense for CISC to win, in the instruction set.
but such access is disabled so far as most all humans are concerned.
Surrrrrrre it is. If you trust your microprocessor manufacturer to get everything right, anyway.
The instruction set vs execution over clock cycles that determines the practical difference.
Processors are virtually all (outside of embedded) multicore and OoO now, there is no practical d
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ARM is based on the 6502 instruction set
No. Just no. Have you even looked at either of them?
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Ok, not really the 6502 instruction set per se, but rather, similar to the 6502 in that it didn't use DMA.
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Your just stringing words together, aren't you?
6502 processor didn't use 'DMA'? DMA is when a peripheral accesses main memory. Apple 2s used DMA, pretty sure C-64 did also.
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Long day.
Read about it here: https://www.engineersgarage.co... [engineersgarage.com]
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The only thing they have over Intel seems to be their "infinity fabric" interconnect architecture
That is definitely not the entire list. Another huge one: AMD cache design is not vulnerable to Meltdown. I agree, definitely not 5 years ahead. Maybe 1 year ahead in process tech because of Intel's engineering misfortune. Roughly even in CPU design.
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Also, AMD can compile custom chips, including a variable amount of powerful GFX. See all the consoles with AMD CPUs.
Bloomberg Ignores the Facts (Score:2, Interesting)
In their effort to move stock, Bloomberg conveniently ignores the speculative execution debacle at Intel. Intel's chips are shit right now.
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Intel CPUs are used day in and day out without any type of security problems.
False [techtarget.com].
This isn't rocket science. (Score:3, Insightful)
They need a registered+unregistered ECC-capable DDR4 memory controller capable of driving at least 2-4 sockets and either hypertransport lanes to a PCIe controler, or onboard PCIe 4.0-5.0 lanes ranging from 16 to 48 minimum, depending on the market segment they are trying to capture, ideally supporting bifurcation along all power of two possibilities.
If they did that their chips would be capable of driving PCIMG passive backplane motherboards, actual x86 style motherboards, and the full range of consumer, professional, and industrial grade hardware.
This isn't rocket science. The technologies, licensing, and engineering are all non-trivial, but also well within the capabilities of companies like Qualcomm. The fact that they managed to fumble this bad enough to take themselves down is both technological and political in nature (the trade war with china closely aligns with Qualcomm's failed attempt, doesn't it?)
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Some of the best, and definitely the worst comments, all seem to come from Mr. Anonymous Coward. This is one of the best. Thank you kind sir.
A Poorly Written Article (Score:5, Interesting)
Seems to have been written (or edited) by someone without a semiconductor background. The biggest question I had was what processor architecture were they building around, something the Bloomberg piece never seemed to answer.
If they mean this [qualcomm.com] it's 48 cores and based on ARMv8. Potentially interesting, but the piece lacks all the technical detail about how Qualcomm intended to position the chip technically against Intel, and what advantages it might have over competing ARM-based offerings.
But "ARM" never even appears in the Bloomberg article...
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So yeah. We all know the real problem - Intel exerting too much pressure on Microsoft.
Seriously, if Microsoft hadn't bowed to Intel, AMD would have had a HUGE head-start in the 64 bit world. Now, it's 2018, why hasn't Microsoft shipped Windows 10 on ARM? They have it working, so get the damn devices OUT THE DOOR.
Break the Intel monopoly. Microsoft needs Intel far, far less than Intel needs Microsoft.
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So yeah. We all know the real problem - Intel exerting too much pressure on Microsoft.
Seriously, if Microsoft hadn't bowed to Intel, AMD would have had a HUGE head-start in the 64 bit world. Now, it's 2018, why hasn't Microsoft shipped Windows 10 on ARM? They have it working, so get the damn devices OUT THE DOOR.
Break the Intel monopoly. Microsoft needs Intel far, far less than Intel needs Microsoft.
This is about servers.
Microsoft isn't really a factor.
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Microsoft isn't really a factor.
And Linus is on vacation because the social networkers got to him.
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So yeah. We all know the real problem - Intel exerting too much pressure on Microsoft.
Seriously, if Microsoft hadn't bowed to Intel, AMD would have had a HUGE head-start in the 64 bit world. Now, it's 2018, why hasn't Microsoft shipped Windows 10 on ARM? They have it working, so get the damn devices OUT THE DOOR.
Break the Intel monopoly. Microsoft needs Intel far, far less than Intel needs Microsoft.
This is about servers.
Microsoft isn't really a factor.
Actually, they are, when you look at their build-out of Azure.
Re: A Poorly Written Article (Score:2)
Microsoft makes billions of dollars from Windows Server. Try again.
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Actually Microsoft did not. Microsoft launched the x86-64 (AMD64) version of Windows against Intel's will and dropped down support for Itanium. At one time Microsoft was even involved in the ACE consortium which meant to sell MIPS computers with Windows NT as a replacement for the Intel architecture. It flopped bad.
Microsoft has tried to change architectures more than once, especially to those with more than one supplier, but the large installed base of applications makes that exceedingly difficult. Every o
actually focused on the corporate dealings... (Score:2)
they just focused on the corporate dealings of qualcomm...
technically if they can focus their efforts for centriq on the 5G edge (fixed in home modems and cell sites with caching, SDN etc) then they have a chance to expand their footprint otherwise intel will own the server and have a 5G modem competing with qualcomm which is not good for corporate returns at all...
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FTFY.
Of course Bloomberg won't focus on the reason they failed. Bloomberg's too busy astroturfing for "what happens when you don't make short term invest....(*hahahahahah!* read: gamblers) happy." What made you think you'd see something like that based the source?
"Cloud Data Centers" (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems to be a one-true Scotsman argument. ARM chips account for 85% of processors currently, Intel only 15%. Sure they dominate the Windows PC and "Cloud Data Center" markets...... Trouble is, your more likely to be reading Slashdot on a non Windows non Intel device these days, with your office or home based server being ARM based (e.g. a Synology RAID). The "true" Scotsman in this claim has changed from "processors" to "server processors" to "cloud scale data center processors".
Sure Intel still dominates the "cloud" data centers, with Xeons running big assed server racks and Qualcomm don't have market share with their ARM based server.... but that's not how the ARM world works. It's not *one* supplier that overwhelmed Intel in the other markets, it was thousands of other companies making thousands of competing commodity products. Pecking away until Intel is driven from that market.
The big growth in cloud servers for Intel *was* China, but the trade war means Intel gets hit with big phased in price hikes in China, while Chinese companies want to sell ARM based servers. Its not like these trade wars can end, because they never had a win scenario, the PR for the trade war *is* the win scenario for Trump. The war is the win. At best, the adults in the room, might resurrect the TPP and EU trade agreements (which locked China out of markets if it infringed IP) and label them "Trump" agreements to save face, but that's a long shot. Most likely the tarrifs will continue for years and Chinese ARM server makers will take over.
I'm not bullish on Intel. They seem to be complacent and in decline.
Re:"Cloud Data Centers" (Score:4, Informative)
Intel were never entrenched in the mobile/embedded market, the market basically grew around ARM. Intel tried and failed to enter this market.
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This is off the mark. Intel never had a foothold, much less any dominance, in the mobile space, so nobody was pecking away and driving away Intel. Intel grew and rose on the desktop and subsequently corporate server market, and still dominate that utterly and completely.
Intel has, so far, not been driven from any processor market. Home servers have not really been a major market, historically (yes, most /. readers probably had home servers decades ago, but that does not a major market make) and the rise in
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China is a difficult beast in this space. It is quite unlikely Chinese made server racks will find international acceptance, for many reasons, but most of all for the extremely high risk of embedded spyware and back doors - and in all likelihood several layers of them, added by government orders, company orders and enterprising individuals in the organization. China has a track record, and shows no inclination to change.
China, however, has their trucks and trains delivering product along massive belts and roads. Semi-authoritarian countries south and west of them are bound to listen to the 'good deals' Chinese providers can supply them with.
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Indeed, they will become a great power in Asia, on all levels. And in the emerging economic prosperity of Africa, if it comes.
But Europe and the US are not out for the count just yet.
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Except Synology uses Intel CPUs in most of their NAS systems.
https://www.synology.com/en-us... [synology.com]
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The "adults in the room" are the problem. They all have an interest in protecting their investment portfolios at the expense of this nations future.
The truth of the matter is there can be only one super power. When there are two you get the cold war and proxy wars along with it. When there are none but many power you get WWI/WWII.
We are already seeing the proxy fights with China. Russia wants to pretend it still matters and is muddying the waters but that is a distraction. China with its imperialistic
Maybe Qualcom should have talked to AMD (Score:3)
Server chips are not mobile chips. Qualcomm was in over their head's before they started.
They never had a chance.
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I believe that AMD were largely, though not completely, cheated out of it by Intel's illegal payments to vendors. The article also glosses over this fact, and it is fact as Intel were convicted. It is a massive business risk IMO, it nearly broke AMD. I could imagine the business part of Qualcomm being uneasy about that more than the technical aspects of it.
I find the article to be rather lightweight.
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It's just that Intel's compiler detected instruction sets by checking the manufacturer and processor id instead of checking the processor's flags like what any reasonable person would do.
Re:Maybe Qualcom should have talked to AMD (Score:4)
I don't believe AMD really ever had an edge. From someone that has used AMD chips for years I've noticed one thing. They always lay just behind Intel in performance about 5% while maintaining a price difference just enough to offset that performance. An when AMD every really seemed to have an edge, they quickly licenced it to Intel.
Even the FX chips, which most people agree was a dog when released, still was good enough to classify as high end performance. I still use one in my home server. Even the Ryzn chips, as good as they are, are not quite as good as the Intel counterparts. The performance gap of chips of the same class has fallen to about 3% but its still there. An the cost offset is still there.
Plus when it seems AMD is about to cash in its chips, someone shows up with a boat load of money. I'm not ready to say intel is pulling the stings behind AMD keeping them afloat but it sure seems that way at times. Keeping the competition a float just enough so they can't be declared a monopoly but not enough that AMD is a serous threat.
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They tried to steal the design of the Alpha? (Score:2, Informative)
Some of us remember how much of the design of the DEC Alpha was stolen by Intel for the Pentium. See https://www.nytimes.com/1997/0... [nytimes.com]. Between this and the theft of VMS technologies to create Windows NT, DEC went bankrupt and stopped producing new technologies to be stolen.
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Intel and AMD carved up DEC's lead engineers between them. Among other things AMD got out of that deal was hypertransport. Intel got... um... itanic.
Re:They tried to steal the design of the Alpha? (Score:4, Interesting)
Intel got StrongARM from DEC, which became Xscale, before they sold it off. That seemed like a kind of weird decision - at the time they owned the best-performing ARM implementation on the market, but they sold it because they were betting everything on x86.
The Pentium 4 NetBurst architecture has more in common with Alpha AXP than Itanic. NetBurst ended up going the same way as Alpha in the end, with high clock speeds but mediocre real-world performance, and horrible power/heat issues.
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Prior to 2005, Intel bought a chunk of DEC to get VLIW technology (for their Itanic CPUs) as well as StrongArm. The latter turned out to be wasteful to manufacture, which is one reason it could not remain.
Atom came from a semi-competing group was working on an X86 SoC thing. Apparently they were overly optimistic about making low power SoC processors because they sold the StrongArm/XScale stuff _early_ to create room in a number of ways for what they thought to be this super compelling X86-compatible line.
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Intel got StrongARM from DEC, which became Xscale, before they sold it off. That seemed like a kind of weird decision - at the time they owned the best-performing ARM implementation on the market, but they sold it because they were betting everything on x86.
It was the fastest ARM on the market, but it was also the most power-hungry and they couldn't get it to scale down. An ARM which doesn't conserve power is worthless in today's computing environments, so they unloaded it.
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Intel got StrongARM from DEC, which became Xscale, before they sold it off. That seemed like a kind of weird decision - at the time they owned the best-performing ARM implementation on the market, but they sold it because they were betting everything on x86.
Intel was not interested in producing something which would compete with their own x86 processors (until Itanium) so Xscale and the i960 were sold or discontinued.
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Intel got... um... itanic
Ever noticed how that kind of rhymes with titanic? With similar fates I might add.
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Ever noticed how that kind of rhymes with titanic? With similar fates I might add.
Poe's Law hitting hard, here.
For whoever modded this up, the actual marketing name of the chip is Itanium. It was retroactively christened Itanic by the community specifically because it sank without a trace.
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It was called itanic long before it sank. It was called itanic because it was expected to sink.
Re:They tried to steal the design of the Alpha? (Score:5, Informative)
The Pentium Pro and Pentium MMX don't really look much like Alpha AXP. If anything, they look more like a desperate response to Sun. Pentium Pro copies conditional moves from SPARCv9 to help conserve branch prediction resources and avoid pipeline bubbles. MMX is a blatant rip-off of UltraSPARC's VIS - allow integer SIMD operations on values in FPU registers.
As for WinNT, it's not stolen. It implements a lot of ideas that had ended up in VMS because Cutler had previously worked on VMS. You can't stop someone from re-implementing their own ideas in a new product. The WinNT makes different compromises to VMS, with more focus on conserving resources, which makes sense for the commodity hardware it was supposed to run on.
1st impression is SCAM (Score:2)
You don't just "walk in" and take over a huge market.
Who lost the most money in this?
Gave Up Too Soon (Score:5, Insightful)
Intel's transition to 10nm is delayed until late next year at best, whereas TSMC is selling (similar-size) 7nm chips en-masse today. Furthermore, Intel is facing a 14nm chip shortage due to their long-term planning on having moved to 10nm already, which is hitting the server chip business hard. Now is the time when Qualcomm should've doubled-down and pushed into the market.
Re:Gave Up Too Soon (Score:5, Interesting)
Problem being that intel is actually going for non-PR speak 10nm (which is PR speak 7nm) and intel is going for high power chips, not low power ones. Latter being the likely reason why it's so hard to get anything out in meaningful numbers. This isn't for memory or mobile chips as is the case with TSMC process. There's a reason why high power chip majors like nvidia aren't touching the TSMC's PR speak 7nm process with a ten metre pole. It's unsuitable for purpose at the moment.
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AMD is planning on releasing large chips made on TSMC's 7nm process later this year, and more chips in January. The first of these is expected to be a 7nm shrink of Vega, targeted at the enterprise IIRC.
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Like it was planning to do it on GloFo's?
Believe PR when you see the results, not when PR says "well, we'll do it elsewhere since this one didn't work".
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They've already taped out and have engineering silicon back.
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The latest processes are never
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This isn't for memory or mobile chips as is the case with TSMC process. There's a reason why high power chip majors like nvidia aren't touching the TSMC's PR speak 7nm process with a ten metre pole.
Uh, AMD's next generation, going by the name Zen 2, isn't just on TSMC's 7nm process, it's already done, taped out, in production, and sampling, with benchmarks leaking [wccftech.com]. For multithreaded/multi-process workloads, it's fast. Very fast.
As stated elsewhere in these comments, server prototypes built around it are being evaluated by all of the major datacenter builders. AMD is slobbering all over themselves. Zen 2 was supposed to compete against Intel's Ice Lake core, which was supposed to be the 10nm coming
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Qualcomm was hamstrung by an activist investor that bought a significant chunk of the company and demanded they drop their server push, because obviously being totally reliant on a single market is a good business practice.
This activist investor destroyed Qualcomm's long term planning, had their effort continued they would be selling chips right now while Intel is hampered by their process. Qualcomm could have conceivably snagged a significant chunk of the cloud market. But when the activist investor made t
Idiots (Score:2)
Idiots.
I really can come up with only one description for all this childish behaviour: Idiots.
An Investor who thinks he can enter a complex market in less than ten years is simply an Idiot.
An Entrepeneur who promises to enter a complex market in less than ten years is simply an Idiot.
Lets check the market:
Google Mail needed seven years to conquer the market.
Android needed six years to conquer the smart phone.
Linux needed 12 years to vanquish the commecial unices.
Whatsapp took six years to rise.
Facebook even