Intel CEO Dismisses 'Pretty Insignificant' Arm PC Challenge (theregister.com) 51
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger has downplayed the threat of rival chipmakers creating processors based on the Arm architecture for PCs. From a report: "Arm and Windows client alternatives, generally they've been relegated to pretty insignificant roles in the PC business," he told analysts during the x86 giant's Q3 earnings call Thursday. "We take all our competition seriously, but I think history is our guide here. We don't see these as potentially being all that significant overall," he added, a sentiment somewhat at odds with Microsoft which last week cited analyst research predicting Arm's PC market share will grow from its curernt 14 percent to 25 percent by 2027.
Which seems far from "pretty insignificant." Gelsinger's words also contrast markedly with past Intel CEO Andy Grove, who penned a book titled "Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company." While Gelsinger doesn't see Arm as a threat, he said Intel Foundry Services is more than happy to work with chipmakers to build chips based on the architecture. "When you're thinking about other alternative architectures like Arm, we also say, 'Wow, what a great opportunity for our foundry'," he said. To that end, the in April 2023 the chipmaker announced a strategic partnership with Arm to make it easier to produce chips on the architecture in Intel foundries.
Which seems far from "pretty insignificant." Gelsinger's words also contrast markedly with past Intel CEO Andy Grove, who penned a book titled "Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company." While Gelsinger doesn't see Arm as a threat, he said Intel Foundry Services is more than happy to work with chipmakers to build chips based on the architecture. "When you're thinking about other alternative architectures like Arm, we also say, 'Wow, what a great opportunity for our foundry'," he said. To that end, the in April 2023 the chipmaker announced a strategic partnership with Arm to make it easier to produce chips on the architecture in Intel foundries.
That was then (Score:2, Informative)
"Arm and Windows client alternatives, generally they've been relegated to pretty insignificant roles in the PC business,"
That was back when the fastest ARM was XScale, which ironically didn't scale... down. Intel could never get the power consumption down to the same low levels as other ARM-based processors, so as they got faster but kept lower power consumption at lower clock rates, XScale got left behind and Intel cancelled it. So you can 100% put his statement in the "sour grapes" category — The only reason Intel didn't go on to become a leader in ARM core processors is incompetence.
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I think the "back then" is about itanium, and how intel itself was beaten down to a pulp by x86.
But they won't want to admit that.
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I think the "back then" is about itanium, and how intel itself was beaten down to a pulp by
...AMD64.
There, FTFY.
Having to adopt AMD's instruction set is surely one of the most embarrassing things that ever happened to Intel. Having had slower top-end processors than AMD for years now has to hurt, too.
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Intel is a corporation; it doesn't have feelings by nature. Its executives don't have feelings either, but that probably took at least some practice.
Duopolies are efficient (for the purpose of suppressing competition while avoiding regulation); they got more out of the AMD deal than whatever face they lost (which was practically none; this shit matters only to fanboys, not actual employees).
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XScale was bought from Digital Equipment Corporation. Back then it was called StrongARM. Intel never quite knew what to do with it despite it selling reasonably well in PDAs like the Compaq iPAQ and others at one point. Then Apple came to Intel, which was their CPU vendor for desktops, and asked them to make a CPU for the iPhone. And Intel refused. Only to later try to make downscaled x86 versions for Android smartphones which no one wanted to buy. So it is that we get here.
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XScale was bought from Digital Equipment Corporation. Back then it was called StrongARM.
Yep. Intel got it up from 233 to 400 MHz, but couldn't get a handle on the power consumption.
Intel never quite knew what to do with it despite it selling reasonably well in PDAs like the Compaq iPAQ and others at one point.
I had the H2215 which had the fastest (400MHz) XScale, PXA255. It was from the bad old days of expensive flash so it had very little nonvolatile memory. If you lost battery power you lost your data. Luckily the system had both a SD card slot and a CF card slot, and you could use both at once. I had the sandisk wifi+128MB flash CF card. It ran Familiar Linux quite well.
How much was Apple's business worth? (Score:3)
I guess Gelsinger would have labeled that as "pretty insignificant" when Apple moved from Intel to ARM derived processors.
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Define "ahead". The last time I checked, they were behind AMD in many metrics. With the last several generations of consumer CPUs, their chips finally are on par with AMD offerings however that performance gain requires a massive amount of power and cooling to achieve. Also define "waste". Efficiency cores was one of a few ways to practically achieve that performance. While many might think that every chip company can put in as many cores as they want, there are realistic limitations like the size of the ch
Old enough to remember (Score:5, Insightful)
I was studying electronics engineering in the '90s, and I was a Computer architecture and Networking buff (decanted for Networking, but that is a tale for another day).
I remember when the Big Iron RISCy guys dismissed the threat of the X-86 architecture as "Insignificant".
"It will not scale", they said, "the instruction decoders are too complex "they said", "It works for PCs, but will not work for serious workstations and servers", they said, "PowerPC is faster and better than Intel" Steve Jobs said.
And Yet, Intel ate them all.
Now, is the turn of ARM. and consistent with their predecesors, the current incumbent says this is a "Pretty insignificant threat".
You can exoect that, in the not too distant future, the CEO of ARM at that time will call RISC-V a "pretty insignificant threat too"
JM2C YMMV
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Why would Microsoft care about keeping Intel in business? I can see how they'd want to maintain friendly business relations, just as the would with Arm and so many others. Microsoft intentionally doing a bad job with Windows on Arm sounds like a bad business decision, if something happens to Intel by chance then that could sink Microsoft. If Microsoft shows preference to Intel then that would not only piss of people at Arm but also make it difficult to establish any future relationship with some other CP
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Why would Microsoft care about keeping Intel in business?
The vast majority of their software is written for x86. Yes AMD is also x86, but MS has a vested interest to keep Intel alive.
Re: Old enough to remember (Score:3)
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Re:Old enough to remember (Score:4, Informative)
Didn't Windows lock down their ARM platforms in the last iteration of that combination? Of course, Intel figures ARM is "pretty insignificant". Because their buddies in Redmond will just bugger their ARM implementation up again. And a PC without Windows will still be an also-ran in today's market.
Win11ARM is tied to Qualcomm (for the time being) for a few reasons:
- At the time of the exclusivity deal, Qualcomm was perceived as one of the few companes capable of delivering an Arm processor capable enough for a Win11 laptop.
- Qualcomm made a SoC and anciallieries tailored to Win11 needs. Like UEFI on ARM, secureboot on arm, and DX12 WDDM 2.0 drivers in the GPU (Adreno in this case). All with adequate driver support duration.
- Qualcomm contributed HEAVILY to the X32 and X64 code emulation of Win11ARM...
All that was in exchange of the exclusivity period...
Which, it seems, will end soonish. So no, microsoft did not tied Win11ARM to Qualcomm to "help intel". Rather, to bootstrap it.
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I'll add you one further. Intel has repeatedly said that ARM will never be able to achieve the higher throughput or clock speeds of Intel chips - both before and after they purchased StrongARM and sold it again. It's been often repeated.
Those benchmarks - of the time - have long since been passed with Apple Silicon, and others are approaching Apple's level of performance as well.
This is just more of "640k ought to be enough for anyone", mixed with a bit of stock market protectiveness. It's not a statement w
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I don't think Intel fully grasps how tenuous their grasp on the processor world is. Their dominance is entirely pinned on the Windows ecosystem, an ecosystem which is quickly moving away from amd64 exclusively while at the same time rapidly (continuing) to destroy any backward compatibility with x86 related applications as fast as they can.
Re:Old enough to remember (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think Intel fully grasps how tenuous their grasp on the processor world is. Their dominance is entirely pinned on the Windows ecosystem, an ecosystem which is quickly moving away from amd64 exclusively while at the same time rapidly (continuing) to destroy any backward compatibility with x86 related applications as fast as they can.
Wrong, on servers they are very strong in Lintel (Linux-Intel) for Cloud and HPC. Intel invested heavily in toolchains (both open and closed) as well as many FOSS projects, and is reaping the rewards.
While the FOSS stuff can be recompiled to ARM, the toolchains are harder to replicate. If you doubt that, ask nVidia about CUDA ;-)
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Wrong, on servers they are very strong in Lintel (Linux-Intel) for Cloud and HPC.
The top 10 has 4 AMD, 3 Intel, 2 Power, 1 ARM and 1 Sunway.
It's a bit more boring in the rest of the list, but as you point out, it's actually NVidia that's the really dominant one in the top 500. They can be fed equally well with AMD, Intel or Power CPUs. AMD has some showing with it's GPUs, and Fujitsu with its integrated system.
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Exactly, even if Intel were to totally clobber AMD in HPC (unlikely but anyhoo) they'd just be picking up a piece of a shrinking market.
I remember when one of Intel's claims to fame in HPC was superior interconnect technology. At one point they were promising (threatening?) thousands of cores on a chip. Now they seem to be struggling to maintain any relevance at all.
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Reusing an archived footgun (Score:4, Funny)
Walking down the halls of an Intel campus, seen framed in glass on the wall is the footgun Otellini used when failing to close the deal where Intel would make chips for the iPhone.
Gelsinger sees it and says "Hey that looks like fun!" and retrieves said footgun without hesitating to spare the glass, then aims it directly at his own foot.
Re:It is time to recall Intel CPUs (Score:5, Interesting)
While I'm here calling out Intel CEOs, Krzanich committed some blatant insider trading when he sold a bunch of shares right before the spectre/meltdown turds hit the fan, while the turd was still in flight.
Not being idiots when it comes to pencil pushing and accounting practices, Intel knew this would make them look bad so they did the smart thing: Make one of Krzanich's inappropriate relationships come to light as cause for resignation/termination. That press took up all the air in the room, and the insider trading never hit the media!
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"He must recall all processors vulnerable to meltdown and specter vulnerabilities"
Because we all know how home machines suffer from those ;) ... and ARM processors don't.
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I'm curious, what keeps these PCs from upgrading to Windows 11? As someone that doesn't use Windows much at home, and even then I still have Windows XP on one computer I use once in a great while, I pay very little attentions to what Microsoft is doing.
I have multiple expensive computers at home too but I recognize that after about six years or so I'd want or need to replace them. This means every couple years I buy myself a new computer to replace the oldest one in use, so no one computer is more than si
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Four years? That's... not a thing for small business.
The standard with ALL of my clients is "when it stops working". They're PISSED if they can't get at least seven years out of a computer, and they'd rather see 10. I'm typing this on an 8 year old computer, and it's absolutely fine. It's officially unsupported with the version of macOS I'm running on it, but with OpenCore Patcher it's chugging happily along. And my clients are fine with running unsupported hardware the same way, if it's still doing th
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Four years? That's... not a thing for small business.
I wasn't working at small businesses when I did my IT work so my experience was biased. Large businesses, at least in my experience, expected to see computers last four years. Maybe there's some tax incentive to this, some support contracts that incentivize this (such as Dell or whatever not supporting hardware more than four years old), some kind of study telling businesses that after four years maintenance or security issues crop up, or whatever. It's not like the old computers ended up in a landfill.
Pulls of glasses and rubs eyes (Score:2)
Second, doesn’t that mean 25% of PCs are gonna be macs by 2027? Cause I’m not sure anyone else is currently making ARM PCs. Please correct me if I’m wrong here.
Third, isn’t Intel currently wiping a ton of egg off it’s face cause they fell asleep and let competitors pass it by? Every single Intel exec should be having regular ni
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Lenovo makes a couple laptops with a Qualcomm ARM [lenovo.com]
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"First, PC ARM market share is slated to go from 14 to 25 percent, in just a few years..."
Yep, SLATED. Guaranteed, promised, scheduled, reserved, assured. Pre-arranged beforehand. Foregone conclusion.
"... and they consider that “pretty insignificant?”
Yeah, and who are they anyway? Didn't they get the memo that ARM was SLATED?
"Please correct me if I’m wrong here."
You're wrong here.
"Every single Intel exec should be having regular nightmares of being chased down a long dark hall by a chai
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AMD makes faster top-end processors than Intel, they charge less per op than Intel at all levels of the market, Apple silicon is continually gaining in market share, and fewer people are buying desktops where the power consumption of amd64 is relatively irrelevant so that's hurting Intel (and AMD) too. Now that tablets are powerful enough to do basically everything the majority of people want to do on their computers, there's less reason to buy a full-fledged processor than ever before.
Gaming remains popula
Typical Intel arrogance. (Score:4, Interesting)
Hopefully Mr. Gelsinger is just feinting arrogance about this, and it's not pervasive through the executive suite. Absolutely nobody could use a M2- based MacBook and claim that they have been relegated to "insignificant roles in the PC business", especially when you know that Intel's own marketing teams have to be pissed that one of the best laptops you can buy doesn't have a single Intel chip in it. And with Qualcomm giving it another go, you have to wonder if Intel is going to be suffering through another round of public humiliation at what they've become.
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You and me both. But these people are apparently still thinking they are the pinnacle of creation, despite mounting evidence to the contrary.
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Indeed. Intel has been playing catch-up for the last few years and they were not very successful at it. Aggressive denial is a stage in the end of a large company.
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To me seems like distraction. Something in Ohio? They were going to do something with their fabs here. Anyway, lots of glittering projects I've heard nothing further about.
Currently at step 2 (Score:2)
First, they ignore you.
Then, they ridicule you.
(You know how the rest goes.)
2024 headline (Score:4, Funny)
New business opportunities anyway (Score:2)
https://it.slashdot.org/story/... [slashdot.org]
(Shameless cross-post joke)
Not surprising (Score:3)
Gelsinger is the same guy who claimed that AMD was in Intel's rearview mirror:
https://www.tomshardware.com/n... [tomshardware.com]
Obviously that wasn't true then and it's becoming less true every day.
Qualcomm's new PC chip looks like a beast. Third-party benchmarks will be most welcome. Intel is in some trouble.
Backward compatibility is important (Score:2)
It's one of the reasons Windows is dominant
There is a LOT of useful, old x86 software out there
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The fact Windows so still so tied to the x86-64 architecture is why unless Microsoft develops a very specific API for Windows to run the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite in true native mode, you can forget about the Qualcomm CPU to become an immediate success.
He thinks history is our guide here (Score:2)
If we use history as a guide, it tells us innovation will shake things up and turn yesterday's headline into tomorrow's footnote. Just yesterday I watched Jeff Geerling's video "Can a CPU be TOO powerful?" [youtube.com] in which he pimps a PC with a 128 core (!!!) ARM CPU, 384 GB RAM and a GeForce RTX 4070 Ti.
With the Intel CEO line of thinking, that machine which in theory is a beast, is reasonably laughable because you can't really play games on it. Titles which can run have stuttering, low fps (given the hardware) an
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ARM cores still need more single thread performance to be able to compete with amd64 in gaming. Even if you solve the compatibility problem, you still have to contend with the performance problem.
Famous last words (Score:2)
Good for his tombstone.