https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/20/intel_carveup/

https://siliconangle.com/2025/02/18/silver-lake-set-buy-majority-stake-intels-altera-programmable-chip-business/

Intel has tried so many things that failed. DRAM, bubble memory, CISC,
RISC, ARM, EUV, and now Altera.

All they ever did successfully was x86, basically the ancient 8008 (or
maybe 4004) architecture.

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John Larkin <[email protected]> wrote:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/20/intel_carveup/

https://siliconangle.com/2025/02/18/silver-lake-set-buy-majority-stake-intels-altera-programmable-chip-business/

Intel has tried so many things that failed. DRAM, bubble memory, CISC,
RISC, ARM, EUV, and now Altera.

All they ever did successfully was x86, basically the ancient 8008 (or
maybe 4004) architecture.

They used to be very good at making chips, till they fell on their faces at
the 10-nm node.

A generally unpleasant outfit to deal with.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics

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On 2/21/2025 7:50 PM, John Larkin wrote:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/20/intel_carveup/

https://siliconangle.com/2025/02/18/silver-lake-set-buy-majority-stake-intels-altera-programmable-chip-business/

Intel has tried so many things that failed. DRAM, bubble memory, CISC,
RISC, ARM, EUV, and now Altera.

Don't forget Atom!

All they ever did successfully was x86, basically the ancient 8008 (or
maybe 4004) architecture.

Their discrete GPUs offer pretty good bang for the buck at the low end.
These $179 cards are amazing for the price, particularly for video
production work and trans coding:

<https://www.amazon.com/ASRock-Challenger-256-bit-Design-Cooling/dp/B0CJGSP9R7/>

They could probably have a good bite of AMD and Nvidia's lunch if they
tried but they're only about 1% of the GPU market share right now, and
seem to be pretty unfocused about what direction they want to go in.

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On Sat, 22 Feb 2025 01:01:49 -0000 (UTC), Phil Hobbs <[email protected]> wrote:

John Larkin <[email protected]> wrote:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/20/intel_carveup/

https://siliconangle.com/2025/02/18/silver-lake-set-buy-majority-stake-intels-altera-programmable-chip-business/

Intel has tried so many things that failed. DRAM, bubble memory, CISC,
RISC, ARM, EUV, and now Altera.

All they ever did successfully was x86, basically the ancient 8008 (or
maybe 4004) architecture.

They used to be very good at making chips, till they fell on their faces at >the 10-nm node.

A generally unpleasant outfit to deal with.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

x86 was a primitive dog of an architecture that Intel applied a ton of complexity and process to. RISC makes more sense, and Intel is behind
on process now.

Imagine a CPU that allows stack overflow to punch a hole in code
space. Imagine executing data.

Intel was a branch of The Traitorous Eight, a founding member of the treacherous Silicon Valley culture.

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On 22/02/2025 1:35 pm, John Larkin wrote:

On Sat, 22 Feb 2025 01:01:49 -0000 (UTC), Phil Hobbs <[email protected]> wrote:

John Larkin <[email protected]> wrote:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/20/intel_carveup/

https://siliconangle.com/2025/02/18/silver-lake-set-buy-majority-stake-intels-altera-programmable-chip-business/

Intel has tried so many things that failed. DRAM, bubble memory, CISC,
RISC, ARM, EUV, and now Altera.

All they ever did successfully was x86, basically the ancient 8008 (or
maybe 4004) architecture.

They used to be very good at making chips, till they fell on their faces at >> the 10-nm node.

A generally unpleasant outfit to deal with.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

x86 was a primitive dog of an architecture that Intel applied a ton of complexity and process to. RISC makes more sense, and Intel is behind
on process now.

Imagine a CPU that allows stack overflow to punch a hole in code
space. Imagine executing data.

Intel was a branch of The Traitorous Eight, a founding member of the treacherous Silicon Valley culture.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

William Shockley wasn't an attractive character, and he alienated the treacherous eight by persisting with an ill-chosen line of research.

Fairchild Semiconductor was remarkably productive and spawned a number
of very successful companies - Intel and National Semiconductor and
later Linear Technology come to mind.

The move fast and break things culture has its weaknesses, but Silicon
Valley is one of its success stories.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

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On 22/02/2025 00:50, John Larkin wrote:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/20/intel_carveup/

https://siliconangle.com/2025/02/18/silver-lake-set-buy-majority-stake-intels-altera-programmable-chip-business/

Intel has tried so many things that failed. DRAM, bubble memory, CISC,
RISC, ARM, EUV, and now Altera.

All they ever did successfully was x86, basically the ancient 8008 (or
maybe 4004) architecture.

Is Microsoft the next Intel? <https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/innovation/microsofts-majorana-1-chip-carves-new-path-for-quantum-computing>

--
Jeff

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On 2/21/2025 6:36 PM, bitrex wrote:

They could probably have a good bite of AMD and Nvidia's lunch if they tried but they're only about 1% of the GPU market share right now, and seem to be pretty unfocused about what direction they want to go in.

This has been Intel's problem from Day 1. They enter a field,
make a contribution to the state of the art -- and then don't know
how to leverage that, going forward.

The 8085 et al. showed how they were unable to leverage past
success in future endeavors -- losing the market to Zilog
(who, subsequently, proved even more inept at leveraging past
success!).

"They don't know what BUSINESS they are in..."

And, things like the 432 were *decades* ahead of their time
the failure of which has left us with archaic processor designs
(at the chip level) and all of the hassles that come with them.

[NatSemi takes the cake for CPU flops -- owing solely to poor commercialization, not technological innovation]

The 8086 probably was the decision that sealed their inevitable
fate; it tied them (and all of their resources) to a single
architecture that they then had to keep supporting in hindsight
(with each new innovation). With MS eating up all of the
performance improvements that the hardware provided, they
never had a chance to make a break-out product.

OTOH, you had folks like GI selling what amounted to "sequencers"
successfully -- albeit to a different (niche) market. Note that
the 86010 didn't set the world on fire -- by a long shot. (Thus
confirming past performance is not a valid predictor of future
success!)

I recall looking at the die in intel EPROMs and admiring how
tiny they were when contrasted with their japanese competitors.
OTOH, their competitors had realized that technical achievement
wasn't the key to market dominance -- just make the parts
*cheaper* than your competitors and worry about the "process"
catching up, later!

Zilog had the momentum, NatSemi the product. Both failed to
meet their challenges. (And poor TI, off in the wilderness
making all the wrong predictions about system performance)

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On Sat, 22 Feb 2025 08:38:36 +0000, Jeff Layman <[email protected]d>
wrote:

On 22/02/2025 00:50, John Larkin wrote:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/20/intel_carveup/

https://siliconangle.com/2025/02/18/silver-lake-set-buy-majority-stake-intels-altera-programmable-chip-business/

Intel has tried so many things that failed. DRAM, bubble memory, CISC,
RISC, ARM, EUV, and now Altera.

All they ever did successfully was x86, basically the ancient 8008 (or
maybe 4004) architecture.

Is Microsoft the next Intel? ><https://news.microsoft.com/source/features/innovation/microsofts-majorana-1-chip-carves-new-path-for-quantum-computing>

I'm hoping that Microsoft is the next Blockbuster.

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On Sat, 22 Feb 2025 07:46:38 -0700, Don Y
<[email protected]d> wrote:

On 2/21/2025 6:36 PM, bitrex wrote:

They could probably have a good bite of AMD and Nvidia's lunch if they tried >> but they're only about 1% of the GPU market share right now, and seem to be >> pretty unfocused about what direction they want to go in.

This has been Intel's problem from Day 1. They enter a field,
make a contribution to the state of the art -- and then don't know
how to leverage that, going forward.

The 8085 et al. showed how they were unable to leverage past
success in future endeavors -- losing the market to Zilog
(who, subsequently, proved even more inept at leveraging past
success!).

"They don't know what BUSINESS they are in..."

And, things like the 432 were *decades* ahead of their time
the failure of which has left us with archaic processor designs
(at the chip level) and all of the hassles that come with them.

The 432 and HPPA were super-CISC architectures, lots of microcode, and
were slow. I think they were born of the core memory concept that main
memory is slow. Neitheher seemed to be designed by people who believed
Moore's Law, specifically that ram and cache would continue to get
denser and faster.

Intel had an ARM license and didn't use it. They should have done a
CPU with one x86 core and a dozen ARMs.

The new Pi Pico chip has both ARM and RiscV cpus. Same idea.

[NatSemi takes the cake for CPU flops -- owing solely to poor >commercialization, not technological innovation]

The 8086 probably was the decision that sealed their inevitable
fate; it tied them (and all of their resources) to a single
architecture that they then had to keep supporting in hindsight
(with each new innovation). With MS eating up all of the
performance improvements that the hardware provided, they
never had a chance to make a break-out product.

I suspect their top management sabotaged anything that wasn't x86.

OTOH, you had folks like GI selling what amounted to "sequencers" >successfully -- albeit to a different (niche) market. Note that
the 86010 didn't set the world on fire -- by a long shot. (Thus
confirming past performance is not a valid predictor of future
success!)

I recall looking at the die in intel EPROMs and admiring how
tiny they were when contrasted with their japanese competitors.
OTOH, their competitors had realized that technical achievement
wasn't the key to market dominance -- just make the parts
*cheaper* than your competitors and worry about the "process"
catching up, later!

Zilog had the momentum, NatSemi the product. Both failed to
meet their challenges. (And poor TI, off in the wilderness
making all the wrong predictions about system performance)

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On 2/22/25 08:46, Don Y wrote:

And, things like the 432 were *decades* ahead of their time

Not really - the IBM System/38 was doing what the 432 was trying to do
and actually shipping. It was object oriented, had capability based
security, and tagged memory. It lived on for decades as the AS/400 and
later iSeries.

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On 2/22/2025 9:39 AM, Dennis wrote:

On 2/22/25 08:46, Don Y wrote:

And, things like the 432 were *decades* ahead of their time

Not really - the IBM System/38 was doing what the 432 was trying to do and actually shipping. It was object oriented, had capability based security, and tagged memory. It lived on for decades as the AS/400 and later iSeries.

It wasn't an "integrated" device that could be slapped on a board
with other bits to make <something>. I don't think folks realize
just how different designing for a 4/8 bit device of that era was
vs. "big iron" of the same day.

How many "big iron" systems do you think EVER existed -- vs the
number of embedded devices produced in an given *year*?!

[Having some technology "filling a room" is little consolation to
a guy trying to squeeze something into a box that can be sold for a
few hundred dollars]

There were lots of "old big iron" devices that were considerably
better architected than the microprocessors of that day -- or even
today! (e.g., Burroughs B5000). Yet, none of them moved forwards
into "smaller (more economical) form factors", either.

[e.g., ARM peripherals are a step BACKWARDS in terms of abilities]

DEC made a lame attempt with the F11/T11/J11 but it was too little
(and there wasn't much that was "truly extraordinary" about the 11's architecture that wasn't easily copied in other *cheap* MPUs.)

As a result, the emphasis was on faster and cheaper instead of
on devices that facilitated the writing of "good/reliable code".

The attitude persists, today, as if cost/speed/throughput mattered
more than correctness, security, etc.

[Why is the presence of an MMU still not /de rigueur/? Has no one
"discovered" its value REGARDLESS OF PROJECT SCALE? It's like saying
"you don't need seat belts on small cars". Do we have to wait ANOTHER generation for folks to learn how to code in such an environment?
And, the learning pains that products will exhibit as a result??]

So, today (many decades later!) we still have to EMULATE these
functionalities in software instead of calling on the hardware
to provide them for us. Thankfully, we can over-provision cheap/fast
hardware so "wasting" a good portion of it on these implementations
doesn't impact performance. But, this means few people get the
experience of working in those realms and THAT state-of-the-art
stagnates.

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On 2025-02-22, John Larkin <[email protected]> wrote:

Intel had an ARM license and didn't use it. They should have done a
CPU with one x86 core and a dozen ARMs.

Intel did make ARM network processors - the IXP425 series were a great
product at a very decent price, must have been around ~2004 - I designed multiple products with these, one of which nearly ran for 10 years.

However, just like in other cases (anyone remember the LXT97x ethernet
PHYs?), after a good start, they apparently lost interest, missed new
features and then dropped off the product line. We switched when Intel
missed the change from PCI to PCIe on the IXP series.

cu
Michael
--
Some people have no respect of age unless it is bottled.

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On 2/23/2025 3:58 AM, Michael Schwingen wrote:

Intel did make ARM network processors - the IXP425 series were a great product at a very decent price, must have been around ~2004 - I designed multiple products with these, one of which nearly ran for 10 years.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM> ahead of the pack, at the time.

However, just like in other cases (anyone remember the LXT97x ethernet PHYs?), after a good start, they apparently lost interest, missed new features and then dropped off the product line. We switched when Intel
missed the change from PCI to PCIe on the IXP series.

Exactly. Intel never knew what business they were in.

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