This is how badly Intel screwed itself over

This guy's thoughts on how Intel bungled their Optane advantage are spot on! https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/intel-4q25-earnings.2633613/post-41562963

It's not just that, they made subpar decisions.

First, they branded the 16/32GB modules under the name "Optane Memory", but they were HDD accelerators, with whole list of caveats such as locking your system out totally if it failed. Instead, it should have lived up to the name and acted as "Slow Memory" complementing DRAM as an extension. It's not like the infrastructure to do this didn't exist. Their datacenter SSD had a software called Memory Drive, which did precisely that. That would have had lot more value than an HDD accelerator and more justified the price. RAM isn't just for performance. At certain point there's a hard line where you have compatibility issues or the performance plummets. The Memory Drive + Optane Memory would have worked significantly to alleviate this at a much lower cost.

Second, they should have worked with AMD to make sure the PM modules with with them. It should have been the goal to make the PM DIMMs fully compatible with DIMMs, where the only difference is the underlying technology, and to get it recognized easy as certifying other DRAM modules. While it seems contradictory to work with a competitor, it would serve to prop you up during times when your own product is uncompetitive and you would partially offset that by the competitor doing well and buying your other products. That would increase volume, which would allow them to gain more real world experience, lower cost. It would have been perfect TODAY.

Third, the goal should have been moving to PC as quickly as possible. 128GB modules for $300.

The big issue with Intel is that they are so into trying to optimizing 1% margin, they lose the sight of big picture. Work with everyone, competitor or not, which would serve to reduce the valleys and peaks of revenue and stabilize the business. They at least did better with the WiFi business, but mainly because it was so ubiquitous in the first place, people would often ditch Marvell and AMD-branded ones to install Intel's. But same could have been applied to Optane.

Without this mindset changing, Intel's pitfalls will continue in the future. Novalake, Unified Core, it doesn't matter. Are the fundamentals fixed where they have a laser-focus on 1% margins/revenue and proprietary interfaces to lock out competition? Without changing this, the long term trajectory for Intel is still a decline, eventually into bankruptcy. This includes Lip "No products under 50% margin" Bu Tan.
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Yeah the fact that Intel drove Optane into the ground is flabbergasting. That was a great tech.

There were a lot of missteps by Intel - the massive bloat of the 00/10's followed by the inevitable divestiture of those techs. McAfee was a good example. The Drone division, remember that?
 
igor_kavinski said:

I haven't seen people cussing their 14900K this bad. Releasing 285K with lower clocks was a real disservice to their loyal customers.
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Arrow lake isn't garbage because its hard to overclock. Yes it's vastly different than raptor lake (which i had a 14900k). It takes time and more thorough tuning and testing to get results. But you are rewarded with better performance and much better thermals and power consumption
 
Tyler-98-W68 said:
Arrow lake isn't garbage because its hard to overclock.
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Problem isn't Arrow Lake as much as the halo part being really hard to bin for Intel. And once word gets around that the halo part is crap, people seem to dismiss everything under it. My 245KF underperforms at stock compared to my 12700K but there are rare instances where it can beat the 12700K too. However, it's been more than a year that I haven't turned on my 12700K because the 245KF is more fun to tinker with trying to get higher RAM speeds and trying to discover the settings that will make it tick the way it should. But also disappointing at the same time because it's so hard to tweak it and it just feels like it was soooooooo close to being an excellent CPU. If it had been a monolithic CPU, I would've loved it to bits. Give me Skymont any day over crappy Gracemont. I honestly feel like a Bulldozer owner. A parent to a disabled child that I know is worth its weight in gold but circumstances prevented it from truly shining.
 
LazyGamer said:
Do you think this is largely related to having so many disparate dies glued together to form the CPU?
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Seems like it and also despite Intel's arrogant claims that their packaging tech is superior to AMD's, it actually sucks and doesn't work that great outside of lower powered mobile chips. And I assume it's also more expensive than AMD's so they aren't making much money doing things their way either.
 
igor_kavinski said:
Seems like it and also despite Intel's arrogant claims that their packaging tech is superior to AMD's, it actually sucks and doesn't work that great outside of lower powered mobile chips. And I assume it's also more expensive than AMD's so they aren't making much money doing things their way either.
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Y9u know of they had ostensibly and demonstrably the best cpu they could charge what they want. People would cry about it then buy it. And their one step down cpu would be selling out faster than they could make them on release.


You know... like AMD does.
 
Grimlakin said:
Y9u know of they had ostensibly and demonstrably the best cpu they could charge what they want.
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I would rather they did that. Like the rumored Royal Core or Beast Lake. At least then AMD CPUs would get cheaper :P

And then AMD would fire back with more cache or more cores in the next gen. I loved the wars they had going during the P4 and Athlon era. Core 2 is a direct result of those wars.

Grimlakin said:
You know... like AMD does.
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AMD still charges less than what Intel would. I look at stupid Xeon workstation CPU prices on Amazon and don't understand who would be stupid enough to buy them. And then I look at the price for 9960X and it looks reasonable considering that it doesn't have any competition and the Intel counterpart is over $2000 with a pathetically low turbo clock of only 4.8 GHz and not even breaching 5 GHz: https://www.serversupply.com/PROCESSORS/Intel Xeon 24-Core/2.7GHz/INTEL/PK8071305501400_399279.htm
 
AMD for the professional market is still trying to win market share. Once they eclipse Intel by a comfortable margin (if they do in the enterprise space) they will mark up their prices to parity with what Intel is doing today.

But Intel has given up the Halo market for consumer and HEDT. They are focused on mobile processors.

AMD holds the halo market for consumers and is quickly encroaching on Intel's market dominance of the mobile space. Those AI max SOC's are as attractive as the M# series from Apple... perhaps more so.

Honestly since my gaming consumption is purely desktop these days I might switch to a MBP for my next laptop. I primarily use it for excel and browsing/streaming when I'm on the road and at a friends doing Table top gaming.

My real requirements. One drive integration. (love it actually), ability to run excel and office apps. Ability to run Discord well and support good headsets. Give me that and I might just switch.

Anyone else in here using their Macbooks like that?
 
Grimlakin said:
Anyone else in here using their Macbooks like that?
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My M1 Macbook Air actually beats my hot as heck and power hungry 12700K in the overclock.net Excel benchmark but I mainly use it for watching movies. Can't get used to the MacOS way of doing things. If Apple ever decides to kill the x86 market, they just need to strike a deal with Microsoft, paying them royalties for Windows ARM copies and then people start switching in droves. A fanless, noise-free computing experience is just super special and especially when it offers desktop level performance. Only Windows ARM availability/compatibility and pricing are the main hindrance to that dream.
 
I started playing around with process lasso, while testing BeamNg. I guess intel really has screwed up with Arrow Lake.

Using only 16 Efficiency cores (performance cores disabled) It's performance with lots of cars spawned is about the same as a 32 thread raptor lake 14900K, all while using far less power.....

285K with only 16 efficiency cores used


14900K all cores

 
Tyler-98-W68 said:
Using only 16 Efficiency cores (performance cores disabled) It's performance with lots of cars spawned is about the same as a 32 thread raptor lake 14900K, all while using far less power.....
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The average user has no idea what E-cores are or what process lasso does or what process affinity means. Now if Intel had gone out of their way to get all the game studios to release patches for their game engines to support their CPUs properly, things might have been better. But that's a gargantuan task as the game engine will need to query the number of available E-cores and then decide which thread to peg on which type of core. Most PC users want things to just work. I don't deny that Arrow Lake is fun to mess around with but average joe doesn't care about that.
 
igor_kavinski said:
Now if Intel had gone out of their way to get all the game studios to release patches for their game engines to support their CPUs properly, things might have been better.
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If they'd figured out their latency issues, the might have exceeded Raptor Lake.

They have a long ways to go to make up for the disparity between Raptor Lake and 9xx0X3D SKUs though.
 
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