Possibly, but I wouldn't read too much into someone's actual strategic thinking based on their public statements. Sometimes, it's all about buying time.
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Incoming Intel CEO Derides Company's Inability to 'Deliver Better Products' Than Apple's M1 Chip
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
We can split hairs about this, but all indications are that Apple simply has a better general purpose processor roadmap across the board. The proprietary optimizations are just the icing on top. That's the problem.
Apple is certainly one of the few companies large enough to vertically integrate so well. That doesn't change that fact that Intel ought to be ahead of them just based on the principle of if you do one thing, you need to do it well.
The fact that they can't is a bad sign, because many other companies are starting to go down the same path to work around Intel's lack of ability to execute.
His last job was with VMware...
but...
"Gelsinger, 59, spent 30 years at Intel and was among its top engineers and top Oregon executives when he left the company in 2009. He became VMware’s CEO in 2012."
we will see about that, if he was such a good engineer maybe they shouldn't have let him go in 2009.
Gelsinger left Intel on his own. He resigned from Intel to go work at EMC. And then he became CEO of VMware.
People leave companies all the time... especially in Silicon Valley.
You make it sound like he was terrible and Intel fired him. That's simply not true.
The article contains quotes. And those quotes to NOT support the “jibe” headline.
Fake news.
I think he left after it was clear he wasn’t going to become CEO there after 30 years at the company and being Andy Grove’s protégé.
If those quotes are accurate, it certainly DOES support the jibe headline. There’s no reason to say “lifestyle company” *except* as a jibe.
Suuuuuure, because an IT company will totally call a competitor a "lifestyle" company as… a compliment, or a neutral descriptor, rather than as a pejorative.
This is what the world has come to. He could have said “our customer” or “a company that’s core job isn’t CPUs” or any of a range of things. But he dogwhistled.
Except we are all supposed to pretend we are stupid. Nobody is saying what we think they are saying unless they declare it straight away without any other possible meanings - as long as there is some gray area, no matter how small or implausible, we supposedly have reading comprehension problems. We are all being gaslighted by people who cling to a CPU design company, a politician, etc. as if in a cult.
It seems to me the real cult are the people who go to Defcon 1 red alert every time someone says something that could remotely be interpreted as a slight against their favorite company.
Because lifestyle is a Key conponent of how Apple creates value in the Tech space. From Jobs and Woz until today. It’s a core part of their legend.
Lifestyle is tge lane Apple is choosing to operate in, regardless of their ALSO leadership in tech and supply chain and leadership.
Anyone in the Tech World at a Leadership level understands that and respects it. For example Apple’s Intel-based macs are more profitable than the rest of the PC sold by all other brands combined.
Kids on a tech forum might find a jibe here - folks who’s job is to secure shareholder returns will see it a a fact worthy of note and respect
It seems to me the real cult are the people who go to Defcon 1 red alert every time someone says something that could remotely be interpreted as a slight against their favorite company.
So you are admitting it could be interpreted as a slight?
And who says Apple is my favorite company? (Hint: they’re not).
In a sense this is precisely the argument.
For 20 years Intel has claimed and behaved as though x86 were so fantastically valuable that nothing else mattered. (Intel the company, not just its fans.) Nothing else explains such bizarre product designs as Larrabee/Phi or Atom or Quark, all of which were less than they could be because of the decision to use x86.
This was indeed a "not valuing the opposition seriously".
Now, even though Intel the company finally appears to accept that they have serious competition, a second myth has now arisen, no longer "everyone needs x86 for everything" but "ISA just doesn't matter very much; there's nothing wrong with x86 that some hard work and new CPU designs won't fix".
Right now this is the new line being touted by the x86 fans. Obviously I think (on technical grounds) that it's nonsense, that for a variety of reasons x86 is a permanent millstone around Intel's (and AMD's) neck. But my opinion doesn't matter, what matters is Intel's opinion. If Intel swallows this koolaid then, IMHO, we get another five to ten wasted years as they try to attach wings to a blue whale and discover the result is not actually a great flyer.
So the questions that matter are:
- what does INTEL (not me, not you, INTEL) think is the cause of their stumbles over the past ten years. (And will they tell us? Will a Burning Platform or Trustworthy Computing memo leak out?)
- in Gelsinger as a human being, how much does "nostalgia" overcome "rationality". Gelsinger has deep experience at the engineering level with x86. On the plus side, this means he knows something about the product. On the minus side, how much of his experience is tinged with the happiness of twenty years of Intel's glory days from the late 80s onward, with a feeling that "people laughed at x86 then and we showed them; we can do it again"?
When Jobs returned to Apple, the Apple he wanted to preserve was "Give people delightful products" not the Apple of "Mac OS was just great the way we shipped it in 1984, all we need going forward is an update System 7".
Is Gellsinger's vision of Intel "we are defined as 'we make the best CPUs, period'"? Or is it "we make x86 CPUs, period?"
This is, IMHO the only question that matters, but it's also the one that no-one is answering. Making some products at TSMC, taking Apple (and ARM and AMD) seriously; these do not matter. What matters is WHY you think Intel went wrong, because that shapes what you do differently going forward. IMHO an Intel going forward that designs CPUs in the same as today maybe beat AMD, but it won't beat Apple and ARM, regardless of whether it's using TSMC's process and whatever fancy chiplet, EMIB, and Foveros packaging it cares to use.
It took Intel like seven years to go from Nehalem concept to ship. (The Nehalem designer gave a talk at Stanford where he said this though I forget the details.) Intel is crazy slow.
I suspect AMD is more or less as slow, that that 3..4 years is based on starting with an existing design (like Skylake relative to Broadwell) rather than starting from zero.
Apple appears to take around 4 years starting from zero. It's hard to be certain but it's not ludicrous to interpret Apple's designs as something like
A7->A8->A9->A10
reset
A11->A12->A13-A14
?reset?
A15
ie something like base design, three years of iteration, while a new base design is worked on.
This is, IMHO, where x86's deepest flaw is. Yes, the variable length instructions and memory ordering, for example, make it harder to speed up some parts of a design. But the real problem is that the sheer complexity of everything makes design and verification very slow, and makes everyone terrified to change (ie improve) anything too deep, let alone start again from scratch.
As this thread shows, it not only could but is being interpreted as such by some people. Personally, I think it's much ado about nothing. Certainly not something worth getting worked up about as you apparently are.
I’m not ”getting worked up” about anything. I am (1) pointing out that Intel still apparently has no clue what its problems are or what it needs to do set things right and (2) pointing out that people that say this was not a dig at Apple are factually full of ****.
Did anyone from the media reach out to him to ask for clarification?
I think the term is called "follow-up"
That might have prevented 12 pages of comments speculating on what he meant with the "lifestyle" comment...
I think the term is called "follow-up"
That might have prevented 12 pages of comments speculating on what he meant with the "lifestyle" comment...
Gotta love people, that aren't in the industry doing design, sitting on the sidelines like experts.
You are right, you can't solve a problem until you admit you have a problem and identify it. Intel has yet to fully do that. Yeah, they moan about the competition and loss of customers, but that isn't identification and an action plan.
It was a dig to say Apple is a "LifeStyle Company" but they are much more than that.
That would be like saying "Amazon is a mail order book company". They are that and much more.
When you dismiss the competition; they will eat your lunch.
It wasn't even a public statement. Just a leaked sentence from an internal company webcast.
Sure... but it'd be nice to know if he meant it as an insult or not.
It's certainly got people here bothered by it.
Did it sound like a compliment to you?Sure... but it'd be nice to know if he meant it as an insult or not.
It's certainly got people here bothered by it.
Of course they have identified the problem: it's their manufacturing woes. TSMC's execution in the last few years has been amazing and that is the primary reason why AMD and Apple were able to catch up and pass them in some sectors after more than a decade of undisputed leadership. They are trying to address it in several ways, including the (for them painful) option to outsource some of their manufacturing to TSMC and developing packaging technologies that allow them to mix and match internally and externally manufactured chips. We'll see what happens with their 7nm process. Personally I wish them the best, because I think it would be terrible for the US to lose its last leading semiconductor manufacturer.
Did it sound like a compliment to you?
I'd need to hear the tone of his voice.
But simply reading the quote in the article... yes... it sounds like he's complimenting Apple:
"We have to deliver better products to the PC ecosystem than any possible thing that a lifestyle company in Cupertino. We have to be that good, in the future."
He mentions Apple... then he says "we have to be that good"
Or at least that's my interpretation of it...