ekeane · HackerTrans

2 yıl öncediscuss

Intel did a great job coming up with great ideas before everyone else, then killing them off once someone decided they weren't going to immediately make 60% gross margins. I'm constantly amazed at how quickly the company managed to throw away good ideas because it could only make 40% gross margin, or was going to take another few years to develop a market.

ekeane

2 yıl öncediscuss

Intel has a habit of coming up with great ideas, then deciding that they aren't immediately successful or immediately 60+% gross margins, so it clearly isn't worth following up. Intel's R&D department is a grave yard of great products murdered at the alter of Gross Margin.

Larrabee is one such product. It wasn't immediately great, and didn't immediately promise great returns, and didn't quite have a market yet, so it was killed. I can't imagine where Intel would be in the AI world if they had the foresight to stick with Larrabee.

ekeane

2 yıl öncediscuss

I was inside since Otellini (left last year). Otellini at least 'stayed the course' reasonably well. I never felt like the company was going to GROW, but at least not die.

BK is who did his best to sink the company, multiple mis-guided layoffs, bad top level hirings, and stupid direction changes every time he read a new news article. Don't even mention his absurd AMA on reddit where he couldn't stop using the ellipse and laughing like a 14 year old girl.

Bob Swan wasn't the guy who could right the ship. He was another Otellini type guy, someone you bring in to not mess stuff up. Pat was a great pickup for Intel, and his return was my first time hoping that Intel could actually survive and grow.

Unfortunately, he came by too late. Foundry STILL hadn't really made progress, and the rot in the rest of the company had set in too far. The brain drain from BK was still being felt everywhere.

Frankly, I still feel like Pat was the right guy, 10 years too late. He joined to right the ship, but by the time he came aboard, the ship had already hit the iceberg, and the bow was 30 feet in the air. And now he's being blamed for the ship sinking.

ekeane

2 yıl öncediscuss

Presumably because the article points that out.

ekeane

2 yıl öncediscuss

The clang driver is particularly bad at this. There is a frequent 'just add one more thing here!' in every section of the driver. Additionally, it is large, somewhat complex, and not very exciting, so those refactors/simplifications don't happen nearly as often as other parts of the clang code base.

The tablegen/macro-gen stuff DID get added at one point fortunately, but before that it was pretty rough as well.

ekeane

3 yıl öncediscuss

Eh? Intel stock is basically flat in that time. It was ~28 around this time in 2007 (IIRC, was my hire date), and its now 32.

Intel stock is a lot of things, but 'up 80%' hasn't been something true since the early 2000s.

ETA: That was 16 years ago I was thinking of, I forgot about the nasty dip in 2008. I misremembered, it was ~26 when I was hired, dipped to 18 the next year, and slowly climbed a while and has been around that $30/share number for ages.

ekeane

3 yıl öncediscuss

That is a 'warning as default error', so for at least Clang16, it is still disable-able. The Clang code owner is on a bit of a well-deserved war-path against these, so they are likely to be completely illegal in the next version or two.

comments