This blog

https://semiaccurate.com/

has told the story for more than a decade that Intel has been getting high on its own supply and that the media has been uncritical of the stories it tells.

In particular I think when it comes to the data center they’ve forgotten their roots. They took over the data center in the 1990s because they were producing desktop PCs in such numbers they could afford to get way ahead of the likes of Sun Microsystems, HP, and SGI. Itanium failed out of ignorance and hubris but if they were true evil geniuses they couldn’t have made a better master plan to wipe out most of the competition for the x86 architecture.

Today they take the desktop for granted and make the false claim that their data center business is more significant (not what the financial numbers show.). It’s highly self-destructive because when they pander to Amazon, Amazon takes the money they save and spends it on developing Graviton. There is some prestige in making big machines for the national labs but it is an intellectual black hole because the last thing they want to do is educate anyone else on how to simulate hydrogen bombs in VR.

So we get the puzzle that most of the performance boost customers could be getting comes from SIMD instructions and other “accelerators” but Intel doesn’t make a real effort to get this technology working for anyone other than the Facebook and the national labs and, in particular, they drag their feet in getting it available on enough chips that it is is worth it for mainstream developers to use this technology.

A while back, IBM had this thing where they might ship you a mainframe with 50 cores and license you to use 30 and if you had a load surge you could call you up and they could turn on another 10 cores at a high price.

I was fooled when I heard this the first time and thought it was smart business but after years of thinking about how to deliver value to customers I realized it’s nothing more than “vice signaling”. It makes them look rapacious and avaricious but really somebody is paying for those 20 cores and if it is not the customer it is the shareholders. It’s not impossible that IBM and/or the customer winds up ahead in the situation but the fact is they paid to make those 20 cores and if those cores are sitting there doing nothing they’re making no value for anyone. If everything was tuned up perfectly they might make a profit by locking them down, but it’s not a given at all that it is going to work out that way.

Similarly Intel has been hell-bent to fuse away features on their chips so often you get a desktop part that has a huge die area allocated to AVX features that you’re not allowed to use. Either the customer or the shareholders are paying to fabricate a lot of transistors the customer doesn’t get to use. It’s madness but except for Charlie Demerjian the whole computer press pretends it is normal.

Apple bailed out on Intel because Intel failed to stick to its roadmap to improve their chips (they’re number one why try harder?) and they are lucky to have customers that accept that a new version of MacOS can drop older chips which means MacOS benefits from features that were introduced more than ten years ago. Maybe Intel and Microsoft are locked in a deadly embrace but their saving grace is that every ARM vendor other than Apple has failed to move the needle on ARM performance since 2017, which itself has to be an interesting story that I haven’t seen told.