Itanium didn't support RDRAM until Itanium 2.

Intel at the time was clear about it: they wanted to concentrate fully on x86. They thought they could do everything with x86; hadn’t they already won against their RISC competitors by pushing billions into x86? Why would ARM be any different? Shortsighted, in hindsight, but you can see how they got there.

shedding ppl in the USA, yes. bringing on hordes of cheap engineers from India and Malaysia at the same time though. labor arbitrage was probably MBA-think as well, to your point. (also, Intel was sued along with other big wheels for collusion, i.e. agreeing not to hire from one another in the US to keep salaries down - they settled this class action suit). managed demolition of a once great company.

I don't know tbh, heard both good and bad things .. he was brought in after many of the problems had already become serious. He probably had a very difficult charter.

Take reading a file from disk.

Abort would cancel the entire file read.

Retry would attempt that sector again.

Fail would fail that sector, but the program might decide to keep trying to read the rest of the file.

In practice abort and fail were often the same.

Yep, in 2014 Intel's Haswell architecture was a banger. It was one of those occasional node+design intersections which yields a CPU with an unusually long useful lifespan due to a combination of Haswell being stronger than a typical gen and the many generations that followed being decidedly 'meh'. In fact, I still run a Haswell i5 in a well-optimized, slightly overclocked retro gaming system (with a more modern SSD and GFX card).

About a year ago I looked into what practical benefits I'd gain if I upgraded the CPU and mobo to a more recent (but still used) spec from eBay. Using it mainly for retro game emulation and virtual pinball, I assessed single core performance and no CPU/mobo upgrade looked potentially compelling in real-world performance until at least 2020-ish - which is pretty crazy. Even then, one of the primary benefits would be access to NVME drives. It reminded me how much Intel under-performed and, more broadly, how the end of Moore's Law and Dennard Scaling combined around roughly 2010-ish to end the 30+ year 'Golden Era' of scaling that gave us computers which often roughly doubled performance across a broad range of applications which you could feel in everyday use - AND at >30% lower price - every three years or so.

Nowadays 8% to 15% performance uplift across mainstream applications at the same price is considered good and people are delighted if the performance is >15% OR if the price for the same performance drops >15%. If a generation delivers both >15% performance AND >15% lower price it would be stop-the-presses newsworthy. Kind of sad how our far our expectations have fallen compared to 1995-2005 when >30% perf at <30% price was considered baseline and >50% at <50% price was good and ~double perf at around half price was "great deal, time to upgrade again boys!".

At some point organizations get taken over by the 9-5 crowd who just want to collect a paycheck and live a nice life. This also leads to the hard-driving talent to leave for more aggressive organizations, leaving behind a more average team. What leaders remain will come up with not so great ideas, and the rank and file will follow along because there won't be a critical mass of passionate thought leaders to find a better way.

I don't mean to look down on this kind of group, I am probably one of them. There is nothing wrong with people enjoying a good work life balance at a decent paying job. However, I think there is a reality that if one wants a world-best company creating world-best products this is simply not good enough. Just like a team of weekend warriors would not be able to win the Superbowl (or even ever make it anywhere close to a NFL team) - which is perfectly fine! - the same way it's not fair to expect an average organization to perform world champion feats.

Essentially no organizations actually reward telling your superiors that they're wrong. You pretend to sip the kool-aid and work on your resume. If one or two high-ranking leaders are steering the ship to the rocks, there's basically nothing the rank-and-file can do

> This is probably why having some churn with the outside world, and also understanding what is the periphery of the outside, unbiased opinion is, is very important.

Maximally efficient is minimally robust.

Squeezing every penny out of something means optimizing perfectly for present conditions--no more, no less. As long as those conditions shift slowly, slight adjustments work.

If those conditions shift suddenly though, death ensues.

It doesn’t even have to be that negative. With the best intentions in the world, it’s rare to have a CEO who is fundamentally capable of understanding both the technology and the viable market applications of that technology. Steve Jobs didn’t manage to do it at NeXT.

yes, this was a direct consequence of the Craig Barrett mentality. Intel wanted a finger in many pies, since it could not predict what would be the next 'thing'. So they went on multiple acquisition sprees hoping to hit gold on something. I can't think of a single post-2000 acquisition that succeeded.

They what??

The early Atoms had pretty good performance per watt compared to Intel's other offerings. The whole 'netbook' and 'nettop' market segment was pretty much enabled by the Atom chips, and similar machines are still around nowadays. The E-cores found in recent Intel generations are also very Atom-like.

I think a key reason they missed mobile is that it was during Intel's peak dominance and growth. Mobile was smaller, less powerful chips at lower prices and lower margins than Intel's flagship CPUs in that era. The founders who built the company were gone and Intel was a conglomerate run by people hired/promoted for managing existing product/category growth not discovering and homesteading new categories. They managed the conglomerate with a portfolio approach of assessing new opportunities on things Wall Street analysts focus on: margins, total revenue, projected market size and meta-metrics like 'return on capital'.

It's classic Christiansen "Innovator's Dilemma" disruption. Market leading incumbents run by business managers won't assess emerging unproven new opportunities as being worth serious sustained investment compared to the existing categories they're currently dominating.

Yes, the flowering of Moore's Law - especially with SSD and memory density - that is still unfolding to the point that an iPhone/android has power of a high end work station from the year ~~2000, same with CMOS optical sensor density and patterned lenses