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Intel Businesses Technology

New Intel CEO Making Waves: Rehiring Retired CPU Architects (anandtech.com) 70

Posted by msmash from the whatever-it-takes dept.
We're following the state of play with Intel's new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, very closely. Even as an Intel employee for 30 years, rising to the rank of CTO, then taking 12 years away from the company, his arrival has been met with praise across the spectrum given his background and previous successes. He isn't even set to take his new role until February 15th, however his return is already causing a stir with Intel's current R&D teams. From a report: News in the last 24 hours, based on public statements, states that former Intel Senior Fellow Glenn Hinton, who lists being the lead architect of Intel's Nehalem CPU core in his list of achievements, is coming out of retirement to re-join the company. (The other lead architect of Nehalem are Ronak Singhal and Per Hammerlund - Ronak is still at Intel, working on next-gen processors, while Per has been at Apple for five years.)

Hinton is an old Intel hand, with 35 years of experience, leading microarchitecture development of Pentium 4, one of three senior architects of Intel's P6 processor design (which led to Pentium Pro, P2, P3), and ultimately one of the drivers to Intel's Core architecture which is still at the forefront of Intel's portfolio today. He also a lead microarchitect for Intel's i960 CA, the world's first super-scalar microprocessor. Hinton holds more than 90+ patents from 8 CPU designs from his endeavors. Hinton spent another 10+ years at Intel after Nehalem, but Nehalem is listed in many places as his primary public achievement at Intel. [...]
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New Intel CEO Making Waves: Rehiring Retired CPU Architects More

New Intel CEO Making Waves: Rehiring Retired CPU Architects

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  • First new product? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 21, 2021 @03:28PM (#60974972)

    Introducing the all new 286 SX+ with optional math co-processor.

    • Take an array of 16 year old CPUs (now 27) and try to compete with GPUs. [wikipedia.org]

      (does anyone remember how many cores Larrabee was going to have? the architecture supports modes for "less than 16 cores" and "16 or more cores")

      It is cool that it comes from a Pentium(P54C) that was kicking around Intel for newer fabrication processes because of a military rad-hardened edition. I can only assume it's in some spy satellites running lots of Ada code.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by The Finn ( 1547 )

        Original Knights Corner (effectively a stepping of Larrabee) was ~60 cores, each 4-way threaded. Top-shelf Knights Landing parts were 72 cores.

        Rumor was that the P54C design was re-imported back into Intel -- they had contracted out a re-implementation, I assume because they needed a fully synthesizable design rather than being tied to a specific die process. My old team had an FPGA socket 7 module that could run an instantiation of this code around 100MHz.

    • Although that was an obvious joke, it was funny. So why wasn't it modded up? My guess is that not only is slashdot full of non-nerds, the modders probably weren't born when the 286 came out.

  • Ex intel engineer Francois Piednoel has a video .. (Score:5, Informative)

    by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 ) on Thursday January 21, 2021 @03:37PM (#60975026)

    Ex Intel principal engineer Francois Piednoel, best known for his work as the architect behind the dual-processor high-end desktop (HEDT) Skulltrail platform, has this interesting video [youtube.com] on Pat Gelsinger.

    Intel has basically been sitting on their laurels for the past decade. AMD's Ryzen and Threadripper are kicking their ass. Intel forgot the wisdom of Andy Grove: Only the paranoid survive.

    While I'm no fan on Intel's shenanigans [youtube.com] having healthy competition again between Intel and AMD benefits consumers.

    Now if only we could get GPUs ...

    • intel is a company you'd think could produce competent dGPUs, but boy are they taking their time -- perhaps they were banking on their manufacturing advantage, but that's since evaporated.

      at this point, their GPUs will be welcome competition in the market, but i cant see them making a top-tier GPU id be interested in purchasing any time soon.

  • More Patrick Gelsinger information (Score:3)

    by Futurepower(R) ( 558542 ) on Thursday January 21, 2021 @03:38PM (#60975032) Homepage
    Patrick Gelsinger information [slashdot.org] (Previously posted, Jan. 13, 2021)

  • You can’t out Moore lifespans (Score:3)

    by xack ( 5304745 ) on Thursday January 21, 2021 @03:38PM (#60975034)
    Unless Intel gets into the life extention business they will have to deal with the fact old talent won’t be here forever and they will have to invest in new generations. Squeezing old 14nm tech for too long got them in to this, and now they face being yet another tsmc client.
    • "... old talent won't be here forever..."

      President Joe Biden is 78 years old. He just got a new job.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by UnknownSoldier ( 67820 )

        Would you want an inexperienced 20-year old running the country?

        While youth have the advantage of not being indoctrinated with dogma, old(er) age usually brings about wisdom. Youth tend to be liberal while Elders tend be conservative.

        Intel bringing back experienced chip architects means they are probably getting serious about rethinking performance since they can no longer rely on 14++++ anymore. If AMD can increase IPC by ~15% then why can't Intel?

        --
        Fuck off /. with your lameness filter and your bullshit

        • "Intel bringing back experienced chip architects means they are probably getting serious about rethinking performance"

          Experienced, but out of date, and responsible for Intel's former flawed designs? That is serious?

          • I admit that I did not find "leading microarchitecture development of Pentium 4," to be a ringing endorsement. I'd have to ask what did he learn from his mistakes on that chip.

            • You're making an assessment now, almost 2 decades later. Everybody can be smarter *now*. The trick would have been to have been smartet then - which you weren't. Nobody was, apparently.

              Here's an article (German, sorry, but you surely can use a translation service) about what P4 actually meant, and what an ingenuous leap of innovation it was for that time.

              https://heise.de/-4967087 [heise.de]

              • The blunders of P4 were recognized soon after its introduction both inside and outside of Intel. Alas for Intel, they were trapped by their own momentum and a contract with RAMBUS.

              • Everybody can be smarter *now*. The trick would have been to have been smartet then - which you weren't. Nobody was, apparently.
                 
                Well, except for the people at AMD who designed the Athlon and the Duron. I felt pretty clever overclocking my Duron 600 to a 1 GHz back in the day...

                • Did you even read the article?

                  I'm not saying P4 was the better processor. It's also not about rekindling old Intel-vs-AMD flame wars. It's only that the P4 had some ahead-of-it's-time improvements, and dismissing the guys who invented it is not good manners. For starters, it could go up to several GHz, which AMD couldn't do until later. AMD did do very nice hardware, but, like everybody else, they, too, were standing on the shoulders of giants. Maybe they would've done the same mistakes as the Intel guys fi

                  • The P4 was a steaming pile of dogshit. It's extremely long pipeline led to frequent branch mispredictions, crippling performance. It was abandoned, and they went back to the P3 processor architecture with a die shrink. It was damn near fraudulent to sell the thing. It wasn't ahead of its time at all. If you know jack shit, maybe you should stop making assertions.

                    • If you know jack shit, maybe you should stop making assertions.

                      Why? To take a good example in you and be a jerk instead, too?

                      In case you didn't realize: you still haven't refuted one single argument from the -- well written -- article. So far, I have a person who took the time and explained step by step what was novel and innovative about the architecture (please mind my choice of words) on one hand, and a slashdot dimwit who's throwing words around like "fraudulent" and "dogshit" on the other. And the latter somehow expects me to STFU because he's... right? She claims

            • You mean.. the chip that made Intel gobs and gobs of money? I think sometimes some of you forget what the purpose of a business is. "Oh noes, my FDIV!"(proceeds to literally rake in money from the floor by the millions, with an actual rake) "yeah, oh no!".

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

                That was more down to business shenanigans and their competitors making mistakes though. Like Cyrix went all in on integer performance but Intel's FPU performance became a key benchmark, not least thanks to games like Quake.

            • I thought the P4 was designed for a customer like NSA, and the consumer version lacked user defined microcode to anything you wanted it to be. In parallel formation, that was never going to cut it with gaming. And it was inferior to what IBM had at the time, and Spark was getting busy. One remembers when Intel always had the best fab plants, bar none. Somewhere, 2nd best became acceptable. Sitting behind NVIDIA is RISC-V. AMD's strategy was give the gamers everything they want- maximum throughput. Then Inte

          • Experienced, but out of date, and responsible for Intel's former flawed designs? That is serious?

            Most things he developed were _not_ flawed. And P4 was based on politics - Intel demanded high clock speed at any cost, so he gave them clock speed at any cost, which _was_ a flawed approach, but probably not something he could prevent.

            • Forgot: High clock speed at any cost was _flawed_ in that it doesn't give the highest performance possible. It was very successful in that it sold lots of chips to the masses.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Pimpy ( 143938 )

          I don't see how your default position of someone challenging one extreme is to counter it with another extreme. No, I don't want a 20-year-old running the country, but I also wouldn't want a 78-year-old in declining health to be running it either. You can certainly find a better line where experience vs. liability is more balanced. The majority of world leaders tend to be in their 50s, by comparison, though many in their 30s have also been effective leaders.

          There's nothing wrong with bringing in experienced

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by teg ( 97890 )

          Would you want an inexperienced 20-year old running the country?

          While youth have the advantage of not being indoctrinated with dogma, old(er) age usually brings about wisdom. Youth tend to be liberal while Elders tend be conservative.

          Intel bringing back experienced chip architects means they are probably getting serious about rethinking performance since they can no longer rely on 14++++ anymore. If AMD can increase IPC by ~15% then why can't Intel?

          While you don't want a 20 year old running the country, I certainly think that 78 is quite a bit too late to start a 4 year term. Not that the other front runners were any better in that regard, Sanders is even older and while Trump is a couple of years younger he sounds a bit senile - not to mention that he just spent four years as the worst US president, personifying dishonesty, narcissism, lack of integrity, lack of knowledge, lack of skills of listening people with knowledge, corruption, nepotism and

          • 4 Democrat disasters and the first Republican President. Kennedy's lack of experience led to the Bay of Pigs tragedy.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by DarkOx ( 621550 )

        playing the corpse in Weekend at Bernie's

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:You can’t out Moore lifespans (Score:5, Insightful)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 ) <[ten.frow] [ta] [todhsals]> on Thursday January 21, 2021 @04:43PM (#60975356)

      Unless Intel gets into the life extention business they will have to deal with the fact old talent wonâ(TM)t be here forever and they will have to invest in new generations. Squeezing old 14nm tech for too long got them in to this, and now they face being yet another tsmc client.

      Old talent can train fresh blood. That's the real goal - the architects are retired, they're not going to need more than a part time job, so they're going to have to train the new guys up and give them exposure.

      The CEO doesn't expect the old guys to produce the next gen chip, but expects the old guys to train up the new guys so the next gen chip comes out as an application all the tribal knowledge that was built up and underappreciated.

      Many of the new guys didn't get to benefit from the wisdom and have to relearn everything the hard way

      • Re:You can’t out Moore lifespans (Score:4, Interesting)

        by thegarbz ( 1787294 ) on Thursday January 21, 2021 @08:14PM (#60976218)

        Many of the new guys didn't get to benefit from the wisdom and have to relearn everything the hard way

        This is a double edged sword. A lot of the old guys may be hampered by the wisdom that the world has changed around them as well. The success of this will depend highly on the attitude the people bring to the table. It's important to filter through the bullshit. Sometimes "We tried this 20 years ago and it failed miserably, it won't work" can be insightful. Sometimes that same phrase is uttered by people who don't realise that the thing they tried 20 years is now the perfectly functional normal way of doing something because while they weren't paying attention that the industry changed.

        My most comical case of this was someone complaining that a certain instrument wouldn't work in a particular service because he's tried it. When I told him it's standard practice these days he called bullshit and asked for examples because he's adamant it wouldn't work. I walked to the window, raised the blinds and pointed to a vessel built 5 years ago by a different project this guy wasn't on, same service, same conditions, same instrument and told him it works flawlessly there, why is his metal container so different.

        Knowledge alone doesn't bring success, it needs to be paired with the right attitude.

    • Intel didn't just make a strategic decision to not move past 14nm. They had problems moving to 10nm.

      That they've been able to accomplish what they have on 14nm is no small feat.

      There are certainly ways to criticize Intel for sitting on their laurels in some areas, and certainly they did something wrong if the 10nm process they were working on didn't work out (though it's easier to criticize than to succeed at hard problems). But being on 14nm isn't just because they didn't want to compete.

      • People often forgot, that switching to EUV meant basically re-inventing ALL the things. Even mirrors and windows stop working. And are hard to develop. Everything has to be under a special inaccesible athmosphere.

        The thing was, that everything up to this has been marginal evolution compared to this.

        Then again, TSMC *did* manage it.
        Ane Intel's management didn't become any less of a bunch of assholes everybody wanted to stab in the back either.

        • Actually, it was ASML who managed it, now the sole supplier of EUV lithography equipment to all of TSMC, Samsung and Intel.

      • As nearly as I can tell, the 10nm fiasco was caused by marketing demanding 10% finer feature size than physics permitted. Then their attempts to fix it made it more bulky and power hungry while yields never got into the zone where they could compete with the old fabs.

    • True. But so far, the diversity hires haven't worked out so great. So, maybe some new hires can learn from the old hands.

  • Cannot shrink the process? Bring old men instead!

  • Meet New Boss (Score:3)

    by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Thursday January 21, 2021 @03:59PM (#60975180)

    Same as the old boss. Literally!

  • I loved my Celeron 300A, got it to 464 Mhz stable or 503 Mhz on cold mornings.

    • I had mine clocked up to 700Mhz, got lucky with the malaysian silicon on that one. Kept that guy running up for the longest time; I wish I would have kept it to be honest.

    • The first Athlons/Durons. Bought 533 ones, ran them at 933 for half a decade, no problems, on $10 worth of cooling.
      (Remember: The ones where you could bridge a connection with a pencil.)

      • I remember but why would you do that? It was only needed to unlock them into MP processors for multiple cpu boards.

        If I remember right they were already unlocked multiplier-wise. The pencil trick just turned it into a more expensive version of the same chip XP to MP.

  • 10 years is a lot of time in that field.

    And if they pull an AMD with him, I hope they remember to send a Thank You cake to AMD for waking them up from their complacent and ultimately deadly slumber.

    • 10 years is a lot of time in that field.

      Your ignorance is showing again. 10 years is current tech in the field. Ever wonder why the current intel CPUs are called 11th Gen? Here's a hint: It's about 11 years old and based on an architecture identical to that was developed 14 years ago. Even AMD's "new" CPU architecture is the result of work that is now close to 6 years old.

      Another ignorant post brought to us by BAReFO0t.

  • Who gave us a few nasty hardware bugs, is their knight in shining armour?

    Methinks I'm selling Intel stock and buying AMD. If I wasn't retired with a long term horizon of "die peacefully".

  • Fire the MBAs and bring the old farts back, I think there is still time.

  • He's making the right moves, Intel will fade away without a leading edge fab, no matter the cost

  • That sends a message... (Score:3)

    by ndykman ( 659315 ) on Thursday January 21, 2021 @08:53PM (#60976366)

    That's the way to kick off a new direction. You can say "chips are number one", but bringing back the best engineers to help get it done is a whole other ball game.

    Let Intel keep some tax breaks if they keep fabrication here and kindly let Apple, AMD and others know that there will be increasing costs in not investing in plants in the US. I say we turn Detroit into Chip City. Chips, batteries and electric motors are the new infrastructure and we can built it all here effectively.

  • Netburst, really? (Score:3)

    by bill_mcgonigle ( 4333 ) * on Thursday January 21, 2021 @09:29PM (#60976492) Homepage Journal

    P4 almost killed Intel last time.

    "Hertz, Hertz, Hertz!" said marketing and Intel complied, to the delight of cooler manufacturers everywhere.

    Meanwhile, an Intel Israel skunkworks kept working on P3 and after Intel was backed into a corner, facing doom from AMD x86_64, they started rummaging through the cupboards, found the "Core" design, and "realigned", kicking Netburst to the curb. The current Intel line is descended from "Core" nee P3, but with lots of added speculative branching for sidechannel attacks ... uh, performance.

    So ... now being backed into a corner by AMD and facing certain doom from Zen ... they're bringing in the Netburst people?

    Old != better. Where them Israelis at?

  • I agree with the actions here of the ne ceo, my comment is about how ceos are given authoritarian power. Its results in stupid actions like the previous ceo. THis is very strange for a country that believes in democracy because it gives too much poer to too few, be it a single president or a ceo.

  • That doesn't sound right

    in my mind intel did not even exist when that happened

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