So Intel failed to mitigate the vulnerability when it was first reported. Then they extended the embargo from May until November.
And they still didn't fix it.
What's going on with Intel?
Like they're going all in with lying in benchmarks against AMD and straight up forgetting what has been reported as security issues.
>Company is dying and has no way to turn itself around.
>Culture is a "go along to get along" / don't rock the boat. Most workers are very passive. Inclusive culture focused on internal "networking" rather than winning. A lot of make work going on, probably 25% extra headcount
>Middle and upper management are in direct revolt against CEO and his plans.
During my orientation (2nd quarter 2013) my orientation meeting was about how the CEO is wrong on his plans.
>Advice to Management
>Not much you can do. These problems are the result of near monopoly on PC CPUs for 20 years. This place is what Hewlett-Packard was probably like in 2000 (with the printer monopoly), the collapse is coming, but without starting over there is no way to fix it.
> This place is what Hewlett-Packard was probably like in 2000 (with the printer monopoly), the collapse is coming, but without starting over there is no way to fix it.
Interestingly, that printer monopoly seems to be doing fine today, given how I have to go to hp.com to get drivers for my Samsung printer.
Hewlett-Packard was an electronic engineering, semiconductor, and computing company from the beginning (the first product they sold was an audio distortion analyzer, it used a creative circuit to achieve high performance at minimum cost), they used to do serious and innovative R&D. There were the glorious days when Hewlett-Packard makes state-of-art test equipment and semiconductor devices, developed in-house enterprise computer systems like HP-UX system and PA-RISC CPUs, first-generation of scientific and programmable handheld calculators, etc., not just today's customer printers and laptops.
e.g. I recently found a datasheet of an IC in an amateur radio gear, it were really the glorious days. Those chips with an HP logo (or a Motorola logo) are really cool.
> The INA series of MMICs is fabricated using HP’s 25 GHz f_max, ISOSAT™-I silicon bipolar process which uses nitride self-alignment, submicrometer lithography, trench isolation, ion implantation, gold metallization and polyimide intermetal dielectric and scratch protection to achieve excellent performance, uniformity and reliability.
Around 2000s, the EE & semiconductor department became an independent company, Agillent, and later Keysight.
I think the last major innovation at HP was probably memristor that was supposed to be the next evolution of digital logic and storage, and HP claimed that it was developing a memristor computer system. Unfortunately, it failed to materialize.
HP was the Google of its day when H & P were in charge. People either retire or die eventually. What happens to Google when time claims Larry and/or Sergei?
Not trying to besmirch or minimize early HP by comparing to Google -- probably better to use Musk/SpaceX or something -- but IMO this is the key takeaway that doesn't seem widely discussed. Innovative companies have innovative leaders with expert-level knowledge in their technical specialties. At some point, the MBAs take over, attempt to put it on autopilot, and it's all downhill from there.
This is one reason why the current high stock market valuations for large, profitable tech companies are crazy. Eventually the corporate culture rots from the inside and they're overtaken by a disruptive competitor. Unfortunately there's no practical way for retail investors to take a short position on those stocks for 30 years in the future; regular options only go out about 3 years.
True, but if you can identify both the winner and the loser, say AMD and/or TSMC vs INTC, you could sell puts/spreads on the loser and sell calls/spreads on the winner in similar at-risk dollar amounts. If the market itself booms or busts through your strikes, gains on one side will cancel the losses on the other. While you're right, you make double money by winning on both sides. But you lose double if you're betting the wrong way.
My friend, whether you're trading naked or spreads doesn't matter on timescales of corporate rot are ~30 years; the contracts available to retail traders are like ~2 years out.
> Unfortunately there's no practical way for retail investors to take a short position on those stocks for 30 years in the future; regular options only go out about 3 years.
You don't, not if you're a small investor. You go index and hedge your bets that they're not all going to rot at the same time.
What about companies like IBM? The company was originally foundered in 1911, but you could say their heyday wasn't until half a century later (or even more), after the original founder had left.
>Although the initiative, and as such much of the credit for the birth of the information revolution, must go to Tom Jr., considerable courage was also displayed by his then aging father who, despite his long commitment to internal funding, backed his son to the hilt; reportedly with the words "It is harder to keep a business great than it is to build it."
Not saying this happened at IBM, but sometimes correct people can be promoted into correct positions, in which case the company keeps going just fine.
However, at some point any company is probably bound to promote wrong people, who will end up promoting/hiring the wrong people under them, eventually completely changing the course of the business.
It seems like the death of a company is inevitable.
It also happens that the circumstances that allowed a company to dominate come to an end. It would require heroic measures to move to a new form of dominance. Why should lightning strike again in the same place?
It's good when we allow them to fail gracefully. I would hate to see what unscrupulous stuff a failing Google could do with all our info being held hostage.
One of the last innovations at HP was the work on Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing and Very Long Instruction Word architectures that led to the Itanium IA-64 processors produced by Intel.
By putting the burden of scheduling parallelism on the compiler, does the EPIC design avoid speculative execution vulnerabilities, or did Intel implement Itanium with the same flaws?
I'm well aware of the impressive achievements of the old HP. But I'm also aware that that era was already clearly over in the year 2000, and they were already a very different company from what their older reputation suggested. In 2000, there was no "collapse coming" for HP from anything like mismanagement or complacency; they weathered industry-wide troubles as well as any other company and didn't experience any personal catastrophes. If the next 20 years for Intel end up like the last 20 years for HP, then long-term investors will be quite satisfied.
The multiple splits and name changes didn't help brand recognition, at least on my end. I remember HP lab equipment being highly impressive and warranting its price. But I consistently fail to make the connection that Agilent amd Keysight products are the successors to that.
I agree. The rebrand to Keysight is the worst. Agilent was a good name by the time they split. Agilent still exists in medical but I know much less about that. I think everyone who works in test & measurement knows the big brands and knows keysight. All of the reps, culture, and products stayed the same.
The rebranding I’ll never understand is Fujitsu -> Socionext.
> The rebranding I’ll never understand is Fujitsu -> Socionext.
I have to look it up... This is stupid. If I see a Fujitsu chip on a board, I know the brand and may find it interesting. But if I see a Socionext chip, I'll think it's some random U.S. startup from California.
I think there's a reason - Wikipedia says it's a joint venture of Fujitsu and Panasonic, so it makes sense for them to give it a new name, and it's common for these Japanese companies to choose a English name for global business (in the same way that NEC becomes Renesas due to the two reasons).
Other than splitting off HPE, the HP of 2000 was pretty much the HP of today. As far as I'm aware, they're still major players today in all the markets that they were major players in back then, and none of those HP or HPE business units had to go through a collapse and start over.
Upvoted. Why downvote this comment? It does not have controversial political content nor personal attacks, it's just an OP's personal observation of HP's business performance. If someone disagrees, I'd like to hear you comment (I'm not the OP), rather than letting the comment sink to the bottom.
One of the problems with Intel culture - especially under BK was that the philosophy was "Focus on our key goals to the exclusion of everything else". It was meant to keep focus and ensure we moved quickly. The problem with that is it meant we were entirely unresponsive. It doesn't matter if something important has come up because you've already agreed what the priority is, you've already committed to what you're going to do. So even if something does come up, communicating that problem to the team that needs to fix it is impossible because you'll get ZBB'd (if we do this, we will drop that). Then once you've got engineering to commit, the bureaucracy won't let you just release anything so you need to line up into a release process.
I'm sure no one intended to mislead, but organisationally Intel just isn't designed to fix bugs. It doesn't have a process to respond to issues.
Dumb question: Can you clarify what ZBB'd means in this context? I've never seen it before. There's a wiki page [0] with various meanings for the abbreviation, but nothing seemed to fit. Maybe Zero-based budgeting?
I have to wonder how many bitter Pyrrhic victory jokes get made by victims of poor implementation based on the creator's last name - Pyrrh. I've seen too many companies destroyed by superficially attractive budgeting schemes, even with how much tech has started to acknowledge perverse incentives they seem to get overlooked. The worst I had direct experience with was a company where they moved to all income being credited to marketing & bizdev and all other parts of the company being treated as losses to be minimized. We were both advertising supported (and thus needed content to sell anything) and had professional products that required analysts, but they when the market started looking rougher they kept the sales & ad people and concentrated layoffs on people who produced things or ran the infrastructure.
Ultra-simplified bookkeeping interpreted through the lens of too much coke nearly destroyed them. The dotcom bubble was a very strange time.
That company culture and structure needs to change, and fast. Giants do fall.
Instead of focusing on a PR war and scrambling to salvage one fire after another, Intel needs to produce a strategy that will keep them in the game by actually providing value -- not by twisting the hands of big corps for lucrative long-term contracts.
Zen and Zen+ may have been strong competitors that Intel was unprepared for, but at least they were still competing, notably in per core performance. Now Zen 2 is out and Intel is taking a beating in every category, from price to power usage to multi core performance to single core performance and everything in between.
Meanwhile it became clear that a decent part of Intel's per core advantage was because of massive shortcuts they took, notably security wise, and so fixing those security holes takes away the performance.
In that situation, I doubt management at Intel is eager to take out yet another one of their shortcut. Intel needs a win, but they are not at all in the state of mind necessary to achieve one...
>So Intel failed to mitigate the vulnerability when it was first reported. Then they extended the embargo from May until November. And they still didn't fix it.
The assumption being that they could in the time given, but are sitting on their hands?
It's precisely because "competence is always within a given context" that the two statements are not identical.
Incompetent can mean "as to the particular project context" (i.e. they could be great engineers that din't manage to deliver the fixes for this issue), or "as to their general professional capacity" (i.e. they are lesser engineers).
No, the second is "incapable" and suggests that even a "great" engineer could not have done it.
The first one says that a "competent" engineer could have.
> going all in with lying in benchmarks against AMD
I'm assuming this is referencing the "intentionally misleading benchmarks" piece in servethehome. It's worth reading the follow up, in which the author discovers their biggest complaint (older version doesn't have avx2 enabled by default on zen2) was not an issue because Intel manually enabled avx2.
They request all benchmark done with SMT off, they insist on doing their bench without the security fixes for Spectres/Meltdown applied, they use dubious TDP counting, ...
AMD has its fair share of issue in their own self published benchmarks, but at least when third party publish they're not forced to cripple other companies' chips.
Intel has become big and rich and has stopped (or perhaps never was) being very responsible. Given their fairly entrenched position in the industry, it's doubtful this strategy will impact their profit all that much and therefore we can expect to see more of this behaviour in the future.
Thankfully AMD is making serious headway and will continue to take market share from Intel. It will take time but Intel should begin to feel the sting soon.
I'm nearly 20 years in mid to large companies, I've never seen an AMD cpu on a desktop, laptop or server. Its almost like nobody ever gets fired for buying Intel.
I'm 30+ years in. AMD shipped huge numbers of 8086/8088s as a second-source; you might have had one and not known it. But I'm guessing that's not what you mean. :-)
There was a good bit of time where Opterons where everywhere on servers, including things like the whole Sun x86 line. At one gig we had datacenters full of IBM blade servers stuffed with dual Opteron boards; they were a big success in the market. I know at one point another gig's non-US folks had significant installed base of AMD-based Fujitsu servers.
Didn't see as much on the desktop/laptop side, though I did carry a AMD-based Thinkpad for a short while. Apparently HP sold a successful, low-end, AMD-based business desktop.
YMMV...I think it's a matter of 'I haven't seen any tigers in my back yard, therefore I doubt they exist'.
I've heard that AMD suddenly pulling out of the server market was very damaging for the relationship with vendors, hence (in part) their trouble of getting back in the door .
But it does seem that adoption is growing again, with recent performance figures and the attractive price point.
That's an interesting insight. Was it "pulled out" or "we screwed up the next gen product" though? Quite a gap between Opteron and Threadripper, so you're probably on to something.
And they still didn't fix it.
What's going on with Intel? Like they're going all in with lying in benchmarks against AMD and straight up forgetting what has been reported as security issues.