[Cialug] OT: More on Intel or Moron on Intel

[Theron Conrey]

You could sell the chip, you'd just have to have all the specs and build 
process available....  GNU does not equate to not costing money.

http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/selling.html

Theron Conrey


Nathan C. Smith wrote:

>Probably nothing new here for most of you, lots of opinions and guessing.
>I'm interested in alternate viewpoints and other opinions.
>
>One of our new attorneys (he is also an engineer) worked at Intel for a
>while, I had a brief conversation with him yesterday and some points I took
>away were this:
>
>* Intel has all the hallmarks of a big company including headcount politics
>* Chip foundries are expensive to build
>* In his opinion, Intel may no longer makes the "best" CPU chip. (I think he
>meant highest performing because they are certainly reliable)
>* There is more money to be made in volume chips for consumer electronics
>etc.
>* Intel chip design teams are big.
>* Intel maintains a "skunk works" team
>* The manufacturing and design groups are in two "silos" that appear to be
>pitted against each other.
>
>He went into the usual schpiel about how the way to get more performance has
>to change because going smaller on-chip is getting to be extremely expensive
>(requires new specially built chip foundries) and physics are getting in the
>way.  The complex Intel model of caches and tricks to boost performance
>breaks down when you go to a dual core chip, requiring other changes to get
>to the performance needed.  
>
>Intel is also expanding into new areas including software and devices more
>aggressively than when they were tightly focused on chips.  Blame or thank
>computer saturation and dot-bomb for that.
>
>What I think it boils down to, is that is is getting too expensive to build
>"hot rod" chips, the way it has been done, and Intel is finding other ways
>to get the performance without building more expensive chip foundries.  He
>said one of the last foundries cost almost 10 billion and that is _before_
>the chip-making equipment went in, basically the building, HVAC (clean
>rooms), and the plumbing (water purification, toxic material disposal etc).
>
>A large company doesn't change 20 years of momentum in a day or even a year,
>but I think at Intel commodity chip-building is going to change from
>building expensive, fast chips to doing more with less until a quantum leap
>occurs that takes us to a new way of thinking about chips.
>
>OK, he's not the ultimate insider, but he was at Intel and he has first-hand
>impressions of what goes on.  Its easy to forget that so much crap and
>politics go on at a big company like Intel that it isn't always about
>building the best chip.  It's about budgets and shareholders and dollars.
>
>[WOT] I wonder what a free (as in libre) chip would be like?  GNUchip?  You
>can only sell the packaging it comes in.
>
>-Nate
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