Comment by thunder-blue-3
5 days ago
Speaking from personal experience, many director-level and above positions at Intel, especially in growth related areas are filled through nepotism and professional connections. I've never seen a headline about Intel’s decline and thought, 'Wow, how could that happen?'
I had a business partner that I agreed on a lot of things with but not about Intel. My assumption was that any small software package from Intel, such as a graph processing toolkit, was trash. He thought they could do no wrong.
Intel really is good at certain kinds of software like compilers or MKL but my belief is that organizations like that have a belief in their "number oneness" that gets in their way of doing anything that it outside what they're good at. Maybe it is the people, processes, organization, values, etc. that gets in the way. Or maybe not having the flexibility to know that what is good at task A is not good at task B.
I saw always intel as a HW company making terribly bad SW. Anywhere I saw intel SW I would run away. Lately I used a big open source library from them, which is standard in the embedded space. Work great, but if you look the code you will be puking for a week.
In my experience Intel's WiFi and Bluetooth drivers on Linux are, by far, the best. They're reliably available on the latest kernel and they actually work. After having used other brands on Linux, I have no intention of getting non-intel WiFi or Bluetooth any time soon. The one time that I found a bug, emailing them about it got me in direct contact with the developers of the driver.
I had a different non-Intel WiFi card before where the driver literally permanently fried all occupied PCIe slots -- they never worked again and the problem happened right after installing the driver. I don't know how a driver such as this causes that but it looks like it did.
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The team working on their Realsense depth cameras was doing great work on the SDK, in my opinion.
Frequent releases, GitHub repo with good enough user interaction, examples, bug fixing and feedback.
This is oddly specific. Can you share the exact Intel software toolkit?
Why does this not affect NVidia, Amazon, Apple, or TSMC?
The affliction he’s imputing is born of absolute dominance over decades. Apple has never had the same level of dominance, and NVidia has only had it for two or three years.
It could possibly come to haunt NVidia or TSMC in decades to come.
A friend who developed a game engine from scratch and is familiar with inner workings and behavior of NVIDIA driver calls it an absolute circus of a driver.
Also, their latest consumer card launches are less then stellar, and the tricks they use to pump up performance numbers are borderline fraud.
As Gamers Nexus puts it "Fake prices for fake frames".
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See the funny thing is, even with all of this stuff about Intel that I hear about (and agree with as reported), I also just committed a cardinal sin just recently.
I'm old, i.e. "never buy ATI" is something that I've stuck to since the very early Nvidia days. I.e. switched from Matrox and Voodoo to Nvidia while commiserating and witnessing friend's and colleagues ATI woes for years.
The high end gaming days are long gone, even had a time of laptops where 3D graphics was of no concern whatsoever. I happened to have Intel chips and integrated graphics. Could even start up some gaming I missed out on during the years or replay old favourites just fine as even a business laptop Intel integrated graphics chip was fine for it.
And then I bought an AMD based laptop with integrated Radeon graphics because of all that negative stuff you hear about Intel and AMD itself is fine, sometimes even better, so I thought it was fair to give it a try.
Oh my was that a mistake. AMD Radeon graphics is still the old ATI in full blown problem glory. I guess it's going to be another 25 years until I might make that mistake again.
It's a bummer you've had poor experiences with ATI and later AMD, especially on a new system. I have an AMD laptop with Ryzen 7 7840U which includes a Radeon 780M for integrated graphics and it's been rock solid. I tested many old and new titles on it, albeit at medium-ish settings.
What kind of problems did you see on your laptop?
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Did you time travel from 2015 or something? Haven't heard of anyone having AMD issues in a very long time...
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Meanwhile PC gamers have no trouble using their AMD GPUs to play Windows games on Linux.
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I wish I had an AMD card. Instead our work laptops are X1 extremes with discrete nvidia cards and they are absolutely infuriating. The external outputs are all routed through the nvidia card, so one frequently ends up with the fan blowing on full blast when plugged into a monitor. Moreover, when unplugging the laptop often fails to shutdown the discrete graphics card so suddenly the battery is empty (because the discrete card uses twice the power). The Intel card on the other hand seems to prevent S3 sleep when on battery, i.e. the laptop starts sleeping and immediately wakes up again (I chased it down to the Intel driver but couldn't get further).
And I'm not even talking about the hassle of the nvidia drivers on Linux (which admittedly has become quite a bit better).
All that just for some negligible graphics power that I'm never using on the laptop.
That’s not specific to Intel though. That’s how Directors and above are recruited in any big company.
For example, Uber hired a VP from Amazon. And the first thing he did was to hire most of his immediate reports at Amazon to Director/Senior Director positions at Uber.
At that level of management work gets done mostly through connections, favors and networking.
I tell people that if they get a new boss who is at Director or above, assume that you are re-interviewing for your job for the first 6 months with the new boss.
Major companies like that become infected with large hierarchies of scum sucking middle management that eat revenue with bonuses.
Of course they are obsessed with shrinking labor costs and resisting all downsizing until it reaches comical levels.
Take a company like health insurance that can't show a large dividend because it would be a public relations disaster. Filled to the gills with vice presidents to suck up extra earnings. Or medical devices.
Software is also very difficult for these hierarchies of overpaid management, because you need to pay labor well to get good software, and the only raison d'etre of these guys is wage suppression.
Leadership is hard for these managers because the primary thing rewarded is middle management machiavellianism, turf wars, and domain building, and any visionary leadership or inspiration is quashed.
It almost fascinates me that large company organizations basically are like Soviet style communism, Even though there are opportunities for internal competition. Like data centers and hosting and it groups. They always need to be centralized for" efficiency".
Meanwhile, they are like 20 data centers and if you had each of them compete for the company's internal business, they'd all run more efficiently.
probably because continuous competition is inefficient within an organization and can cause division/animosity between teams?
"within an organization and can cause division/animosity between teams"
Are you aware of what goes on in middle management? This is the normal state of affairs between managers.
If what you are saying is true, then .......
Why is there competition in the open marketplace? You have just validated my suggestion that internally companies operate like communists.
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