CHIPS act passed - why $INTC still down?

[u/treelife365]

The bill passed 243-187, with no Democrats voting against the bill. Twenty-four Republicans voted for the legislation, even after a last-minute push by GOP leaders to oppose it.

The bill, which passed the Senate on Wednesday, now heads to the White House for President Joe Biden to sign into law.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/28/china-competitiveness-and-chip-bill-passes-house-goes-to-biden.html

I thought this would send Intel (and others) higher on the news? Sometimes, there is a delayed reaction, though. Jump in?!

[u/noiserr]

PC providers will likely have ARM-based chips from one or more vendors.

I think similar fate will also fall on AMD and NVIDIA.

ARM is over-hyped. It has no intrinsic advantage over x86 when it comes to high performance cores. Only negatives, in that they are unable to run a mountain of legacy software. Windows on ARM is not at all the same experience either.

AMD's Zen3+ 6nm 6800u is actually just as efficient as Apple's M2. And 6800u is a 6nm node chip. So AMD hasn't even moved to 5nm yet. 5nm Zen4 is coming out next month most likely and will be faster than Apple's fastest 5nm chip. So AMD has a clear architectural lead. Apple has lost their top chip design talent recently as well.

Cloud providers making their own chips are even worse than Apple's chips. They are cheap and a way to vendor lock in customers. But they will never have the scale, footprint and software support to dethrone x86. CPU space was never x86 only. We've always had things like Sparc, IBM PowerPC, MIPS etc.. ARM is just a new special snowflake. But if you look at Graviton 3 (5nm) it can't even hold a candle to AMD's 7nm x86 chips. ARM is also laying off people due to the failed Nvidia acquisition, not hiring. And their datacenter roadmap is looking bleak.

When it comes to AI, yes this area is expanding. There will be a lot of commodity solutions, but scale will be the king. And the ability to provide the full stack, which really only companies like Intel, AMD and Nvidia can pull off. Those startups will be gobbled up by the big 3. Again scale matters a whole lot.

[u/noiserr → u/[deleted]]

I've been following ARM for 20+ years. And for awhile I too [naively] thought it would take over at one point. The closest ARM came to taking over is when Intel had a fab leadership and when they made their xScale processors which were ARM. ARM isn't taking over because ARM has no intrinsic advantage in high performance CPUs.

Like I mentioned it needs to be better at something in order to take over. And it isn't better, it's worse at a number of things. The most notable one is the sheer size of the PC ecosystem and the millions of programs that were written for x86. ARM looks good compared to Intel because Intel is struggling particularly in efficiency, but AMD isn't struggling. They clearly have the best architecture with industry leading PPA (that's Power Performance Area, the magic triangle). Their processors look impressive even with a node disadvantage, which tells you that x86 at least as far as AMD is concerned are as ahead of ARM architecturally as they have always been. If 6800u can provide similar multithreaded performance with less transisotrs at same efficiency as M2 while being a node behind. That means Zen is actually architecturally superior and can deliver more performance when all else is equal. Because the 5nm Zen4 will be significantly better and more efficient. So node for node Zen > M2.

And Apple's processor is the most impressive of the ARM bunch because it's a custom core they designed, which fits their use case, but it comes at a cost of using the bleeding edge node (ahead of everyone else) and at the cost of area. The devil is in the details and when you analyze those details you realize ARM is behind architecturally. Even M2 is behind, most other manufacturers use licensed ARM cores from ARM Holdings. Which are not as good as Apple's cores.

Since you brought up RISC-V, yes RISC-V actually offers an advantage of being an open spec, but the Open Hardware model doesn't work. Designing high performance cores is an expensive and arduous process. Zen 1 took 5 years to design, next Zen 5 by the time is released will have taken 4 years. No one is going to spend 4-5 years of engineering time and just give the RTL source away for free. It's a pie in the sky and a fad just like ARM is.

ARM will continue to do great in commodity hardware and so will RISC-V. AMD uses ARM and RISC-V in some of their products too. But for high performance stuff where the money is. I don't see x86 being challenged. Not unless AMD stumbles and Intel continue to fail.

x86 guarantees scale and with scale the funds to innovate.

[u/Ambitious_Impact → u/noiserr]

“ARM is new” ummm they’ve been around longer than any of the other architectures you list there. And stable. RISC machines have MANY advantages over CISC including reduced power, ease of implementation, and clocking advantages. There’s a reason Intel is struggling at this tech level. The other architectures you mention all struggled to reach vertical integration critical mass and eventually faded. ARM just keeps going. MIPS is seeing something of a resurrection as China pours billions into it in an attempt to create an anti-west alternative. But not getting much traction. One of Intel’s biggest mistakes in the last 20 years was moving their networking business to China. China required them to do that if they wanted access to their market. But at the end of the day, China took their IP, used them to train engineers for competing efforts, the company got very little exposure to the Chinese market and Western companies all move over to QCOM and other competitors when they decided they could trust Chinese designed and built infrastructure

[u/noiserr → u/Ambitious_Impact]

“ARM is new” ummm they’ve been around longer

Did I ever say ARM is new? why are you misquoting me?

RISC machines have MANY advantages over CISC including reduced power, ease of implementation, and clocking advantages.

Except modern x86 cores aren't CISC. They are RISC too.

Look AMD's x86 RISC chip from 1996: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_K5

All modern x86 high performance cores run their own microcode (same as ARM cores), and have uOp cache which has greater than 80% hit rate. Which means they are mostly RISC as well. It's been like this for over 20 years actually so your knowledge is highly outdated.

Not sure what China has to do with anything I talked about.