02 December 2024

Frying Pan Into Fire

Well... Intel does it again. Gelsinger is out. Guess who's in?
Gelsinger stepped down as CEO and resigned from Intel's board effective December 1, the company said Monday. He will be replaced by interim co-CEOs David Zinsner, Intel's chief financial officer, and Michelle (MJ) Johnston Holthaus, general manager of Intel's client computing group, as the company conducts a search for a permanent new CEO. Holthaus has also been named to the newly-created CEO of Intel products, which will oversee, among other things, its data center and AI product efforts.
Yet another big bidnezz, not of the financial sector but one that makes physical things, giving the reins to a bean counter. How's that worked out in the past? Does Boeing strike a familiar note?

As to missing the AI boom: did Nvidia create the AI sector? Hardly. They just happened to be the leader in graphics processing units (GPU to the uninformed), which were used to make pretty pictures on the screen and thence which were then re-purposed for cryptomining. IOW, anything that needed lots of floating point. So entered the AI boom where Nvidia is swapping out some rendering for more maths. Or so it is believed; Nvidia doesn't show its instruction sets. Which is the main reason the linux community doesn't play well with Nvidia chips. Huge correlation matrix to solve. One of the first applications to leverage floaters. One might not remember that it was Intel that built the 8087, circa 1980. Bet you didn't know that. Neither did I; the first Intel floater that I remember was the 80287. Intel knew, and should still know, how to build a floater.

And a floater is limited in instructions. Depending on source, the instruction set size is over 50 and is 70. But it runs in high parallel fashion. So, yeah, not building a respectable floater is on Intel's head.

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