mm2 is directly proportional to BOM cost and minimum profitable selling price. Intels software and hardware is much less efficient than nvidia so their products cost more to make and sell for less. Battlemage is at best break even, with alchemist they lost money. If they want to stay in business they need to raise their ASP. Since no one is buying intel for their games support they need to find a new market, thus SRIOV and local LLM. Unlike nvidia they don't need to worry about cannibalizing other business units.
On the die size argument, which I see being echoed a lot online:
Why would a customer care or factor that into their purchasing decisions? Saying that these dGPUs with large dies are what is going to put Intel out of business is ludicrous and the Xe cores are shared amongst many of Intel's most lucrative products.
You can afford larger dies on N4 compared to when the 40-series were launched. It's no longer the leading edge node and yields have likely improved.
dGPUs have pretty expensive GDDR modules, I do not have data on the exact proportion but I would bet that the memory modules is the more important line item.
BoM matters less on lower volume (compared to mobile SoCs) dGPU units. Masks masks, R&D and validation are big fixed up-front costs.
Recurring software support is also independent of how many units get sold. Xe cores are shared by many Intel products (client & server CPUs, datacenter GPUs and gaming GPUs).
B580 is widely popular for gamers, Intel cannot keep up the demand at the moment. I doubt they need to unlock SRIOV on the gaming segment dGPUs to get rid of stock, as you seem to suggest. Their datacenter GPUs [1] offer support for SRIOV, as you probably already know, so I assume you are bemoaning market segmentation.
Gamers are buying at $250. If you pay more you can find B580 on the shelves now. That Xe cores and driver development are shared with other products is the only reason they haven't canceled the dGPU division. The hardware business is all about designing IP and amortizing the cost in as many products as possible.
Of course consumers don't care about die size and cost, only the value of the end product. The problem is intel and their negative margins. Maybe people are too blitz scale brained but running a negative margin hardware business is a really bad idea. Typically they target 50% margins.
Now if intel was healthy maybe they could survive a few negative margin products by subsidizing from their profitable SKUs. However intel is not healthy and reported losses every quarter last year. It's a sinking ship and they need a come to Jesus monent before they go bankrupt.
I'm arguing that their product segmentation strategy is stuck in the past and a significant reason why they're unprofitable. On desktop CPUs they lock ECC even though the Xeons are cheaper because they remove the E cores so AVX512 will work. On dGPUs they lock out SRIOV even though the desktop iGPUs support it. On the server they created accelerators which they then tried to charge for which means no one bothered to write integrations to make it work with their software. It's a broken culture which is so up it's own ass that management only cares about intel and is completely disconnected from the customers. Intel needs product features and value differentiators that aren't just negative margin products, changing product segmentation is low hanging fruit.
Being intransigent and the same as the competition but slightly worse had led them to unprofitability and soon, bankrupty. Interest rates are going up and companies carrying debt are going to be in a rough spot.
Intel needs to vastly streamline and cut down their SKUs (antithetical to the PM regime they have built up over the last 25+ years).
They need to stop artificially crippling their products to segment them. Simplify naming and have mid, great and greatest. The lowend shit products should be dumped. This means SRV-IO and ECC available everywhere. All of their GPUs should shift right by 8GB or more.
Streamlining their SKUs would streamline their wafer processing in the fabs.
How much has SKU explosion lead to mask set explosion and having to do runs, bank that and switching to another set of masks?
At this point they should just produce Xeons and support at most 2 sockets. I don't care if they fuse off features with cryptographic keys. Ship one piece of silicon to everyone, streamline the shit out of that.
Agreed, Intel needs to win back customers. Removing the MBA-staple strategy of artificial market segmentation would be a strong signal that they are serious about becoming an actual customer-first company.
Yes, agreed, the agencies were put in place by executive order and they're being gutted. However, that doesn't mean the executive branch is being gutted. Gutted means "to destroy the essential power or effectiveness of". Maybe there's confusion about the word "gutted"?
Indeed the power and effective of agencies is being dramatically reduced. I believe this is the point that was trying to be made.
However, rulings like Trump v. United States vastly expand the power of the executive branch. Even if you're one of those people who believes in Unitary Executive Theory, prior to Trump v. United States, those powers were hypothetical. Hence the need for a ruling. It's to be seen whether a Unitary Executive would be more effective.
I assume you mean they're racist. Yes I do know one openly racist person who happened to vite for Trump. I don't think he voted for Trump for that reason though, he's just been a republican voter for decades if I'm not mistaken.
No, I mean they'd rather not verbalize why they want Trump in office. Like one of his voters mentioned during his first term when she felt he wasn't "hurting who he's supposed to". A surprising number of Trump voters see him as a tool for retribution against various groups the voters' feel animosity towards. Saying this outright is probably something most are not comfortable to say to you, so they stay vague and non-specific.
I would assume the same goes for some Democratic voters as well. There's a lot of hate thrown across the aisle in both directions these days. Maybe it comes more frequently from Trump's supporters, I don't know, but I've been surprised by how much blatant disregard, disrespect, and animosity I've heard from those on the left. The idea of voting for Trump was so foreign to many in the Biden/Harris bubble that anyone willing to vote for Trump must have been crazy or less than.
I didn't vote for Trump (or Harris), but working in the tech industry and mostly around people who would consider themselves progressive or liberal has been pretty eye opening the last few elections. Everyone wants to be inclusive unless its political and they strongly disagree with the other side.
> It’s not exaggeration to say that the web has set UIs back by decades.
The trade-offs for the UI setback are unbeatable cross-platform compatibility, ease of distribution and a decent security model with sandboxing. MacOS only introduced desktop app sandboxing in the last 10 years, most desktop run software with user permissions which is not great.
> I also find the publisher's claims that he "[just can't] bring [him]self to sit down and read 77 pages of these messages right now" implausible.
Read back a few sentences for the context - they aren't willing to ready 77 pages just to seek/isolate messages from one individual around a specific topic. I would expect a journalist to do this repeatedly for multiple individuals, so it makes sense to parse the data and make it queryable without having to read through hundreds/thousands of telegrams just to capture a few dozen
> How has that "unlimited" money supply worked out ever since?
It works very well when your currency is the world's reserve currency. You get way more latitude for printing money with much lower inflation vs some isolated economy win no deep reservoirs of unused currency in "reserves".
If the US loses the status of being the dominant reserve currency, the link between money supply and inflation will become much stronger. The USD is currently backed by the US hegemony , of which foreign policy is a big part of.
> However polls show that Americans don’t like Putin.
Out of that 81%, how many believe in appeasing Putin to "Avoid world war III" despite their animus? Too many, IMO, and Putin doesn't care for how the American populace feel about him personally, as long as he can achieve his foreign policy goals without hindrance from American bombs, intelligence or funding, which has become the status quo as of yesterday.
IIRC, the Blender Foundation's Open Source movies have been rendered on render farms from the very first one, produced over 20 years ago. This predates Cycles/Eevee, but I don't think it's something they'd regress on.
