The Intel Execution in [2025]

[tuna]

Their management got paid plenty.

 

[MfA]

This is exactly the problem I was saying about Intel: they really wanted to push x86 everywhere, without considering whether it's a good fit or not. Mobile is growing? Make a x86 CPU for it (Atom). Super computing? Make a x86 CPU array. They even wanted to push x86 into embedded computing (with limited success).

Poor timing and design decisions.

With Mediatek moving to designs with all big cores it's getting to the point where x86 isn't much of a problem any more for mobile either. As for Xeon Phi, CU/SM's in GPUs aren't small enough that using x86 for the scalar processing is a significant overhead ... it was how Intel decided to design the rest of the processor which made it impossible to compete with GPUs. Narrower SIMD, less SMT, strict coherence etc ... that killed the computational density, not x86.

 

[pcchen]

Poor timing and design decisions.

With Mediatek moving to designs with all big cores it's getting to the point where x86 isn't much of a problem any more for mobile either. As for Xeon Phi, CU/SM's in GPUs aren't small enough that using x86 for the scalar processing is a significant overhead ... it was how Intel decided to design the rest of the processor which made it impossible to compete with GPUs. Narrower SIMD, less SMT, strict coherence etc ... that killed the computational density, not x86.

I think this is partly a x86 problem, because some of these decisions probably was at least partly due to some limitations of x86. For example, x86 only had 8 GPRs, so SSE also has 8 registers, but since SSE is a completely new set of instructions, they don't really need to have only 8 registers, but yet Intel still made it with only 8 registers. They probably think it's better this way as some decoding hardwares can be reused or something.

It's only later with VEX encoding they are able to support 3-operand instructions and with EVEX to extended the number of registers to 32. They could do this earlier, but I think the baggages of x86 still shows in mnay places.