Friday, July 21st 2017
François Piednoël Quits Intel
Who is François Piednoël, you ask? Why, just the principal engineer at Intel for nearly 20 years now. He has been involved in the architecture development of CPUs, including Katmai, Conroe, Penryn, and Nehalem as well as SoCs in Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell, Broadwell, Skylake, and Kaby Lake. Oh, and did I mention he was also strongly involved in the Intel Atom processor line and the massive shift in Intel's microarchitecture from Pentium 4 to Core? He has also supported development of CPUz, Intel Hyperthreading, and the Android x86 platform.
François Piednoël is a big name in the industry, so it was a big surprise to see him quit Intel today. Time will tell where he ends up next, but if his reply tweet to his announcement is anything to go by it is not AMD. Nonetheless, we wish him the very best in his future endeavors and also remind readers that this does not necessarily mean anything for the future of Intel or the ongoing CPU market share battle.
Source:
François Piednoël via Twitter
François Piednoël is a big name in the industry, so it was a big surprise to see him quit Intel today. Time will tell where he ends up next, but if his reply tweet to his announcement is anything to go by it is not AMD. Nonetheless, we wish him the very best in his future endeavors and also remind readers that this does not necessarily mean anything for the future of Intel or the ongoing CPU market share battle.
94 Comments on François Piednoël Quits Intel
Intel is preparing their next architecture, but in the meantime it would be great to respond to AMD's new CPUs. And Skylake has enough potential to do it.
Generally speaking, Intel's 14nm architecture is still more efficient than current Zen.
i7-7700 draws less power than Ryzen 5 1400 (idle and load) while being more powerful (both 4C/8T, TDP 65W). Actually quite a lot of companies can afford him. It's just that he might be unwilling to work for a smaller company. Well... we've already woken up once with half of the world fighting with a weird guy with a mustache. And it wasn't the most fatal period in our history. We don't need AI to make problems. :)
However, we need AI to dream about shortening business hours or not having to do simple, time-consuming things (e.g. driving, cleaning, farming).
Sure, at some point AI will be able to build machines, program them and - potentially - fight humans. But even a possibility of that is still decades ahead. Today AI can only help.
Just my 2 cents, so no flaming please.
Edit: being serious, anything is possible. From his twotter account though, i gkt the feeling they were going in different directions. Maybe Zen had something to do with it...
Want to bet hes going to be working on AI soon.... perhaps with apple... perhaps after his non compete is up? Anyone?? :p
But now with Ryzen maybe they started asking too much from him, pressuring him, or even blaming him of losing time and money all those last years. I can imagine a simple question to him
"How a company with 1/10 the size, resources, money, everything managed to get so close to our architecture? How can we gain that safe distance we had before Ryzen, in the near future? You have all the money and resources in the world at your disposal, how fast can you show results?".
It's just a possibility that, being a big name in the industry and probably a very wealthy person working all those years for Intel, maybe he decided to avoid a working environment full of pressure and anxiety for the coming years. Maybe he jumped ship because he values quietness more than a huge salary.
If you had, the discussion would be quite different I think.
You don't leave a job where you've been for almost 20 years just like that, so something has clearly happened to make him leave on what almost looks like a whim.
He posted this on LinkedIn a few days ago, which might help explain a little bit about why he left.www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6293148635236564992
Intel did it's best to make core into what it it is today i.e. Skylake, SKL-X is reason enough for me to believe that the next 5~15% IPC gains they may get out of this uarch are gonna come at a high enough cost, like temps for SKL-X, that it might force them to go for something more revolutionary. This doesn't mean that they'll get the 5~15% IPC gains easily with the next few iterations, clock speeds going to be a problem again on 10nm, but rather it's unlikely that Intel can milk their cash cow too much without having to reduce prices or their fat margins, now that AMD is back in the game.
www.anandtech.com/show/11550/the-intel-skylakex-review-core-i9-7900x-i7-7820x-and-i7-7800x-tested
AMD is still playing the budget brand like they have been doing for years and still gets outsold by Intel and Nvidia. But I guess AMD is attractive to the poorer PC users that seems to be the vocal minority. They have zero performance lead in both CPU and GPU.
As for the IPC, it is usually 5%, if not less in the latest generations of Intel processors. The rest is just frequency. So in a way you are repeating more or less what I wrote. As for temps, the problem with Intel cpus, is with the interface material between the cores and the heatspreader. The more revolutionary thing they can do, is find an acceptable way for them to solder the die on the heatspreader.
As for poorer people. It's obvious that there are also poorer people in the brain, who love to express their problem with the vocal minority, that ruin the neighborhood obviously.
His twitter account posted a few things as well as i mentioned earlier.
The guy and intel were going different directions. :)
Some more reviews (I hope I'm not cherry picking, since these are all major CPU reviewing sites):
www.anandtech.com/show/11550/the-intel-skylakex-review-core-i9-7900x-i7-7820x-and-i7-7800x-tested/17
www.bit-tech.net/reviews/tech/intel-core-i9-7900x-and-x299-chipset-revie/8/
hexus.net/tech/reviews/cpu/107017-intel-core-i9-7900x-14nm-skylake-x/?page=10
From Hexus:
"...a 10-core powerhouse offering excellent IPC performance and outstanding multi-core potential in a single $999 chip armed with plenty of overclocking headroom."
That doesn't exactly mean "garbage line-up of fail products" in my book.
Only advantage AMD has is price. That's it. Performance still belongs to Intel and Nvidia. You don't brag about owning an inferior product, but I guess the red team has no shame.
And that same Hardware Unboxed guy burned his 7800x which leds us to question his competency.