[tssge]

You have to look more far back than just the Pentium 4 days. Intel absolutely were some of the greatest innovators on the industry if you look at 70s, 80s and 90s. I would say they simply were the best, but dropped the ball at least when AMD64 became a thing. How the mighty have fallen...

It's hard to overstate Intel's importance in regards to the modern CPU: they invented the microprocessor itself. (Though I'd like to state it's a bit controversial whether they only were the first to come up with a commercially available one or whether they actually invented the concept itself)

Also, there are many things outside the CPU that we take for granted today that were of Intel's innovation. A great example would be PCIe that Intel invented and essentially standardized. More recent example would be USB4.

Regarding CPUs they have some truly legendary chips, like the Intel 8086. This chip from the 70s is still in use today in your everyday products (as a clone though). It can be found TODAY in common products like computer mice, keyboards, AC, TV remotes and so on. Anything that is a commodity and needs some simple processing power has usually some derivative of 8086 inside it, granted ESP32 and such are taking over nowadays.

Of course the x86 instruction set comes from that very chip. I guess the name speaks for itself how big of a thing that was.

There's too much to fit inside one comment about how innovative Intel truly used to be, but they have a pretty good page for their history here: https://timeline.intel.com/

[Alupis]

I guess it was innovation until competition got tough, then it was squash-mode, no matter how illegal or unsavory. During that era, can we honestly say Intel was still innovating in the CPU line? Have they innovated in CPU's recently? It seems not so much...

Look at the Core series - moderately incremental improvements for nearly two decades now? Many of which have significant, unfixable design flaws. AMD got their act together, and with significantly fewer resources ended up totally leap-frogging Intel in nearly all CPU metrics. How did this not happen at Intel after all these years?

AMD had some objectively better CPU's during the Athlon era - until they ran out of money mostly due to Intel's anti-competitive behavior.

The "what-if" scenario is interesting to ponder...

[ethbr1]

> AMD got their act together, and with significantly fewer resources ended up totally leap-frogging Intel in nearly all CPU metrics. How did this not happen at Intel after all these years?

AMD outsourced foundry issues to TSMC.

[Alupis]

And so could Intel if they wanted. Instead, they seem more interested in designing yet another socket and asking everyone to upgrade all of their hardware for a moderate performance bump...

[gruez]

>Instead, they seem more interested in designing yet another socket and asking everyone to upgrade all of their hardware for a moderate performance bump...

Who's upgrading their cpus after 1-2 generations?

[Alupis]

AMD folks, because you can use the same socket for many generations of CPU's, providing a drop-in 10-minute upgrade...

[tssge]

Yeah I totally agree if we consider Intel's innovation in the CPU space or lack thereof in the 21st century.

I have seen more innovation happen in the CPU space in the last 5 years than the 20 years prior to that. This has been thanks to AMD, Apple, ARM, TSMC etc; Intel has seemingly attempted to only slow down the innovation to keep cozy at the top spot.

Personal example: I rented an AMD machine last month and I seriously thought there was a bug with fastfetch when it showed the CPU having 5,7GHz clocks with 32 threads. I didn't believe such was possible. I had to double check because it felt so far fetched seeing such monstrous increase in clocks and cores, when upgrading from a few years old Intel machine to a new AMD one. That's innovation.

However to Intel's credit they have made major innovations in other areas, like peripherals, interconnects and so on. I am extremely grateful for Thunderbolt/USB4 existing today compared to the myriad of vendor specific docking connectors of the past.

>How did this not happen at Intel after all these years?

They replaced engineers with accountants after gaining dominant position on the market. Short term it gave more profits but long term most innovation was lost in the process.

[RiverCrochet]

Intel developed and released the first single chip microprocessor, the 4-bit MCS 4004.

You had CPUs before that, but they were not single chips.

> like the Intel 8086.

You mean the 8051? It is a nice embedded chip, mostly because it has a lot of bit-level instructions and has separate execution and data address spaces if I'm remembering the details right.

> Of course the x86 instruction set comes from that very chip

It does come from the 8086, which I do believe was at least somewhat based on the even earlier 8080. I could be wrong though.

But yeah Intel did a lot. In the 70's though you had lots of semiconductor companies: Fairchild, Signetics, Motorola, MOS/CSG branching off of them. I really wonder what Intel would be if IBM selected a 68000 for the 5150 though.

[tssge]

Yeah sorry I might've mixed up 8051 and 8086. Not totally sure, main point was that it's an old ass chip design used in modern products.

These chips with 70s design are very common in ordinary "non computing" products, granted most are Chinese clones with varying levels of modification. I spend a lot of time reverse engineering regular commodity devices, their electronics and their firmware. For example the portable AC I just opened had 2 of these 8051s(?) inside, with an ESP32 for networking which I find rather fascinating. The first one controls physical inputs (buttons) and IR input from a remote, the second controls the AC compressor, fans and lower level electrical inputs (sensors etc) while taking input from the first and the ESP32 handles wireless communication sending input to the first one.

These old low performance chips are found inside mice, keyboards, remote controllers, dehumidifiers, air fryers and almost any other "simple" electronics. It's fascinating how a 70s chip design is still so prevalent in our everyday products.