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Intel exits memory business, sale to Hynix for $9B

news.skhynix.com

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Re: Intel exits memory business, sale to Hynix for $9B

#91

Post by mathattack »

bnt wrote: post #7
lend000 wrote: post #5

Intel's NAND flash was overshadowed by their Optane (not included in the sale) and lagging behind Hynix and Samsung, so I guess this isn't such a bad move. The cynical take is that the CFO running Intel is attempting a bunch of standard corporate restructuring strategies to delay the effects of their slowing technical innovation. It is definitely concerning from a US technical superiority standpoint to consider that…

The real shitshow starts when the CFO becomes the CEO (as is usually the case), so Intel is pretty much dead as is US tech innovation on this scale (until VCs do what China does and start pouring money into hard stuff, not just fluffy software).

It’s natural for large tech companies to enter the harvesting business when they can’t innovate anymore. Look at IBM. They just can’t innovate, so they do all kinds of financial engineering on the back of a robust customer audit program.

Eventually that money gets recycled into funding earlier stage companies. (If a company buys back stock, the old investors have to put the money somewhere)

Re: Intel exits memory business, sale to Hynix for $9B

#94

Post by Cullinet »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #86
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Letting Bieing get to chapter 11 means letting Airbus eat their lunches and the US would never let that happen.

Why? Chapter 11 doesn't mean they stop making or selling planes. The biggest problem would be uncertainty, and that can be dealt with by announcing the intention of bailout immediately after the chapter 11 announcement. For example GM went through chapter 11 in 2009. This helped their sales rather than hurt it.

Neither should Chapter 7 mean discontinuity for operations.

Pre-packing can be as easily applied to Ch. 7 as 12, if the insolvency court agrees.

But there's no management continuity or parachute in Chapter 7.

I nearly added union agreementd to the sacrifices of Ch. 7, but I'm really not sure if you can be so cavalier with well written agreements like union concessions made in order to enable management to work thru difficulties. At least instinctively I believe that creates a equitable interest.

Which makes me wonder if working out the union position in Chapter 7 wouldn't put the necessary fire under complacent managers.

Re: Intel exits memory business, sale to Hynix for $9B

#95

Post by Cullinet »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #27
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unpopular opinion: Intel may be slowly dying, but this is fine and eventually happens to all ageing corporations. Looking at the technical quality of their non-x86 products, most of it was not great, so it is not surprising to see the rot spread.

> Looking at the technical quality of their non-x86 products, most of it was not great, so it is not surprising to see the rot spread. What's a damn shame is Intel's StrongARM / XScale division in the early-to-mid-2000s. Methinks the world would be very different today if they continued investment in that sector - and we'd have more than just Qualcomm and Apple to contend with.

I remember the inherited DEC team split, causing the Intel development to stall.

This was amid the height of the RISC - CISC drama and hardly noticed at the time.

Re: Intel exits memory business, sale to Hynix for $9B

#96

Post by magicsmoke »

javajosh wrote: post #87
solarkraft wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Foxconn is taiwanese, Samsung south korean. Some Nvidia chips are also made by Samsung. Apart from these inaccuracies however I'd mostly agree that us-american manufacturing is not in a great position, to put it mildly. That's not neccessarily where the real value lies, however: That's usually exactly in the designs, where the USA are strong.

Physical manufacturing doesn't matter until the shooting starts.

America is the world power least worried about physical geography and locations if and when the shooting starts. 2 oceans as moats, plenty of oil and natural resources on its home turf, and all potential flashpoints on the other side of the world. I'm sure America would love to give WW2 another run, especially considering how last time it shook them out of the great depression and devastated everyone else's industrial base.

Re: Intel exits memory business, sale to Hynix for $9B

#97

Post by yourapostasy »

bnt wrote: post #7
lend000 wrote: post #5

Intel's NAND flash was overshadowed by their Optane (not included in the sale) and lagging behind Hynix and Samsung, so I guess this isn't such a bad move. The cynical take is that the CFO running Intel is attempting a bunch of standard corporate restructuring strategies to delay the effects of their slowing technical innovation. It is definitely concerning from a US technical superiority standpoint to consider that…

The real shitshow starts when the CFO becomes the CEO (as is usually the case), so Intel is pretty much dead as is US tech innovation on this scale (until VCs do what China does and start pouring money into hard stuff, not just fluffy software).

The challenge even when "VCs do what China does and start pouring money into hard stuff, not just fluffy software" is that like Feynman's There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom observation, there is plenty of innovation room in the intricacies of "low-end", "low-margin" manufacturing. Divorcing that operational, get-your-hands-dirty aspect from your business closes off insights that arise from the ongoing software-eats-the-world wave still building up steam around the world.

The more you cram together the people networks, culture, knowledge, tooling and practices of how to create all this stuff into a single ecosystem, the more they start making Burke-like Connections. Thinking you can Jira-innovate your way to dominance on an ever-narrowing technology stack is architecture astronaut'ing on a strategic corporate scale.

If Amazon had outsourced their IT operations to an IBM, would their internal culture still have de novo evolved the nascent devops principles back then into AWS?

It isn't what Intel gives up now by selling this business that will hurt their innovation. It is the options that suddenly get a lot more expensive to investigate in the future for future innovation. Technology innovation is evolution: extremely messy, more dead ends than successful adaptations, enormously energy-intensive from lots of majority-repetition, and highly organic. You can certainly optimize around the edges to make it slightly less jagged-edge, but innovation sparks at the tiny interstices, usually not at the top.

Re: Intel exits memory business, sale to Hynix for $9B

#98

Post by fnord77 »

bnt wrote: post #7
lend000 wrote: post #5

Intel's NAND flash was overshadowed by their Optane (not included in the sale) and lagging behind Hynix and Samsung, so I guess this isn't such a bad move. The cynical take is that the CFO running Intel is attempting a bunch of standard corporate restructuring strategies to delay the effects of their slowing technical innovation. It is definitely concerning from a US technical superiority standpoint to consider that…

The real shitshow starts when the CFO becomes the CEO (as is usually the case), so Intel is pretty much dead as is US tech innovation on this scale (until VCs do what China does and start pouring money into hard stuff, not just fluffy software).

> until VCs... start pouring money into hard stuff

this is pretty unlikely. big government projects (.mil, .nasa) are better at kick starting the hard stuff.

america has gotten so fragmented though that I doubt we'll ever have a moon-shot scale project ever again.

Re: Intel exits memory business, sale to Hynix for $9B

#99

Post by danaris »

magicsmoke wrote: post #96
javajosh wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physical manufacturing doesn't matter until the shooting starts.

America is the world power least worried about physical geography and locations if and when the shooting starts. 2 oceans as moats, plenty of oil and natural resources on its home turf, and all potential flashpoints on the other side of the world. I'm sure America would love to give WW2 another run, especially considering how last time it shook them out of the great depression and devastated everyone else's industria…

While I'm sure there are plenty of people who see it this way, it's not 1939 anymore. If it came to war, there would be a plethora of ways China could devastate the US's infrastructure and terrorize its civilian population.

Re: Intel exits memory business, sale to Hynix for $9B

#100

Post by danaris »

mschuster91 wrote: post #13
mehrdada wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is the hyper-competitive, low-margin, commodity NAND business core to what Intel does or aspires to do? (Intel is of course not doing their best at their core, but this does not seem to be an instance of it IMO. This is more analogous to exiting the DRAM business early in their existence)

> How is the hyper-competitive, low-margin, commodity NAND business core to what Intel does or aspires to do? Because that "commodity" gives a company a steady revenue stream. The less diversification a business has, the more vulnerable it is in case of issues (e.g. the fiasco that is the new fab process sizes), market demand shifts or other external events (wars, tariff / trade wars, pandemics, economic crises). Int…

This feels like moving the goalposts: first it was a core part of their business, now it's diversification.

The core of Intel's business is x86.

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