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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

#101

Post by AnonC »

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…

Cyber warfare is probably a more likely and a bigger threat than missiles. Attacking core infrastructure (like power grids, for example) connected to a network would bring things to a crawl or to a stop.

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

#102

Post by tharne »

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…

Oceans are nice, for sure. But if you're reliant on China and others for all of your manufactured goods including semi-conductors, you're in for a world of pain, oceans or not.

Likewise, oil and gas aren't all that helpful if you can't get them out of the ground because your equipment is broken and all the replacement parts are made in China.

I say this as a patriotic American. Comparisons to WWII are fairly off-base because in the 1930's and 40's we were much less reliant on foreign countries for manufactured goods.

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

#103

Post by dragontamer »

mathattack wrote: post #91
bnt wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

IBM's chips seem pretty innovative to me. A large amount of IBM's software is stagnant though.

OpenCAPI, SMT4... and POWER10 has those GDDR modules coming for ~1000GBps memory bandwidths.

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

#104

Post by tharne »

yourapostasy wrote: post #97
bnt wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's amazing that pretty much every economist, journalist, business school professor and overpaid McKinsey consultant miss this critical point about how innovation works.

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

#105

Post by tharne »

oblio wrote: post #37
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

iPhone was also barely making a dent in Nokia and Blackerry's margins in the first couple of years. The difference is the update cycles are longer in this business but intel could be the next Nokia in 10-20 years.

By then all the current board members will be retired :-)

And right there you just pinpointed the reason why so few companies truly innovate anymore. There's no benefit to innovation if the only thing you're ever evaluated on is how profitable you were in the prior three months.

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

#106

Post by sitkack »

mathattack wrote: post #91
bnt wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

IBM has a full hardware/software stack, cloud computing and consulting services. What is your basis the claim?

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

#107

Post by ksec »

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…

>Intel's NAND flash was overshadowed by their Optane

It is important to note Optane is manufactured in partnership with Micron. The partnership is that Intel still owns part of the IP, but actual manufacturing with guarantee capacity is still done by Micron. And judging from previous Micron Investor notes, Intel hasn't been keeping up with their Optane Sales and buying agreement. So that means Intel will no longer be doing any NAND / Optane manufacturing by themselves.

Few other point worth noting,

Intel has one of the best Enterprise / DC SSD range on the market. And they are extremely popular in wholesales channel as well as with System vendors. Intel has been using these SSD as weapons / incentives by giving away SSD with enough Xeon CPU volume. One of the few reasons why AMD EPYC hasn't been gaining much ground at all in Enterprise segment.

The NAND Plant is in China. Wroth pointing out in the current geopolitical climate.

NAND is a commodity market. It doesn't swing up and down like DRAM in the old days mostly due to less players in the market and HyperScaler's volume creating enough buffer. But generally speaking Intel doesn't like commodity business. May be not commodity market per se, but Intel doesn't like margin fluctuation.

Overall I think it is a good move. Most of the time I am very cynical of CFO running companies. But I give Bob Swan some credit because so far things seems to be moving in the right direction. While the pace might not be fast enough. ( Mostly due to inertia ) But at least it is better than BK's era.

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

#108

Post by seg_lol »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #77
MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that was spectacularly dumb, considering how Intel grew big themselves: out-competing the high-end, big-bucks server and workstation vendors with low-end, mass-market CPUs that eventually, through economies of scale, made them obsolete. Yet Intel thought "eh this cheap, mass-market CPU that every household has dozens of will lead nowhere, lets sell it lol". they probably deluded themselves that they could do it i…

That decision was made by the CEO. An interesting case of alternative history would be: What if Jobs asked the CEO to make the processors, and the CEO went to the employees to get feedback on the idea. My guess is that the engineers would be like ‘yeah let’s do this, we will learn so much!’ and the marketing/business folk would be like ‘is this a $100M opportunity? nope, don’t engage’

Imagine if questions like these were brought to the whole worker base? There is so much knowledge and intelligence at the leaves of the organization that doesn't make it up the chain.

The amount of fiddling and coddling that is done to "protect" the director and GM level folks is incredible. With each level respinning the facts to match a pre-approved mileiu.

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

#109

Post by baybal2 »

ksec wrote: post #107
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…

>Intel's NAND flash was overshadowed by their Optane It is important to note Optane is manufactured in partnership with Micron. The partnership is that Intel still owns part of the IP, but actual manufacturing with guarantee capacity is still done by Micron. And judging from previous Micron Investor notes, Intel hasn't been keeping up with their Optane Sales and buying agreement. So that means Intel will no longer be…

There is a lot of flash makers, way, way more than DRAM makers. And there is tons of flash going to things other than PCs, unlike DRAM. Regular DDR DRAM only goes to high-end desktop PCs, and servers, with few laptops. Everything else has switched to the LP-DDR line even if there is no explicit need for energy saving (LPDDR4 may actually cost you less than regular DDR4 these days, especially given the extra for DIMM/SO-DIMM, through hole sockets, assembly cost, and wasted PCB space).

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

#110

Post by ardy42 »

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…

> 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.

Can you grow semiconductors on corn plants? Big moats don't help with embargoes, and if your economy is based on international trade (like the globalization crowd has championed), an embargo would be crippling.

Around WWII, they used to call America the "workshop of the world," but China has that title now.

Also, you seem to be forgetting that long range, intercontinental missiles and bombers exist now, when they didn't during WWII.

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