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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

#121

Post by m463 »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #115
m463 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and Tesla

Tesla has sold fewer than a million cars since 2012. That’s a rounding error, and unless they scale up, they will remain a rounding error. Of course that has nothing to do with their overvalued market cap.

I think tesla is scaling up pretty well, considering.

It's almost like a chip company launching at this point and building its own fab.

So, Tesla just will not be able to scale up like a a software company or a company like apple that doesn't own a fab.

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

#122

Post by magicsmoke »

ardy42 wrote: post #110
magicsmoke wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cha…

Apparently when war starts iPhones will be more important than oil, steel, jets, and ships. Or does China build those for the US military as well?

Also, ICBMs fly both ways. But while nobody decides to press the "End Game" button, the US with its self sufficient continent can weather more punches than any other country in any conceivable conventional war scenario.

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

#123

Post by lumost »

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.

The US has an arguably overbuilt military supply chain. But in practice modern military hardware is both expensive and slow. The destructive capacity of modern great powers effectively limits the timeline of any large war to either hours(nuclear bombardment) or weeks ( precision bombing of all military and industrial targets )

The real loss is that industrial enterprises employ a lot of people who are exposed to hard problems. I'm skeptical that the current set of "design"/"marketing" only hardware businesses will last much longer than the international trade pacts that support US patent law.

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

#124

Post by aitait »

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…

Yes sure. But with Russia it would be different. Mind the Poseidon torpedoes.

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

#125

Post by inasio »

baybal2 wrote: post #109
ksec wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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/…

Intel was not the first to NAND flash, but they pretty much started the SSD revolution with the first truly revolutionary SSD. I still remember Anand's review of the first X-25M (only 100GB) [0], immediately becoming the standard-bearer for the SSD revolution.

[0] https://www.anandtech.com/show/2614

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

#126

Post by StillBored »

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)

Its not that large companies can't innovate (re: IBM) its that they can't cannibalize their high margin businesses on risky strategies until its too late.

This happens over and over, intel wasn't willing to bet on low margin phone SoC's at the expensive of their laptop/server business. Now those low margin SoC providers are selling a billion chips a quarter and financing a manufacturing behemoth that intel can't keep up with. Same thing with IBM, porting zos/ztpf/aix/i5/etc to x86 and making servers wasn't something they could justify, so they spun the business off to lenovo which grew it 5x, and now IBM is stuck with hardware they can't get enough volume on in a shrinking (but high margin!) business.

If they were selling POWER10 blue pi's for $50 they might have a chance in the edge space or IoT, but that might cannibalize the business elsewhere.

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

#127

Post by actuator »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #24
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…

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.

> Intel may be slowly dying, but this is fine and eventually happens to all ageing corporations.

The sad bit is, it will lead to consolidation at the hand of few players which would be worse for customers. Intel used to have good products in flash space.

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

#128

Post by ThrowawayR2 »

magicsmoke wrote: post #122
ardy42 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cha…

Apparently when war starts iPhones will be more important than oil, steel, jets, and ships. Or does China build those for the US military as well? Also, ICBMs fly both ways. But while nobody decides to press the "End Game" button, the US with its self sufficient continent can weather more punches than any other country in any conceivable conventional war scenario.

We all saw the manufacturing chaos that ensued when shipping of components and products from overseas was drastically curtailed at the start of the COVID-19 epidemic. While military suppliers are supposedly required to secure their supply chains against such disruptions, it would be surprising if they hadn't screwed big parts of it up after being so long in peacetime.

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

#129

Post by Symmetry »

ardy42 wrote: post #110
magicsmoke wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 cha…

Leading node semiconductors come from Taiwan and South Korea. In the event of WWIII nobody is going to be getting those until the fighting stops. Of the accessible fabs the US has better domestic silicon manufacturing capacity than China. Also China's economy is just as reliant on importing cheap raw materials as the US is on importing cheap manufactured goods.

Hypothetical non-nuclear WWIII is terrible for everybody but the US, with the ability to control oceans that aren't within a few thousand miles of the Chinese mainland, is probably in a better position than China is to recover economically.

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

#130

Post by magicsmoke »

lumost wrote: post #123
javajosh wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Physical manufacturing doesn't matter until the shooting starts.

The US has an arguably overbuilt military supply chain. But in practice modern military hardware is both expensive and slow. The destructive capacity of modern great powers effectively limits the timeline of any large war to either hours(nuclear bombardment) or weeks ( precision bombing of all military and industrial targets ) The real loss is that industrial enterprises employ a lot of people who are exposed to hard…

This. The US's biggest future threat isn't having its military production choked off in a conflict. It's having its military complex become irrelevant as the world moves towards a model where money and consumer technology become the main avenues for influence and control, and where the moment the US tries to flex its military muscle it gets put on a decades-long blacklist by members of the global economy for starting a mess.
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