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

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

#131

Post by rossdavidh »

Note: once upon a time, Intel's fab strategy involved new fabs making CPU's (x86) for a couple years, then being repurposed for memory. This meant that their memory fabs were practically free (i.e. they were building them for CPU business anyway), which helped them compete on price in memory.

I'm sure they still find some use for their no-longer-brand-new fabs, but this kind of examination of each business line in isolation doesn't take into account synergies like that. I can easily imagine Intel doing one "makes good business sense" decision after another, until they are no longer able to manufacture competitively at all.

Oh, wait, maybe that already happened a couple years ago...

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

#132

Post by nemothekid »

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.

>Apparently when war starts iPhones will be more important than oil, steel, jets, and ships

You are focusing too much on the war aspect instead of what happens at home.

What happens to companies like Apple and nVidia when for whatever reason they can no longer manufacture in China. Apple luckily has a rainy day fund to fund itself until heat death of the universe, but other companies may not be so lucky.

I’m sure it would take decades at this point to develop the talent, infrastructure and scale in manufacturing that China currently has

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

#133

Post by jjoonathan »

hibbelig wrote: post #117
tharne wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think the consultants get paid for it, which helps.

Yep. China figured out that they can just pay the hand to shoot the foot. The hand commissions some academic opinions on the virtues of foot-shooting so that in the unlikely case someone tries to hold it accountable it can claim it didn't know that foot-shooting was bad.

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

#134

Post by stefan_ »

nabla9 wrote: post #66
agumonkey wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone did remind us that TSMC relies on dutch machines for wafer productions. It's not china-skills-black-hole as one could think (I used to)

ASML is currently the only maker of EUV lithography machines in the world. Each machine costs over $200 million. TSMC, Samsugn, Intel are all relying on ASML.

Well that's okay, they also own parts of ASML.

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

#135

Post by coliveira »

m463 wrote: post #121
TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a fantasy. Tesla sells cars, not chips. A chip manufacturing company can sell 1M chips this year and 100M two years from now. A car company cannot even go from 1M to 2M without a lot of effort. It is not a business that can scale easily, especially not at the price point at which Tesla is operating.

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

#136

Post by coliveira »

jjoonathan wrote: post #133
hibbelig wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the consultants get paid for it, which helps.

Yep. China figured out that they can just pay the hand to shoot the foot. The hand commissions some academic opinions on the virtues of foot-shooting so that in the unlikely case someone tries to hold it accountable it can claim it didn't know that foot-shooting was bad.

Sorry, but China didn't do this, it was the US that did it to itself. China just saw the opportunity and acted on it.

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

#137

Post by runamok »

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…

I have a suspicion in a future war a swarm of cheap drones will do things like take out aircraft carriers and waste a large portion of that arsenal.

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

#138

Post by coredog64 »

Cullinet wrote: post #57
mobilio wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same happens to Boeing too.

Difference between the 777 and 787 programs : for 787 management was in a tower in Chicago not looking over the factory floor. Obviously the distributed manufacturing introduced with the 777 meant it became possible to argue that the ideal management perch is virtual. But this was a profound separation from tradition and I sold my shares on learning of the new HQ. The problem is that real engineering often absorbs "t…

Boeing HQ was across the street from Boeing Field while the 777 was engineered and built in Everett. There’s a huge engineering building in Everett that was nicknamed the “Taj Mullaley”, after Alan Mullaley, who ran the 777 project (and later Ford Motor Company).

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

#139

Post by didibus »

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.

Why you all worried about war, who'd start it? The US?

Right now we're just talking about economies and being able to have a well off society where people don't struggle to make ends meet. And from that point of view, the future of the US as it continues to lose competitive advantage to other countries doesn't look as good as it used too.

Are we saying the US plan in case this trend reaches extreme levels is to start a war?

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

#140

Post by mrguyorama »

tharne wrote: post #105
oblio wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Worse, if you're a 60yr old board member, you're not going to approve of a project that wont get returns to you quickly. How can any company make a 10 year investment when none of the board cares longer term than their retirement in a couple years
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