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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

#161

Post by javajosh »

Symmetry wrote: post #129
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…

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…

Americans in 1941 were much different than they are now. My sense is that Americans then were more practical, more humble (while still being feisty), and they had a better handle on physical and social reality. We could do so much so quickly then. But now, during late-stage capitalism, information systems dominate physical systems, and that's a great way to lose a war. When everyone wants their cut, wants their say, is willing to fight dirty, with tooth and nail in the legal system to get their way, it slows everything down to a crawl, and makes everything more expensive. Want to preview Americans in wartime? Look at any and every city infrastructure project currently deadlocked and billions over-budget. That's us. And while our broken justice system grinds through the paperwork, the courthouse gets bombed by the barbarians who were never slowed down by paperwork.

This is less an argument against civilization, and more like a wake-up call: America has multiple interlocked badly broken systems that all need massive reform. Forget about justice, I think its necessary for our civilization to survive. It is urgent that we reform our judicial system (where any involvement IS the punishment), our medical system (where getting sick is a prelude to bankrupcy), our social safety net (where getting fired without a personal support net means homelessness), consumer rights (where deregulation and arbitration clauses leave individual consumers to fight alone against huge well-funded interests), the tax system (which is too large and complex for anyone to use properly), and education (where students must take enormous debt to get educated, and so much of that debt funds administrative overhead). Personally, I don't even think these things should be about your location on a politcal scale - right or left, these are table stakes for a 21st century democracy. The lack of on-shore manufacturing, particularly for big infrastructure projects, e.g. things like roads, the electrical grid, tall buildings, and factories, is merely a symptom, I think, of all the rest. Yeah, the consumer market is strong, but for the everyday Joe, it is painful to deal with all these broken systems on a day-to-day basis.

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

#162

Post by coliveira »

jjoonathan wrote: post #152
coliveira wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a big difference. The US was led astray due to its economic ideology. There was a concerted effort to move industry to other countries, so that salaries in the US would be depressed for lower income classes and the owners of industry could realize larger profits for a generation. Now the country is finally realizing that this is a losing proposition, while China saw the opportunity and based its economy on i…

Yes, that's what happened. Yes, the US was incredibly stupid and had a big hand (the biggest) in its own downfall. No, that doesn't mean China's hands are clean in the matter. Ultimately, politics are amoral and it doesn't matter, but to the extent that we're interested in making purely academic moral distinctions there's no need to whitewash China's actions. They did us dirty, and if we have the option to do them di…

Let's make things clear: China didn't invade the US. China didn't steal natural resources from the US. China didn't make Americans slaves. China didn't promise something they couldn't deliver. They just played the capitalist game with the US and became rich. Why should I harbor bad intentions against them?

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

#163

Post by qznc »

StillBored wrote: post #126
mathattack wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Simon Wardley describes it very well as "past success breeds inertia": https://medium.com/wardleymaps/exploring-the-map-ad0266fad59...

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

#164

Post by georgeecollins »

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…

The US actually depends on trade much less than most nations. Any economic embargo would be bad, but in general much worse for almost any other nation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_trade-to-...

Also, surprisingly, more people in the US work in manufacturing today than in 1939. And obviously the $ value of that manufacturing is much higher due to increased productivity.

https://thelevelfield.com/dashboard/us-manufacturing-employm...

Any conflict would be terrible and should be avoided, but its not like the US became very vulnerable recently.

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

#165

Post by dba7dba »

Open-Sourcery wrote: post #44
keypusher wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple does research, design and software but all the manufacturing and assembly is done in China by Chinese companies. Mostly Samsung and Foxconn. Nvidia is the same but the chips are fabbed by TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor).

Ahh yes, Foxconn and Samsung, two famous Chinese companies...

Foxconn = Taiwan

Samsung = South Korea

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

#167

Post by jcranmer »

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…

> 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 100-year history of strategic bombing theory has consistently held that once you start strategic bombing, the enemy's will or ability to fight will collapse very quickly. The actual application of strategic bombing has consistently failed to live up to those expectations, with the atomic bombings of Japan being the only example people give of countries capitulating due to strategic bombing, and even then it's still debatable what factors induced it to surrender.

It should also be pointed out that people saying great power wars will be swift and decisive is usually followed by a great power war that is exactly the opposite of swift and decisive.

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

#168

Post by ardy42 »

javajosh wrote: post #161
Symmetry wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Americans in 1941 were much different than they are now. My sense is that Americans then were more practical, more humble (while still being feisty), and they had a better handle on physical and social reality. We could do so much so quickly then. But now, during late-stage capitalism, information systems dominate physical systems, and that's a great way to lose a war. When everyone wants their cut, wants their say,…

> where getting fired without a personal support net means homelessness

I think you're spot on, but I want to point out the above situation was created by design. IIRC, part of the creation of a modern market system was the demolition of traditional social safety nets, so peasants were put in the situation where the alternative to selling their labor in the market was starvation. Early market advocates understood this clearly, and praised the motivating power of an empty stomach.

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

#169

Post by icegreentea2 »

wtallis wrote: post #146
icegreentea2 wrote: post #76

A tinge of sadness. I remember reading reviews of the X-25 like a decade ago and being so excited (it was this anandtech review https://www.anandtech.com/show/2614 ). To me it was the dawn of the "common SSD". Just now I've looked at a bunch of timelines of SSD history, and I suspect the X-25 was similar to many other people. There was certainly a lot of SSD activity prior to the X-25 being released, but it seemed li…

Intel pretty much stopped being relevant to the consumer SSD market as soon as the SSD market as a whole broadened enough to support the development of client/consumer-specific SSD controllers. Once Intel could no longer compete by stripping a few features out of an enterprise SSD design, their consumer SSD products had no real advantage over other brands. (Minor exception: Intel's consumer QLC NVMe drives have consi…

Oh totally. By the time I actually had my own money to buy an SSD (so like 2013 or so), Intel was completely out of the running (I went for a Crucial). As you said, I remember looking at some reviews last year and being surprised that Intel was in the running at all in any category.

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

#170

Post by monocasa »

kelnos wrote: post #154
renw0rp wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not for much longer

Parent is being flippant here, but there's some truth to this. If we get into a Cold War with China (or, worse, a shooting war), China may attempt to forcibly re-unify Taiwan, and they have a pretty good chance of succeeding.

Very true. However there's only a very slim chance that they'd get TSMC out of that. Taiwan has made it pretty clear that they'd rather destroy TSMC than let it fall into PRC hands. Since they don't have nukes, holding a large portion of the global semiconductor supply change hostage is a very large part of the power they wield geopolitically.

ironically, Taiwan falling to the PRC probably makes the US the inheritor of at least down to TSMC's 5nm node. That DoD backed foundry in Arizona then being orphaned would probably mean it either spins off as a US company or goes on the market in some backroom deal.

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