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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

#181
post #107
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…

>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.

Intel illegally abusing its market position. Again. If Intel was Chinese they would be sued into the ground.

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

#182
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A more proper comparison might be revenue instead of units sold. Otherwise I could compare Intel's 8051 sales figures which dwarf AMD's gpu sales figures.

(and tesla does make their own chips)

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Given that the practical survival of technology megacorps depends heavily on internal competition and making unpopular internal moves, I'm surprised that megacorps today still don't foster internal competition and encouraging the propagation of negative opinions as much as they should.

As an example of an org that does it _right_ (even if I have absolutely no idea _how_ they do it), look at Apple: when the iPhone was ready for release they made the gut-wrenching decision to axe the superbly profitable and hugely popular iPod product line. It's hard to imagine another company doing something as drastic at that, especially when the bright future of the iPhone wasn't really established until after the defeat of Blackberry and Windows Phone by 2013.

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

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Let's make things clear: you shouldn't. You should aspire to amorality, just as they have done. It's not about revenge, it's about winning, and doing what it takes to win. Half of the people in America look at foreign policy through the lens of naive capitalism and the other half look at foreign policy through the lens of naive morality. Both are incredibly foolish, as China has taught us. To be clear, the current ad…

I have just not learned anything from this. The way China got there was working hard and developing its industrial and scientific capacity. I don't think at this point the US has even a military upper hand over China. If there is a hot war, China will be able to produce weapons quicker than the US can assemble a coalition against China, and at the same time China will stop supplying every vital export to the USA. The only way out for the US is to do what it used to do in the past, which is to develop its industrial and scientific capacity. There is no way to solve this problem through war.

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

#186

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…

Intel 600p was a disaster. I'm curious why they designed such product for first NVMe drive.

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

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Intel 600p was a disaster. I'm curious why they designed such product for first NVMe drive.

Intel pretty much didn't design it. It wasn't worthwhile for them to invest in making a consumer-oriented NVMe SSD controller of their own. Instead, they used the first NVMe SSD controller from Silicon Motion, whose SATA SSD controllers Intel had been using for a while. That SM2260 NVMe controller was cheap but bad, because it was made on a 40nm process (compared to 28nm or smaller for most NVMe controllers) and it was Silicon Motion's very first NVMe controller so they had lots of bugs.
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