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Intel's disruption is now complete

jamesallworth.medium.com

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Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#401

Post by pyb »

credit_guy wrote: post #330
SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #20

As someone who worked on Intel's phone chip: we definitely didn't win it. We fucked it up twelve ways to Sunday. Why: giant egos. There were turf wars between Austin, Santa Clara and Israel over who would design it, and the team that won out had long since lost its best principle engineers and had no clue how to spin the architecture to meet the design win. Otellini's hindsight hedge is pure spin: we knew the landing…

This is why good CEO's deserve 100x, 200x, or 300x the median salary. They don't work 300 times more than a regular employees, but they are not supposed to. They are there to prevent all the bad things that naturally happen at large companies: turf wars, bloat, focus on process rather than delivery, duplicated work, manual and buggy processes when automation is possible, unfocused investments, mindless chasing of buz…

Do you observe any correlation between CEO compensation and their skills at the above?

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#402

Post by agumonkey »

spamizbad wrote: post #133
agumonkey wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's somehow incredible how this infiltrates even the most advanced classes of company in terms of technical knowledge. You'd expect a bit more objectivity

One value that cuts through most of elite society is the thought that competition produces better outcomes. So “competing” instead of collaborating with another office is good, actually, because competition will breed excellence (or something). When you’re small all that competitive energy is directed at your competitors. When you’re king of the hill that competitive energy turns inward.

They should compete against the odds instead.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#403

Post by generix00 »

notSupplied wrote: post #92
SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #20

As someone who worked on Intel's phone chip: we definitely didn't win it. We fucked it up twelve ways to Sunday. Why: giant egos. There were turf wars between Austin, Santa Clara and Israel over who would design it, and the team that won out had long since lost its best principle engineers and had no clue how to spin the architecture to meet the design win. Otellini's hindsight hedge is pure spin: we knew the landing…

I have a theory about why turf wars like this happens: the more successful and wealthy an entity, the greater opportunity there is for a manager to take wealth instead of make it. When you’re scrappy and broke, the only path to success is to make the company successful. When the company is rich and multitudinous, an individual can gain more from politics and turf wars rather than actually trying to push an already hi…

Backstabbing intertribal warfare is a bold new idea.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#404

Post by T-A »

chorsestudios wrote: post #342
wmf wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Samsung is not that bad. They just announced a 5nm chip; it's not as good as TSMC but it's not as far behind as Intel either.

Right, don't underestimate Samsung - they have top tier fabs and manufacture a lot of chips. If the world has all their eggs in the basket of one company that company is ASML.

Right, so our eggs are not all in one basket, but in two. One claimed as rebel territory by the CCP and one still technically at war with a nuclear-armed hermit kingdom.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#405

Post by Spivak »

raziel2701 wrote: post #354
systemvoltage wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am afraid, they're going to be using US gov as their wheelchair to survive a few more decades: https://newsroom.intel.com/news/intel-wins-us-government-adv...

So it's gonna be another too big to fail thing again.

Less too big to fail, more a national security interest in ensuring the US can make chips during a hypothetical conflict.

Great if you’re the company the gov’t blesses for this purpose (like Microsoft) but not so great for their competitors.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#406

Post by galaxyLogic »

dmix wrote: post #371
notSupplied wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a theory about why turf wars like this happens: the more successful and wealthy an entity, the greater opportunity there is for a manager to take wealth instead of make it. When you’re scrappy and broke, the only path to success is to make the company successful. When the company is rich and multitudinous, an individual can gain more from politics and turf wars rather than actually trying to push an already hi…

As I've linked to many times on HN: The Iron Law of Bureaucracy > Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people": > First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricu…

That sounds like an ironclad law. But is there empirical evidence for it? And a rational explanation behind it? I mean it's very strict as a rule: "in EVERY case the second group ... ".

Strong claims like that require strong evidence and a theory of WHY that would (always) be the outcome.

I'm thinking of society as large. That is an organization too. Are we doomed by bureaucracy?

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#407

Post by karmasimida »

SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #20

As someone who worked on Intel's phone chip: we definitely didn't win it. We fucked it up twelve ways to Sunday. Why: giant egos. There were turf wars between Austin, Santa Clara and Israel over who would design it, and the team that won out had long since lost its best principle engineers and had no clue how to spin the architecture to meet the design win. Otellini's hindsight hedge is pure spin: we knew the landing…

Intel didn't have a real competition for a long time. It gets misguided over its own might eventually.

Turf war and cookie leaking is a problem for all big companies, we are all humans, when there is no external threat, we turns to infighting. After all, why not? This will compensate the missing competing pressure that is also necessary as well.

But unable to have a cohesive strategy and call the shot would be Intel's own downfall. Looking back the past decade, they are on a one-way losing path, without any meaningful expansion. Had they have a decisive leadership, it will definitely fare better right now.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#408

Post by AnthonyMouse »

viburnum wrote: post #235
notSupplied wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a theory about why turf wars like this happens: the more successful and wealthy an entity, the greater opportunity there is for a manager to take wealth instead of make it. When you’re scrappy and broke, the only path to success is to make the company successful. When the company is rich and multitudinous, an individual can gain more from politics and turf wars rather than actually trying to push an already hi…

This is why extremely steep marginal takes rates improve economic efficiency. If you can’t get rich by playing office politics you might as well enjoy making a good product.

> If you can’t get rich by playing office politics you might as well enjoy making a good product.

It seems to me this would go the other way. Making a good product (in the sense that it's successful in the market) is what you want a company to do, but that's the thing mostly aligned with the profit incentive.

If profits are taxed heavily then spending resources on making a better product so that more people buy it doesn't make you a lot more money, but spending resources on office politics brings non-monetary personal benefits like status and control, so managers would have a greater relative incentive to do those things. See e.g. Soviet Union.

One of the biggest problems today is actually that the tax code provides incentives for corporations to retain profits within the organization rather than paying them out to shareholders to invest in something else, which results in inefficient corporate bloating.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#409

Post by whack »

xenocyon wrote: post #316
whack wrote: post #194

This is a controversial opinion, but I don't agree with the idea that big corporations should make an entry into every single adjacent market. If the company has core expertise and advantages that can deliver a decisive win in a known-lucrative market, then it's a no brainer. But if that's not the case, why run around chasing shadows everywhere, instead of focusing on harvesting the markets where you're already winni…

> The purpose of a corporation... to maximize returns for its investors. That's a common misunderstanding. "In nearly all legal jurisdictions, disinterested and informed directors have the discretion to act in what they believe to be the interest of the business corporate entity, even if this differs from maximizing profits for present shareholders. Usually maximizing shareholder value is not a legal obligation, but…

I was really hoping to avoid going off on this tangent. To be more precise, I was comparing existing-in-perpetuity vs maximizing-investor-returns, and the latter is a more important goal. Whether corporations should prioritize morality and employee/customer interests, is a whole other discussion that is best debated elsewhere.

Re: Intel's disruption is now complete

#410

Post by ineedasername »

I don't think Intel is out of things. Apple's M1 chip on preliminary analysis looks like a huge game changer.... for Apple. They don't have much of a history of licensing their tech (except for a disastrous period of Mac clones waaay back) so I don't see the M1 disrupting the notebook/desktop market.

That leaves AMD. AMD Isn't eating Intel's lunch, they've had a pretty good taste of it and are about to say "no, not just lunch, we're taking all the food".

But there's a window. My not-very-expert opinion is that the window is 2 years. That's how long Intel has, while AMD chips away its market share with new installed systems, to turn things around. If they do it, they'll still have to claw back their previous position, or there will simply be a new stable equilibrium, but I think Intel's dominance in the server & consumer-grade space gives them some breathing room.

In the consumer space, shoppers for high end systems e.g., gaming etc are gone: AMD has them now, and more every day. They have me, that's for sure. But the much much larger consumer market is not in gaming. Intel has the name recognition for the average consumer, and it's their hardware in most consumer grade systems. A quick glance at a dozen consumer grade laptops & desktops from HP & Dell don't show any AMD CPUs in them.

So, Intel still has that level of inertia. If they can limit the bleeding in server & high end systems to a rapid bleed-out instead of a near instant & complete gushing torrent, that inertia may be enough to allow them to claw things back if they're able to execute within the next two years.

I'm no Intel fanboi: They lost me unless/until they turn things around. And from where they are now, I don't rate their chance more than 50/50, which might be generous. But I do think they've still got 2 years until their viability is really threatened. At that point, and I'm sure they've got some skunkworks & low-profile conversations going on about this already, they'll need to look at offloading high performance fabs to TSMC.

Personally, from a global strategy standpoint, I think the US might not want to lose what is really a strategic asset that way though, so we could also see some type of subsidy/bailout/whatever to prop them up.

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