Intel is dying and we can’t save it
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Intel is dying and we can’t save it
1–10 of 268 posts
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#2Good.
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#3And that's okay.
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#4Feels like Microsoft during the Balmer years. Instead of Linux and Mac ascendant, you have AMD and ARM... it doesn’t seem impossible to think a Satya Nadella could turn things around.
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#5Intel innovates in process. Everything else is ruled by backwards compatibility and frenetic management scared to stay the course. (The vast majority of projects are killed if they don't tape out in ~2 years.)
Intel will shift to a TSMC model. They have the best fabs on the planet, and the best fab engineers. I believe it is something like a 3 millions dollars lost per minute if they are idle. They have already started doing that a few years ago, I suspect this will be their final form.
IMHO: The only thing holding them back from the transition are the hundreds of small boondoggle-groups staffed by old-timers too scared to retire, and too scared to do something daring, yet still somehow hang on to their hidey-holes. They lost a ton of key architects to Apple a few years ago, which I also suspect was the reason why the M1 is so badass.
...and if you really want to get sentimental, here's an AMD poster we had in our cubes back in ~1991:
https://linustechtips.com/uploads/monthly_2016_03/Szg2Ppo.jp...
The Sanders-as-Indiana was both funny and infuriating....
(The Farrah Fawcett looking woman was Sander's bombshell wife, compared to Grove at the time, who drove a beat up old car.)
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#6Any analysis that says that Intel's death is being precipitated by AMD and Apple rather than by TSMC is pretty much worth ignoring.
The fact that they're almost equivalent to those two at 5nm when Intel is at 14nm+++++++++ shows how killer the RTL and tape out folk are at Intel.
The real fight has always been at the fab layer.
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#7Feels like Microsoft during the Balmer years. Instead of Linux and Mac ascendant, you have AMD and ARM... it doesn’t seem impossible to think a Satya Nadella could turn things around.
Good observation. The only thing that kept MS going was the massive inertia of Win & Office. It bought them time to pivot to the cloud. And now we have things like VSCode, an ElectronJS app, which is the first microsoft product I've adored in two decades. And TypeScript, which has made the world a better place.
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#8I'd be cautious about the use of "We Can't Save It" in the title of this article. This industry has a history of big players losing steam and then making big comebacks.
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#9Feels like Microsoft during the Balmer years. Instead of Linux and Mac ascendant, you have AMD and ARM... it doesn’t seem impossible to think a Satya Nadella could turn things around.
Realistically, Intel only have to get one process node right to either be right back in the game or buy themselves years more time to play with. They are currently somewhere between 3-5 times behind TSMC lithographically, but nowhere near that far behind in raw performance, which suggests that they could at very least knock AMD off their perch in single-threaded work.
Obviously process nodes are much harder than pretty much anything in the cloud, but this is a serious test of (pure and simple) whether their leadership has the (gender-neutral) balls to not back down.
Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it
#10And that's okay.
If Taiwan ends up getting trampled by China, we'd effectively only have Samsung for cutting edge lithography.