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Intel is dying and we can’t save it

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131–140 of 268 posts

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#131

I see Intel not being dominant, having to take a back seat, shrinking a bit. But dying?? Nup, I'm not seeing this at all. I mean AMD for years survived in a situation much worse then Intel currently is. Intel's productions nodes might be behind TSMC's but they are still quite valuable, not all chips need 5nm processes. Heck we could say most chips don't need it. Intel is still innovating, just because they currently…

> might even take back dominance (in a 2-3 years)

Well, they won't even have that EUV capacity in 2-3 years. ASML is almost fully booked at this point.

The way the industry is moving to custom chips won't wait for Intel. And realistically, the trend is already there, next stage of cloud evolution would be application specific chips for cloud native services, like storage/DB/ML, etc. There is zero chance it would scale back.

And I am not sure why everyone here is taking 'dying' so literally. Losing influence is another form of dying. It will take a long time for a company to cease to exist after it becomes irrelevant.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m almost positive Intel have tech ready to deploy to be on top again. They will have been developing it... but not needed to use it until they came under competition pressure.

Jim Keller's apparent rage quit has me questioning that. I was bullish on Intel until quite recently. I was able to convince myself that they were taking the L on 10nm to focus completely on a full, true EUV transition, in order to be at the top of the game just everyone else was hitting that wall in order to dominate again. That turned out to be overly optimistic.

Yes I agree. Jim Keller was the canary in the coal mine. When he left without finishing his assignment, after a decades long reputation for excellence at multiple companies, that was a clear signal to sell your Intel stock. Intel could be the new Northern Telecom (though I felt the same way about Microsoft ten years ago and ... it didn't turn out as expected)

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just puts into perspective how stagnate cpus have been, ~14 years and we are just starting to move to more than 4 core processors on prosumer systems.

Sad really. I was so passionate about hardware then. I lost interest because the innovation just dropped off a cliff. We were nearly exponential before the Core i series. Interestingly during that period Servers have had many-core CPU's. It just seems that Intel hasn't had a reason to push the envelope on the consumer side.

Pour one out for Denard scaling.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#137
Like everything is life, there is the circle of birth, growth, death.

Intel contributed too much. The world owes them a lot. Thanks for contributions.

Intel is dying is totally ok, it will open up more competition and innovation.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jim Keller's apparent rage quit has me questioning that. I was bullish on Intel until quite recently. I was able to convince myself that they were taking the L on 10nm to focus completely on a full, true EUV transition, in order to be at the top of the game just everyone else was hitting that wall in order to dominate again. That turned out to be overly optimistic.

Yes I agree. Jim Keller was the canary in the coal mine. When he left without finishing his assignment, after a decades long reputation for excellence at multiple companies, that was a clear signal to sell your Intel stock. Intel could be the new Northern Telecom (though I felt the same way about Microsoft ten years ago and ... it didn't turn out as expected)

I agree. From an investment perspective though, there is enormous potential in Mobileye. They're way off in Israel, so they don't get the attention of the valley SDC companies, but they are way ahead of many, many others.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#139
post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> Fab has lifetime of 2-3(?) years >> Many Intel fabs are from the early 2000s. Some are from the 90s. What do you mean 2-3 years? > I think they're referring to each line as a new fab, rather than the complex of buildings they're in, which is pretty fair. Even so, wouldn't the 2-3 year number only apply to CPUs? Couldn't they keep the lines running making things that don't require top of the line processes, like U…

Yes, for chips that need leading edge density like CPUs. Of course the lines stay open after that for cases you've laid out, but there's a lot of financial reasons why that needs to be basically gravy train money at that point with the lines being fully amortized and having paid for themselves many times over.

For those retired lines, don't they sell them off to lower tier manufacturers pretty quickly? Say, within 5 years?

I am no expert but I didn't think the site would be just accumulating its n-1, n-2 generation lines to produce lower grade stuff in the same fab walls. They take up space that they want to continue producing top of line latest output. I thought.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#140

Intel has at least 20 more years and probably dozens of real chances to reclaim past market position and maybe even more so. Intel is a large company with a massive market cap. The bigger they are, the longer they fall. They just have so much runway and market gravity. For comparison, Apple shot itself in the foot repeatedly for at least 10 years before Steve Jobs rejoined, and it took 10 more years after that before…

I don’t think this is right: it completely ignores the iPod, for one. And the iMac plays a role here too.

And OSX (which came from Jobs via NeXT).
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