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Intel is dying and we can’t save it

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

#161

Post by abacadaba »

ahepp wrote: post #155
0xy wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they're propping Intel up as their last bastion of chip superiority they've already lost. The US knows they need to defend Taiwan with the full weight of their military resources. This means war in the event of an invasion or takeover. If the US loses influence over Taiwan and subsequently TSMC, they've lost. In this phase of global geopolitics, whoever controls the chips has the influence. You can't do anything w…

How important is it, strategically, to have the most advanced process tech? As far as I know, military tech tends to lag commercial significantly.

Only so much as it leads to faster AI.

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

#162

Post by blihp »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #71
exintelwithop wrote: post #39

I worked at Intel years ago. At that time, The ratio of excellent to useless people I experienced there was 1:40. That is way out of whack. I am certain it only got worse because all the 1/40’s I knew left. They are going to have to go and get people who have modern skillsets and mindsets and those people don’t want to live in Hillsboro. And it’s going to be expensive. And those people don’t tolerate dead weight. My…

> The ratio of excellent to useless people I experienced there was 1:40 This has to be hyperbole but the rest of your comment makes me think you're being serious. I have only worked at small companies My guess is you thought those people were useless because you didn't understand the role they played in the company. However, I'll admin again that I don't have first hand experience. I'd genuinely love to hear from oth…

There are absolutely staggering amounts of waste in large, especially market dominating, companies. Mainly because they can afford it... for a while. The difference with most smaller, and even mid-sized, companies is that if they made even a fraction of the number and size mistakes (and I'm only talking in relative, rather than absolute, terms) that large companies do they would be bankrupt in a year or two. Large companies typically have momentum and either very large (i.e. other large companies and governments) or very large numbers (i.e. many 10's or 100's of millions of consumers) of customers who are slow to change. (Intel has both) It will often be years before catastrophic mistakes will even be acknowledged and even longer before the company is irreversibly impacted by them. As a result, you can pack in people for years who really have no business being there without immediate negative impact.

While people would likely disagree on the exact ratio in a given company, it's far worse than you would ever imagine. The inevitable eventually happens: they cease being able to make (or make very well) the very product(s) they're known for. Occasionally companies will get shocked back to life as they see it all slipping away. More commonly they just wither and die as they are unable or unwilling to change the culture that got them to that point.

Do I believe 1:40? If anything, I think that might be a conservative number at this point. Intel has become tragically/comically incompetent.

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

#163

Post by jabl »

kllrnohj wrote: post #41
mhh__ wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pret…

> They are currently somewhere between 3-5 times behind TSMC lithographically No they aren't. The nanometer names are only kinda comparable within a single company, but they are not comparable beyond that. It's like saying that Chrome is 6x further ahead than Safari because Chrome is on 87 and Safari is only on 14. Same thing with fabs here, it's just a version number that counts down and has been for a long while. I…

> Remember that as far as the fab goes, performance is just what clock speeds can be hit, and Intel's clocks are the highest - they have the fastest transistors. 14nm+++++ is a meme/joke, but the actual transistor speed of it is still downright impressive.

My understanding is that Intel's fast transistors come at a cost of not being particularly dense for the process node they are implemented on. So it's a question of design philosophy as well. Intel has fast, but somewhat sparse transistors, they use a lot of hand layout etc. to really optimize their designs so they can clock high.

Other players use a different philosophy. Slower, but denser transistors and more automated layout may not clock as high, but the improved density gives you more cores (e.g. AMD vs Intel) and/or allows a more "brainiac" core design (wider, deeper ROB, better branch prediction, more cache, etc. like Apple M1), and also gets you a better turnaround time.

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

#164

Post by swiftcoder »

CPAhem wrote: post #142
nwmcsween wrote: post #117

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.

That's monopoly power for you. Right now there's competition to Intel again which means processors will probably start getting much faster again. That's one of the few great things about capitalism - competition drives innovation.

> That's one of the few great things about capitalism - competition drives innovation.

Just so long as the aforementioned monopolies don't choke out competition. Sadly, we seem to end up with a lot of pseudo-monopolies in the tech industry.

I wonder how much more competition we could have with strict monopolies regulation on acquisitions and mergers?

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

#165

Post by jabl »

RobLach wrote: post #121

Intel could stop making CPUs altogether and would still be a huge player. This is all the result of Intel fab failings. They have the talent to compete, dunno if the leadership wants to take to it.

Well, the other viewpoint is that Intel is really a fab company, which is in the business of selling silicon real estate.

The CPU design business is just a tiny part, most of the investment goes into fabs and process.

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

#166

Post by monocasa »

supernova87a wrote: post #139
monocasa wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They're not really taking up space per se. For the cost of a fab, a new building (or new wing of a building) is peanuts.

Adding on to that, in a lot of ways the fab is the building, and at a bare minimum you'd be resetting a lot of the yield issues you fixed by moving it to a new space. So then you'd be left with an old node and yield issues, and what's the point of that?

There's also a ton of trade secret style IP still in the old nodes that could help a competitor, so why let it leave your property? Intel for instance is so into preventing trade market theft on the specifics of their nodes that they (at least used to) manually drill out every mobile device camera allowed in their fabs, in addition to the normal "no outside electronics past this point" security stations.

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

#167

Post by robk »

jrumbut wrote: post #102
exintelwithop wrote: post #39

I worked at Intel years ago. At that time, The ratio of excellent to useless people I experienced there was 1:40. That is way out of whack. I am certain it only got worse because all the 1/40’s I knew left. They are going to have to go and get people who have modern skillsets and mindsets and those people don’t want to live in Hillsboro. And it’s going to be expensive. And those people don’t tolerate dead weight. My…

It's odd that when people from Intel talk about Intel on the Internet or with me in person it's so frequently about high level strategy and C level/Board of Directors politics. The way they're spoken of exhibits a lot of careful examination. I can't think of another company like that, maybe Microsoft years ago or GE. Is this something I'm imagining or is that a frequent topic of conversation at all levels of Intel?

Read mini msft

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

#168

Post by arp242 »

ChrisIsTaken wrote: post #79
CyberRabbi wrote: post #51

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…

Intel has a very impressive balance sheet for a failing company, it has almost no debt and is generating double-digit billions in free cash flow from almost state of the art fabs. They are still number three on process technology, and number one on volume. The fact that Intel's management have chosen to spend two decades flushing that amazing free cashflow down the M&A toilet instead of fixing their workplace culture…

Yeah, exactly; if Intel is a "failing business" then I don't know what a successful business looks like. It's still one of the most profitable companies on the planet.

Look at IBM; while Big Blue was once seemingly omnipotent and they've since fallen from that position, it's still a double-digit billion company with over 300k employees. It's not as big (relatively speaking) as it once was, but it sure didn't die either.

Other companies have died, such as Digital Equipment, but that was the result of 1) a massive paradigm shift in computing and computing equipment (introduction of "personal computing"), and 2) some pretty bad business decisions (not just failing to get a hold of the PC market). Thus far, I'm not really seeing 1) happen, and 2) alone probably won't be enough to completely kill intel, just cripple it temporarily.

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

#169

Post by arp242 »

mhh__ wrote: post #10
albalus wrote: post #3

And that's okay.

If Taiwan ends up getting trampled by China, we'd effectively only have Samsung for cutting edge lithography.

TSMC's lithography machines come from ASML, which is in the Netherlands. I always find it surprising that people talk about TSMC so much and not mention ASML; people talk about "TSMC's 5nm process", but it's really ASML's tech that powers all of that.

Setting up a new factory to replace TSMC is not trivial of course, as it's operationally hard, but none of the core tech would be "in China's hands".

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

#170

Post by jabl »

monocasa wrote: post #6

Any 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.

The rise of TSMC, or more generally the merchant fab model, is really the big semiconductor story of the past few decades.

Traditional wisdom used to be that if you wanted cutting edge performance, you really needed your own cutting edge in-house fab. The vertical integration advantages of tuning your ASIC design to your process were unassailable. If you couldn't afford your own foundry, tough luck, you suffered a severe penalty in performance and/or cost.

But the merchant foundries, first and foremost TSMC, have really turned that traditional wisdom around. Both in terms of matching, and then surpassing Intel on deploying the latest process nodes, but also in terms of making it possible for 3rd party ASIC developers to use that process as efficiently as an in-house design team would be able to.

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