Intel is dying and we can’t save it • Hacker News Board

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

#211

Post by totalZero » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:27 PM UTC

Torkel wrote: post #198

dathinab wrote: post #28

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…

Fast forward a few years. Look at the time it takes to design chips. Look at where the market and tech is going (M1 and AMD especially). Compare with RIM and Nokia. There is a "roadrunner" effect where a colossal company will continue for a few years on pure momentum. There are so many things speaking against Intel. And the facts you bring up as speaking for Intel seams more like short term momentum to me. I would gu…

Semiconductor demand is so high right now that any company that makes processors is going to print money in the short term. It's a "right place, right time" situation. Intel's long-term problem is loss of market share, but if you're going to lose market share, you're more likely to survive if it happens when the whole market is growing.

There's not much that a company so heavily invested in x86 can do in the face of Apple Silicon, aside from executing well on 7nm and bringing it to market ahead of schedule.

I don't see much of a similarity between Intel CPUs and Blackberry phones, considering that many flagship notebooks (even Apple's) have Intel inside. I for one am heralding the new era of voracious semiconductor demand, and am rooting for Intel to get its game face on and turn things around before the opportunity passes.

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

#212

Post by kllrnohj » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:34 PM UTC

mhh__ wrote: post #42

kllrnohj wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Intel still can't make 10nm in any decent volume. TSMC are shipping chips at something like 170MTr/mm^2, the bulk of Intel's production (even their new chips) are still closer to 40-50MTr/mm^2

Intel can't make large 10nm dies, or at least isn't, but there's quite a few 10nm mobile parts and they are on their second shipping generation of those parts. Which are shipping in volume, or at least volume-enough for the likes of Dell to put the 10nm CPUs in most of their lineup including the XPS series. Which is about where TSMC's 7nm was 2 years ago, too.

And TSMC's 170MTr/mm^2 is still restricted to a single vendor and hasn't ramped up beyond that yet. You can't simultaneously claim Intel is restricted to what their bulk volume lineup is and then use TSMC's non-volume lineup. The bulk of TSMC is still 7nm which is 100MTr/mm^2.

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

#213

Post by incrudible » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:37 PM UTC

Torkel wrote: post #198

dathinab wrote: post #28

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…

Fast forward a few years. Look at the time it takes to design chips. Look at where the market and tech is going (M1 and AMD especially). Compare with RIM and Nokia. There is a "roadrunner" effect where a colossal company will continue for a few years on pure momentum. There are so many things speaking against Intel. And the facts you bring up as speaking for Intel seams more like short term momentum to me. I would gu…

The idea here must be that somehow Apple or AMD have figured out the magic sauce to making faster processors, while Intel of all companies is oblivious to it and won't be able to catch up.

In reality, there is nothing that Apple or AMD are doing that Intel could not also do, isn't already doing, or isn't in a hurry to also do.

Consider that at 14nm+++++, Intel still manages to outpace AMD with its 7nm CPUs and latest architecture. AMD competes mainly on price, which is not a great position to be in. Intel's profit margins are massively better.

It's possible that x86 will become less relevant in the future, but in that case Intel will still be one of the be best chip designers in the industry. They will once again produce ARM chips, perhaps borrow one or two insights from Apple's architecture. They will continue to outsource manufacturing to other fabs, perhaps even become fabless.

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

#214

Post by kllrnohj » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:44 PM UTC

Torkel wrote: post #198

dathinab wrote: post #28

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…

Fast forward a few years. Look at the time it takes to design chips. Look at where the market and tech is going (M1 and AMD especially). Compare with RIM and Nokia. There is a "roadrunner" effect where a colossal company will continue for a few years on pure momentum. There are so many things speaking against Intel. And the facts you bring up as speaking for Intel seams more like short term momentum to me. I would gu…

Intel's chip designs are still fine, though. Tiger Lake's IPC gains are right in line with Zen 3's IPC gains over Zen 2. And Xe looks to be a great iGPU.

Which means Intel is more or less on equal design footing with AMD, they're just having trouble getting it built.

And Intel has multiple huge revenue streams that are not in question at all. All their networking stuff, for example (everyone, even on AMD, still goes for motherboards with Intel LAN instead of anyone else's, and same with wifi). And things like Optane. And all their tooling & software suites. Intel's CPU division is struggling to get wins, but Intel overall as a company isn't.

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

#215

Post by kllrnohj » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

morsch wrote: post #203

danijelb wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is very US-centric view. Most countries in the world don't have chip fabrication facilities in their country and they do just fine. Sure, US is currently a superpower whose influence is felt across the world so having chip manufacturing locally is very important, but in a scenario where US would lose some influence that would no longer be an issue, same as it is not an issue for Canada, Germany or Russia.

The EU is worried about it to the tune of 145bn EUR... https://www.eetimes.eu/eu-signs-e145bn-declaration-to-develo...

So is China: https://www.tomshardware.com/features/zhaoxin-kx-u6780a-x86-...

> As such, China began an initiative to build its own processors back in the early 80's that eventually evolved into the "Made in China 2025" campaign that has the goal of producing 70% of the chips used in China by 2025.

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

#216

Post by throwawayriver » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:50 PM UTC

They just need more diversity and SJW initiatives! They spent hundreds of millions on them the past five years, to great effect!

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

#217

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:52 PM UTC

nwmcsween wrote: post #117

thisisnico wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Core Architecture in the mid 2000's was such an incredible shot back to the top. I remember seeing the benchmarks absolutely dominate AMD on every level, power, performance, TDP, Cost, etc. etc. This is almost immediately after Athlon 64 and the Athlon 64X2 started to gain market share, spanking Intel's Pentium 4 at the time. IIRC Intel ended up dropping the Prescott architecture, moving to the Pentium M architec…

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.

[deleted]

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

#218

Post by cpeterso » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:53 PM UTC

kilburn wrote: post #127

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.

To be fair, the move started a while back (arguably in 2017 with the introduction of the Ryzen CPUs). For instance, Steam's hardware report indicates that 1/3 of their install base already has 6 cores or more [1]. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/cpus/

Mozilla's Firefox Hardware Report shows that most Firefox users (55%) still have only two cores! Four cores is slowly climbing at 34%. Firefox users surely have older hardware than Steam gamers, but it's another data point showing just how slowly hardware turns over.

https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware#goto-os-and-arch...

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

#219

Post by willis936 » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:56 PM UTC

incrudible wrote: post #213

Torkel wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fast forward a few years. Look at the time it takes to design chips. Look at where the market and tech is going (M1 and AMD especially). Compare with RIM and Nokia. There is a "roadrunner" effect where a colossal company will continue for a few years on pure momentum. There are so many things speaking against Intel. And the facts you bring up as speaking for Intel seams more like short term momentum to me. I would gu…

The idea here must be that somehow Apple or AMD have figured out the magic sauce to making faster processors, while Intel of all companies is oblivious to it and won't be able to catch up. In reality, there is nothing that Apple or AMD are doing that Intel could not also do, isn't already doing, or isn't in a hurry to also do. Consider that at 14nm+++++, Intel still manages to outpace AMD with its 7nm CPUs and latest…

>In reality, there is nothing that Apple or AMD are doing that Intel could not also do, isn't already doing, or isn't in a hurry to also do.

On the contrary, Intel has refused to do any architectural innovation for nearly 20 years. They are capable, but overly conservative. They should have been in a hurry 10 years ago. It's well documented that they weren't and were resented for it. AMD came up with a winning strategy (multi-die packaging) and Intel still doesn't seem in a hurry to catch up. You could swap "AMD" in that sentence with "Apple" and maintain the meaning.

When superscalar or simultaneous multithreading came out you didn't see competitors mill about waiting for the customers to forget about the advantages.

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

#220

Post by totalZero » Thu, Jan 14, 2021, 4:57 PM UTC

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…

M&A often pays off in strange and discontinuous ways that extend beyond the growth of an acquired division. My intuition is that the payoffs tend to catalyze when the company is refactored, people get shuffled around, IP becomes accessible across divisions, research from one group gets synthesized into another, burgeoning market landscapes become less competitive, etc.

Personally I think strategic M&A is a far more intelligent use of cash and credit than share buybacks and dividends.

Intel has arguably made at least a few solid acquisitions. AMD is buying Xilinx a few years after Intel bought Altera, which tells us that the Altera acquisition couldn't have been totally misplaced -- AMD has the benefit of hindsight with which to evaluate its own acquisition. Mobileye seems to be well positioned as conventional automakers are beginning to offer mainstream EVs.

Perhaps the problem is that there are certain higher-order functions (M&A, stock buybacks) that should generally be conducted only when the lower-order functions (core business) are firing on all cylinders. Companies have finite resources, and executives have limited time and energy, that shouldn't be starved away from the core business unless absolutely necessary.