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Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

tomshardware.com

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Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#151
post #123

In the next 1-5 years we are going to see a lot of big companies falling apart. Small teams, with the help of tech/AI can now move so much faster than big teams. The communication and coordination overhead is starting to be too big of a burden, especially when you can have 1 person do the work of 30-100 (using AI).

> when you can have 1 person do the work of 30-100 (using AI)

That’s quite the statement. I highly doubt that will be reality in the next 1-5yrs, especially for novel R&D work. Even more so for products in the physical world.

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#152
post #2

hard to feel sorry for Intel here they're still tied to Windows which is increasingly weaker and more rotted over time, losing market share every year for a decade (Microsoft doesn't even seem to care afaict) the Apple M1 laptop is an incredible value, offers 10x the performance the average person will need, with good battery life, a better OS/ecosystem...and its priced right! Intel needs to seriously look at Linux..…

> once Windows enters into a death spiral in a few years I'm not sure, on the contrary I think in a few years Windows will be rewritten in Rust and entering a virtuous spiral. We'll see!

The percentage of end-users who care about which language their OS is written in rounds to zero. Rust may add additional stability to the OS, but modern OS's feel pretty stable to the mom and pop users and "additional stability" is pretty far down the list of demands.

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Of course they care. If they care they sure don't act like it. Microsoft is clearly squeezing Windows users for whatever revenue is left. Nothing else explains the user hostility, backwards compatibility breaks and unending advertising and data collection.

My parents aren't technical and don't see the builtin ads and news feed as being user hostile. They like that candy crush is pre-installed and that Windows shows them random spam news articles that they find interesting. I hate it and use a Mac, but I suspect most users aren't like you and me.

my parents and their friends are in their 80s and are ALL on ipads now, and this is by their own choice, not their kids pushing it on them

nothing to "administer"

the platform is curated

it does what they need

it runs on battery for a long time

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can buy an M1 8/256 Air at $800 right now. I'd expect to get 5 years out of it minimum (we're buying one shortly to replace a mid-2013 Air). That's less than $15/month if it gets thrown in a bin in 5 years. It's under $20/mo if we bin it in 3.5 years. https://www.bestbuy.com/site/macbook-air-13-3-laptop-apple-m... I feel like the Chromebook on the lower end is great for a lot of uses/people and the Air is an easi…

You could buy a laptop with 16GB to 32GB of memory and more than double the storage space for $800, and you can buy laptops that you can actually upgrade the hardware on. You can also spend less and get a similarly spec'd laptop. I just picked up a new laptop with 16GB/1TB and 8 cores for $500 and upgraded it to 64GB of memory for $100. I bought a low end Mac in 2015 with the same 8GB/256GB specs, 8GB wasn't enough e…

If all that matter to you is RAM and HD space, you can as well buy a cheap desktop tower. As for "similarly spec'd" laptops if you put good perf and low consumption in the equation, they just do not exist. Yes Intel Mac were not extremely interesting at least on the CPU + GPU + RAM + HD + power side of the equation. The M1/M2 is - esp if you also value a decent screen. And the M1 + 8GB is reasonable depending what you are doing with it.

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#155
Something is going on with Xeon-W. Intel started "shipping" Ice Lake Xeon-W in June 2021 [0], yet today in April 2023 major PC OEM vendors such as Lenovo, [1] Dell, [2] HP [3] and Apple [4] are still shipping workstations with the older Skylake Xeons in them and none of them offer a workstation with Ice Lake Xeon-W. Either the chips are not available in volume or a large segment of the PC industry decided not to update their computers to use the new chips.

[0] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-ice-lake-xeon-w-to-c... [1] https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/workstations/thinkstation-p-s... [2] https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/workstations-isv-certified/p... [3] https://www.hp.com/us-en/workstations/z4.html [4] https://www.apple.com/mac-pro/

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#156
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel got out of memory when that became a complete commodity, similarly Intel sold their NAND business (now called Solidigm) a while ago to Hynix, because similarly NAND and SSDs are now commodities (in the sense of highly standardized, interchangeable product made by a large number of competing companies). It does make sense if you only wish to keep things where your company has unique advantages and doesn't need t…

You are absolutely correct in the history to my recollection. But I'd challenge that it was a good idea as having multiple product lines better creates opportunities for new and unique products in different spaces. Optane is an example of where Intel tried to "fake it" but ended up producing a confused product that didn't leverage common industry knowledge in either the memory or solid state storage spaces. More towa…

I agree! When memory became a commodity --- there are periods in markets when nobody confers distinction --- then maybe you keep your hand in to break even or small profit. But keep your eye on the next evolutionary step. Compute co-located with memory (non von Neumann) is that step. With the hw, there'd be an opening for a next gen OS to run it.

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like I said, I'll believe it when I see it. At the end of the day capitalism rules supreme and trumps jingoistic nationalism. If it's cheaper for Apple and others to build chips overseas then all your devices will continue to have chips made there. I don't see any fundamental change to make labor in America competitive with overseas labor costs. Intel can build as many fancy fabs as they want in Ohio but they will be…

> capitalism rules supreme and trumps jingoistic nationalism. I'm not so sure about that. At an individual level sure but we're talking about the USG not a bunch of individuals at a national level. The government has made many decisions to subsidies/backstop local companies in the interest of nationalism. There's no way it's cheapest for Boeing to make its airplanes in the US. Janitors for the USG get security cleara…

Deciding to give Intel massive subsidies would require congress to agree and enact legislation, and that isn't happening with it being a politically fractured senate and house. It also isn't exactly sustainable to just keep funneling truckloads of money into Intel to be competitive and kind of pokes a giant hole in the idea that the free market is supreme at solving all problems. In the end subsidies just contribute to rising inflation (it's printing money). The fundamental problems have to be fixed.

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#158
post #116

Intel and Google share surprisingly similar problems: an almost pathological inability to grow lines of business with new products because they kill them off too early. In Intel's case, it's even worse, they kill them off right before the market would have made them successful. They should own the "things with semiconductors" market, but instead financially engineered their way to focus only on higher profit core chi…

Intel got out of memory when that became a complete commodity, similarly Intel sold their NAND business (now called Solidigm) a while ago to Hynix, because similarly NAND and SSDs are now commodities (in the sense of highly standardized, interchangeable product made by a large number of competing companies). It does make sense if you only wish to keep things where your company has unique advantages and doesn't need t…

It's extra bitter to see Intel exit NAND because they largely invented & drove NVMe. The p3700 was the first mainstream NVMe drive, July 2014, & is still a beast, still pleasantly fast with stable & high iops, albeit lacking in raw bandwidth.

The before times were so awful. A sea of proprietary interfaces, dubious drivers. Intel identified a huge weak point in the ecosystem & created radical change where it was needed, taking something exotic & astronomically priced & building a stable better future, around what has always made PC so exceptional: standards. The flash industry was a mess, & Intel more than anyone made it real.

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlike foxconn, the federal government has a huge interest in that fab being built.

Like I said, I'll believe it when I see it. At the end of the day capitalism rules supreme and trumps jingoistic nationalism. If it's cheaper for Apple and others to build chips overseas then all your devices will continue to have chips made there. I don't see any fundamental change to make labor in America competitive with overseas labor costs. Intel can build as many fancy fabs as they want in Ohio but they will be…

Yes, this is a major unsolved problem to my eye. The cost of living in Columbus - while nowhere near the craziness of coastal cities - is steadily rising. Real estate in surrounding cities is also going up, and it's hard for me to imagine how all those working the jobs that will supposedly be created by the fabs will afford to live near them.

One development in Ohio has been a proposal for a passenger rail line that would connect Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland. I'm originally from Crestline - a small town which sits right on the rail line between Columbus and Cleveland, and which used to be a big railroad town. It's interesting to think of how my hometown might change if passenger rail were to actually happen (though I'm skeptical, as versions of this plan have been proposed for decades).

That said, there are some major problems to overcome if we wanted to start doing "state-scale" transportation like that - Columbus is a very car-centric city, and in the scenario where I would move home and ride the train to Columbus when I needed to go to the office, it's very unclear how I'd get from the station to wherever I'm going.

Furthermore, there was just a very public and catastrophic train derailment in Ohio, which can't do much good for public confidence in commuter trains.

Either way, the next decade or so in Ohio will certainly be interesting. Columbus has a burgeoning tech community with lots of VC investment, and while I'm not sure where I'd put the odds, it's not impossible that our little flyover state could become the proverbial "heartland tech hub".

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#160
post #2

hard to feel sorry for Intel here they're still tied to Windows which is increasingly weaker and more rotted over time, losing market share every year for a decade (Microsoft doesn't even seem to care afaict) the Apple M1 laptop is an incredible value, offers 10x the performance the average person will need, with good battery life, a better OS/ecosystem...and its priced right! Intel needs to seriously look at Linux..…

Until linux devs can get through their head that common users never want to even see something that represents a CLI, linux isn't going anywhere. The biggest problem with linux is that it's made by people who like linux.

obviously, for Linux to ever see mass adoption it would need a drastic reformulation like Android

my point is, once Windows passes the event horizon, Intel needs SOMETHING or they are going to see 2/3 of their revenue stream go away...cloud vendors are busy pushing ARM in the datacenter now too...Intel is running out of markets

btw AMD is also screwed by all the same logic...x86 is on the endangered species list

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