Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

tomshardware.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

221–230 of 293 posts

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

#221

Post by bcrosby95 »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #199
kube-system wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the people moving big money on the stock market are not sitting around waiting until earning reports come out to make a move. They already knew intel was going to post a loss, this was not news to the market.

You're not wrong, but I think this misses the point. Even retail knew they were estimated to post a loss. I'm guessing something in the earnings report was "less bad than expected" in order for the stock to be up 5% today?

Think of it like sports.

You don't want to go where the ball is right now. You want to go where you think it will be in the future.

I don't usually do sports analogies, but my kid recently started playing soccer and I've been trying to get her to intercept rather than chase people. Heh.

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

#222

Post by yyyk »

0zemp2c wrote: 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..…

>they're [Intel] still tied to Windows

Nonsense. Intel is one of the largest contributors to the Linux kernel, the biggest depending on what measure you count by[0]. They even have their own distro.

Moreover, much of their profit is from the server market, which tends to run Linux.

>the Apple M1 laptop

Is very expensive and is running MacOS.

[0] https://truelist.co/blog/linux-statistics/

https://news.itsfoss.com/huawei-kernel-contribution/

https://thenewstack.io/contributes-linux-kernel/

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

#223

Post by garganzol »

tonightstoast wrote: post #108
wslh wrote: post #16

Only the paranoid survive [1] I don't think Intel passed Andy Grove's wisdom to the organization. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove

“Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.” Andy Grove

Those words are a pure gold. So true.

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

#224

Post by j_walter »

BeetleB wrote: post #181
bane wrote: 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 will contract TSMC to make their chips? They've been using TSMC for various parts/chips for probably 5 years now.

They have been using TSMC for a few decades for many of their chips. The last ~5 years has been the cutting edge chips...but they still have a lot of old chips made by TSMC still (think ethernet controller chips, etc).

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

#225

Post by nemothekid »

darth_avocado wrote: post #191
bane wrote: 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…

> but instead financially engineered their way to focus only on higher profit You explained the core of the problem that usually gets little blame. Successful companies get infiltrated by Wall Street MBA types who make decisions for the short term to manipulate the stock price because their own compensation structures help encourage that behavior. Companies, especially like Intel should be built for being resilient o…

>Successful companies get infiltrated by Wall Street MBA types who make decisions for the short term to manipulate the stock price

This really applies for Intel, but for Google, I think it's less so. I've been thinking you have to look at incentives and at a large corporation everyone is incentivized to make the most amount of money in the shortest amount of time. If you really want to spend years hammering away at something, it made more sense to just start your own company doing that where you would reap most of the benefits through equity. There is no reason for someone to spend years at Google on a project that is seemingly going nowhere; they would struggle to get promoted, and if it does work out, most of the value will go to existing shareholders.

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

#226

Post by pas »

matthewdgreen wrote: post #200
cyanydeez wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe this is handwaving for Intel. Intel lost money because computing started moving towards GPU architecture and AMD has both beat them in low power CPU and offer cheap GPU. That's all. They were too late to GPU sales.

Is there really a “too late” here? GPU sales today are probably a small fraction of future AI (TPU?) chip sales. Seems like Intel should be racing in this direction no matter how long it takes them to catch up, no matter how unprofitable it is in the short term. But maybe there’s something fundamental that ensures they’ll never catch up?

management issues, comp issues. those are not fundamental, but it seems an awfully sticky sauce, and they seem neck deep in these.

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

#227

Post by jandrese »

bane wrote: 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…

I think Intel missed the boat when they refused to accept third party fabbing back when they were process node leaders. So instead that business went to TSMC and other competitors and made so much money that those companies were able to overtake Intel and are far more diversified so they don't live and die on the PC market.

At the time everybody was saying "of course Intel isn't going to fab AMD chips, that would be crazy", but in the end the crazy thing was giving up market dominance.

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

#228

Post by diffeomorphism »

rsynnott wrote: post #121
itsoktocry wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> losing market share every year for a decade (Microsoft doesn't even seem to care afaict) Of course they care. Windows, at one point, had 95% market share. Do you believe that to be sustainable? Do we want that? No, in both cases. They are still dominant in desktop computing. > offers 10x the performance the average person will need Why is buying something 10x more powerful than you'd need at 2x the price "good valu…

> Why is buying something 10x more powerful than you'd need at 2x the price "good value"? So a MacBook Air is 2x the price of the very cheapest laptops. Trouble with the very cheapest laptops, though, is that they use the very cheapest chips; Intel is not making a lot of money on those (if they're Intel at all; these days a lot of that category is ARM Chromebooks). The MacBook Air's actual competition is more capable…

Only in the US. A macbook air is much, much more expensive in most of the rest of the world.

E.g. m2 air with bare minimum upgrades is 2000€. That is much more than double. So sure it is good, but at that price point that is the bare minimum.

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

#229

Post by j_walter »

29athrowaway wrote: post #125

Intel gets MBAed.

This is absolutely what happens when bean counters are promoted to CEO...they killed Intel a long time ago. Finally put an engineering guy in charge, but he is blowing smoke up investors asses...you can't dump billions in new fabs and technology while also losing billions per quarter.

Their foundry business is dead...they won't compete with Samsung and TSMC. Even GF found that was a losing proposition and they had a lead on Intel and endless pockets of cash.

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

#230

Post by 0zemp2c »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #216
matheusmoreira wrote: post #48

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.

This is the real consequence of Intel being run by MBA sociopaths for two decades now. Intel (and AMD) needs a good consumer OS to keep it relevant in the next decades. It's what keeps the DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS on x86, and therefore use x86 server architectures. Either that, or it is a commodity ARM business. Microsoft has never been up to the task of a good consumer OS. Intel always should have had multip…

even if Windows survives, they will also likely move to ARM

Intel is in real serious trouble, and so is AMD

Post reply on HN