Earlier quoted context omitted.
MBAs eating the world one acquisition at a time.
He was a process engineer
It's never too late to go back to school.
Intel's Humbling
31–40 of 414 posts
Re: Intel's Humbling
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
TSMC manufactures Apple Silicon. It’s a good example of the foundry model that the article is talking about.
Not only do they manufacture Apple Silicon, but Apple usually buys out the first runs of their new processes so they have a head-start against even other TSMC customers. I believe every 3nm wafer that TSMC makes is still going to Apple, hence the just-released Qualcomm SD8G3 flagship chip still being made on TSMC 4nm.
Not a good deal for consumer IMHO. Intel is floundering and AMD is now always a node behind. Seems very anti-competitive.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#33Intel has truly been on a remarkable spree of extremely poor strategic decisions for the last 20 years or so. Missed the boat on mobile, missed the boat on GPUs and AI, focused too much on desktop, and now AMD and ARM-based chips are eating their lunch in the data centre area.
They ran it for max profit in an era when strategic investments needed to be made.
It's remarkably common and heavily incentivized.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#34Intel has truly been on a remarkable spree of extremely poor strategic decisions for the last 20 years or so. Missed the boat on mobile, missed the boat on GPUs and AI, focused too much on desktop, and now AMD and ARM-based chips are eating their lunch in the data centre area.
No, they were on the boat, they just mis-managed it. They used to make Arm chips, but sold it off just before the first iPhone was released as they saw no future in mobile CPUs. Same with network processors for routers around the same time.
They have been trying half-heartedly with GPUs on and off since the late 1990's i740 series.
The root cause is probably the management mantra "focus on core competencies". They had an effective monopoly on fast CPUs from 2007 until 2018. This monopoly meant very little improvement in CPU speed.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apple had been sandbagging the Intel chips for several generations of macbook with anemic cooling solutions, poor thermal throttling curves, and fans that wait until the last moment to turn on. To the extent that the fastest CPUs available in Macbook Pros did not outperform lower models, because both became thermally saturated. When properly cooled, the Intel silicon tends to perform a lot better. Additionally, both…
> When properly cooled, the Intel silicon tends to perform a lot better. Of course, but the average Joe does not want to wear ear protection when running their laptop. Nor do they want the battery to last 40 minutes or have it be huge brick, or have to pour liquid nitrogen on it to not get it to not thermal throttle. Apple innovated by making chips that fit the form and function most people need in their personal dev…
It's always curious to me how Apple's superior products are somehow some other company's fault.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
MBAs eating the world one acquisition at a time.
He was a process engineer
The CEO at the time of the McAfee acquisition was Paul Otellini -- an MBA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otellini.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#37Intel's 2010 7.6B$ purchase of mcafee was a sign that Intel doesn't know what its doing. In the CEO's words: The future of chips is security on the chip. I was like no, no its not! I wanted them to get into mobile and GPUs at the time. Nvdia's market cap was about 9B at the time. I know it would have been a larger pill to swallow, and likely had to bid a bit more than 9B, but I thought it was possible for Intel at th…
There's definitely a lot that can be critiqued about that period.
Famously they divested their ARM-based mobile processor division just before smartphones took off.
The new CEO, as the article mentions, seems to have a lot more of a clue. We just hope he hasn't arrived too late.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#38As someone that doesn’t really understand the space and stuff that the article is talking about, I was surprised that “Apple Silicon” didn’t appear here since from my perspective having used both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, it’s a huge “wow” change. Was Apple leaving and Apple Silicon Macs being so incredibly better than Intel ones not actually a big deal for Intel?
I don't think Macs really amounted to much $ in sales for Intel, compared to e.g. Dell etc.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#39Honestly I think the real deathwatch started during spectre/meltdown. Intel had a real choice. They could own the issue, patch and use it as a chance to retool a largely broken architecture when corporate money was still 0% interest or negative interest.
They didnt. Every press conference downplayed deflected and denied the performance issues, every patch to the Linux kernel was "disabled by default." They lied through their teeth and real players like amazon vultr and other hosting providers in turn left for AMD.
Re: Intel's Humbling
#40Intel has truly been on a remarkable spree of extremely poor strategic decisions for the last 20 years or so. Missed the boat on mobile, missed the boat on GPUs and AI, focused too much on desktop, and now AMD and ARM-based chips are eating their lunch in the data centre area.
Is it just the fate of large successful companies? The parallels with Boeing always come to mind. We’ve seen this play out so many times through history, it’s why investing in the top companies of your era is a terrible idea.
https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_archive/f...
I wonder how many of our companies will survive at the top for even 20 more years?
https://companiesmarketcap.com/
Berkshire is the only one I feel sure about because they hold lots of different companies.