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Intel's Humbling

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Re: Intel's Humbling

#171

Post by paulmd »

tw04 wrote: post #20
captn3m0 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would have had the same fate as the NVIDIA ARM deal.

Unlikely with AMD owning ATI. The reason NVidia was blocked from buying ARM was because of the many, many third parties that were building chips off ARM IP. Nvidia would have become their direct competitor overnight with little indication they would treat third parties fairly. Regulators were rightly concerned it would kill off third party chips. Not to mention the collective lobbying might of all the vendors buildin…

one example would be the semicustom deal with mediatek

https://corp.mediatek.com/news-events/press-releases/mediate...

like it’s of course dependent on what “build competing products” means, but assuming you mean semicustom (like AMD sells to Sony or Samsung) then nvidia isn’t as intractibly opposed as you’re implying.

regulators can be dumb fanboys/lack vision too, and nvidia very obviously was not spending $40b just to turn around and burn down the ecosystem. Being kingmaker on a valuable IP is far more valuable than selling some more tegras for a couple years. People get silly when nvidia is involved and make silly assertions, and most of the stories have become overwrought and passed into mythology. Bumpgate is… something that happened to AMD on that generation of gpus too, for instance. People baked their 7850s to reflow the solder back then too - did AMD write you a check for their defective gpu?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iLWkNPTyg2k

Re: Intel's Humbling

#172

Post by kens »

chasil wrote: post #94
BirAdam wrote: post #50

Everyone acts as though Intel should have seen everything coming. Where was AMD? Was AMD really competitive before Ryzen? Nope. Core 2 series blew them out of the water. Was ARM really competitive until recently? Nope. Intel crushed them. The problem for Intel is the inertia of laziness due to a lack of competition. I wouldn’t count them out just yet, however. The company’s first true swing at modern GPU was actually…

Intel's flaw was trying to push DUV to 10nm (otherwise known as Intel 7). Had Intel adopted the molten tin of EUV, the cycle of failure would have been curtailed. Hats off to SMIC for the DUV 7nm which they produced so quickly. They likely saw quite a bit of failed effort. And before we discount ARM, we should remember that Acorn produced a 32-bit CPU with a 25k transistor count. The 80386 was years later, with 275k…

> Acorn produced a 32-bit CPU with a 25k transistor count. The 80386 was years later, with 275k transistors

Coincidentally, ARM1 and 80386 were both introduced in 1985. I'm a big fan of the ARM1 but I should point out that the 386 is at a different level, designed for multitasking operating systems and including a memory management unit for paging.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#173

Post by rectang »

rpmisms wrote: post #162
mmaunder wrote: post #152

Intel is just like Boeing: A company with legendary engineering roots taken over by myopic financial engineers who can’t think further than next quarters stock price, which is their only measure, their only target, and to which all their bonuses are attached.

While it's sad now, I'm looking forward to long-term thinking being emphasized in business school again.

Why would people pay attention even if long-term thinking is taught? Only chumps think about the long-term interest of the company. Your long-term interest as an individual is in extracting as much money from short-term bonuses as possible, because once that money is in your bank account it doesn't matter if the company craters.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#174

Post by tgtweak »

I'm kind of bullish on Intel right now. They've moved up so many process nodes so quickly and have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab. Let's ignore the elephant in the room which is taiwan and it's sovereignty, and only focus on the core r&d.

Intel flopped so hard on process nodes for 4 years up until Gelsinger took the reigns... it was honestly unprecedented levels of R&D failure. What happened over the 8 years prior was hedge funds and banks had saddled up on Intel stock which was paying healthy dividends due to cost cutting and "coasting". This sudden shock of "we're going to invest everything in R&D and catch back up" was news that a lot of intel shareholders didn't want to hear. They dumped the stock and the price adjusted in kind.

Intel's 18A is roughly 6 months ahead of schedule, set to begin manufacturing in the latter half of 2024. Most accounts put this ahead of TSMC's equivalent N2 node...

Fab investments have a 3 year lag on delivering value. We're only starting to see the effect of putting serious capital and focus on this, as of this year. I also think we'll see more companies getting smart about having all of their fabrication eggs in one of two baskets (samsung or tsmc) both within a 500 mile radius circle in the south china sea.

Intel has had 4 years of technical debt on it's fabrication side, negative stock pressure from the vacuum created by AMD and Nvidia, and is still managing to be profitable.

I think the market (and analysts like this) are all throwing the towel in on the one company that has quite a lot to gain at this point after losing a disproportionate amount of share value and market.

I just hope they keep Pat at the helm for another 2 years to fully deliver on his strategy or Intel will continue where it was headed 4 years ago.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#175

Post by rpmisms »

rectang wrote: post #173
rpmisms wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it's sad now, I'm looking forward to long-term thinking being emphasized in business school again.

Why would people pay attention even if long-term thinking is taught? Only chumps think about the long-term interest of the company . Your long-term interest as an individual is in extracting as much money from short-term bonuses as possible, because once that money is in your bank account it doesn't matter if the company craters.

Well, the idea of giving value to society has been evaporating of late, but it should still be taught as the ideal.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#176

Post by krautt »

i worked at intel between 97 and 07. MFG was absolute king. Keeping that production line stable and active was the priority that eclipsed all. i was a process engineer, and to change a gas flow rate on some part of the process by a little bit, i'd have to design an experiment, collect data for months, work with various upstream/downstream teams, and write a change control proposal that would exceed a hundred pages of documentation. AFAIK, that production line was the most complex human process that had happened to date. It was mostly ran by 25-30 yo engineers. That in itself was a miracle.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#177

Post by isignal »

eslaught wrote: post #127
vineyardmike wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not noticing a hugely growing segment that was bringing insane reams of cash to Apple, and Qualcomm, Samsung and others involved is not something I could call astute. And it's not like they didn't notice either. Apple literally asked intel to supply the chips for the first iPhone, but the intel CEO at the time "didn't see it". https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/16/4337954/intel-could-have-...

I agree mobile was a miss but the linked article actually quotes Intel's former COE making a pretty good argument why they missed: > "The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do... At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below o…

Intel also had a later chance when Apple tried to get off the Qualcomm percent per handset model. This was far after the original iPhone. Apple also got sued for allegedly sharing proprietary Qualcomm trade secrets with Intel. And Intel still couldn’t pull it off despite all these tailwinds.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#178

Post by mastax »

solarkraft wrote: post #136
mise_en_place wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel pivoting to GPUs was a smart move but they just lacked the tribal knowledge needed to successfully ship a competitive GPU offering. We got Arc instead.

Isn't Arc actually pretty okay?

They mostly work now and they are decent options at the low-end (what used to be the mid-range: $200) where there is shockingly little competition nowadays.

However, they underperform greatly compared to competitors' cards with similar die areas and memory bus widths. For example the Arc A770 is 406mm^2 on TSMC N6 and a 256-bit bus and performs similarly to the RX 6650XT which is 237mm^2 on TSMC N7 with a 128-bit bus. They're probably losing a lot of money on these cards.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#179

Post by chrisco255 »

markus_zhang wrote: post #164
mmaunder wrote: post #152

Intel is just like Boeing: A company with legendary engineering roots taken over by myopic financial engineers who can’t think further than next quarters stock price, which is their only measure, their only target, and to which all their bonuses are attached.

They all look like that, aren't they? It's like cancer, late stage. It's everywhere. I'm trying to be optimistic here, but I don't see much light at the end of the tunnel. Best case a second depression wipes away everyone's wealth and we start from clean slate.

I mean, clearly the competitors eating Intel's lunch do not look like that. Nvidia does not look like it. Apple doesn't. AMD doesn't. Just seems like ordinary competitive churn in the marketplace to me.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#180

Post by krautt »

brutus1213 wrote: post #47
autokad wrote: post #5

Intel'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…

I remember when they did random stuff like the whole IoT push (frankly, their offerings made no sense to humble me .. Microsoft had a better IoT than Intel). They did drone crap .. gave a kick ass keynote at CES I recall .. also .. made little sense. Finally, the whole FPGA thing .. makes little sense. So much value being destroyed :(

i was a process engineer there in the early 2000's, they did crazy random shit then too! they had an 'internet tv' pc that was designed to play mp4's in 2001.
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