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Intel's Humbling

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Re: Intel's Humbling

#211

Post by _the_inflator »

throwup238 wrote: post #146
mdasen wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The curse of having weak enemies is that you become complacent. You're right: AMD wasn't competitive for an incredibly long time and ARM wasn't really meaningful for a long time. That's the perfect situation for some MBAs to come into. You start thinking that you're wasting money on R&D. Why create something 30% better this year when 10% better will cost a lot less and your competitors are so far behind that it doesn…

> It's that Intel should have understood that just because you have weak enemies today doesn't mean that you have an unassailable castle. Their third employee that later went on to become their third CEO and guide Intel from the memory to processor transition literally coined the term and wrote a book called "Only the Paranoid Survive" [1]. It's inexcusable that management degraded that much. [1] https://en.wikipedia…

Yes, I agree. However, I don’t necessarily see this book title as an imperative to innovate. Patent trolling can also be a way to deal with competitors.

After all, Apple and ARM came from the idea to have better end user products around softer factors than shear CPU power. Since Intel‘s products aren’t highly integrated Phones nor assembled computer, Intel had no stake directly.

It is complex.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#212

Post by tcmart14 »

FullyFunctional wrote: post #183
NtochkaNzvanova wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The CEO at the time of the McAfee acquisition was Paul Otellini -- an MBA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otellini .

Intel has an amazing track record with acquisitions -- almost none of them work out. Even the tiny fraction of actually good companies they acquired, the Intel culture is one of really toxic politics and it's very hard for acquired people to succeed. I wish Pat well and I think he might be the only who could save the company if it's not already too late. Sourced: worked with many ex-Intel people. POSTSCRIPT: I have s…

Not gonna lie, I had a professor who retired from Intel as a director or something like that. Worst professor I had the entire time. We couldn't have class for a month because he 'hurt his back,' then half us saw him playing a round of golf two days later.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#213

Post by SchumerGrift »

tgtweak wrote: post #174

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 th…

> They've moved up so many process nodes so quickly and have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab.

I'd buy this if they'd actually built a fab, but right now this seems too-little, too-late for a producer's economy.

The rest frankly doesn't matter much. Intel processors are only notable in small sections of the market.

And frankly—as counter-intuitive as this may seem to such an investor-bullish forum—the death knell was the government chip subsidy. I simply can't imagine american government and private enterprise collaborating to produce anything useful in 2024, especially when the federal government has shown such a deep disinterest in holding the private economy culpable to any kind of commitment. Why would intel bother?

Re: Intel's Humbling

#215

Post by chx »

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…

> Where was AMD?

Crushed by Intel's illegal anticompetitive antics?

Re: Intel's Humbling

#216

Post by paulmd »

djha-skin wrote: post #83
whalesalad wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They still dominate PC’s and the server market.

I run all my workloads in AWS on armchips. It's half the cost for just as good of an experience on my side.

Cloud providers are very careful to make sure of that - they have deliberately eschewed performance increases that are possible (and have occurred in the consumer market) in favor of keeping the “1 vcpu = 1 sandy bridge core” equivalence. The latest trend is those “dense cores” - what a shocking coincidence that it’s once again sandy bridge performance, and you just get more of them.

They don’t want to be selling faster x86 CPUs in the cloud, they want you to buy more vcpu units instead, and they want those units to be arm. And that’s how they’ve structured their offerings. It’s not the limit of what’s possible, just what is currently the most profitable approach for Amazon and google.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#217

Post by selimthegrim »

borissk wrote: post #167
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.

And furthermore they lost most of their best engineers and scientists during the years that the company was run by the useless MBAs. Now each new technology process is a huge struggle. Intel has secured some of the first new gen EUV machines from ASML, but if they'll have the talent to quickly start using them on scale is not yet clear.

Somebody from Intel who had a PhD from my school and manages a bunch of process engineers was on sabbatical and teaching a class at his old department, some of whose undergrads I taught. I visited an info session he was presenting and pointed out that I had been a green badge in JF5 for Validation and that they had a reputation of not matching ASML and Nvidia offers. He went ballistic on me and told me to go work for them if I got an offer from them and that he wouldn’t want me on his team with that attitude. While I am sure all the other people in the room who were F1s and undergrads still wanted jobs and he answered their questions honestly as far as I could tell (saying Intel would be bankrupt without CHIPS act money etc) that can’t have been a good look for him. I did leave the room only after telling him I wanted his company to succeed.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#219

Post by GeekyBear »

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…

"We couldn't figure out how much a chip design would cost to make" is pretty damning, in my book.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#220

Post by ffgjgf1 »

nine_k wrote: post #62
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…

ARM has been really competitive since, well, 2007, when the first iPhone hit the market, and when Android followed in 2008. That is, last 15 years or so. 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. Pretty certainly, Intel is improving, and of course should not be written off. But they did get the…

> ARM has been really competitive since

And a few years prior to that Intel made the most competitive ARM chips (StrongARM). Chances are that an Intel chip would have powered the iPhone had they not scrapped their ARM division due to “reasons”

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