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

Intel's Humbling

stratechery.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 414 posts

Re: Intel's Humbling

#231

Post by dur-randir »

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…

>have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab

In the terms of end product - not really. Last 3-4 gens are indistinguishable to the end user. It's a combined effect of marketing failure and really underwhelming gains - when marketing screams "breakthrough gen", but what you get is +2%/ST perf for another *Lake, you can't sell it.

They might've built a foundation and that might be a deliberate tactics to get back into the race, we'll see. But i'm not convinced for now.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#233

Post by makeitdouble »

mjevans wrote: post #169
makeitdouble wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Where was AMD? Trying to breathe as Intel was pushing their head under water. We saw AMD come back after their lawsuit against Intel got through and Intel had to stop paying everyone to not use AMD.

Kind of, but not really in laptops :( they're doing great on handhelds though.

I think they're doing better (disclaimer: writing this from a Ryzen laptop) and their latest chip has better thermals and consumption, with a decent reputation compared to 10 years ago for instance. But yes, it's a long road ahead.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#234

Post by bayindirh »

dijit wrote: post #139
hollerith wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got curious about how ARM is doing in the data center and found this: >Arm now claims to hold a 10.1% share of the cloud computing market, although that's primarily due to Amazon and its increasing use of homegrown Arm chips. According to TrendForce, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was using its custom Graviton chips in 15% of all server deployments in 2021. https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/09/23/arm-holdings-data-...

ARM would be even more popular in the datacenter if getting access to Ampere CPUs was possible. I can get a top of the line Xeon Gold basically next day with a incredibly high quality out of band management from a reputable server provider. (HP, Dell). Ampere? Give it 6 months, €5,000 and maybe you can get one, from Gigabyte. Not known for server quality. (yes, I'm salty, I have 4 of these CPUs and it took a really l…

I'm using Ampere powered servers on Oracle cloud and boy, they're snappy, even with the virtualization layer on top.

Amazon has its own ARM CPUs on AWS, and you can get them on demand, too.

Xeons and EPYCs are great for "big loads", however some supercomputer centers also started to install "experimental" ARM partitions.

The future is bright not because Intel is floundering, but there'll be at least three big CPU producers (ARM, AMD and Intel).

Also, don't have prejudices about "brands". most motherboard brands can design server-class hardware if they wish. They're just making different trade-offs because of the market they're in.

I used servers which randomly fried parts of their motherboard when see some "real" load. Coming one morning and having no connectivity because a top of the line 2 port gigabit onboard Ethernet fried itself on a top of the line, flagship server is funny in its own way.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#235

Post by RCitronsBroker »

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…

i honestly don’t see what you are seeing in terms of taiwans future sovereignty. Of course, China would like to do something about Taiwan, especially now with their economy kind of in the dumps and a collapsing real estate bubble. But when you look at the facts of it all, there’s absolut ZERO chance chine can muster up what it takes to hold their own in such a conflict. Their military isn’t up to snuff and they are one broken dam away from a huge mass casualty event.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#236

Post by treffer »

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…

The problem is this... The money cow is datacenters, and especially top of the line products where there is no competition.

Then fastest single core and multi core x86 cpus that money can buy will go to databases and similar vertically scaled systems.

That's where you can put up the most extreme margins. It's "winner takes all the margins". Beeing somewhat competitive, but mostly a bit worse is the worst business position. Also...

I put money on AMD when they were taking over the crown.

Thank you for this wakeup call, I'll watch closely if Intel can deliver on this and take it back. I'll habe to adjust accordingly.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#237

Post by makeitdouble »

whalesalad wrote: post #67
this_user wrote: post #26

Intel 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 still dominate PC’s and the server market.

Looking at Statistica [0] I see Intel at 62% and AMD at 35% on desktop for 23Q2. That's a significant gap, and having more than half of the market is nothing to sneeze at, but I think they move from being dominant to just being a major player.

IF (big IF) the trend continues we might see Intel and AMD get pretty close, and a lot more comptetion on the market again (I hope)

On the server side, I don't have the number but that's probably a way harder turf to protect for Intel going forward, if they're even still ahead ?

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/735904/worldwide-x86-int...

Re: Intel's Humbling

#238

Post by dchftcs »

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…

>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"

Not clear about what the role of activist hedge funds is here but Intel's top shareholders are mutual funds like Vanguard which are part of many people's retirement investments. If an activist hedge fund got to run the show, it means that they could get these passive shareholders on their side or to abstain. It would have meant those funds along with pension funds, who should have been in a place to push back against short term thinking, didn't push back. These funds should really be run much more competently given their outsized influence, but the incentives are not there.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#239

Post by riffraff »

RCitronsBroker wrote: post #235
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…

i honestly don’t see what you are seeing in terms of taiwans future sovereignty. Of course, China would like to do something about Taiwan, especially now with their economy kind of in the dumps and a collapsing real estate bubble. But when you look at the facts of it all, there’s absolut ZERO chance chine can muster up what it takes to hold their own in such a conflict. Their military isn’t up to snuff and they are o…

I think "economy in the dumps" is a bit too harsh.

China is facing a deflating real estate bubble, but they still managed to grow the last year (official sources are disputed but independent estimates are still positive).

Re: Intel's Humbling

#240

Post by bernardlunn »

Brilliant article. He is totally right that what Pat Gelsinger is doing is as brave as what Andy Grove did and just as essential. In hindsight Andy Grove was 100% right and I hope Pat Gelsinger is proved right.

The fact that Intel stock went up during the Brian Krzanich tenure as CEO is simply a reflection of that being the free money era that lifted all boats/stocks. Without that we would be writing Intel’s epitaph now.

You cannot play offense in tech when there is a big market shift.

Post reply on HN