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

281–290 of 414 posts

Re: Intel's Humbling

#281

Post by jillesvangurp »

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…

There are a few areas where they are under pressure:

- The wintel monopoly is losing its relevance now that ARM chips are creeping into the windows laptop market and now that Apple has proven that ARM is fantastic for low power & high performance solutions. Nobody cares about x86 that much any more. It's lost its shine as the "fastest" thing available.

- AI & GPU market is where the action is and Intel is a no-show for that so far. It's not about adding AI/GPU features to cheap laptop chips but about high end workstations and dedicated solutions for large scale compute. Intel's GPUs lack credibility for this so far. Apple's laptops seem popular with AI researchers lately and the goto high performance solutions seem to be provided by NVidia.

- Apple has been leading the way with ARM based, high performance integrated chips powering phones, laptops, and recently AR/VR. Neither AMD nor Intel have a good answer to that so far. Though AMD at least has a foothold in the door with e.g. Xbox and the Steam Deck depending on their integrated chips and them still having credible solutions for gaming. Nvidia also has lots of credibility in this space.

- Cloud computing is increasingly shifting to cheap ARM powered hardware. Mostly the transition is pretty seamless. Cost and energy usage are the main drivers here.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#282

Post by finaard »

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…

Since roughly the first year of covid the supply generally has been quite bad. Yes, I can get _some_ xeon or epyc from HPE quickly, but if I care about specific specs it's also a several month long wait. For midsized servers (up to about 100 total threads) AMD still doesn't really have competition if you look at price, performance and power - I'm currently waiting for such a machine, the intel option would've been 30% more expensive at worse specs.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#283

Post by throwaway4good »

hardware2win wrote: post #273
throwaway4good wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I worry about with Intel is that they have gotten too much into politics; relying on CHIPS act and other subsidies, encouraging sanctions on Chinese competitors while relying on full access to the Chinese market for sales. It is not a good long term strategy: The winds of politics may change, politicians may set more terms (labour and environment), foreign market access may become politicized too (US politicians…

Have you read chip war? It will challenge your concerns

Yeah. Too much the cold war angle. I think he overstates the role of government/military and underestimates how much the consumer market has driven the process innovations that has made computing cheap and ubiquitous,

Re: Intel's Humbling

#284

Post by baq »

landryraccoon wrote: post #145
TylerE wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that true for virtually EVERY big tech merger? Like, which ones have actually worked?

Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp and they were both home runs. Zuckerberg knows how to buy companies.

Facebook bought their eventual competitors by making an offer they couldn't refuse. Zuck knows Metcalfe's law.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#285

Post by lotsofpulp »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #194
tru3_power wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Market forces are hard to fight sometimes. Look at Meta- they were beaten like hell cuz of their metaverse bet.

Meta was beaten because investors were worried Mark had gone rogue. Now that hes laid a bunch of people off to show that the investors are in control theyre cool with the metaverse.

Or maybe it has something to do with their amazing net income trend in recent quarters:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform...

Re: Intel's Humbling

#286

Post by lotsofpulp »

zeusk wrote: post #265
Mistletoe wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

Apple makes 40% of Berkshire's investment portfolio

https://www.cnbc.com/berkshire-hathaway-portfolio/

As of Nov 2023, BRK has ~915.5M AAPL shares, with a market cap of $172B. BRK’s market cap is $840B.

Per the CNBC link, the market cap of BRK’s AAPL holding is 46% of the market cap of BRK’s publicly listed holdings, but BRK’s market cap being much higher than $172B/46% means there is $840B - $374B = $466B worth of market cap in BRK’s non publicly listed assets.

I would say $172/$840 = 20% is more representative of BRK’s AAPL proportion.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#287

Post by hardware2win »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #281
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…

There are a few areas where they are under pressure: - The wintel monopoly is losing its relevance now that ARM chips are creeping into the windows laptop market and now that Apple has proven that ARM is fantastic for low power & high performance solutions. Nobody cares about x86 that much any more. It's lost its shine as the "fastest" thing available. - AI & GPU market is where the action is and Intel is a no-show f…

They will be manufacturing those ARM cpus

Re: Intel's Humbling

#288

Post by distances »

finaard wrote: post #277
distances wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was very luck for Apple though. Nokia made deals with Intel to provide the CPU for upcoming phone models, and had to scramble to redesign them when it became clear Intel was unable to deliver.

Not quite true - the intel projects were at a pretty early stage when Elop took over, and the whole Microsoft thing happened - and the projects got canned as part of the cleanup and moving to Windows for the phones. The CPUs were indeed horrible, and would've caused a lot of pain if the projects had actually continued. (source: I was working on the software side for the early Nokia intel prototypes)

Thanks for the insights. N9 was originally rumored to use Intel, and it was speculated so [1] still half a year before the release. Was that then also switched by Elop as part of the whole lineup change, or were these rumors unfounded in the first place?

[1] https://www.gottabemobile.com/meego-powered-nokia-n9-to-laun...

Re: Intel's Humbling

#289

Post by goriloser »

mixedbit wrote: post #258

Isn't the current GPU-based stack which drives the progress of AI an early stage architecture which will become sub-optimal and obsolete in a longer term? Having separate processors with separate memory and separate software stack to do matrix operations works, but it would be much more convenient and productive to have a system with one RAM and CPUs that can efficiently do matrix operations and would not require the…

Fast memory is very expensive.

Which is why you only use it when you really need it - on a GPU/AI accelerator.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#290

Post by cpursley »

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…

> In that circumstance, I think most people would have made the same decision.

In that circumstance, I think most MBAs would have made the same decision.

Fixed that for you

Post reply on HN