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Intel's Humbling

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Re: Intel's Humbling

#371

Post by xw39011 »

nebula8804 wrote: post #357
myth_drannon wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are taking sides. That is easily seen during an interview with the CEO, who almost cried talking about the events of October 7th. Intel will give 5000$ war grant to the Israeli employees. One of Intel's largest fabs is a 20-minute drive from where the massacres occurred.

Do you know if AMD has any presence in Israel? Intel has already sold me multiple garbage dump products in the past and so if I can minimize my Israel related purchases i'd prefer to do that. The Mac is annoying since I think some pieces of their silicon designs come from Israel (storage controller). Can someone correct me if I am wrong on that?

What company doing VLSI, with more than say 500 employees, doesn't have some kind of presence in Israel? That's got to be a short list.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#372

Post by p_l »

jldugger wrote: post #251
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…

> Was ARM really competitive until recently? The writing was on the wall 6 years ago; Intel was not doing well in mobile and it was only a matter of time until that tech improved. Same as Intel unseating the datacenter chips before it. Ryzen I will give you is a surprise, but in a healthy competive market, "the competition outengineered us this time" _should_ be a potential outcome. IMO the interesting question is ba…

Previously, wverytine competition managed to out engineer intel, they crushed them either by having spare process advantage they could use to brute force performance... Or lock competition out of markets by blocking large swathes of them through illegal deals.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#373

Post by xw39011 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #330
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…

This blog https://semiaccurate.com/ has told the story for more than a decade that Intel has been getting high on its own supply and that the media has been uncritical of the stories it tells. In particular I think when it comes to the data center they’ve forgotten their roots. They took over the data center in the 1990s because they were producing desktop PCs in such numbers they could afford to get way ahead of the…

> every ARM vendor other than Apple has failed to move the needle on ARM performance since 2017

You must mean, performance relative to Intel, not absolute performance. Clearly Qualcomm has improved Snapdragon over time as have a number of other Android SOC vendors.

But I wonder if it's even true, have ARM vendors other than Apple failed to move the needle on performance (let's call performance single thread geekbench) relative to Intel? If someone is up for tracking down all the numbers I'd read that blog post. :)

Re: Intel's Humbling

#374

Post by [deleted] »

andrewstuart wrote: post #107

Off topic but I find it weird that Intel CEO does so much religious quoting under the Intel corporate logo: Here's one examples but there's a pile of them. https://twitter.com/PGelsinger/status/1751653865009631584 I guess Intel does need the help of a higher power at the stage.

[deleted]

Re: Intel's Humbling

#375

Post by MR4D »

riffraff wrote: post #239
RCitronsBroker wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

I would refer you to these to take the counterpoint to your position [1][2] [3].

China is in a world of hurt, but the government is trying desperately to hide how bad it actually is. If this continues for a few more months, it will be an existential situation for their economy.

[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-31/china-hom...

[2] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-31/china-sto...

[3] - https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/foreign-direct...

Re: Intel's Humbling

#376

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

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…

> 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.

Why the fuck are shareholders often so short-sighted?

Or do they just genuinely think the R&D investment won't pay off?

Re: Intel's Humbling

#377

Post by jcheng »

bux93 wrote: post #262
ffgjgf1 wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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”

Intel had purchased/gotten StrongARM from DEC. DEC had started developing ARM chips as they concluded it was a bad idea to try and scale down their alpha chips to be more energy efficient. Then, after the success of these ARM chips in the blackberry and most of the palm PDAs as well as MP3 players and HTC smartphones, Intel sells it off, so it could focus on trying to make its big chips more energy efficient, making…

> DEC had started developing ARM chips as they concluded it was a bad idea to try and scale down their alpha chips to be more energy efficient.

I thought this was interesting enough to track down more of the backstory here, and found this fascinating article:

https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...

Page 60, hard breaks added for readability:

Baum: Apple owned a big chunk of it, but when Apple was really having hard times, they sold off their chunk at quite a profit, but they sold off the chunk. And then-- oh, while Newton was going on, some people from DEC came to visit, and they said, “Hey, we were looking at doing a low power Alpha and decided that just couldn’t be done, and then looked at the ARM. We think we can make an ARM which is really low power, really high performance, really tiny, and cheap, and we can do it in a year. Would you use that in your Newton?” Cause, you know, we were using ARMs in the Newton, and we all kind of went, “Phhht, yeah. You can’t do it, but, yeah, if you could we’d use it.”

That was the basis of StrongARM, which became a very successful business for DEC. And then DEC sued Intel. Well, I worked on the StrongARM 1500, which was a very interesting product. It was an ARM and a DSP kind of highly combined. It was supposed to be like video processing using set top boxes, and things like that. And then we finished that project and our group in Palo Alto, we were just gonna start an Alpha project.

And just then it was announced that DEC was-- no. No. Intel, at that time, Intel, DEC sued Intel for patent violations, didn’t go to them and say, “Hey, pay up or stop using it.” They just sued them. Intel was completely taken by surprise. There was a settlement. The settlement was you have to buy our Microelectronics Division and pay us a whole pile of money, and everything will go away.

So they sold the Microelectronics Division, which we were part of, except for the Alpha Design Group, 'cause they didn’t think that they could sell that to Intel and have the SEC approve, 'cause the two can conflict. So I went away on vacation not knowing whether I would be coming back and working for Intel, or coming back working for DEC. And it turned out they decided to keep the Alpha Design Group, so I was still working for DEC. Except the reason for the lawsuit was Compaq wanted to buy DEC, but didn’t want to buy ‘em with this Fab and Microelectronics Division. So by doing this, they got rid of the Microelectronics Division, and now they could sell themselves to Compaq.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#378

Post by landryraccoon »

baq wrote: post #284
landryraccoon wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Instagram and WhatsApp are still popular with consumers though. Meta didn’t kill them, if anything they’ve grown significantly.

Re: Intel's Humbling

#379

Post by bgnn »

zer00eyz wrote: post #17

>>> Notice what is happening here: TSMC, unlike its historical pattern, is not keeping (all of its) 5nm capacity to make low-cost high-margin chips in fully-depreciated fabs; rather, it is going to repurpose some amount of equipment — probably as much as it can manage — to 3nm, which will allow it to expand its capacity without a commensurate increase in capital costs. This will both increase the profitability of 3nm…

5nm is good yield at the moment. It's even fully automotive qualified, which is a testament to its yield. But performance advantage vs cost doesn't justify to move from 7nm for a lot of designs. So tech adoption is getting stickier. For hogh performance designs like Apple CPUs going to the cutting edge is a given. So since 3nm is available 5nm lost its appeal. This is a new territory for TSMC but I think they handled it well. Just last year they were gearing up a lot of 5nm capacity in anticipation of people moving from 12 and 7nm to 5nm. It quickly became clear that this isn't happening. So they moved some of this to 3nm and some is going back to 7nm and 6nm (shrunk 7nm) I think. They are also cautious about buying the newest equipment from ASML unlike Intel and Samsung. This seems to play well for TSMC.

I think TSMC learned from Intel's downfall more than Intel. I don't see any industry traction from IFS. They can research any new technology they want. Without wafer orders it's a recipe for a quick cash burn..

Re: Intel's Humbling

#380

Post by JonChesterfield »

bpt3 wrote: post #369
andrewstuart wrote: post #107

Off topic but I find it weird that Intel CEO does so much religious quoting under the Intel corporate logo: Here's one examples but there's a pile of them. https://twitter.com/PGelsinger/status/1751653865009631584 I guess Intel does need the help of a higher power at the stage.

That's not under the Intel corporate logo. It's a personal account. His comments aren't my cup of tea but they certainly aren't generally offensive.

It has implications for his decision making process though. Christianity requires comfortably handling internally inconsistent information and taking a superficial approach to evidence. Whether that is an advantage in a CEO is unclear. It probably helps him remain confident in Intel's outlook.
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