Intel Reports Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results • Hacker News Board

Re: Intel Reports Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results

#41

Post by epolanski » Thu, Aug 01, 2024, 11:24 PM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #38

blinded wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

he also dismissed arm. https://www.pcmag.com/news/intel-ceo-dismisses-threat-of-arm... my gut reaction is that he wont be their ceo for long.

It’s still far from clear that ARM for Windows will be going anywhere. And Intel is trying to increase ISA diversification with their foundry business.

I've seen reviews of the latest 13 inch Dell XPS and it's both more powerful and less energy hungry than the M3 in a MacBook air. It uses the Snapdragon Elite X ARM cpu.

It also blows the latest mobile i7 ultra 155H on the same XPS 13 in performance while lasting almost 20 hours (compared to Intel's 6).

The comparisons are made on software that runs on both (Geekbench, handbrake) but it's clear that there is a huge momentum building for windows on arm.

Re: Intel Reports Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results

#42

Post by nateglims » Thu, Aug 01, 2024, 11:26 PM UTC

tedunangst wrote: post #17

bluedino wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 years from now, when the downfall of Intel is being taught at business schools, what are going to be the big takeways and now-obvious mistakes?

Go back and read the answers to when somebody asked the same question ten years ago?

10 years ago the supposed lesson was probably don't operate in the US.

Re: Intel Reports Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results

#43

Post by epolanski » Thu, Aug 01, 2024, 11:27 PM UTC

ladyanita22 wrote: post #26

layer8 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Leadership changed back to an engineer with the return of Pat Gelsinger in 2021. I’d give him a couple more years. It takes time to turn around a big ship like Intel.

Everyone around here keeps talking about how the problem of Intel is that it was a Business guy running the company and not an engineer, and it feels so similar to when people claimed Phil Spencer was going to save Xbox. Truth is, Pat is doing nothing despite the generous government subsidies

I think that in a business like hardware and foundries you can really judge the CEO in no less than 4/5 years.

Re: Intel Reports Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results

#44

Post by missedthecue » Thu, Aug 01, 2024, 11:27 PM UTC

softfalcon wrote: post #12

bluedino wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 years from now, when the downfall of Intel is being taught at business schools, what are going to be the big takeways and now-obvious mistakes?

In my opinion, one the most reliable signs is when companies stop repeatedly investing into their product innovation. The moment they start behaving like an established behemoth (monopoly/oligopoly) and you see repeated stock buybacks and frequent layoffs, the end is coming. This applies to most large, inefficient corporations that get too comfy with success and forget how to pivot fast, take risks, and fiercely figh…

Intel has put literally hundreds of billions of dollars into R&D annually in the past decade. Last year alone it was more than $16 billion. That's one of the highest annual R&D spends of any company in the entire US.

Nvidia for comparison is less than half that per year.

Re: Intel Reports Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results

#45

Post by linotype » Thu, Aug 01, 2024, 11:34 PM UTC

epolanski wrote: post #41

layer8 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s still far from clear that ARM for Windows will be going anywhere. And Intel is trying to increase ISA diversification with their foundry business.

I've seen reviews of the latest 13 inch Dell XPS and it's both more powerful and less energy hungry than the M3 in a MacBook air. It uses the Snapdragon Elite X ARM cpu. It also blows the latest mobile i7 ultra 155H on the same XPS 13 in performance while lasting almost 20 hours (compared to Intel's 6). The comparisons are made on software that runs on both (Geekbench, handbrake) but it's clear that there is a huge m…

> It also blows the latest mobile i7 ultra 155H on the same XPS 13

Oh my.

Re: Intel Reports Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results

#46

Post by epolanski » Thu, Aug 01, 2024, 11:34 PM UTC

bluedino wrote: post #7

softfalcon wrote: post #3

This sounds worryingly like “sales are down, cut costs to maintain profitability to spike our stock numbers” and not enough focus on what I believe is actually wrong, which is that they can’t seem to reliably make competitive processors in a stiff market. Anyone else feel like this is bean counters at Intel playing the wrong game? I personally feel like leadership at Intel lost the plot almost a decade ago.

10 years from now, when the downfall of Intel is being taught at business schools, what are going to be the big takeways and now-obvious mistakes?

Big takeaways: in consumer tech you live and die by the performance of your latest product. That applies to both CPUs and foundry.

Now-obvious mistakes: I'm not including the obvious mobile argument as it belongs to the previous point, but they slept too long on GPUs. Even though the biggest supercomputers in the planet started doing computations on GPUs a decade ago they missed the ultimate parallelization-hardware train.

Re: Intel Reports Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results

#47

Post by nateglims » Thu, Aug 01, 2024, 11:37 PM UTC

bluedino wrote: post #7

softfalcon wrote: post #3

This sounds worryingly like “sales are down, cut costs to maintain profitability to spike our stock numbers” and not enough focus on what I believe is actually wrong, which is that they can’t seem to reliably make competitive processors in a stiff market. Anyone else feel like this is bean counters at Intel playing the wrong game? I personally feel like leadership at Intel lost the plot almost a decade ago.

10 years from now, when the downfall of Intel is being taught at business schools, what are going to be the big takeways and now-obvious mistakes?

This move is what business school would suggest. Revenue is declining in their near monopoly position in the market. What's the obvious mistake that fixes that?

Re: Intel Reports Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results

#48

Post by epolanski » Thu, Aug 01, 2024, 11:40 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #16

softfalcon wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, one the most reliable signs is when companies stop repeatedly investing into their product innovation. The moment they start behaving like an established behemoth (monopoly/oligopoly) and you see repeated stock buybacks and frequent layoffs, the end is coming. This applies to most large, inefficient corporations that get too comfy with success and forget how to pivot fast, take risks, and fiercely figh…

>> The moment they start behaving like an established behemoth (monopoly/oligopoly) and you see repeated stock buybacks and frequent layoffs, the end is coming. Add to that the suspension of the dividend, and the packaging of the FPGA business (getting ready to sell it?) and the reference to idle capacity - guess they can't even fill that with their foundry business. One thing I've noticed is that predicting timing i…

The writing was on the wall for Intel more than 7 years ago.

By then:

- Intel's 10 nm node was known to be two years late and known to be plagued for many others while TSMC had already taken the crown for most advanced foundry on the planet

- Apple announced their work on phasing out Intel hardware completely for their own ARM SOCs

- AMD had launched Ryzen, back then a bit slower in single thread but already much more competitive in MT

- Supercomputers and crypto showed the ever increasing possibilities of GPUs for heavily parallelizable calculations and Intel had nothing to offer there

- Cloud providers building their own hardware on ARM

Re: Intel Reports Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results

#49

Post by computerdork » Thu, Aug 01, 2024, 11:42 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #11

bluedino wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

10 years from now, when the downfall of Intel is being taught at business schools, what are going to be the big takeways and now-obvious mistakes?

Probably not offering fab time to other companies when they were process leaders. TSMC ate their lunch and managed to leapfrog Intel due to their massive R&D efforts fueled by cell phone chips.

agreed. Stalling and then falling behind in fab to TSMC and Samsung is where they really lost the company. Still, Gelsinger sees this and they have bet the company on their 18A process. Will be interesting to see if they pull it off.

Re: Intel Reports Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results

#50

Post by s1artibartfast » Fri, Aug 02, 2024, 12:06 AM UTC

missedthecue wrote: post #44

softfalcon wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, one the most reliable signs is when companies stop repeatedly investing into their product innovation. The moment they start behaving like an established behemoth (monopoly/oligopoly) and you see repeated stock buybacks and frequent layoffs, the end is coming. This applies to most large, inefficient corporations that get too comfy with success and forget how to pivot fast, take risks, and fiercely figh…

Intel has put literally hundreds of billions of dollars into R&D annually in the past decade. Last year alone it was more than $16 billion. That's one of the highest annual R&D spends of any company in the entire US. Nvidia for comparison is less than half that per year.

There is this interesting phenomenon where people outside an organization view R&D potential as elastic. That is to say, there is always a positive return on investment for the marginal R&D dollar.

It is clearly not in the case or every company would have exponential growth simply by reinvesting in R&D.

In reality, it is extremely difficult to create growth from R&D at all.