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Intel Reports Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results

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Re: Intel Reports Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results

#121

Post by bgnn »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #67
honkycat wrote: post #53

$152 billion in stock buybacks. We don't have an economy anymore, we are just handing money to the ultra-wealthy. US. Total economic collapse. Hard landing. This is the beginning of the end. We really had the chance to make something beautiful with this country, but the 1% bought and sold it into the ground. Half our politicians aren't even trying to keep it running anymore.

They should have done more buybacks so it could be used for something productive. All of the money left in the company is going to be wasted as it rots from the inside. The company didn't die of starvation, it died of obesity.

This is happening while Intel is begging for government monry to fund its new fabs. what about they don't get taxpayer money?

Re: Intel Reports Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results

#122

Post by hylaride »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #97
hylaride wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should elaborate on the word "proper" in this context. Intel rarely had the best technology, but it was often "good enough, cheap enough, and available enough" to succeed in the marketplace - this is a lesson SO MANY people forget. Sun, DEC, etc arguably had better hardware, but it was expensive. What Intel was very good at was iterating on the technology it had and making it faster within a reasonable budget. Micr…

> Then there was the whole Itanium debacle, where politics succeeded over engineering and they ended up with a worse, more expensive product that failed in the market. Why do you say Itanium was politics over engineering? It turned out to be a not-really-workable idea, sure. But if you looked at it, not knowing how it was going to work out, it was not an obviously bad idea. It was probably worth trying. (Or are you s…

I’m saying the latter, that politics succeeded over engineering in the process of implementation of Itanium.

The instruction set for it was relatively bloated, indicating that there were too many compromises being made.

Writing compilers for it was a notorious shitshow. Itanium introduced a too much of indeterminism by via static scheduling hostile methods like branch prediction, variable latency caches, and attempts at an x86 compatibility layer. The core problem for Itanium is that it was impossible for the compiler to make good calls since it could not know exactly where and when things in memory would be. Even intel’s own compilers produced lackluster results, to say nothing of attempts by Microsoft, HP (who bet the farm on Itanium), and GNU (which mattered for Linux).

There were politics and demands from HP, which was the only seriously committed partner that wanted chips that would in theory be best for replacing pa-risc, but then intels own expectations of having it replace x86 everywhere.

Itanium actually did perform well at some kinds of parallelism. However, to take full advantage of that would have required a paradigm shift in the way languages worked, because 99% of the code out there was sequential/procedural. So maybe some new code (or more likely languages) could have really kicked ass (and intel did demonstrate that was possible), but even if everybody decided to go ahead there’d be a lot of learning and mistakes on the journey to full optimisation. Or you could just make your current code go faster by buying cheaper 64 bit x86.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

Re: Intel Reports Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results

#123

Post by osnium123 »

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

The previous CEO was going to shut down the fabs. Maybe it would have been the right strategy but Pat Gelsinger had reoriented towards fab manufacturing for what it’s worth.

Re: Intel Reports Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results

#124

Post by osnium123 »

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?

Maybe they should have shut down the fabs and gone all on TSMC. Manufacturing in the US is a dead end due to costs and incompetence.

Re: Intel Reports Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results

#125

Post by osnium123 »

honkycat wrote: post #54
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't run your own fab? It makes business sense but I don't know if I like that answer. What if everyone did that? Should everyone just use TSMC? That's stupid IMO.

We never should have allowed the fabs to leave in the first place. Clearly it is both a security AND economic liability. The US leadership fucked the dog and decided cheap labor was more important than national security or a functioning economy. Everything is gone, it has been shipped overseas.

For fabs to run efficiently and effectively, you need a competent workforce. I’m not sure you can get that kind of workforce here in the US. Just look at TSMC’s struggles in AZ.

Re: Intel Reports Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results

#126

Post by s1artibartfast »

bgnn wrote: post #121
s1artibartfast wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should have done more buybacks so it could be used for something productive. All of the money left in the company is going to be wasted as it rots from the inside. The company didn't die of starvation, it died of obesity.

This is happening while Intel is begging for government monry to fund its new fabs. what about they don't get taxpayer money?

Im not sure who was begging who, but as long as they build the fabs they are being paid to build, they should get the money. If they dont build the fabs, they shouldn't get the money for them.

Seems pretty clear to me.

Re: Intel Reports Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results

#127

Post by kkert »

softfalcon wrote: post #20
phkahler wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

I am convinced that the decay is often very slow. There are signs of impending failure and it frequently drags out for many, many years. Then, eventually, you'll see a "straw that breaks the camel's back" and the hollow shell of the company will finally, fully implode.

[dead]

Re: Intel Reports Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results

#128

Post by frognumber »

hylaride wrote: post #122
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then there was the whole Itanium debacle, where politics succeeded over engineering and they ended up with a worse, more expensive product that failed in the market. Why do you say Itanium was politics over engineering? It turned out to be a not-really-workable idea, sure. But if you looked at it, not knowing how it was going to work out, it was not an obviously bad idea. It was probably worth trying. (Or are you s…

I’m saying the latter, that politics succeeded over engineering in the process of implementation of Itanium. The instruction set for it was relatively bloated, indicating that there were too many compromises being made. Writing compilers for it was a notorious shitshow. Itanium introduced a too much of indeterminism by via static scheduling hostile methods like branch prediction, variable latency caches, and attempts…

My recollection at the time was that there were good reasons to believe compilers would be workable.

We were in the golden years of Java bytecode translations, real-world JITs, and Transmeta (which made a similar bet in hardware). That was the era we were starting to introduce rather complex transformations and optimizations. Computers were just starting to become powerful enough to where this kind of analysis and optimization felt possible and practical.

The compiler problem felt complex, but not unsolvable.

There were no good, obvious reasons I recall why the Itanium optimization problem couldn't be solved. The basic philosophy was make the hardware as fast as possible, even if it was hard to program, just rely on the compiler to deal with it.

Now, in hindsight, I can give all the reasons it didn't work. Key among them is that we drastically underestimated the degree to which complex software systems are hard to build and the way code messiness grows exponentially for these kinds of systems.

However, that wasn't really knowable in hindsight, though. Around the time, a lot of firms were making similar bets, and in 2001, I likely would have made the exact same bet with what was known at the time.

As a footnote, the anticipated progress in compilers is being made, but much more slowly than anticipated. NVidia reached its market cap on architectures being explored at that time. I had plenty of faculty promise similar SIMD/MIMD architectures would be increasingly important, but __dramatically__ underestimating the time it would take to get there.

Re: Intel Reports Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results

#129

Post by bornfreddy »

2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #15
frognumber wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't screw up running your own fab is the better lesson. * Intel foundry services were perhaps a decade or two too late. Running a fab needs scale. That had to come before they lost the technology edge. * Intel treatment and mismanagement of engineers was well-known in 2000, and you need the best and brightest. * Leadership needs to understand core business / technology. Bob Swan. Arguably Brian Krzanich. Paul Otell…

Don't screw up? Sage advice! I agree they are mismanaged but it also takes luck to stay in the lead. I hope for a comeback too. My amateur worthless opinion is that Intel is struggling now but at least they have fabs. The fabless companies are going to be fucked in the long term- the fabs they contract to are all on shifting geopolitical sands!

> The fabless companies are going to be fucked in the long term- the fabs they contract to are all on shifting geopolitical sands!

The fabless companies will also have a problem if only TSMC is left. What is there to keep them from rising the prices? Right now TSMC is afraid of Samsung and Intel, but if Samsung falls behind and Intel folds, AMD / NVDA / ... will have a crisis on their hands.

Re: Intel Reports Second Quarter 2024 Financial Results

#130

Post by gosub100 »

michaelmrose wrote: post #108
gosub100 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropped in value, as in stock price? Sure. Was it ever with that much to begin with? Likely not.

Dropped in projected value as a company irrespective of the stock which you can't buy now because its private per individuals with large stakes. Their financials tanked as advertisers fled the platform or reduced spend drastically. It's now basically a money pit that at present trajectory will continue to burn money until Elon's other ventures can't afford it. Given his wealth he can keep losing a billion or two a ye…

advertisers are free to join the platform back. Could it be that allowing people to publish 200 word texts just isn't that great of a business? Also, I can't help but notice the similarities in the arguments about censorship ("It's their platform their rules"), then when the wrong person buys the platform, suddenly that argument gets put to rest.
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