Intel Honesty • Hacker News Board

Re: Intel Honesty

#11

Post by AnotherGoodName » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 5:34 PM UTC

Intel is trapped. Its debt repayments alone are massive. The poor performance in stock has encouraged 20years of wage stagnation to the point where you can literally earn over 50% more at amd or nvidia or even an startup for equivalent roles so they aren’t hiring the best. Their pay in the Bay Area is double tsmc in taiwan for equivalent roles in raw dollar terms but the ppp differences means your better off working for tsmc in Taiwan than intel in the Bay Area. That’s not a joke. Intel are literally incapable of attracting talent from Taiwan right now.

They don’t have the talent they need and the debt trap and poor performance means a lot of push back to the needed doubling of wages to attract that talent. It’s a very hard sell for any exec trying to correct this problem. They sidelined lip bu tan who was one of the advocates for even more layoffs and wage freezes but he’s one of many backwards thinkers they need to remove. It’s going to be difficult to fix their board.

Without talent intel has no hope of winning and they can’t get that talent due to poor stock performance for the past 20years leading to executives and shareholders wishing to implement the opposite of what they need right now. In fact they have ongoing layoffs right now. A true downward spiral and the only real hope is for a newcomer to step up.

Re: Intel Honesty

#12

Post by rowanG077 » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 5:34 PM UTC

knightfall21 wrote: post #9

andy_xor_andrew wrote: post #6

US chip production really needs its SpaceX moment, but it seems like it will never happen, and we're left with the crumbling empire of Intel. By "SpaceX moment", I mean a startup entering an impossible market, where the barrier to entry is billions of dollars of research and manufacturing, a market dominated by industry giants from the 60s, and yet still coming out on top somehow.

[flagged]

I'll gladly take another Elon for siliconX. Hell I'd take 10. The good Elon has done in terms of his companies vastly outweigh the few bad tweets he slings into the world once in a while.

Re: Intel Honesty

#13

Post by cherryteastain » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 5:35 PM UTC

andy_xor_andrew wrote: post #6

US chip production really needs its SpaceX moment, but it seems like it will never happen, and we're left with the crumbling empire of Intel. By "SpaceX moment", I mean a startup entering an impossible market, where the barrier to entry is billions of dollars of research and manufacturing, a market dominated by industry giants from the 60s, and yet still coming out on top somehow.

The semi spacex moment already happened - it was when TSMC was founded

Re: Intel Honesty

#14

Post by hangonhn » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 5:35 PM UTC

scrlk wrote: post #10

> in the late 2010’s Intel got stuck trying to move to 10nm, thanks in part to their reluctance to embrace the vastly more expensive EUV lithography process TBH, it's easy to say this with the benefit of hindsight. Throughout most of the 2010s, EUV lithography was like the "year of the Linux desktop" - i.e., this year will be the year where EUV was suitable for high volume manufacturing. I don't really blame Intel fo…

In addition, SMIC in China managed to get to 7 nm without the use of EUV. Also early EUV yields were actually quite low.

Re: Intel Honesty

#15

Post by TheAmazingRace » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 5:36 PM UTC

I'm still hopeful of the fact that Intel is, in many aspects "too big to fail", and with their cash on hand, they have enough of a burn rate to turn this ship around, even if they aren't being as intense on cutbacks as they should be.

The question remains, will Intel survive in its current form or could an activist investor stir up a hostile takeover and change the calculus?

Re: Intel Honesty

#16

Post by hangonhn » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 5:37 PM UTC

cherryteastain wrote: post #13

andy_xor_andrew wrote: post #6

US chip production really needs its SpaceX moment, but it seems like it will never happen, and we're left with the crumbling empire of Intel. By "SpaceX moment", I mean a startup entering an impossible market, where the barrier to entry is billions of dollars of research and manufacturing, a market dominated by industry giants from the 60s, and yet still coming out on top somehow.

The semi spacex moment already happened - it was when TSMC was founded

That's such a good insight. It really was the SpaceX moment or maybe we can say SpaceX was the TSMC moment of space since TSMC came first.

Re: Intel Honesty

#17

Post by milesskorpen » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 5:38 PM UTC

andy_xor_andrew wrote: post #6

US chip production really needs its SpaceX moment, but it seems like it will never happen, and we're left with the crumbling empire of Intel. By "SpaceX moment", I mean a startup entering an impossible market, where the barrier to entry is billions of dollars of research and manufacturing, a market dominated by industry giants from the 60s, and yet still coming out on top somehow.

I think the issue is that TSMC exists, which takes up a lot of oxygen and opportunity. Whereas in space, there wasn't a high quality opportunity, so SpaceX had a lower hurdle to being the best (even though that still wasn't easy!).

Re: Intel Honesty

#18

Post by oldpersonintx » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 5:40 PM UTC

flerchin wrote: post #2

Brutal. Intel processors will be the equivalent of government cheese. Not what anyone wants, but it's what you get with your government dollars.

[dead]

Re: Intel Honesty

#19

Post by vessenes » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 5:40 PM UTC

rowanG077 wrote: post #12

knightfall21 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I'll gladly take another Elon for siliconX. Hell I'd take 10. The good Elon has done in terms of his companies vastly outweigh the few bad tweets he slings into the world once in a while.

Plus if there were ten more Elons they would all probably just argue on Twitter and sort of cancel each-other out. Win-win-win.

Re: Intel Honesty

#20

Post by api » Wed, Sep 04, 2024, 5:40 PM UTC

scrlk wrote: post #10

> in the late 2010’s Intel got stuck trying to move to 10nm, thanks in part to their reluctance to embrace the vastly more expensive EUV lithography process TBH, it's easy to say this with the benefit of hindsight. Throughout most of the 2010s, EUV lithography was like the "year of the Linux desktop" - i.e., this year will be the year where EUV was suitable for high volume manufacturing. I don't really blame Intel fo…

> Throughout most of the 2010s, EUV lithography was like the "year of the Linux desktop" - i.e., this year will be the year where EUV was suitable for high volume manufacturing.

We need to learn to recognize the difference between something that's never going to happen for either physical or economic/social/structural reasons, and something that is just really difficult and takes a long time.

I always think of this when I think about fusion and the irritating "fusion is 20 years away and always will be" meme. In reality fusion has been edging closer, and closer, and closer for decades. Like EUV lithography it's just incredibly hard and requires a ton of capital and time and some of the smartest people on Earth to make it a reality. The same logic applies to things like a working HIV vaccine, life extension, or human space flight and space settlement.

The reason there's never been a year of the Linux desktop on the other hand has to do with the full picture of what's required to mass market a desktop OS and support that, not just the technical problems, as well as business reasons around what Microsoft does to incentivize vendors to stay in their ecosystem. Linux desktops are just about ready today but no mainstream laptop/desktop PC vendor is going to sell them for a long laundry-list of non-technical or para-technical (legacy software base) reasons.