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Intel Honesty
121–130 of 426 posts
Re: Intel Honesty
#122Intel 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…
It's grim at INTC but don't forget the CHIPS act and whatever else will follow that. The US government spends 0.5T per month - more than the market cap of all but the top 15 American companies [0] [1] Not saying it's a good or bad idea, or that it will or won't happen - but if the US government decides to reinvent Intel, they can easily write a cheque that (if spent wisely) might do the trick. [0] https://companiesma…
Intel is underserving of this investment and the chips act has no teeth to ensure that they follow through and build these facilities and create jobs. They will not follow through and spend the money wisely and that was clear from the moment that bill was drafted.
Re: Intel Honesty
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of the issues are way downstream of those NIMBYs: Non-housing costs are quite low in Taiwan. Food and childcare, in particular, are so much cheaper than California that it’s hard to believe. But the NIMBYs aren’t totally in the clear. Rental housing with 3+ bedrooms (for families) is severely lacking in much of the US. Maybe fire codes are to blame. Taiwan is full of very nice new high-rise development that cont…
>Rental housing with 3+ bedrooms (for families) is severely lacking in much of the US. Maybe fire codes are to blame. Taiwan is full of very nice new high-rise development that contains units with lots of bedrooms. Wandering around those developments and the new 3-story developments in California, the ones in Taiwan are much, much, much nicer, even from the outside. The NIMBYs should take note. And it's because of zo…
How could we get a council of a half-dozen visionaries to own a city-sized chunk of land and design a utopia, communist party-style but done right? I really think this is not possible without it being a private parcel where there aren't thousands of individual property owners in the loop for decision making.
Re: Intel Honesty
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're pretty incredible machines for the price. I bought one a year and a half ago in an emergency, as the networking on my laptop died over the course of a few days and I needed something for browsing and email. I got the Linux dev environment set up on the Chromebook and I actually kept it instead of getting a new expensive laptop.
They are. The problem is that they are for the educational market. Especially with Google's exit from hardware, they're basically mostly cheap devices for kids. And, if you do build a nice one, you could probably get a lower-end MacBook Air for about the same price which would be almost as low-maintenance to use if you wanted it to be.
The cheapest Air is $999 for a fast but pretty limited 8G device. That budget gets you a 16G Meteor Lake Chromebook which runs Debian cleanly in a VM. It's true that Apple is doing a better job than it used to in serving the budget market, but Macs remain pretty exclusive. Similarly a low end Windows laptop with WSL is a better budget choice, though IMHO very inferior to the Chromebook in Linux integration.
Re: Intel Honesty
#125> 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…
So did the year of the EUV lithography happen? What year was it? (Genuinely asking, I don't know anything about chips - I'm the kind of programmer who is profoundly comforted by pretending like my CPU is like a really fast version of the thing I did in CompE 201, as opposed to reality which i gather is a bit more like a demonically possessed stone that glues together a bunch of barely understood physics that kind of…
Your description of reality made me chuckle. I remember during my degree the professor teaching us about how simple CPUs are made, but saying that the people who engineer the current hardware are like dark magicians. It can only have gotten more complicated since then.
Re: Intel Honesty
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
In addition, SMIC in China managed to get to 7 nm without the use of EUV. Also early EUV yields were actually quite low.
Did SMIC get 7nm to yield or is it limping but propped up for PR purposes like Intel 7?
The latter. China isn't even close to achieving high-yield 7nm.
Re: Intel Honesty
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some of the issues are way downstream of those NIMBYs: Non-housing costs are quite low in Taiwan. Food and childcare, in particular, are so much cheaper than California that it’s hard to believe. But the NIMBYs aren’t totally in the clear. Rental housing with 3+ bedrooms (for families) is severely lacking in much of the US. Maybe fire codes are to blame. Taiwan is full of very nice new high-rise development that cont…
>Rental housing with 3+ bedrooms (for families) is severely lacking in much of the US. Maybe fire codes are to blame. Taiwan is full of very nice new high-rise development that contains units with lots of bedrooms. Wandering around those developments and the new 3-story developments in California, the ones in Taiwan are much, much, much nicer, even from the outside. The NIMBYs should take note. And it's because of zo…
But isn't housing extremely unaffordable in Taipei (and presumably rest of Taiwan)? Price per m2 is comparable to San Francisco or San Jose but median earnings are several times lower.
Re: Intel Honesty
#128>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. There's some whiplash in hearing constantly how the US is a corporate-dominated oligarchy, and then also seeing trillion-dollar indus…
Some of the issues are way downstream of those NIMBYs: Non-housing costs are quite low in Taiwan. Food and childcare, in particular, are so much cheaper than California that it’s hard to believe. But the NIMBYs aren’t totally in the clear. Rental housing with 3+ bedrooms (for families) is severely lacking in much of the US. Maybe fire codes are to blame. Taiwan is full of very nice new high-rise development that cont…
> Taiwan is full of very nice new high-rise development that contains units with lots of bedrooms
But presumably you'll never be able to buy and will have to rent forever? Real estate is significantly more expensive in Taiwan relative to income than in SF/etc.
Re: Intel Honesty
#129Intel 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…
It's grim at INTC but don't forget the CHIPS act and whatever else will follow that. The US government spends 0.5T per month - more than the market cap of all but the top 15 American companies [0] [1] Not saying it's a good or bad idea, or that it will or won't happen - but if the US government decides to reinvent Intel, they can easily write a cheque that (if spent wisely) might do the trick. [0] https://companiesma…
Why doesn't the USA just buy out all of Intel's debt, let them start fresh? Call it a Silicon Era War Bond, in reverse.
Re: Intel Honesty
#130I'm not sure if I buy the thesis entirely (that thesis most aptly being: "Gelsinger does have one fatal flaw: he still believes in Intel, and I no longer do.") The biggest reason is geopolitics: If escalated confrontation happens with China, Intel becomes one of the most valuable companies on the planet, period. TSMC will finish western fabs eventually, but the delta-t on when they become competitive (tech, capacity…
> remember that TSMC is built entirely on the back of ASML;
Probably a few people east of the Netherlands have noticed and are doing something about it.