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Intel Honesty

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Re: Intel Honesty

#301

Post by philsnow »

taormina wrote: post #245
kagakuninja wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Texas actually has higher taxes than California, despite the lack of income tax. They make up for it in property tax AFAIK. California actually has low property taxes for many property owners, thanks to the controversial proposition 13. Desirable urban areas of California are expensive because we don't have enough housing.

As a Texan, who has considered moving to California many times, this is laughable. I pay maybe $10k-$11k in property taxes ( https://tax-office.traviscountytx.gov/properties/taxes/estim... ). I work for myself at the moment, but if I took my previous salary of $200k and earned that in CA instead, I would owe CA closer to $15k, and I'm not grandfathered into prop 13. Never once in my career has the math made any sense…

Back in 2018 I did the math and ended up buying a house in Texas. Table stakes for a 2- or 3-bed shack on the SFBA peninsula was ~$1.5M at the time. At 1%, that's $15k / year in perpetuity to CA. In TX I found an amazing house in the town I was looking at for about $450k, and the property tax on this particular one (every house is in a locality, county, school district, maybe some other domains, and each has their own tax) added up to about 3%, or $13.5k / year.

In addition to being fewer dollarbucks out of my pocket, I had confidence that that money was going to be used closer to my own community.

(All of this is to say nothing of TX having no capital gains tax, which pushed the move from being kind of a wash to being a slam dunk.)

I didn't end up actually moving there for personal reasons, and having done all this analysis makes the California taxes all the harder to stomach.

Re: Intel Honesty

#302

Post by benreesman »

wmf wrote: post #298
benreesman wrote: post #183

I’ve heard the theory that Intel is physically incapable of doing the lithography transition they need to do without missing at least one full release cycle. Which should be bad news but shouldn’t be existential. The theory goes that any CEO who does the necessary thing will be fired, so either they won’t do it, or the board will replace them with someone who won’t do it. That kind of market failure can destroy arbit…

They skipped a release cycle with 14th gen (it's the same as 13th gen) and the lithography transition is basically finished already. It looks like Intel 18A will come out before TSMC N2.

I hope you’re right, I’m not an Intel fanboy but when they hit a high note it’s usually pretty good, and we like competition.

I had a 12900K that was one of my favorite chips in ages but nothing since then has looked appealing.

Re: Intel Honesty

#304

Post by sroussey »

throwaway81523 wrote: post #276
SSLy wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, and in Intel's fabs? They're still not on EUV, right?

Does doing an EUV chip when you already have tons of non-EUV fab take more technical wizardry than writing a huge check to ASML for the EUV machine? EUV is in the mask making step, right? Obviously your wafer fab has to be tuned to your masks but EUV lithography itself (i.e. ASML making the machine) is waaay more difficult from what I can tell.

Yes and no. More difficult in that it is different and smaller and there are issues to work out every time that happens (I once worked in a fab changing nodes). But some things are easier downstream, skipping the multi-patterning business for example. Though that multi-patterning stuff was pretty smart!

Re: Intel Honesty

#305

Post by sroussey »

amluto wrote: post #229
beAbU wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean "it all started..." ? One of my earliest memories is my mum paying for groceries using her credit card in the 90/00s, where the machine used was completely mechanical/manual. It copied the card number (that was embossed on the plastic) by literally taking a carbon paper rubbing of the card. The system was designed to be offline, because back then there was no "online".

That would be one of the credit card imprinters I referenced, which is offline… I also recall the occasional business writing down credit card details, in person, with a pen, on a form they had for the purpose.

> I also recall the occasional business writing down credit card details, in person, with a pen, on a form they had for the purpose.

Sadly, I still see this...

Re: Intel Honesty

#306

Post by sroussey »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #33
davidw wrote: post #5

The geopolitical bit of all this is the real wild card. No one really knows what's going to happen there.

Yeah, you've got Apple, Nvidia and AMD heavily exposed to that geopolitical risk, but seemingly not willing to help lessen it by investing in US fabs. Whenever I note this people here and elsewhere say "they're smart to be fabless" but somebody's gotta run fabs and more fabs need to be run in the US and quickly. I realize industrial policy isn't in vogue these days but it might be a good idea for the future of US sem…

Apple could invest in an Intel Foundry spinoff, but there is no reason to invest in the Intel of today.

Re: Intel Honesty

#307

Post by AnotherGoodName »

phonon wrote: post #108
bryanlarsen wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By what metric do you consider INTC to be low? I took a look because I'd be happy picking up some cheap INTC, but it still looks expensive to me.

It's trading significantly below book? $120 B vs $82 B. Downside is that most of their assets are their fabs...

That can also mean they haven’t done asset writeoffs they should have already done in previous quarters.

If you have billions in obsolete equipment you can technically get away with not doing an asset write off so it doesn’t show in the books of current quarterly performance. Just claim it’s not actually obsolete yet. It catches up eventually though.

So the above may be more of a timebomb than a value signal. It can indicate that Intel hasn’t written off ~$40billion of assets it should have and it would seem a lot of investors are aware of this. They are already losing $10billion a quarter without counting those write off so I understand the hesitance.

Re: Intel Honesty

#308

Post by blasphemers »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #116
highfrequency wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice analysis on competitive dynamics of semiconductor industry vs. space industry in the 2000s. > I'm not aware of any other industries which are quite as far "behind" today as space launch systems were in 2010. But if anyone else is, please mention those industries here! Digital payments may be in a similar situation. Visa's 2% fee may seem low but from a scale and competitive standpoint it is fairly absurd - they…

>Visa's 2% fee may seem low but from a scale and competitive standpoint it is fairly absurd - they are making 80% gross margins on $30b of revenue to do what boils down to a few API calls and some fraud repayment. The banks issuing Visa cards do fraud repayment. Visa gets paid for their network, and specifically their network of higher income spenders who want to play the rewards game. Also, note that Visa does not e…

Exactly, the interchange fee is split between the issuing bank(largest cut), acquiring bank, and the network(smallest cut). Yet everybody acts like visa is just skimming 2% from every transaction without them getting anything in return while they have created entire lifestyles and communities around hacking credit card offers.

Re: Intel Honesty

#309

Post by DiscourseFan »

nunez wrote: post #286
DiscourseFan wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Florida will be underwater immanently, in Texas abortion is illegal. I'd call it a "bubble," for lack of a better term.

Texas politics is temporary IMO. Tides will turn eventually.

History is not some abstract concept that moves with as much regularity as the moon around the ocean. It takes people to change laws.

Re: Intel Honesty

#310

Post by DiscourseFan »

kortilla wrote: post #280
DiscourseFan wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Florida will be underwater immanently, in Texas abortion is illegal. I'd call it a "bubble," for lack of a better term.

Whatever you want to call it, people want to live there.

They want a well-paying job or a better community or better schools. Nobody "wants" to move to a state just because its that state. Long term political and ecological trends won't deter short term gains for many, that's all.
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