311–320 of 426 posts
What happens to the computer and tech industry if Intel fails? The x86 licence still has value to some others in the space, but it seems like Intel could potentially be sold off for parts if it can't sell correct.
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> allow to select the purchase price within the last 2 years I don't think that's true. My reading of that is "you lock in the price on your start date and can keep that for the next 2 years going forward". That doesn't help anybody joining at >$1k / share. :D (and that's only ESPP, not standard stock compensation).
Can't speak for NVIDIA but at another company I know they use the lowest price on the last 4 periods (so lowest of 8 timestamps)
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…
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I worked there for a few years a little over a decade ago in Oregon. The wages were abysmal, so you're not wrong, but they still drew a lot of good talent because Intel was more accessible to the suburbs than the city of Portland (commuting to downtown Portland was awful) and remote options were limited. Krzanich era layoffs and the availability of more remote work options resulted in a rapid drain of talent though.…
I worked there on a contract while they were building a phone and had as many as six managers over six months. One of them would come in at 11, talk to me about nothing until lunch, then come back after lunch, talk more, and go home. I had to come in early to get anything done. When I was toward the end of my project and sure I wasn’t going to try to get a blue badge I laid into someone in a meeting. It wasn’t my bes…
I wonder how it became a culture so afraid of itself. How did Amazon (possibly no less "toxic", Idk) embarrassed combative disagreement and sublimated that natural emergent expression/desire during stressful situations into something that worked for the company, whereas Intel sounds like it failed to do that?
Org psychology point of view.
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…
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.
But surely it wouldn't be impossible, with enough capital and initiative, to start a US-side TSMC clone on US soil? Just like the Valley successes of the 70s and 80s prompted savvy Taiwanese investors to found TSMC. We might need to start copying back some of their playbook to chart our own course to success, as they did with ours, then exceeded it with their out strategy and ingenuity, currently.
The geopolitical bit of all this is the real wild card. No one really knows what's going to happen there.
Maintaining a US native foundry might actually be a way to prevent war because one of the key triggers might be the moment where all major chip players totally depend on TSMC, which gives Chinese/Taiwanese massive leverage. Economically, might be a loss leader. But strategically, important, probably.
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1987? As near as I can tell there was nothing particularly remarkable about TSMC in the 1980s or 1990s.
20 years for a hardware startup to get really going isn't unusual. One of the other reasons VC likes SAAS. Hardware startups are cash intensive and slow boils, typically.
UMC was a Taiwan foundry that started even before TSMC and it eventually folded.
yeah intel's foundry business might not be competitive in the short term. but it's better than nothing. they can focus on other industries that don't need high performance / for low power. because if you yield the whole thing to tsmc. you won't be able to recover the expertise, which is catastrophic for both intel / USA.
Capacity building here has to be a long term play.
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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.