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Intel Honesty

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Re: Intel Honesty

#341

Post by Panzer04 »

rstuart4133 wrote: post #233
crowcroft wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$29b cash and about $50b in debt. They have a valid business still, but I think you're under appreciating how much of a hole they need to dig themselves out of. Their current foundries can't just make other chips, and they certainly can't make GPUs for AI (TSMC make Intel GPUs). They are making a new foundry in Ohio, but in Intel's current state and comments they've made to the market it's not guaranteed the foundry…

> $29b cash and about $50b in debt. I know nothing about finance, but I have trouble figuring out how they got themselves into this situation given this https://www.intc.com/stock-info/dividends-and-buybacks : As of June 29th, 2024, we were authorized to repurchase up to $110.0 billion, of which $7.24 billion remain available. We have repurchased 5.77 billion shares at a cost of $152.05 billion since the program bega…

Because debt was cheap. Easy to keep it on balance sheet a few % rather than give it to shareholders.

Remember, for the decade before this point INTC was throwing off 20B+ profits every year. They've had a couple of bad results recently, and everyone is ready to throw them off a cliff.

People are, in general, very sensitive to the most recent news when it comes to stocks. They will extrapolate what happened over the last year out into the next decade and say X is dead or X is going to rule the world (Intel, Nvidia respectively).

Re: Intel Honesty

#342

Post by anitil »

keepamovin wrote: post #316
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.

TSMC would likely never let itself be bought by a Western company. It's too vital to Taiwan's (and China's interest). The best that can be hoped is its ethical engagement with US chip players in decline. 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.…

I don't know geopolitics well enough to know the answer to this. Is losing TSMC an existential risk to Taiwan?

Re: Intel Honesty

#343

Post by bluecalm »

Panzer04 wrote: post #337
eric-hu wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Another way to look at it: Intel market cap is 83B, AMD's market cap is 228B. Do you think Intel is expected to make 1/3 of the money AMD is going to make in coming decades? I see no reason to be as optimistic. Nit: market cap is not earnings. That's stock price * shares outstanding. This year's earnings looks like this: Intel, 3 months ended: Jun 29, 2024 > Net income (loss) (1,654) https://www.intc.com/news-event…

Intel's revenue is 54B to AMD 22B. If Intel's CPU division was spun off, I see little reason to believe AMD deserves a 3x premium to that - and you get IFS with Intel as well right now! Granted, IFS is the millstone hanging around their neck right now, unless they can fix it.

Intel still has 75% of data center market share (for CPUs). I think this is mainly momentum and they will lose most of it in coming years.

Re: Intel Honesty

#344

Post by keepamovin »

anitil wrote: post #342
keepamovin wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TSMC would likely never let itself be bought by a Western company. It's too vital to Taiwan's (and China's interest). The best that can be hoped is its ethical engagement with US chip players in decline. 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.…

I don't know geopolitics well enough to know the answer to this. Is losing TSMC an existential risk to Taiwan?

Existential depends on perspective, but TSMC is a strategic asset. Any loss of it would lead to TW losing significant leverage and being more vulnerable to external pressures.

Re: Intel Honesty

#345

Post by keepamovin »

joe_the_user wrote: post #323
keepamovin wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a great indicator of how it's often presented as collaborative or even slightly-"woke" on the outside, when in reality, advancement is cutthroat. But conducted in an cliquey/politically repressive atmosphere where everyone is afraid to act like that, but when someone has the courage to start speaking their mind, the rest look to them as the one who can save the malaise from the stagnation. I wonder how it bec…

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? All that worked (or seemed to work) for Intel for many years - 30+ years of profits and market dominance. I don't know the exact abuse level of Amazon, Microsoft,…

This is a good point. I get it probably gets ingrained, more so than a more open culture that would be open to bettering it self.

My view was Intel had a good culture until external pressures resulted in turning toxic.

Re: Intel Honesty

#346

Post by lotsofpulp »

Panzer04 wrote: post #339
UncleOxidant wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I thought historically companies always wanted "second sources" for things like this. Surely all the fabless semis can't be blithely running off a cliff with TSMC as their only parts source? That would be a catastrophic risk to take down the track if there's only a single vendor for advanced chips and they've decided to hike prices and collect all of the benefits alone from their advanced processes and share none of…

Buyers will obviously always want more sellers. That is not a sufficient condition for sellers to exist, however.

Selling what TSMC sells might not be easily reproducible.

Re: Intel Honesty

#347

Post by lotsofpulp »

philsnow wrote: post #301
taormina wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ow…

In Washington, the property tax rate is 1% with no income tax.

Re: Intel Honesty

#348

Post by lotsofpulp »

Panzer04 wrote: post #341
rstuart4133 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $29b cash and about $50b in debt. I know nothing about finance, but I have trouble figuring out how they got themselves into this situation given this https://www.intc.com/stock-info/dividends-and-buybacks : As of June 29th, 2024, we were authorized to repurchase up to $110.0 billion, of which $7.24 billion remain available. We have repurchased 5.77 billion shares at a cost of $152.05 billion since the program bega…

Because debt was cheap. Easy to keep it on balance sheet a few % rather than give it to shareholders. Remember, for the decade before this point INTC was throwing off 20B+ profits every year. They've had a couple of bad results recently, and everyone is ready to throw them off a cliff. People are, in general, very sensitive to the most recent news when it comes to stocks. They will extrapolate what happened over the…

How often do business reclaim the top spot?

The pessimism is because Intel is behind by tens of billions of dollars, and more importantly, years. Many years. Effecting management change and developing the right workforce with the right expertise is not a given, even if they were previously earning $20B net income per year.

One could easily say this is the business with the highest barriers to entry in the world (hence the highest profit margins and profits in the world).

Re: Intel Honesty

#349

Post by ho_schi »

ho_schi wrote: post #86
SoftTalker wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say Linux desktops have been good enough for a long time, but never broke into the mainstream for the reasons you cite. ChromeOS is the closest thing I guess, but outside of schools and a few other institutional uses, Chromebooks are not very popular.

Linux is not preinstalled. There are some ThinkPads* and Dells with Ubuntu or Fedora but you need to know that. And people how know will and must reinstall anyway Arch, Gentoo, Suse, Debian, Fedora or Ubuntu. The Steamdeck is an excellent proof how a full featured Linux (SteamOS is based upon Arch) is shipped well. Not a unmaintained or googlyified closed-source derivate of Linux (Android and ChromeOS). * I ordered a…

Correction: ThinkPad X13 *Gen3* AMD

Re: Intel Honesty

#350

Post by namibj »

nick238 wrote: post #56
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 rockets are insanely simple compared to silicon. The amount of research and development it takes to build a light source (hot tin plasma[1]) is extraordinary, and fabs are also probably the most complicated manufacturing facilities in the world. Tesla struggled mightily with integrating disparate auto parts manufacturers some years ago. SpaceX and Tesla benefited from being helmed by a crazy person (in their…

There's another light source that isn't nearly as hard and actually delivers better quality light at far higher electrical efficiency... It's just large and most of the cost is in the large machine that's kept under vacuum. GloFo was working on doing EUV with that (they gave up on EUV), and Japan was or is recently working on a small demonstrator fab with iirc about 10 steppers, starting with the light source machine.

That machine btw is called "free electron laser", and utilizes relativistic electrons to match their velocity to free-space photons instead of the slowed-down-by-metal-helix traveling-wave-tube-amplifiers that power most TV satellites. Those work at about 10 GHz or 30mm wavelength, much larger than the 13nm band used for EUV lithography.

FELs can have efficiencies in the double digit % if built with energy recovery, btw.

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