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Intel Honesty

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Re: Intel Honesty

#391

Post by joe_the_user »

keepamovin wrote: post #375
joe_the_user wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My gosh you can read the posts on this thread of myself and others talking about the toxicity of Intel's culture in the 90s. If you're in doubt, I'd recommend David M. Gordon's Fat And Mean for a discussion of how toxic culture persists and intensifies in corporate America. Edit: I think can credit the long period of success Intel had to shrewd leadership and leading in a massively expanding market. The thing about a…

Hmmm....unhappy optimum. How can we do better?

Well, clearly something other than maximizing shareholder value at all costs

Re: Intel Honesty

#392

Post by jhallenworld »

arder wrote: post #354
jhallenworld wrote: post #90

The Altera merger pain is maybe enlightening. Altera 10-series FPGAs were massively delayed due to Intel's 10 nm fab problems. But I speculate that there was also a big difference in toolchains, does anyone know for sure? I mean Altera was using TSMC previously, and I presume were using industry standard tools: Cadance / Synopsis. But I would guess Intel was running their fab on home-grown tools... what is the status…

The Altera merger was a perfect storm. I could write for pages about what went wrong. But here's a few key things: First FPGA companies have been massively hit and miss with their product - they were perfectly capable of screwing up their next chip all on their own (it's a mutually beneficial duolopy of crapness with Xilinx). Second, when Altera agreed to fab with Intel the deal was written such that Intel could neve…

Oh right, 14 nm.. it was so long ago now :-)

Also I assume that both AMD and Intel bought FPGA companies for FPGA co-processor acceleration opportunities. I don't think this has panned out.. I know Microsoft has their bing FPGA accelerator, but I don't think FPGAs have made any dent in the AI space, and are certainly not essential in any of the hyperscalers. Maybe AMD will sell Xilinx at some point.

>they partitioned off the entirety of the transceivers to a separate tile fab'd by TSMC and sellotaped to the edge of the Stratix 10

awesome.. I could imagine it was too risky to redesign the transceivers.

Re: Intel Honesty

#393

Post by schmidtleonard »

astrange wrote: post #228
graymatters wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spoken like a true Marxist. The purpose of Marxism is to literally kill hundreds of millions of people who oppose the Marxist way. Like they did during the 20th century in the countries where Marxism prevailed (even briefly).

It is not spoken like a true Marxist; they didn't even believe this. Here's Engels saying being a renter is not exploitation: https://x.com/TheOmniZaddy/status/1559949666543878151 Georgism is better though, and the homeownership market isn't about "capitalism".

Ah, Georgists. Smart enough to see the problem, but dumb enough to think the people benefiting will help them solve it.

Re: Intel Honesty

#394

Post by monocasa »

nunez wrote: post #284
monocasa wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And you if you don't own your property, you don't owe TX anything. If you're renting, it's not like your landlord isn't baking that I to your rent.

But the rent is way lower on the average because cost per sq ft is way lower.

Wages are lower as well.

Re: Intel Honesty

#395

Post by kbolino »

_w1tm wrote: post #388
kbolino wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why/how would the death of Intel kill off AMD too?

IBM still sells CPUs based on the PowerPC (now Power ISA) architecture. AMD doesn’t need to die for x86 to become irrelevant.

But Intel does? Or are you saying x86 becomes irrelevant no matter what?

Re: Intel Honesty

#396

Post by crowcroft »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #348
Panzer04 wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (henc…

Yea, Intel is more than 50 years old, they’re a mature player in decline. They look more like IBM than Apple.

Re: Intel Honesty

#397

Post by nunez »

DiscourseFan wrote: post #309
nunez wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Agreed; fortunately, those people are moving to Texas en masse.

Re: Intel Honesty

#398

Post by nunez »

water_556 wrote: post #294
nunez wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Houston and Austin are frickin' awesome if you're into food and hot weather. Alabama has beautiful beaches...and Huntsville. Birmingham is actually quite nice. Florida has amazing beaches.

Hard stop there pal. Austin food is overpriced and mostly bland. Some good Asian and BBQ other than that.... LOL. Food abomination maybe

Definitely a lot of that in Austin but they have an overall good food scene.

Nothing on Houston though. Houston all day.

Re: Intel Honesty

#399

Post by paulmd »

benreesman wrote: post #194

I generally like Stratechery but this is not up to the usual standard. To the extent that CISC means anything it means “backwards compatible”. Modern ARM cores have multi-step decode and issue: to the extent that RISC means anything it means “we developed this with twenty year’s hindsight so we don’t have to do a lot in microcode yet.” In die area, in TDP, in wafer consumption, it’s just not a big cost. To the extent…

> In die area, in TDP, in wafer consumption, it’s just not a big cost.

And yet we live in a world where an AI 370 processor has less than 1/4 of the single-threaded perf/w of a “totally equivalent” M3 Max processor. One of those things can’t be true.

Who are you going to believe, Jim Keller or your lying eyes?

And it only gets worse when you realize that he didn’t vaguely say the thing people claim he said… people have spent 4 years now arguing against observable reality using a quotation from Keller that he didn’t even make lol.

Re: Intel Honesty

#400

Post by Panzer04 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #367
Panzer04 wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As it currently stands, it is reproducible. In 5 years, it might not be, if Samsung/Intel throw in the towel. I don't really see that happening yet, but at some point if TSMC maintains its lead and the alternative options don't get the sales to continue investing, TSMC could well become completely unassailable at the leading edge.

Intel seems like it’s at least a few years (but I would bet many years) behind TSMC on obtaining/training the necessary people with necessary expertise with the necessary management changes. It took TSMC a long time and many expensive, risky bets to beat Intel. I imagine it will take Intel just as many resources and time to catch up to TSMC. Hence the divergence in their market caps.

I would frame TSMCs lead to be as much down to a failure st intel rather than a success at TSMC. Intel invested a ton of money into making a non-EUV 7nm process work and basically got it wrong. Now they have EUV, it seems largely a matter of doing basically the same things as TSMC. Not to denigrate TSMC at all, they have excellent execution and are being well rewarded for that.

Intel supposedly will be on par with TSMC in the next year or two with their newest processes. Even when they were stuck on 10nm, they were fabbing competitive parts with it for ages. I don't see the same "years behind" narrative you see, personally.

Interestingly, even TSMC revenue is only 70b usd. Intel made 55b revenue last year (down markedly from earlier years as well). Yes, that combines semiconductor design and fab income, but Intel still has the financials to make things work over the next few years.

Funnily enough, if TSMC starts hiking prices (which presumably they will at some point), that would also aid Intel, since there are only really three players, and Samsung is hardly in a better position than Intel is.

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