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A message from Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to all company employees

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Re: A message from Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to all company employees

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember this blog post coming across HN when it was posted: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2025/07/07/support/ It's a good story, but what I'm remembering and is relevant here is this: > At some point, I realized that if I wrote a wiki page and documented the things that we were willing to support, I could wait about six months and then it would be like it had always been there. Authoritarians and fascists recognize…

I am trivializing the LOC Constitution page thing and nothing you can say is going to make me stop, because the conspiracy theory behind it doesn't make any sense. By continuing to defend it, you're making my point for me about this Intel story (where malfeasance would make sense!). But we're going around in circles and should probably just let this go.

Actually your original point was:

>Eh. Without getting anywhere near the merits of this particular fracas, the federal government has gotten deeply involved in critiquing the management of companies like Lockheed and Boeing, both for national security reasons and because of the importance of those companies to the economy. Easy to see Intel fitting into that mold in 2025.

Which was you saying "this Intel thing is NBD and basically the same as a bunch of past things presidents have done."

That's the original false equivalency I called you out on. And which you now disagree with apparently, because now you think the Intel thing is potential malfeasance? I don't think you really know what your position is anymore.

Re: A message from Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to all company employees

#242
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meh, Trump wants someone as loyal and willing to spy on us as he thinks this guy was for China. I love how the right detests regulation but is okay with arbitrarily monkeying directly in the management of a company like this with no rules around it. No company is safe under this guy.

It can be very difficult for some people to separate their personal feelings about Trump from whether he’s on the right side of an issue.

It's nearly impossible for people to reason objectively about any political issue given the type of rhetoric that's fed to them 24/7.

Here's a fun experiment. Take someone you know who's super passionate about a political figure, doesn't matter which one.

Then tell them "everything you think you know about this person has been told to you by someone else".

Re: A message from Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to all company employees

#243

I view Intel as a company that has a huge number of missed opportunities: 1. They have excellent engineering resources - why didn't they just take their ARC cards and add more RAM to them? People are dropping $2K+ on the 5090 with 32GB and would surely pay $1200+ for an ARC with 32GB or even much more for one with 64GB or higher. Absolute performance wouldn't be the benchmark; being able to load larger models would m…

https://www.servethehome.com/intel-arc-pro-b50-and-b60-for-l...

24GB and 48GB cards are supposed to be coming.

Re: A message from Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to all company employees

#246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ashkenazi Jews are ethnically European and plenty of people driving motorcycles have lived but there is a statistical connection between driving motorcycles and dying.

Well they’re mixed with Semitic and in our socially constructed definition of race they’re not ethnically European.

No, that's incorrect, Ashkenazi Jews are widely considered European.

The only people who disagree are people engaging in a settler colonial political project, which is geopolitics, not fact.

Re: A message from Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to all company employees

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The craziest thing is... Intel could totally try to capture the LLM market 'bottom up' if they wanted to. As an underdog in the GPU market, all they need to do is start by making cheap boards with lots of VRAM. I'm talking 32GB boards under 1k. They don't have to be fast . They just have to take these bigger models into VRAM and be fast enough that it's better than dealing with normal CPU+RAM. That gets them into the…

This is such an obvious gap in the market for GPUs right now. Nobody wants to make an affordable card with a ton of vram. 32GB isn't even enough. Someone needs to make 48 or 64gb gpus for reasonable prices. Surely GDDR isn't that expensive. AMD and nVidia margins must be insane.

This doesn't seem like a bad idea but let's follow it a few steps. If a key tactic is to take share by shipping LLM-friendly consumer GPUs, one question is would this work. Setting aside the technical issues, they'd certainly sell some. They'd be limited by software, that's still much better on Nvidia, so it would be people with a near-term need for inference at lower cost than Nvidia's going rate. Two things to think about:

1) How might Nvidia etc respond? They've made one-off SKUs for crypto, they could certainly respond quickly with a part that matched on memory but had much better software (meaning, more compatible with tools and better performance. AMD doesn't have the software, but their hardware is find and they could similarly up on-board memory. So Intel would really have to compete on price.

2) Ok, now we've found some 2nd or 3rd place success in a business built on logic fabbed at TSMC and DRAM from Samsung or Micron. If this is the future, why have fabs or any of the associated R&D?

I don't know what the right answers are but maintaining Intel at anything resembling its current size seems like a pretty tough puzzle.

Re: A message from Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to all company employees

#248
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How effective would Gelsinger be Effective at what? Intel’s done, it’s on the Boeing trajectory, it’s just about grabbing what you can as the ship goes down.

I highly doubt the US government will let Intel sink. I think one way or another they will bail them, either by emergency funds or through government contracts, and keep the lights on until they turn things around. For the same reasons they didn’t let Boeing die out.

> For the same reasons they didn’t let Boeing die out.

Right — so that extends the time window for pillaging, and means that you can raid future taxpayer money, not just current assets. But there’s still no “turn around,” it’s just different flavors of getting paid massively to go down with the ship.

Re: A message from Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to all company employees

#249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the past AMD needed to survive for antitrust reasons. Now x86 is losing in relevance now as alternatives are established. Nobody needs to keep intel alive.

Which alternatives? Other than Apple, where can I get a non-x86 desktop?

Does the Nvidia DGX Spark qualify as a desktop?

Re: A message from Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan to all company employees

#250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Should not be" is too harsh, you should have diversity on a board, not only people from that single industry, but maybe you mean "too many". Presumably the investor-appointees have broad experience with many other companies. The type of people who should know how to hire a CEO.

I'll bite. Autodesk turned into a rent seeking company over a decade ago. Anyone Ex Boeing is sus, but maybe I'm wrong. Ex HP CEO is also sus because HP has been slowly circling the drain for the last 20 years.

Depends a lot on whether the ex-Boeing was pre McDonnell Douglas.
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