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Intel is dying and we can’t save it

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Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#101

Post by systemvoltage »

passive wrote: post #59
monocasa wrote: post #6

Any analysis that says that Intel's death is being precipitated by AMD and Apple rather than by TSMC is pretty much worth ignoring. The fact that they're almost equivalent to those two at 5nm when Intel is at 14nm+++++++++ shows how killer the RTL and tape out folk are at Intel. The real fight has always been at the fab layer.

Yeah, exactly this. Intel has really stumbled on fabrication the last 2-3 years, but the idea that they won't correct that ignores decades of precedent. I'm an AMD fanboy from the K6 days, and I love what Lisa Su has been able to deliver for them, but if it wasn't for Intel's stumbles, they would still be single digits at best in most markets. Look at their progress from Pentium 4 to Core 2 Duo (makes me feel real ol…

Curious, why were you a fanboy? Is it like rooting for team red and all the fun that goes into it? Honestly wondering since I have no feelings for any company even if their products are amazing.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#102

Post by jrumbut »

exintelwithop wrote: post #39

I worked at Intel years ago. At that time, The ratio of excellent to useless people I experienced there was 1:40. That is way out of whack. I am certain it only got worse because all the 1/40’s I knew left. They are going to have to go and get people who have modern skillsets and mindsets and those people don’t want to live in Hillsboro. And it’s going to be expensive. And those people don’t tolerate dead weight. My…

It's odd that when people from Intel talk about Intel on the Internet or with me in person it's so frequently about high level strategy and C level/Board of Directors politics. The way they're spoken of exhibits a lot of careful examination.

I can't think of another company like that, maybe Microsoft years ago or GE. Is this something I'm imagining or is that a frequent topic of conversation at all levels of Intel?

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#103

Post by raverbashing »

ardy42 wrote: post #87
icedchai wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, a similar situation happened in the mid 2000's before Intel moved to the Core architecture. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this happened again.

> Indeed, a similar situation happened in the mid 2000's before Intel moved to the Core architecture. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this happened again. Though that may have been a bit easier for them to solve, because the main thing they had to do was scrap NetBurst (Pentium 4) and return to a derivative their old architecture (which they were still using for the notebook market).

Correct, they only had to quit being led by their own marketing BS about "higher clock rates are faster"

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#104

Post by m-p-3 »

ChrisIsTaken wrote: post #79
CyberRabbi wrote: post #51

Intel has at least 20 more years and probably dozens of real chances to reclaim past market position and maybe even more so. Intel is a large company with a massive market cap. The bigger they are, the longer they fall. They just have so much runway and market gravity. For comparison, Apple shot itself in the foot repeatedly for at least 10 years before Steve Jobs rejoined, and it took 10 more years after that before…

Intel has a very impressive balance sheet for a failing company, it has almost no debt and is generating double-digit billions in free cash flow from almost state of the art fabs. They are still number three on process technology, and number one on volume. The fact that Intel's management have chosen to spend two decades flushing that amazing free cashflow down the M&A toilet instead of fixing their workplace culture…

And they're still the dominant CPU vendor in most end-user corporate systems. I'm happy to see some Ryzen laptops finally coming out and breaking that dominance, but let's not kid ourselves that Intel is still in a great position, and that won't change overnight.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#105

Post by Ericson2314 »

userbinator wrote: post #90
SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #5

Intel innovates in process. Everything else is ruled by backwards compatibility and frenetic management scared to stay the course. (The vast majority of projects are killed if they don't tape out in ~2 years.) Intel will shift to a TSMC model. They have the best fabs on the planet, and the best fab engineers. I believe it is something like a 3 millions dollars lost per minute if they are idle. They have already start…

Everything else is ruled by backwards compatibility That's one of the biggest reasons to choose them. If Intel's "x86" stops being x86 , they'll lose one of their biggest competitive advantages. See the first comment here, for example: http://www.os2museum.com/wp/vme-broken-on-amd-ryzen/

Yes but loosing that security blanket will make them better.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#106

Post by ReptileMan »

thisisnico wrote: post #85
icedchai wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, a similar situation happened in the mid 2000's before Intel moved to the Core architecture. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this happened again.

The Core Architecture in the mid 2000's was such an incredible shot back to the top. I remember seeing the benchmarks absolutely dominate AMD on every level, power, performance, TDP, Cost, etc. etc. This is almost immediately after Athlon 64 and the Athlon 64X2 started to gain market share, spanking Intel's Pentium 4 at the time. IIRC Intel ended up dropping the Prescott architecture, moving to the Pentium M architec…

And you could overclock them almost 50% and at factory speeds they didn't need a fan, just a heatsink. Those were the days.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#108

Post by mlyle »

mhh__ wrote: post #13
SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #5

Intel innovates in process. Everything else is ruled by backwards compatibility and frenetic management scared to stay the course. (The vast majority of projects are killed if they don't tape out in ~2 years.) Intel will shift to a TSMC model. They have the best fabs on the planet, and the best fab engineers. I believe it is something like a 3 millions dollars lost per minute if they are idle. They have already start…

> Intel will shift to a TSMC model. I think fabbing for outsiders would probably be a good idea, but splitting the fabs out from the designers seems like a bad idea.

Intel has fabbed for (larger) outsiders for a few years (2014):

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/foundry/overview.htm...

In late 2018, it was rumored they were exiting the business because of low uptake and because of constrained supply of their leading edge process, but it doesn't look like that happened.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#109

Post by e_y_ »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #71
exintelwithop wrote: post #39

I worked at Intel years ago. At that time, The ratio of excellent to useless people I experienced there was 1:40. That is way out of whack. I am certain it only got worse because all the 1/40’s I knew left. They are going to have to go and get people who have modern skillsets and mindsets and those people don’t want to live in Hillsboro. And it’s going to be expensive. And those people don’t tolerate dead weight. My…

> The ratio of excellent to useless people I experienced there was 1:40 This has to be hyperbole but the rest of your comment makes me think you're being serious. I have only worked at small companies My guess is you thought those people were useless because you didn't understand the role they played in the company. However, I'll admin again that I don't have first hand experience. I'd genuinely love to hear from oth…

I question if those people are actually bad workers, but I could easily imagine people being assigned to work on useless projects and just going along with it for a steady paycheck instead of leaving or trying to push the boundaries.

I've worked for 100-person, 1000-person, and 100000-person companies, and the biggest companies have so many resources that they barely know what to do with them all. Most startups would kill for a fraction of a percent of the "let's screw around" R&D money that the big corps have.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#110

Post by nurspouse »

MichaelApproved wrote: post #71
exintelwithop wrote: post #39

I worked at Intel years ago. At that time, The ratio of excellent to useless people I experienced there was 1:40. That is way out of whack. I am certain it only got worse because all the 1/40’s I knew left. They are going to have to go and get people who have modern skillsets and mindsets and those people don’t want to live in Hillsboro. And it’s going to be expensive. And those people don’t tolerate dead weight. My…

> The ratio of excellent to useless people I experienced there was 1:40 This has to be hyperbole but the rest of your comment makes me think you're being serious. I have only worked at small companies My guess is you thought those people were useless because you didn't understand the role they played in the company. However, I'll admin again that I don't have first hand experience. I'd genuinely love to hear from oth…

Disclaimer: I worked at Intel.

Calling them useless may be a bit of a stretch. If you said "mediocre", I'd believe it. Also, in my experience there, the ratio is not uniform - you could go to a department with lots of top notch folks, and then to another department with everyone being mediocre.

Some data points:

Asked a person in a SW interview to write a function to calculate the factorial. The candidate was repeatedly told he could use whatever language he wants. He insisted on using a language he had little experience in (C++), and not the one he was experienced in (Python). He was given latitude to use any method he wanted: Recursive, iterative, etc.

He didn't even come close to solving it.

He was still hired.

He is not an outlier when it comes to SW folks at Intel. Yes, Intel definitely has some really good SW engineers, but the 1:40 ratio easily applies in that sphere.

Up till 2014, my department insisted on using cvs for version control. They said they saw no benefit to git (or even SVN).

In another team I was in, we were stuck with SVN. The senior manager wouldn't allow us to use git because he was sure it would be over the heads of many of the employees (sadly, he may have been right). Then in 2017, when IT announced that SVN was being EOL, to avoid git they switched to MS TFS (even though TFS themselves recommend git!) I still hear from folks there about the resistance to switch to git. And the following comment I've heard from multiple folks:

"I don't want to use git because it comes from Microsoft!" (conflating github with git, and upon further discussion realizing they have no idea MS bought Github - they think Git and Github both originated from MS).

BTW, I'm not a git fan boy - I much prefer mercurial.

If you're good at SW and somewhat up to speed with current technology, Intel is a very frustrating place to work.

But then again, their compensation for SW is simply not competitive:

https://www.levels.fyi/company/Intel/salaries/Software-Engin...

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