111–120 of 122 posts
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> AMD almost went bankrupt because of Intel's illegal behavior. Nope. AMD at the time had been outcompeted by Intel in most areas. They survived as a cheaper alternative for Intel.
Rewriting history does not change history.
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"...shrivelled to $84bn, less than the value of its plants and equipment..." Hints at private equity sharks might start circling. Splitting chip design and fabrication would align with how most of the industry operates. Get very good at chip design or fabrication. The era of WinTel is over. Megalithic data centers tend not to use MS OS and thus are free to choose AMD and increasingly ARM CPUs. For Intel to rush into…
I blame Microsoft for enshittifying Windows 11 to the point of nobody wanting to "upgrade" to it.
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20A was just a stepping stone to 18A, dropping it was more of a tactical than a strategic decision, I think people are reading too much into it.
They skip the node means no customer demand an no incoming money. If 18A is merely meh, they run out of money, and 14A never happens. Someone else buys the assets and Intel will not compete with Samsung or TSMC.
Not really, it also has to do with timing, fab space, extra cost of maintaining that node, etc. I don't want to get into details as I work on 20A/18A development but I'll say that they share the same major process, 20A is just an earlier version. So it's not like Intel is dropping the process, it's just deciding to put it into production later.
There's some more information here: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/opinion/con...
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That would be an argument for splitting Intel into two, the contract fab business and the design business. It's tough to make a partnership with Intel to fab your chip design if their other arm is competing with you on the same thing. Intel's process is tailored to their own designs which make it hard for outsiders to optimize. So, it's not only risky from a business perspective to make Intel your manufacturing partn…
But their struggles on 10nm and the fact that Lunar Lake is on TSMC tells me that they are not good at making chips.
Intel being on life support is a bit of a stretch. They are investing an awful lot of money, and it's going to take time for those investments to pay off. I worry more about their inept handling of recent CPU bugs than I do about their stock price or reduced dividends.
> They are investing an awful lot of money, That was my impression, until the news came out that they had a massive round of layoffs. That looks like the opposite of investing, poisons the climate, causes people who can to seek greener pastures (potentially further disrupting those projects they allegedly invest into), ... I'm sure there were other bad news that caused their stock drop from $30 to $20, and it's hard…
Yes, layoffs suck, but Intel seems to be in a position where something had to give, and giving up on building a leading edge fab would almost certainly lead to a death spiral. Additionally, Intel was and still is a huge company. They have more employees than TSMC & AMD combined (an imperfect comparison, but probably as close as one can get).
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20A was just a stepping stone to 18A, dropping it was more of a tactical than a strategic decision, I think people are reading too much into it.
They skip the node means no customer demand an no incoming money. If 18A is merely meh, they run out of money, and 14A never happens. Someone else buys the assets and Intel will not compete with Samsung or TSMC.
No one in their right mind would think this is going to be a smooth ride. The massive amount of capital required to build cutting-edge fabs is a hard pill to swallow. These news writers need to cut Intel some slack. The world needs cutting-edge fabs in geopolitically stable locations. I believe Intel is simply too critical to fail at this point, and, as always, Uncle Sam won't let them.
Is intel even in a position to be competitive on the fab level? I was under the impression intel's fabs haven't been "cutting edge" for a long time now.
I'd love to have Intel's cash flow while being on "life support", thanks. This was like the stupid ass DEC hostile giveaway to Compaq while DEC had almost 2 gigabucks+ a year in enterprise services revenue that was going to continue forever . A single year of services revenue was almost as large as the entire merger deal . And then, as PCs crashed and burned, Compaq couldn't figure out what to do with all that cash,…
Intel lost money the past two quarters. Revenue is still high, but having high "cash flow" doesnt work indefinitely if more of it flows out the door than in.
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> They are investing an awful lot of money, That was my impression, until the news came out that they had a massive round of layoffs. That looks like the opposite of investing, poisons the climate, causes people who can to seek greener pastures (potentially further disrupting those projects they allegedly invest into), ... I'm sure there were other bad news that caused their stock drop from $30 to $20, and it's hard…
The investments OP is referring to are almost certainly the CapEx investments related to opening new fabs and the aggressive push to launch new leading edge nodes. Yes, layoffs suck, but Intel seems to be in a position where something had to give, and giving up on building a leading edge fab would almost certainly lead to a death spiral. Additionally, Intel was and still is a huge company. They have more employees th…
Doesn't that need R&D though (i.e. people, and preferably motivated ones)?
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The investments OP is referring to are almost certainly the CapEx investments related to opening new fabs and the aggressive push to launch new leading edge nodes. Yes, layoffs suck, but Intel seems to be in a position where something had to give, and giving up on building a leading edge fab would almost certainly lead to a death spiral. Additionally, Intel was and still is a huge company. They have more employees th…
> the aggressive push to launch new leading edge nodes Doesn't that need R&D though (i.e. people, and preferably motivated ones)?
Also, unless you know some non-public information, its not clear they are laying off anyone doing R&D. The only specific groups mentioned in the layoff memo are sales & marketing.