181–190 of 414 posts
Intel is just like Boeing: A company with legendary engineering roots taken over by myopic financial engineers who can’t think further than next quarters stock price, which is their only measure, their only target, and to which all their bonuses are attached.
While it's sad now, I'm looking forward to long-term thinking being emphasized in business school again.
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I remember when they did random stuff like the whole IoT push (frankly, their offerings made no sense to humble me .. Microsoft had a better IoT than Intel). They did drone crap .. gave a kick ass keynote at CES I recall .. also .. made little sense. Finally, the whole FPGA thing .. makes little sense. So much value being destroyed :(
The Altera (FPGA) acquisition could have made sense, but they never really followed through and now it's being spun off again.
Regarding other plans, QPI and UPI for cache coherent FPGAs were pretty infeasible to do at the sluggish pace that they need in the logic fabric. CXL doesn't need a close connection between the two chips (or the companies), and just uses the PCIe lanes.
FPGA programming has always been very hard, too, so the dream of them everywhere is just not happening.
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He was a process engineer
The CEO at the time of the McAfee acquisition was Paul Otellini -- an MBA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otellini .
I wish Pat well and I think he might be the only who could save the company if it's not already too late.
Sourced: worked with many ex-Intel people.
POSTSCRIPT: I have seen from the inside (not at Intel) how a politically motivated acquisition failed so utter spectacularly due to that same internal power struggle. I think there are some deeply flawed incentives in corporate America.
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They all look like that, aren't they? It's like cancer, late stage. It's everywhere. I'm trying to be optimistic here, but I don't see much light at the end of the tunnel. Best case a second depression wipes away everyone's wealth and we start from clean slate.
I mean, clearly the competitors eating Intel's lunch do not look like that. Nvidia does not look like it. Apple doesn't. AMD doesn't. Just seems like ordinary competitive churn in the marketplace to me.
Intel is just like Boeing: A company with legendary engineering roots taken over by myopic financial engineers who can’t think further than next quarters stock price, which is their only measure, their only target, and to which all their bonuses are attached.
These companies didn’t fail because of myopic financial engineers. The ones focused on quarter to quarter tend to bomb the company relatively quickly and do get flushed out.
These companies failed because of long term financial visionaries. These are the worst because they are thinking about how the company can capture markets at all costs, diversify into all adjacent markets, etc. They are a hard cancer to purge because on the surface they don’t sacrifice stuff for the current quarter. They sacrifice laser focus for broad but shallow approaches to all kinds of things.
“Sure, we’ll build a fab here. And we’ll also do enterprise NICs… And also storage… and also virtualization… and also AI… and also acquire some startups in these fields that might have something interesting…”
The company becomes big listless monster coasting on way too many bets spread out all over the place. There is no core engineering mission or clear boundary between what is the business and what isn’t.
Intel is far from “myopic”. If it was something as obvious as a next quarter driven CEO, the board would have made a change immediately.
Intel has truly been on a remarkable spree of extremely poor strategic decisions for the last 20 years or so. Missed the boat on mobile, missed the boat on GPUs and AI, focused too much on desktop, and now AMD and ARM-based chips are eating their lunch in the data centre area.
You're missing the big one: they missed the boat on 64-bits. It was only because they had a licensing agreement in place with AMD that they were able to wholesale adopt AMD's extensions to deliver 64-bit x86 processors.
Had Itanium been a success then Intel would have crushed the competition (however it did succeed in killing Alpha, SPARC, and workstation MIPS).
Everyone acts as though Intel should have seen everything coming. Where was AMD? Was AMD really competitive before Ryzen? Nope. Core 2 series blew them out of the water. Was ARM really competitive until recently? Nope. Intel crushed them. The problem for Intel is the inertia of laziness due to a lack of competition. I wouldn’t count them out just yet, however. The company’s first true swing at modern GPU was actually…
The curse of having weak enemies is that you become complacent. You're right: AMD wasn't competitive for an incredibly long time and ARM wasn't really meaningful for a long time. That's the perfect situation for some MBAs to come into. You start thinking that you're wasting money on R&D. Why create something 30% better this year when 10% better will cost a lot less and your competitors are so far behind that it doesn…
AMD bet BIG on the software industry leaning in heavily on massive thread-counts over high throughput, single-threaded usage... But it never happened so the cores tanked.
It was never a secret WHY that generation of core sucked, and it was relatively clear what AMD needed to do to fix the problem, and they were VERY vocal about "doing the thing" once it became clear their bet wasn't paying off.
Intel has truly been on a remarkable spree of extremely poor strategic decisions for the last 20 years or so. Missed the boat on mobile, missed the boat on GPUs and AI, focused too much on desktop, and now AMD and ARM-based chips are eating their lunch in the data centre area.
Apple and Microsoft have both managed to avoid this, and been the exception.
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I got curious about how ARM is doing in the data center and found this: >Arm now claims to hold a 10.1% share of the cloud computing market, although that's primarily due to Amazon and its increasing use of homegrown Arm chips. According to TrendForce, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was using its custom Graviton chips in 15% of all server deployments in 2021. https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/09/23/arm-holdings-data-...
ARM would be even more popular in the datacenter if getting access to Ampere CPUs was possible. I can get a top of the line Xeon Gold basically next day with a incredibly high quality out of band management from a reputable server provider. (HP, Dell). Ampere? Give it 6 months, €5,000 and maybe you can get one, from Gigabyte. Not known for server quality. (yes, I'm salty, I have 4 of these CPUs and it took a really l…
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Isn't that true for virtually EVERY big tech merger? Like, which ones have actually worked?
Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp and they were both home runs. Zuckerberg knows how to buy companies.