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US Intel

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251–260 of 581 posts

Re: US Intel

#251
post #30

The short version is: this can work but it won't. Let me just say, for those of us who remember the 1990s and 2000s, Intel's drop off has been something nobody would've predicted. It's hard to overstate just how dominant they were (other than the fairly brief but significant Athlon64 era). And even when they were behind on consumer CPUs, which they were until the Core Duo/Centrino platform (which was really the Penti…

> So what happened? Capitalism happened. More specifically, financialization happened. Everything US companies does comes down to simply cutting costs and increasing profits for short-term financial performance. There is (now) absolutely no long term thinking.

Blaming real-world problems on nominalized abstractions is quite unhelpful, especially when those abstractions are all-encompassing ones like "capitalism" or "financialization" which mostly represent patterns of behavior that have always been present.

Identifying specific shifts in incentives or intentions that resulted in different motivations or intentions becoming dominant is difficult, but there's really little point in engaging these conversations without at least making an attempt to do so.

> As for the author, I suspect he represents the American corporate view that any kind of government intervention (beyond bail outs) cannot work because they don't want that long term. It would reduce profits and/or make a few people slightly less wealthy. They spend a lot of money on propaganda to convince ordinary people that corporatism is good and collectivisim of any kind is bad, that governments aren't capable of anything, etc.

"Corporatism" is collectivism, and much of the critique of these kinds of interventions stems from the correct recognition that political incentives (a) are deeply entwined with commercial ones, not a counterbalance to them, and (b) often have even worse failure modalities than prevailing economic incentives.

Re: US Intel

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that Intel manufacturing chips in the US wouldn’t have solved the chip problems with cars for instance. What TSMC traditionally does is keep trailing edge fabs online that are fully depreciated and use those to produce chips that don’t need to be leading edge. It wouldn’t make sense to create a new fab for trailing edge chips. Car manufacturers aren’t going to all of the sudden start using 2mm expensive…

14nm is mature and would suit this purpose fine, and they have existing capacity. The business, tools, and everything else around would need to get built out.

Yes. But Intel doesn’t have any customers and do they even have 14nm fabs online and how long will take to move customers to it in the case of a disruption?

Re: US Intel

#253
post #143
post #61

How is this ‘equity stake’ different than nationalization? (The thing that soviet socialism did to russian property and business a hundred years ago). After all the government prints the money. So instead of just taking control of a company the govt prints the money to buy it. Isnt it the same thing? And where is the example of a successful govt run business? Why dont we encourage businesses here w free trade zones?

10% is nowhere near a controlling stake, let alone "nationalization". And where is the example of a successful govt run business? USPS, TVA, Paris Metro... I know many are irrationally scared of the S and C words, but this ain't it.

The USPS is a really good example. Most of its modern problems are exclusively the result of politicians sabotaging it - given the constraints it operates under it's wildly successful. Even some foreigners I know have a positive view of the USPS because of their interactions with it (shipping goods to the US).

It offers good service to everyone in the US - even people living in the middle of nowhere - with fairly good delivery speeds and strong reliability. I can't remember the last time I had a package or mailpiece get lost, and I think I've had a package get damaged exactly once in my entire life.

Re: US Intel

#254
post #99
post #80

Maybe it's worth noting that the new CEO's explosive statement, Intel would give up development of leading edge nodes (14A and beyond) unless they find a large external customer in advance, hardly got any attention on Hacker News or other websites. But that was almost certainly the reason the US administration got involved. This blog post thankfully makes this point clear. In the past, most people (including myself)…

> But that was almost certainly the reason the US administration got involved Now the US government can coerce Nvidia, Apple or someone to use Intel's fabs with no real political repercussions...

They already could do that previously (with tariffs).

Re: US Intel

#255
post #173
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have developed an economy oriented around selling one another websites, and we are only belatedly noticing that none of our enemies seem to have followed.

What 'enemies'?

How about those folks actively engaging in behavior that damages the US?

Re: US Intel

#256
I think that the difficulty for Intel is that they don't seem to attract the best talent anymore like they did 20 years ago. A big part of the job of running a leading edge fab is solving a lot of very tricky technical problems, and a lot less of those people work at Intel than used to. There are feedback loops in these things. The top people want to work with other top people. To some degree you can try to find those people and just offer them tons of money, which is what seemingly happened with Jim Keller (on the logic rather than the fab side, but still), but then he went and quit shortly thereafter.

Without the right people at the company, you can dump almost infinite money at a problem and still not solve it.

Re: US Intel

#257
post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I may add my view as a formerly high-achieving semiconductor worker that Intel would benefit greatly from having right now, a lot of us pivoted to software and machine learning to earn more money. My first 2 years as a software engineer earned me more RSUs than a decade in semiconductors. Semiconductors is not prestigious work in the U.S., despite the strategic importance. By contrast, it is highly respected and r…

Honestly, I don’t think US wages make sense any longer. We have extraordinarily profitable semi companies that don’t pay more than a third of what non profitable startups are paying software engineers. The issue seems to be one of negotiation power as the determinate of wages taken to an extreme - leading to companies taking a monopoly position, paying poorly, then falling to foreign competition due to lack of talent…

Greed. You’re describing greed. The folks at the top of the pile in the US seemingly all have hoarding disorder. Very little of what they do appears rational… unless you concede their actions are meant to harm the general wellbeing of the US. population, while themselves being nicely insulated from all that.

Re: US Intel

#258
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We outsourced manufacturing because it's not very profitable. The Mag 7 make 50x as much money as TSMC. Apple and Microsoft are the most profitable businesses in history.

The problem is when importance is not reflected in the quarterly profit margin.

Chips are one of those things where being the best is simultaneously very important and not at all important. Making a 10% better chip gets you the entire market. But it makes practically no difference if your cellphone or laptop or server or whatever has a 10% worse chip.

Re: US Intel

#259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I may add my view as a formerly high-achieving semiconductor worker that Intel would benefit greatly from having right now, a lot of us pivoted to software and machine learning to earn more money. My first 2 years as a software engineer earned me more RSUs than a decade in semiconductors. Semiconductors is not prestigious work in the U.S., despite the strategic importance. By contrast, it is highly respected and r…

The gap between hardware and software salaries has been strangely stubborn. I started in hardware and pivoted to software for the same reason: It's easier to find higher paying jobs. It's been strange to see the gap persist at companies that cling to salary data for compensation decisions. Incredible to see companies complain about not being able to find good hardware talent but then also refuse to pay hardware hires…

It mirrors the 8-10x multiple that you can command in your valuation for ARR.

Re: US Intel

#260

the president unilaterally extorting 10% ownership out of a company isn't going to build the kind of system that competes with anyone. Big business can't really thrive under this kind of thing any more than corner stores can thrive under a protection racket.

As much as I dislike Trump, he didn’t extort anything. He renegotiated the profit-sharing terms for an equity stake in Intel.
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