Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 734 posts

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#331

Post by hunglee2 »

kragen wrote: post #322
hunglee2 wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people overrate TSMC are the primary motivator for the PRC, who have basically maintained the same posture toward the 'renegade province' since 1949. This is unfinished business from a civil war which never officially ended.

I agree, but I think TSMC has also assumed a geopolitical importance it didn't have previously.

for sure, but most opinion from the west inflates TSMC as primary motivator, its a complicating factor yes, but the PRC has been on about taking Taiwan for the past 70 years, before semi-conductors were even invented.

look at the top voted comment in this thread - the narrative is some sort of escalation from Xi Jinping when unification with Taiwan is boilerplate rhetoric which every leader since Deng says at Party Congress.

PRC position has not changed - commitment to unification by peaceful means, but war never off the table.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#332

Post by CoastalCoder »

iancmceachern wrote: post #270
CoastalCoder wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Targeted layoffs might be the best thing long-term. From my limited perspective of having recently worked at Intel, they had a lot of dead weight. There was a lot of talent, but it was also diluted by a lot of management and bureaucracy. I honestly don't know if layoffs are an effective solution to this, but IMHO they could definitely benefit from lower headcount and greater urgency.

Thanks for this. I see that perspective and from my experience in larger tech corps it jibes. I'm still trying to reconcile it with the CHIPs thing. Intel on one hand is admittedly bloated and inefficient, and so is choosing to reduce its headcount and therefore bandwidth to do work. So what is the CHIPs money going to. Typically when you invest in something like this you are buying people's time to do the work and a…

I don't have any insider info on this, but here's my guess:

Gelsinger thinks x86's days are numbered. So Intel's historical moat of designing and manufacturing x86 chips is going away.

So now it's more compelling to treat design and manufacturing as separate business concerns:

- For potential foundry customers, it reduces fears that Intel will give higher priority to fab'ing its own chips.

- It frees Intel's chip designers to design chips without needing to assume they'll be built at Intel's foundries. E.g., they can design chips for TSMC's process if that would result in a better product.

And given all these factors, I suspect Gelsinger and the Intel board of directors are planning to separate the design and manufacturing functions into separate businesses. (Either practically speaking by limiting their interaction within Intel, or literally by making them separate companies.)

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#333

Post by svnt »

bullen wrote: post #156
svnt wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument doesn’t hold together. Many traditional hardware companies are transitioning/have transitioned to some form of hybrid model or subscription service explicitly. We are actually looking at degrowth, not eternal growth. Processors may be near peaking but the Raspberry Pi is not a competitor with those processors. The reason stock is down is because of supply chain issues still overhanging from the pandemic…

That is what I mean with eternal growth... how can you missunderstand that? Raspberry 4 has 2Gflops/W where M1 has 2.5!!! Pandemic is not the problem. Energy and money is the problem. Edit: Premise = Promise yes.

I don’t think I can edit my previous comment in response to your edit around Gflops/W, but I still don’t know anyone trading off rPi for M1. Do you?

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#334

Post by patmorgan23 »

nscalf wrote: post #297
JAlexoid wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Em... I doubt that semiconductor industry is the thing to lead us to WW3.

If Taiwan is taken off the board for semiconductors, or if all semiconductors have to go through China, that means the entire US military (and all western militaries) are dependent on a geopolitical rival. To allow that would be nothing short of giving away the game.

There are advanced Fabs in Israel, Intel and TSMC are both building next gen Fabs in Arizona. It's not like Twain is the only place with advanced chip fabs(though yes the vast majority of the capacity is there and IIRC thats where their latest process nodes are but I don't think the military is dependent on those absolute cutting edge process nodes)

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#335

Post by mFixman »

I know nothing about the chip-making process, and news about fabs and the chip industry confuse and scare me.

Can anybody link me to a guide with the basics of these topics, like what exactly is a chip (is it a microcontroller? a part of a larger system?), or why the few giant fabs can't be replaced by a lot of smaller and cheaper ones?

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#336

Post by paulmd »

reportingsjr wrote: post #265
paulmd wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, it is still hard to get your hands on top-notch chips at a reasonable price whatever the news is saying... it's really not and actually the slowdown is so bad that AMD has had to reduce production, as well as other companies reducing memory/flash wafer starts etc. it's not just intel or fake news, availability really hasn't been a problem for a year or more at this point, and if anything we're starting to shi…

It depends on what you're looking at. I develop electronics hardware, and it is still incredibly difficult to get a lot of ICs. Texas instruments still has not caught up, and their chips are used just about everything, including on graphics cards.

yeah that's fair, the embedded market (both power, microcontrollers, and others) is still fucked up, but, the leading-edge market is in oversupply at this point and companies are starting to pull back production hard.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#337

Post by datavirtue »

formercoder wrote: post #269
kjkjadksj wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We honestly should nationalize intel, raytheon, boeing, and lockheed martin. Probably others too. It makes no sense to develop our sensitive technology and reserve some resources solely to feed the parasite that is the profit margin.

No thanks, I’ve been to the DMV

The DMV isn't a chip factory. It is an administrative office performing unskilled work. Most of which has been automated away.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#338

Post by lovich »

Isinlor wrote: post #22

China already declared that it will use force in Taiwan if "possibilities for a peaceful reunification should be completely exhausted". From Chinese Anti-Secession Law: Article 8: In the event that the "Taiwan independence" secessionist forces should act under any name or by any means to cause the fact of Taiwan's secession from China, or that major incidents entailing Taiwan's secession from China should occur, or t…

The soviets used this ad a phrase given how many times China doesn’t follow through with a threat.[1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%27s_final_warning

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#339

Post by _trackno5 »

chatterhead wrote: post #237
_trackno5 wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1) We need chip manufacturing to be nationalized in the USA - if it's that important to national security we don't need to leave it in the hands of private industry I generally agree with you that countries should have control over strategic industries (e.g., oil), but I'm not sure if nationalisation is the way to go. I feel like that serves more to scare off investors than anything else. The way the US is going ab…

If you believe oil should be then so should all energy; including the entirely government created "alternative energy" industry. Investors will be scared of the US nationalizing specific strategic industries but not the changing political winds of foreign nations? I don't think so.

I don't understand your comment. You seem to believe because I stated something it means that I'm denying something else.

If clean energy sources are strategic, yeah the US should do the work to protect its ability to utilise it regardless of it being oil, solar, wind, nuclear. Doesn't mean the state needs to own those ventures, just that they should put in the effort to fund investment and growth in strategic areas.

Re: Intel and the $1.5T chip industry meltdown

#340

Post by vkou »

MikePlacid wrote: post #330
vkou wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they aren't. There's not a single point in time when I have ever scanned my own groceries faster than the guy who does it 8 hours a day. They scream at me when they think I'm stealing (Any human being doing that would instantly be reprimanded by a manager), they have tiny platforms where I can't even fit my groceries and heaven forbid if I do something the machine doesn't like, an attendant needs to come unfuck i…

> I can't wait for the next grocery innovation of having the customers stock the shelves from the backroom before they can fill a sack with onions. Think bolder. As a software engineer in the Soviet Union I had to spend about three weeks each year in the collective farm fields planting, tending and harvesting potatoes and cabbages. Since some of my American friends are very fond of socialism these days - these types…

You were a professional software engineer in the Soviet Union while still being a high school student? Or do you mean to say that you were one in the 1940s, when people were packed into train cars to bring in the harvest, among other things?

Something about this doesn't seem to entirely add up, given that workers in government and defense-critical industries weren't exactly rounded up a la carte to work the fields. Not when there was a dedicated class of kolhozniks that were paid next to nothing, and couldn't really leave the countryside for better jobs in the cities.

But now that you mention it, I would pay good money to see the likes of Peter Thiel spend a few weeks a year picking strawberries, or filling grocery bags, or piloting a shitbarge up the Hudson river along with the rest of us. I do keep hearing from that half of the political spectrum that hard, poorly paid work, and pulling yourself up by the bootstraps builds character...

Post reply on HN