51–60 of 67 posts
Broadcom getting involved with Intel will be excellent business ... for all of Intel's competitors.
They’d hike prices 10x for the whales: hyperscalers and PC manufacturers and ignore the needs of anyone who does not buy CPUs by the tray.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sometimes you just gotta stick to the core competencies and stick to them well. Part of me thinks this is what Radio Shack could've made work. They almost made it to the point in time where hobbyist electronics / maker culture was popular again, but by that time they were just the place people used to buy cell phones from.
Radio Shack got bad. Even when they still had components, it's hard to justify driving to the store to spend $30 for an aux cord when Amazon will have it here tomorrow for $10. Notably, the whole sector seems to have collapsed in favor of online shops like Sparkfun and Adafruit. Most small cities used to have a shop where you could go pick through trays of random electronic components. Now, I don't even know where yo…
The goal is to get people in the store and building together. Of course no one is going to drive to the store and spend $30 on an aux cable when Amazon will ship it to you tomorrow. But they might just spend $20 on a pack of resistors and a USB breakout board while they're already at the shop using the oscilloscope to probe out a signal on their in flight project and ordering from amazon means stopping progress for the day.
I'd probably also aim to have on-prem competitions, think ant-weight battle bots stuff, micro-mouse or even pinewood derby stuff.
Heck you could probably even lure in some additional markup sales on components by having a "grab-bag" bench, in which you can't bring your own stuff, but you only pay for what you take out. Want to build a battle bot but don't know in advance what pieces you will or won't need? Build it on the grab-bag bench and we'll total up your costs after the fact. Sure you probably could get everything cheaper if you ordered it all online, but how convenient to just have a massive wall of parts already and only get the things you need and not need to store the rest of the 500 resistor pack you had to order to get the 20 you needed.
It might not have worked, the whole thing still might have ended in liquidation, but it feels like it would have had a better chance than batteries and cell phones.
I'm not seeing what Broadcom brings to the table here. They don't have chip mfg experience. Sure, they're a customer, but so what? TSMC is not going to be motivated to build up a competitor who weakens the economic wall around Taiwan. What I could see happening based on recent events is that Trump tells Taiwan they have a couple years of US security left. TSMC is then forced to consider putting more effort into mfg i…
Why would TSMC want to buy factories from Intel? Intels plants are far from start of the art. Given their inability to compete and catch up with TSMC
This data is a couple years out of date now but it still shows how relevant older nodes are: https://stockdividendscreener.com/technology/semiconductor/t...
It would really be a sad day and the begin of truly dark era for the entire computing industry, though.
As an alternative... Amazon would probably be another interesting buyer. Amazon is another company dead serious about having their own silicon. And owning the main supplier of x86 chips as well in-house capabilities to manufacture their own Graviton chips would give them an incredible edge over other cloud computing providers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is the guy who fired Pat Gelsinger: > Yeary has been telling individuals close to him that he is most focused on maximizing value for Intel shareholders, the report added. RIP Intel.
holy shit. it really is the end, isn't it? cut the company into pieces and sell to the highest bidder. three letter agencies would be interested... a couple months ago.
But with a company like Intel, one does really need long term vision to maximize value in the long run. We don't know if he's looking for quick fixes (short term) or long term fixes.
He's been on the board that hired the last 3 CEOs, so I have little faith in their getting things right.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sometimes you just gotta stick to the core competencies and stick to them well. Part of me thinks this is what Radio Shack could've made work. They almost made it to the point in time where hobbyist electronics / maker culture was popular again, but by that time they were just the place people used to buy cell phones from.
Radio Shack got bad. Even when they still had components, it's hard to justify driving to the store to spend $30 for an aux cord when Amazon will have it here tomorrow for $10. Notably, the whole sector seems to have collapsed in favor of online shops like Sparkfun and Adafruit. Most small cities used to have a shop where you could go pick through trays of random electronic components. Now, I don't even know where yo…
Micro Center. They are what Radio Shack might have become if they'd been well-funded and stayed in business.
Unfortunately there are not very many of them.
Broadcom getting involved with VMware did wonders for all VMware customers - I'm sure all current users of Intel products and services are also delighted in a similar manner! ;-)
I think Intel is a different kind of acquisition for Broadcom than VMWare. VMWare had/has a strong moat which can be exploited by jacking up prices. Intel doesn't have that.
What a nightmare. Imagine Broadcom merging with IBM. They'd have the legacy IT market cornered whether virtualized x86 or mainframe, customers be damned. Perhaps they already do. Mainframe users often rely on CA Tech's software, which Broadcom bought years ago.
Since reading a Gibson novel that mentioned the dystopian mega tech conglomerate (DatAmerica maybe?), I've always enjoyed the mental exercise of M&A to create a monster corporation. Intel + Broadcom + IBM + HP + Oracle + Apple + Google They'd from Chips to Cloud.