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Intel is dying and we can’t save it

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Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#71

Post by MichaelApproved »

exintelwithop wrote: post #39

I worked at Intel years ago. At that time, The ratio of excellent to useless people I experienced there was 1:40. That is way out of whack. I am certain it only got worse because all the 1/40’s I knew left. They are going to have to go and get people who have modern skillsets and mindsets and those people don’t want to live in Hillsboro. And it’s going to be expensive. And those people don’t tolerate dead weight. My…

> The ratio of excellent to useless people I experienced there was 1:40

This has to be hyperbole but the rest of your comment makes me think you're being serious.

I have only worked at small companies My guess is you thought those people were useless because you didn't understand the role they played in the company.

However, I'll admin again that I don't have first hand experience. I'd genuinely love to hear from others who have experience with large companies.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#72

Post by monocasa »

gscott wrote: post #50
mhh__ wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Taiwan ends up getting trampled by China, we'd effectively only have Samsung for cutting edge lithography.

We should just bomb Taiwan's chip plants in case the Chinese take over. We can do that from pretty far away so not too much danger.

Rumor is that Taiwan already has this handled. That there are rooms with explosives to scuttle the plants if the China lands troops on the island.

Removes the option of a painless transfer of power so that the US is still geopolitically interested in a independent Taiwan.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#73

Post by monocasa »

mhh__ wrote: post #68
monocasa wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given how dependent high end computing is on TSMC (Amd, Apple, Nvidea, + more) it's quite unlikely to be a viable strategy. That's a temporary advantage for Taiwan, and pretty much their only one. A silicon atom is only around 0.1nm wide, so the end of scaling is coming up like a brick wall. We've got maybe a half dozen nodes left. After that, industrial espionage, pumping up SMIC or some other new Chinese domestic…

> A silicon atom is only around 0.1nm wide, so the end of scaling is coming up like a brick wall. We've got maybe a half dozen nodes left. That's still something like a hundred thousand to a million times smaller that what we can actually fabricate, right?

You also can't make a transistor out of a single atom. The fact that you need doped silicon to have a semiconductor rather than just silicon as an insulator means that we'll be cut off well before then. A ~50x reduction in feature size (so that's 6ish nodes of shrink) is about what I've heard about industry expectations.

That being said the future never ceases to surprise.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#74

Post by ChrisIsTaken »

trhway wrote: post #57
monocasa wrote: post #6

Any analysis that says that Intel's death is being precipitated by AMD and Apple rather than by TSMC is pretty much worth ignoring. The fact that they're almost equivalent to those two at 5nm when Intel is at 14nm+++++++++ shows how killer the RTL and tape out folk are at Intel. The real fight has always been at the fab layer.

>The fact that they're almost equivalent to those two at 5nm when Intel is at 14nm+++++++++ Only when it comes to single core. And even then Intel has to spend 2x silicon - Zen 3 CCD at 7nm with a die size of 80.7 mm² while Intel's 10th gen 8C die is 170mm2. Of course it isn't silicon itself which is costly, it is the processing of each wafer what is the cost here, and getting 2x less cores per wafer is bound to affe…

I'd reckon per unit area, Intel's cost on 14nm wafers are going to run to less than 25% of TSMC's ask price at 7nm.

Do keep in mind that a fair amount of a desktop chip is pad space, IO hasn't shrunk since 22nm nodes, DUV steppers are dirt cheap, Intel's foundries are fully amortized, and yields at 14nm are going to be approaching 100%.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#75

Post by kristopolous »

jasoneckert wrote: post #8

I'd be cautious about the use of "We Can't Save It" in the title of this article. This industry has a history of big players losing steam and then making big comebacks.

I read the dying headline and all it says to me is "buy more Intel stock".

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#76

Post by chrisseaton »

icedchai wrote: post #53
dathinab wrote: post #28

I see Intel not being dominant, having to take a back seat, shrinking a bit. But dying?? Nup, I'm not seeing this at all. I mean AMD for years survived in a situation much worse then Intel currently is. Intel's productions nodes might be behind TSMC's but they are still quite valuable, not all chips need 5nm processes. Heck we could say most chips don't need it. Intel is still innovating, just because they currently…

Indeed, a similar situation happened in the mid 2000's before Intel moved to the Core architecture. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this happened again.

I’m almost positive Intel have tech ready to deploy to be on top again. They will have been developing it... but not needed to use it until they came under competition pressure.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#78

Post by chrisseaton »

supernova87a wrote: post #62
SoSoRoCoCo wrote: post #5

Intel innovates in process. Everything else is ruled by backwards compatibility and frenetic management scared to stay the course. (The vast majority of projects are killed if they don't tape out in ~2 years.) Intel will shift to a TSMC model. They have the best fabs on the planet, and the best fab engineers. I believe it is something like a 3 millions dollars lost per minute if they are idle. They have already start…

>I believe it is something like a 3 millions dollars lost per minute if they are idle. I think that's overestimating, although you are right it is damn expensive. Order of magnitude I would say it's more like: Fab has lifetime of 2-3(?) years, and costs $10B to build and amortize. So every minute of idled factory capital = $6,000 in pure cost of the facility. (although, if you think of it in potential lost revenue te…

> Fab has lifetime of 2-3(?) years

Many Intel fabs are from the early 2000s. Some are from the 90s. What do you mean 2-3 years?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_...

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#79

Post by ChrisIsTaken »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #51

Intel has at least 20 more years and probably dozens of real chances to reclaim past market position and maybe even more so. Intel is a large company with a massive market cap. The bigger they are, the longer they fall. They just have so much runway and market gravity. For comparison, Apple shot itself in the foot repeatedly for at least 10 years before Steve Jobs rejoined, and it took 10 more years after that before…

Intel has a very impressive balance sheet for a failing company, it has almost no debt and is generating double-digit billions in free cash flow from almost state of the art fabs. They are still number three on process technology, and number one on volume.

The fact that Intel's management have chosen to spend two decades flushing that amazing free cashflow down the M&A toilet instead of fixing their workplace culture and getting their design house in order is what Pat Gelsinger needs to fix.

Re: Intel is dying and we can’t save it

#80

Post by kristopolous »

mhh__ wrote: post #17
jasoneckert wrote: post #8

I'd be cautious about the use of "We Can't Save It" in the title of this article. This industry has a history of big players losing steam and then making big comebacks.

That and if you asked 20 years ago what CPUs our desktops will be running, not only would Intel not necessarily have been a popular answer (Many compiler books were written around that time, giving us a guess as to what the academic groupthink was, and they generally treat x86 as a weird ISA soon-to-be obsolete or dead) but Intel's main architectural competitor (ARM) might not've even been mentioned at all.

The answer would have likely been SuperH and Transmeta, both way dead.

Things change fast.

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