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Intel grew revenues in Q2 2020, but key manufacturing upgrade delayed

venturebeat.com

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Re: Intel grew revenues in Q2 2020, but key manufacturing upgrade delayed

#81

Post by p1esk »

Torkel wrote: post #77
ksec wrote: post #5

20% YoY Revenue increase, 43% YoY Growth in Datacenter Segment. 76% Growth in Non-Volatile Memory solution, another 7% YoY growth in Client Side computing. This is truly amazing results. I get stabbed over at Anandtech every time I made an argument for Intel as an AMD investor. The Internet is full of Intel bashing comments but reality is Intel has been making record revenue quarter after quarter. For the not so good…

As other commenters I'm reminded of the classic RIM roadrunner effect - the decapitated chicken that keeps running. Another thought though: is it completely unthinkable for Intel to pull an AMD themselves and spin out their fabs and rely on whoever has the best fabs out there? I mean - if they are years late with something that is already outdated there are not too many downsides to it.. Next-gen process nodes are no…

What is already outdated? Is TSMC shipping their 3nm already?

Re: Intel grew revenues in Q2 2020, but key manufacturing upgrade delayed

#82

Post by heisenbit »

billyhoffman wrote: post #39
grizzles wrote: post #17

Intel is a company that's living on it's distribution legacy. Ask yourself - why do regular people still buy Intel PCs? Because they are easy to buy. A great non Intel hardware and software laptop+aio by AMD or someone else would be a mortal wound on $INTC.

This is a 2000s view of Intel that is not accurate in 2020. Look at the numbers. - 7% growth for consumer (the “Intel PCs” you mention) - 43% growth for data centers - 70%+ growth in nonvolatile storage (SSDs)... much of which goes into high end servers in data centers Will there be more data centers And cloud offerings in 3 years, or less? Many More! Will there be more or less PC sales in 3 years. For Intel it’s les…

But the datacenter is hugely vulnerable. AMD is cheaper and Amazons ARM may be cheaper as well and more importantly validates that cheaper matters. To end customers these offerings are a click away. And while the volumes will take time due to inertia and verification work the pricing happens at the margin. And it seems that margins of processors are already being impacted. Investors are understandably worried as there is nothing on the roadmap stopping further erosion in the one market making the bulk of profits,

Re: Intel grew revenues in Q2 2020, but key manufacturing upgrade delayed

#84

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

Torkel wrote: post #77
ksec wrote: post #5

20% YoY Revenue increase, 43% YoY Growth in Datacenter Segment. 76% Growth in Non-Volatile Memory solution, another 7% YoY growth in Client Side computing. This is truly amazing results. I get stabbed over at Anandtech every time I made an argument for Intel as an AMD investor. The Internet is full of Intel bashing comments but reality is Intel has been making record revenue quarter after quarter. For the not so good…

As other commenters I'm reminded of the classic RIM roadrunner effect - the decapitated chicken that keeps running. Another thought though: is it completely unthinkable for Intel to pull an AMD themselves and spin out their fabs and rely on whoever has the best fabs out there? I mean - if they are years late with something that is already outdated there are not too many downsides to it.. Next-gen process nodes are no…

They can’t. Intel has at least five times the production capacity of TSMC when it comes to the bleeding edge nodes, and companies are already fighting for a share of TSMC capacity, which means contracts will be expensive.

Re: Intel grew revenues in Q2 2020, but key manufacturing upgrade delayed

#85

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

wtallis wrote: post #46
sct202 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you getting that number for Intel? Everything I see has Samsung, TMSC, then Micron as the top in terms of wafer production. Intel is like 1/3 of TMSC which is still alot. https://www.eetindia.co.in/over-half-of-global-wafer-capacit...

Raw wafer counts aren't particularly relevant here, because you can't really re-tool a NAND or DRAM fab into a competitive logic fab. Based on those numbers, about a third of Samsung's wafer count is logic, putting them slightly ahead of Intel (logic and a bit of NAND). TSMC's wafer count (all logic, AFAIK) is higher than Samsung+Intel, but not all of that is on leading-edge nodes. TSMC 28nm and 16nmFF nodes are goin…

The numbers are even more tilted in Intel‘s favor if you consider that the foundries do a huge part of their volume business on outdated nodes. Intel doesn‘t do that. They have many times the capacity of TSMC in their market segment.

Re: Intel grew revenues in Q2 2020, but key manufacturing upgrade delayed

#87

Post by perryizgr8 »

CarbyAu wrote: post #60
OldHand2018 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If all Apple cared about was faster chips Everybody _wants_ faster chips, but for most people, the chip is in idle state 99% of the time. Outside of the data center and serious gamers, chip speed has been fairly irrelevant for years.

I agree with you. My frustrations centre around wait times after starting an app. Am I waiting for CPU? No. Storage? No. I am waiting for some friggin call-home/update-check/irrelevant network request. Edit:brevity, removal of profane words.

> I am waiting for some friggin call-home/update-check/irrelevant network request.

Is that right? Any examples? I feel most of the times I'm waiting is for the network because everything is online now. Even my work is all done on a remote VM in a data center. I connect using vscode over ssh. And the app is snappy af except when it needs to do a network opeation.

Re: Intel grew revenues in Q2 2020, but key manufacturing upgrade delayed

#88

Post by thu2111 »

snovv_crash wrote: post #18
jjoonathan wrote: post #4

Have any insider accounts of the 10nm debacle emerged, or is it still too soon?

This is 3rd hand, but I heard that the 14nm was rushed with a crazy schedule, and as a result the greybeards who actually knew everything all left. Intel is having to rebuild all that institutional knowledge from scratch again.

The account I just read (linked from the other thread) suggested it was more just that they happened to set really ambitious targets and make a lot of big bets in 10nm, some of which simply did not pan out. Sounds like they may have ended up in a situation where diagnostic and investigation tooling also wasn't working properly due to the use of cobalt, so they'd have ended up with fabrication failures that were then difficult to investigate, as the debugging tools also weren't working. Painful.

Re: Intel grew revenues in Q2 2020, but key manufacturing upgrade delayed

#89

Post by Symmetry »

perardi wrote: post #56

Is there any reputable reporting, or even just wild gossip, about why Intel is behind? The cynical answer is “they were focused on profit margins and didn’t invest in process”, but is it possible they bet hard on some technology that didn’t pan out? Ultraviolet lithography? Some exotic indium gallium arsenide magic that didn’t work in mass production?

Well, SemiAccurate made some claims about some of the cultural problems Intel was having a bit ago.

https://semiaccurate.com/2018/06/29/intels-firing-of-ceo-bri...

With regards to the specific technologies Intel was trying to do a lot of new things with 10nm. Initial rumors said that replacing copper with cobalt in some of the metal layers was causing problems. But later rumors were that Contact Over Active Gate (COAG) used mostly in the GPU section of a chip was the main culprit and why none of the early 10nm parts had working GPUs.

Re: Intel grew revenues in Q2 2020, but key manufacturing upgrade delayed

#90

Post by godzillabrennus »

shadowtree wrote: post #64
ksec wrote: post #5

20% YoY Revenue increase, 43% YoY Growth in Datacenter Segment. 76% Growth in Non-Volatile Memory solution, another 7% YoY growth in Client Side computing. This is truly amazing results. I get stabbed over at Anandtech every time I made an argument for Intel as an AMD investor. The Internet is full of Intel bashing comments but reality is Intel has been making record revenue quarter after quarter. For the not so good…

RIM/Blackberry's best quarters happened after the iPhone launch. Unclear if Intel is following that path.

Seems reasonably clear.

The naming convention Intel has chosen for the last 10 years (Core iX Generation X) has basically been a long running joke. The average person can’t figure out if a used machine from 2015 has the same CPU as a 2020 machine.

Not that they’ve made the chips noticeably faster for web browsing in that timeline anyway.

Basically, this news is the blackberry storm launch announcement.

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