81–90 of 122 posts
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Microsoft bought shares of Apple when it was on its knees. The foundry business doesn't compete with Nvidia.
Microsoft bought Apple shares for their own benefit instead of for supporting a competitor (it was too cheap for them and they could argue not a monpoly).
Keen to see what the team that split off to do a RISC-V DSP chip end up producing. Even if they added dual RX/TX SDR front ends on a SoC, than it could open up a single-chip smartphone solution etc.
Intel is entrenched with process-people obsessed with features no market asked for like hardware RATs, and betting on imaginary AI economies.
There are paths to move forwards technologically, but Intel as a company has structured itself to be its own worst problem. =3
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Call me conspiratorial but feels like TSMC is the target for both China and US. China needs TSMC to have economic and political leverage. US wants TSMC to become an American owned enterprise so it can prop up Intel. South Korea or Samsung rather see TSMC burn to the ground giving it monopoly marketshare. It benefits if US and China destroys each other in the process. There's like only 3 guys in town with TSMC dominat…
TSMC is geographically perfectly suited to be the best semiconductor manufacturing center in the world. This is great for the free market, tsmc engineers make less than half what US software folks make. This is a win/win for the US if TSMC keeps puttering along as normal.
No one in their right mind would think this is going to be a smooth ride. The massive amount of capital required to build cutting-edge fabs is a hard pill to swallow. These news writers need to cut Intel some slack. The world needs cutting-edge fabs in geopolitically stable locations. I believe Intel is simply too critical to fail at this point, and, as always, Uncle Sam won't let them.
Is intel even in a position to be competitive on the fab level? I was under the impression intel's fabs haven't been "cutting edge" for a long time now.
Just because they are second place, doesn't mean they have lost the race.
You really have 3 cutting edge players in fabrication. TSMC who is the best by a significant margin, and Intel/Samsung. TSMC is certainly winning right now, but they have not "won."
If Intel doesn't choke on its debt payments or corporate culture in the next 3-5 years, they will have one shot at pulling the nose up out of their dive. Of course their altitude is low enough that if they fail to execute in even a small way they will hit the ground.
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INTC is criminally oversold right now. I'm buying as much of it as I can at these prices.
I was contemplating the same thing. I get Intel isn't doing so well but I really can't imagine it just collapsing and dying. That said another possibility is just years of stagnation and low returns on your investment
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They're not in a position to grind out the AI supercomputers of today's excitement. Those aren't the chips I'm worried about from a national security perspective. It's the microcontrollers and FPGAs controlling weapons systems that really should be made within the country boundaries and that should be completely fine on GF's machinery.
Intel was never heavily involved in that, so idk why you think we'd be able to deduce that meaning from your previous comment. Also, the military semiconductor supply chain is already protected and has serious export restrictions, you just don't hear about it often. Don't forget that today's leading edge nodes are tomorrow's trailing edge, so you really can't escape the issue.
There's been a continual drive towards better semiconductor processes. That's really important for things like GPU compute. I think we're past diminishing returns for a lot of other things. There's probably a ~14nm arm chip in the keyboard I'm typing on that's only there because it was the cheapest option. Does the ECU in a car benefit from being sub 7nm? Maybe, probably not by much.
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> why aren't Nvidia and Apple stepping up to support Intel? Is it the role of a for-profit public company to "support" another for-profit public company? Free market, supply and demand, live by the sword die by the sword and all that. If Intel made decisions that lead to it's downfall, surely that is on them.
TFA says companies have an incentive for intel to succeed so they're not all reliant on TSMC. Apple used to dual-source their chips from Samsung/TSMC before they went all in with TSMC, but it's clear they're now vulnerable to geopolitical tensions.
Kind of. If Intel keep making shit, it doesn't help anyone if they succeed doing it. They are nothing making products that are a viable alternative to TSMC, so it makes no difference if they vanish.
If Intel is critical to the US industrial base, why aren't Nvidia and Apple stepping up to support Intel? What is the point of $3T national champions like Apple and Nvidia if they ship the industrial base overseas.
This effect is more obvious in small countries, but large ones are not immune to it either, especially if their fortunes turn.
Intel being on life support is a bit of a stretch. They are investing an awful lot of money, and it's going to take time for those investments to pay off. I worry more about their inept handling of recent CPU bugs than I do about their stock price or reduced dividends.
I felt this was strongly, and felt incredibly sure of that, until I read Stratechery on it last week: https://stratechery.com/2024/intel-honesty/ It slipped by me how much AMD eating a little more every quarter really added up over the last ~5 years. (~9% to ~50% of datacenter revenue) Also, the foundry stuff just isn't working as a financial exercise: they can't split it out as a division and massively subsidize it…
> The tests conducted by Broadcom involved sending silicon wafers - the foot-wide discs on which chips are printed - through Intel's most advanced manufacturing process known as 18A, the sources said. Broadcom received the wafers back from Intel last month. After its engineers and executives studied the results, the company concluded the manufacturing process is not yet viable to move to high-volume production.
and
> A Broadcom spokesperson said the company is "evaluating the product and service offerings of Intel Foundry and have not concluded that evaluation."
The make or break is not this summer. It's next. Gelsinger himself said he bet the company on 18A. If it doesn't work out then yeah, Intel is in very deep trouble but until then, Intel still has 29B cash on hand which is not chump change.
It's not that I stan for Intel, the heck do I care, I dislike the reporting that goes around this topic.
Intel being on life support is a bit of a stretch. They are investing an awful lot of money, and it's going to take time for those investments to pay off. I worry more about their inept handling of recent CPU bugs than I do about their stock price or reduced dividends.
That was my impression, until the news came out that they had a massive round of layoffs. That looks like the opposite of investing, poisons the climate, causes people who can to seek greener pastures (potentially further disrupting those projects they allegedly invest into), ...
I'm sure there were other bad news that caused their stock drop from $30 to $20, and it's hard to separate the impact of the layoff from those, but I wouldn't be surprised if the layoff news (that generally tend to push stock values up for companies in a different situation) contributed to it (due to lowering confidence that the investments will happen and work out).