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

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

#91
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Kinda like trying to debug an issue in a large JS SPA on IE11's F12 tools, bad, inaccurate test data is a 10X slowdown.

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

#92
post #30

Aren’t these node sizes mostly marketing BS that can’t be compared across manufacturers anyway? If Intel’s products can compete on performance or price or power consumption then who cares what they call it?

The objective metrics are things like: transistors per square millimetre, power per billion transistors, frequency, SRAM bit-cell size, etc... Marketing calls it "7nm+++super", engineers get graphs of power-vs-frequency. E.g.: comparing transistor densities: Intel 14nm 38 MTr/mm^2 TSMC 7nm 97 MTr/mm^2 Intel 10nm 100 MTr/mm^2 Samsung 5nm 127 MTr/mm^2 TSMC 5nm 173 MTr/mm^2 Intel 7nm "higher than TSMC 5nm" (planned for…

You are spot on on 10nm fab, it's why Apple shipped an update with split 14 and 10nm chips on different models, it wasn't large enough or cheap enough to update all models.

A notable thing about TSMC's 5nm is it is shipping in three months. Thats a massive gap and there is little proof that Intel 7nm is 'much' more than 5nm.

And thats before you consider other upsides seen in the TSMC chips such as cost, or the incredible power management tactics seen in the Ax series chips that are easily generations ahead of Intel.

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

#93

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.

I honestly think Apple will deliver this later this year with the new Air. There's a reason why iPads are so well liked and are so incredibly fast.

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

#94

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.

> chip speed has been fairly irrelevant for years. When you are emulating another architecture, speed often becomes a much bigger factor. Particularly since Apple caters to a lot of markets where performance is more important. Developers, video & audio pros, animators, photographers, and other pro users are a big part of what makes Apple's higher end systems move. Even if your CPU is idle 90% of the time, when you ru…

I'd argue that while Apple serves those markets, it hasn't catered to them for a long time, and it would be fair to say that in many cases it's downright neglected them.

There's a whole lot of people who are in the 'pro user' market who are incredibly frustrated with Apple - slow on hardware refreshes, generally way behind on chip generations, and a focus on design over reliability or performance.

The thing that stops a lot of people from migrating away is a lack of better options.

Some are tied to the Apple Ecosystem, and so there's no legit way of running OSX on non-Apple hardware.

Others don't need to use Apple, but Microsoft in the Windows 10 era is arguably worse, and they still haven't figured out that they need to fire all those people who keep pushing user-unfriendly choices like changing defaults on already installed systems, pushing app store apps down people's throats, etc.

For those who could move to Linux - there's a lack of nicely designed hardware that has all the modern bells & whistles, and that doesn't have weird software quirks. Particularly in the mobile space, but also to an extent in the desktop space, too.

Even when you look at a PC builder like System76's systems, their laptops still look like something out of a catalogue from 10 years ago, with none of the clean aesthetic and polish of Apple, or even premium Windows laptops. The desktops are better on that front.

Sure, you could, like I have, run a modern Linux distro on say a Lenovo X1 Carbon, or a HP Spectre X360 if you want something that looks pretty decent and has good performance, but even they have weird hardware quirks. Sound, for instance, is amazingly frustrating, and something I have to mess around with regularly, sometimes multiple times a day. It makes me look like an incompetent idiot when I'm talking away on a conference call to discover that for some bizzare reason, between Firefox/Chrome/Chromium and the System sound settings - what was working just fine not 30 minutes ago has decided that it no longer wants to cooperate, and has switched, yet again to a profile I don't want and don't need.

On the desktop side is no better - the few companies selling desktops, are mostly selling overpriced garbage aimed at Windows users, so you need to go through a Custom PC Builder using enthusiast equipment, which means spending half your time trying to find out if the 50W of RGB LEDs that the damn device comes with can be switched off (Answer: Probably not, unless you run Windows, or are willing to pull out a soldering iron. Which makes for a great discussion if you need warranty support on something).

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

#95

"Yes, we missed 10nm... and 7nm... but we assure, we will be ahead with 5nm" History says otherwise...

Totally agree though 7nm brings them to UVL which will make that step much easier. But they will still be at least a year behind.

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

#96
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

IMO, that sounds exactly like the greybeards weren't there to advocate for "one step at a time" and "get the debug tools working first".

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

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like they should've sent them "please take me back" bouquets with a stack of cash instead of fruit.

They'd be stupid to accept it. Don't work at a place with a bad culture for the money. Unless it's life changing money for a very short duration, it's unlikely to be worth it. Value your quality of life.

Especially if you have little time and enough money -- like a career-end engineer.

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

#98
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.

Commodore reported 7-year record revenue&profit 4 years before going bankrupt. https://dfarq.homeip.net/commodore-financial-history-1978-19...

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

#99

Apple's timing here is spot on. If Intel was firing on all cylinders, it would be a lot harder for them to pull off a processor change.

If all Apple cared about was faster chips, they could easily call up AMD and move their platform there. It'd be a lot less work for them. Moving to their own ARM chips lets them gain tighter control over the platform, and not be beholden to Intel or AMDs roadmap or desire to implement specific features Apple wants.

But Apple already controls its own chips in the sector that matters to them: mobile.

Shifting to ARM for laptops and desktops just sounds like a big burden for them.

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

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regular people didn't but PCs in 2000 that's just not true. Sorry I've got no idea what this means.

You said regular people haven't bought PCs for a couple of decades. A couple of decades ago PCs were still too expensive for regular people to buy, they were mostly owned by businesses and the upper middle class. Sales volume peaked somewhere in the mid 2000s. Since then the PC ownership rate hasn't really declined (it's still ~75%), but people haven't bought as many PCs because the rate of performance improvement ha…

>A couple of decades ago PCs were still too expensive for regular people to buy, they were mostly owned by businesses and the upper middle class.

This sounded wrong to me, but in the interests of not just making a kneejerk response, I googled and found total global sales from 1997-2000 estimated at ~400 million PCs[1] and also a claim[2] that at that time about 60 percent of US households had at least one personal computer.

Also, since the 80s, affordable computers were available, and sold in the millions,[3] so I don't think it's valid to say the reason they were mostly owned by businesses and the upper middle class at that point was because they were too expensive. It was more that people in the upper middle class used computers at work and could relate to why they were the future, and that future included them/their children, so they were likely to see value in a new computer rather than something else.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_share_of_personal_compu...

[2]https://hypertextbook.com/facts/2004/DianeEnnefils.shtml

[3]By 1985, the Commodore 64 was selling for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64

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