27 ms·

Intel ousts its chief engineer, shakes up technical group after delays

ghostcluster 6y ago
> Ann Kelleher, a 24-year Intel veteran, will lead development of 7-nanometer and 5-nanometer chip technology processes. Last week, the company had said the smaller, faster 7-nanometer chipmaking technology was six months behind schedule and it would have to rely more on outside chipmakers to keep its products competitive. I hope Intel keeps its US-based fabs and continues to upgrade them. It would be a mistake to cede this capacity to outsourcing like so much of our other manufacturing capacity. Interestingly, it seems the US is almost unique in our mass deindustrialization. Japan, Germany and South Korea have avoided this.
- criddell 6y ago
  Another article I just read says Intel is talking to TSMC. I think they are trying to get out of manufacturing.
  - segfaultbuserr 6y ago
    While I'm not a fan of Intel's monopolistic position on x86, but if Intel really gets rid of manufacturing, it's going to be another accelerator of consolidation in the semiconductor industry. I see it as a threat and I hope it will not happen. The timeline which Intel's in-house fabs survive, is a better timeline.
    - harpratap 6y ago
      Samsung has pledged to heavily invest in fabs and try to beat TSMC while SMIC is gaining historic momentum too. Looks like good competition in the upcoming decade to me.
    - scarface74 6y ago
      A monopoly is not defined as you’re the only one that can make your own products. Intel doesn’t have a “monopoly” in the processor space.
  - DC-3 6y ago
    It is going to be a little bit geopolitically terrifying if Taiwan/TSMC monopolizes cutting edge chip fab.
    - Bud 6y ago
      TSMC is building a $12B factory in Arizona.
      - jorblumesea 6y ago
        It will never be the latest chips. TSMC will never let their cutting edge fab machines out of Taiwan. If they're on 3nm then Arizona will make 7nm or something.
        ethbro 6y ago
        We'll see. Bargains come in many forms, and Taiwan certainly has things they want from the US.
        TheGrassyKnoll 6y ago
        Like what ? F16s ?
        wahern 6y ago
        Aircraft carriers and nuclear ICBMs. F-16s and missiles are merely to buy enough time for the U.S. to respond, which in a surprise attack with a minimal initial invasion force probably doesn't require as much sophisticated equipment as Taiwan has to preserve a viable defensive line for if and when the U.S. intervenes. If China (PRC) was smart, it'd have invaded Taiwan two years ago as Trump's resolve to backup commitments to Taiwan, or pretty much any military commitments to any ally, with force is basically nil. Nearing the election it's less clear as retaliation and a standoff crisis might better suit his reelection bid under present circumstances (e.g. COVID-19 sentiment). China missed its opportunity, but if Trump were to win re-election China would have much less to lose given their rejection of one country, two systems, the deterioration of trade ties, etc. In a lame duck Trump presidency invasion would have an even better cost+benefit profile for China.
  - baybal2 6y ago
    Yes, I myself heard that Intel CEO been frequenting visits to Hsinchu last year. There is only one company out there worth visiting in person for a man of his calibre.
    - devmunchies 6y ago
      Can you elaborate? I just learned about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hsinchu_Science_Park https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hsinchu_Science_Park Would this be to acquire, poach, invest, or relocate?
      - baybal2 6y ago
        The biggest company there is TSMC. The murmur been that Intel gave up on 10nm, and wanted to do a tapeout at TSMC's fab as a stopgap measure until they can make a new process from scratch.
  - jhallenworld 6y ago
    Maybe for Altera FPGAs? I don't really understand the scale Intel needs and whether TSMC offers enough for their micros.
- rehitman 6y ago
  half of chip making is in manufacturing it. If they out source it, not much would be left.
  - hardikgupta 6y ago
    This is clearly false. None of Nvidia, AMD, or Qualcomm manufacture their own chips. These companies are valuable despite not having in-house manufactures, perhaps because of it.
    - segfaultbuserr 6y ago
      > half of chip making is in manufacturing it. Correctness of this statement also depends on the type of chips. Not everything needs the latest and greatest process node (which is predominately a fabless industry) except for advanced microprocessors, SoCs, or storage. On the other hand, 65 nm is perfectly fine for 90% of chips in existence, even 0.18 microns is still often used. You don't need EUV for a good LED driver, a serial port, or a battery charger controller. If we talk in this context, indeed, companies like Texas Instruments, NXP, ONSemi, Analog Devices, Microchip, etc, usually make chips in-house.
  - ksec 6y ago
    They dont have to outsource their Core Asset. If Intel ships 250M CPU annually there are also 250M Chipset going alongside with it. Those can go to TSMC or Samsung. ( Or in a turn of an event, Global Foundry )
- jjcon 6y ago
  > Interestingly, it seems the US is almost unique in our mass deindustrialization The US manufacturing share of real GDP has been pretty much unchanged since the 40s - ie it’s growth has kept up with the rest of the economy. https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/Blog/2017/April/BlogImage_ManuRealGDPShare_041117.jpg https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/Blog/2017/April/BlogImage...
  - chrisjarvis 6y ago
    this image contradicts everything I've maybe ever heard about "American manufacturing"'s decline. Not saying the image is wrong, it's just impressive how much one segment of industry has been politicized.
    - jjcon 6y ago
      I imagine a lot of it is due to automation - there are in fact less assembly line jobs than there were in the 40s but economically the sector has continued to grow.
      - varjag 6y ago
        Automation in the industry is a big lie, the degree of it since post-WW2 days (when most of modern mass production methods were perfected) is greatly overstated. It is mostly due to outsourcing the labor-intensive parts to cheaper labor markets. The hypothetical robots are people working elsewhere.
    - jedberg 6y ago
      It's important to note that the number of manufacturing jobs has fallen significantly. Manufacturing has gotten way more efficient since the 40s, so a lot fewer people are necessary. That's why it's so politicized. Manufacturing is about 12% of GDP. That 12% used to go to a lot of people. Now it goes to the few people who own all the factories and the robots inside them.
      - baybal2 6y ago
- nabla9 6y ago
  > it seems the US is almost unique in our mass deindustrialization. Japan, Germany and South Korea have avoided this. This is very common misconception. The US has not deindustrialized other sectors have grown faster. US is the second largest country by industrial output. Third largest if you count EU as comparable unit. Industrial era is over in all advanced economies. We live in post-industrial societies.
  - ghostcluster 6y ago
    It's not in China, Germany, Japan, or South Korea. They still have a huge manufcaturing presence. Samsung builds its products in South Korea. Everything has to get manufactured somewhere and, in my view, the US has made a mistake by outsourcing this capacity more than other countries. As I said elsewhere in the thread, chip manufacturing is a special category as well, and Intel has the only US-based fabrication that is competitive with the state of the art. It should be as important to protect that capacity as other industrial sectors, like Boeing.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - Ericson2314 6y ago
      I recently read this review https://phenomenalworld.org/reviews/trade-wars https://phenomenalworld.org/reviews/trade-wars book sounds quite good as a sober explanation without the blinders of neoliberalism or industrial romanticism.
      - Ericson2314 6y ago
        https://phenomenalworld.org/interviews/trade-wars-are-class-wars https://phenomenalworld.org/interviews/trade-wars-are-class-... interview is nice too.
    - renewiltord 6y ago
      Yeah, China is a manufacturing powerhouse. But the world system has moved beyond that. The US can't compete on price. Germany and Japan have stagnant economies. South Korea and the US grow at similar rates but the US has a massive base to grow on. America's economy grows at 2.9% every year. The largest in the world and it's still growing at this rate. I take this trade every single time. It's why Americans are so wealthy in general.
- vkou 6y ago
  > I hope Intel keeps its US-based fabs and continues to upgrade them. It would be a mistake to cede this capacity to outsourcing like so much of our other manufacturing capacity. Intel is a publicly traded internationally-owned corporation, with no obligations to the long-term welfare of the United States. If you'd like a chip manufacturer to make decisions based on what is good for the US, I would recommend bribing it, nationalizing it, or starting a government-backed competitor. Any of those would be more effective at accomplishing this than hope and prayers. The free market itself is not necessarilly going to deliver the results you wish for, just because you wish for them.
  - chottocharaii 6y ago
    Gee save us the free market lecture friend. What he said doesn’t exclude any of the options you’ve brought up. Also I note you’ve raised carrot strategies when stick strategies exist also.
  - stass 6y ago
    You are correct about having no obligations, but as a company that is based in US and employs a large US-based workforce it benefits a lot from US itself being successful.
    - shi314 6y ago
      In Today's World, Countries should be grateful to a company when they employ people. There is no lack of highly skilled workforce in entire world. US with it's abysmal education system should be grateful to intel that it attracts semi conductor industry talents from all over the world which maintains US's hegemony in the world. If intel doesn't employ them, they would start companies like TSMC in their countries, hell if US didn't discriminate against Asians in 1980s maybe TSMC wouldn't even exist in the first place. Benefits that US provides to companies is way less than benefits companies provide to US.
- hammock 6y ago
  >Interestingly, it seems the US is almost unique in our mass deindustrialization. Japan, Germany and South Korea have avoided this. Related to the dollar being global reserve currency, which encourages a trade deficit. The US has a deficit equal to the next 15 biggest deficits combined. On the other hand, Germany, Japan and South Korea are top 5 trade surpluses.
- jake_morrison 6y ago
  This deindustrialization was driven by Wall Street. The important metric is return on invested capital. Manufacturing companies use a lot of capital for their factories. Shut down the factory and outsource to China, and you have the same sales with a lot less capital, so the stock goes up. Great success. Maybe repeat by having your suppliers do more and more of the engineering. At a certain point, you are just a brand, with no actual engineering capability. You can't compete with the people who actually know how to make the things. Then you die. See Hewlett Packard. The US taxing companies on global income at high rates also has an effect. Say you have 50% of your sales outside the US. You pay taxes in the country where you sell the product. Then you have profits overseas. If you bring that cash back to the US, you pay the difference between the corporate rate in country X and the US, which can be a lot, say 15%. Might as well take that money and use it to pay for manufacturing at e.g. Foxconn. So it's 15% better to invest in manufacturing capacity outside the US. The poor health care system in the US drives up costs as well, twice what it is in other industrialized countries for worse outcome. Same for cost of housing because zoning laws won't allow building. Google was allowed to build offices in Mountain View but not residential property for the employees to live in. So everyone has to commute from somewhere else, and cost of rent is driven by how much misery you can handle. Failures in government policy make US workers much more expensive without creating any more value or improving the quality of life for the employees.
  - kiba 6y ago
    Reminds me of the old joke about the ideal company is having one person to turn on a factory and then place a logo on it, while engineering and everything else is outsourced.
    - TeMPOraL 6y ago
      It's like celebrities launching lines of cosmetics products - all they do is contribute a picture of their face, and then they rake in the money.
      - sharken 6y ago
        Sadly a very effective strategy until you develop critical thinking, some struggle their entire life to achieve it.
- quotemstr 6y ago
  Yes. Intel's failure demonstrates that the US no longer knows how to make chips as good as those of our geopolitical rivals. We're kept safe in large part by our technological edge. If we start falling behind in technology, it's not just a bad decade for Intel, but a hole in national security.
  - Symmetry 6y ago
    Taiwan and South Korea are hardly our geopolitical rivals.
    - quotemstr 6y ago
      Oh, come on. We both know that in a war, our main geopolitical rival would conquer both on turn 1.
      - Symmetry 6y ago
        We really don't. Naval invasions are hard, particularly when the US is the world's dominant sea power. Theoretically China could invade South Korea through North Korea but North Korea wouldn't like that and they have nukes. But conquest of them is what happens when WWIII cooks off - we were talking about geopolitical rivalry.
        quotemstr 6y ago
        Even if China can't invade Taiwan right away, China can set up a naval and air blockade. And if they can't do that, they can destroy the very delicate fabs using short-range conventional missiles. China is a high-tech peer adversary, not a bunch of desert guys in pickup trucks. As a matter of national security, we need a secure (and E2E-trusted!) supply chain for advanced technology.
- whazor 6y ago
  But running a fab is a huge cost and liability while all the competition is outsourcing to TSMC. Because the process is so difficult, I think it makes sense to only have fabs that work for multiple companies. I do think US chip companies (Intel, AMD, Nvidia) and government should get together and start a fab by themselves.
  - beaunative 6y ago
    The reason market challengers outsource to TSMC is because they don't have enough revenue to support their own fab line, with Intel taking majority of the revenue. The precise reason Intel kept their own fab is because it's the makret leader that wants to keep their competitive edge, that is under the assumption their own fab is more advance, and for their use only. However, now that TSMC as a fab somehow got more advanced. It meant Intel's in-house fab has failed in that mission. That doesn't mean Intel's challenger's gonna hand their production to Intel's fab. Intel obviously won't just turn over their technology for their competitors to use either. It's quite impossible and unconventional to do.
- qserasera 6y ago
  We really, really, really NEED US based fabs. >US is almost unique in our mass deindustrialization. Japan, Germany and South Korea have avoided this. yup, I wouldn't necessarily include SK in that list but I'm very displeased at our deindustrialization process. Most/all of it does not make sense outside a tenuous abstract global finance system. We are losing knowledge and control every time and every day factories are allowed to leave the country.
- beaunative 6y ago
  There is of little significance advocating a company to do that. Unless it's regulated and legislated. Any company who willingly gave up such advantange in cost would be a fool and lost its market due to such policies unless that company has other unique advantange to keep their market position. People like to talk about how they love "locally-sourced products" until they realized they had to pay double or triple.
- oblio 6y ago
  > Interestingly, it seems the US is almost unique in our mass deindustrialization. The UK, Belgium did the same. The whole Communist Bloc also did it (for different reasons).
  - dgellow 6y ago
    France too.
- burntoutfire 6y ago
  > it seems the US is almost unique in our mass deindustrialization. Japan, Germany and South Korea have avoided this. Entire Central Europe (Poland, Slovakia, Hungary etc.) is filled with German manufacturing plants. The Germans have done plenty of deindustrialization themselves.
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    47% of German GDP is manufacturing. Hardly deindustrialisation. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/german-economy-3-reasons-economy-is-flopping-headed-for-recession-2019-8-1028484056#:~:text=In%20fact%2C%2047%25%20of%20Germany%27s%20GDP%20is%20made,an%20economy%20that%27s%20four%20times%20as%20much%20 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/german-econo...
    - burntoutfire 6y ago
      I wonder how is that counted - i.e. can for example Mercedes contribute a lot towards the part of GDP counted as production even if most of its cars are produced outside Germany. Or, is that counted as engineering and branding.
- numlock86 6y ago
  > make a lot of short term profit (cut expenses) > invest into long term stability Well, you have to choose one.
- gmtx725 6y ago
  > Interestingly, it seems the US is almost unique in our mass deindustrialization The UK has vast swathes of poverty in the deindustrialised north of England and other areas. Former mining and heavy industry towns that even today almost 40 years on from deindustrialisation are dominated by insecure, unskilled work and unemployment
- noir_lord 6y ago
  Not that unique. UK did it as well, we let Arm be sold to foreign investors - I wonder if the French or German government would have allowed that sale.
  - gspr 6y ago
    Arm is hardly a company that manufactures anything. An impressive tech company for sure, but I don't understand how the foreign takeover of a company that licenses processor designs is an example of loss of British manufacturing.
- knubie 6y ago
  > Interestingly, it seems the US is almost unique in our mass deindustrialization. Japan, Germany and South Korea have avoided this. Those countries also have much higher trade barriers. The US is almost unique in how few trade trade restrictions they (used to) have.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    >Those countries also have much higher trade barriers. This isn't true. Here's a comparison of the EU, several individual European countries, Japan and the US[1], and there isn't much difference tariffs or trade barriers. Global trade-barriers have been reduced to virtually nothing among developed economies, the US isn't unique at all. This is a stale old meme that seems to be popular in the US because it frames the US as a sort of victim of global trade which is a popular political narrative but not evidence backed. The real difference is in the overfinancialised, laissez-faire capitalism of the anglosphere (the UK suffers from the same issue of deindustrialisation, Australia as well), comopared to the industrial policy and state/big business dominated capitalism of Japan, Germany, France and so on. [1]https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2017/10/24/the-eu-isnt-protectionist-its-one-of-the-most-open-economies-in-the-world/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2017/10/24/the-eu-isnt-protec...
- curiousllama 6y ago
  The US hasn't deindustrialized at all. Industrial production has increased pretty consistently as far back as I can find data. What has increased in pace, though, is capacity per person, so manufacturing _jobs_ have decreased. It's less of a geopolitical issue and more of a domestic employment issue. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/INDPRO https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/INDPRO https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CAPB50001SQ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CAPB50001SQ
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    Ironically, those numbers were cooked up by counting Intel as manufacturing and over-weighting its success with a hedonic multiplier: https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-thats-cost-americans-millions-of-jobs/ https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-...
    - curiousllama 6y ago
      Idk what a hedonic multiplier is, but my understanding of that article is that production numbers measure the real $ value of output, not the actual quantity, making the production index misleading (e.g., if the US manufactured totally stopped except to make 1 computer chip costing $100 trillion, then manufacturing would seem to shoot up, even as it actually collapsed.) If that's correct, then it's interesting: we're making few, valuable items now, rather than many, cheap items. It follows that automation isn't a drive towards cheaper production, but more a drive towards higher quality goods that simply require machines to make. But it all takes me back to my point: from a geopolitical perspective, being good at highly-differentiated, tech-intensive, difficult-to-execute manufacturing is a great position. It's just a disaster from an employment perspective, because to get there, we traded away all our labor-intensive manufacturing.
      - jjoonathan 6y ago
        Hedonic multiplier is the idea that a CPU that's twice as good should count for twice the GDP even if it doesn't actually sell for that. It's a strategy for overweighting our strengths in those manufacturing indices by confusing the relationship between money and value. Intel was the lynchpin of this lie. We are in a thread about Intel becoming non-competitive at highly-differentiated, tech-intensive, difficult-to-execute manufacturing. No, that is not a great geopolitical position to be in.
- chkaloon 6y ago
  Just spent 3 months in Hillsboro, Oregon, and Intel construction work there is full speed ahead it seems. Of course that could change pretty quickly, but right now it sure looks like they intend to keep fabs going in the US.
Uhhrrr 6y ago
Why does Renduchintala's head roll and not Swan's?
- metalliqaz 6y ago
  We'll never know, but I imagine strategic positioning in the blame game is very important at the upper rungs of a company like Intel.
  - exmadscientist 6y ago
    Reliable sources from within Intel have long indicated that you don't have to imagine :) The biggest question I have about this news is how much of it is really Murthy's fault, and how much of it is an excuse for Swan to get rid of his biggest rival at the company? It could easily go either way. The previous succession battle can't have left a strong executive team behind... but what else is new for Intel?
    - kps 6y ago
      > but what else is new for Intel? “Only the paranoid survive” — Andy Grove
    - ksec 6y ago
      >The biggest question I have about this news is how much of it is really Murthy's fault, I dont know for how long he was looking after Fabs, surely wasn't from the beginning.
- emmelaich 6y ago
  Complete speculation but perhaps Renduchintala wasn't providing the full accurate info to Swan.
- KSS42 6y ago
  Swan has only been CEO for 18 months. Renduchintala has been charge of technology group including fabs for 5 years.
metalliqaz 6y ago
Intel getting beat by both AMD and TSMC. I'm not surprised a Qualcomm guy would be at the helm of that listing ship.
- ghostcluster 6y ago
  AMD uses TSMC for manufacturing.
  - reducesuffering 6y ago
    GP probably meant AMD is beating them on CPU design and TSMC at fab.
    - metalliqaz 6y ago
      yep
    - nomel 6y ago
      > AMD is beating them on CPU design How is this possible to know?
      - Teever 6y ago
        Can you elaborate on why it isn't possible to know this?
        andrewprock 6y ago
        It's probably not true with respect to design. Intel chips are still the fastest cores out there. The difference is that AMD can pack more cores into their 7nm process and not break thermals.
        t-writescode 6y ago
        There is real benefit to the chiplet design that shouldn’t be understated. Not needing a full set of cores successfully made every time to have a useful wafer must seriously save AMD money and that’s all in the design.
paulpan 6y ago
Expected outcome for the delays in 10nm and now the 7nm fabrication nodes... What I find surprising is: 1. This former chief engineer was originally poached from Qualcomm back in 2016. Qualcomm was (and remains) not comparable to Intel for market and silicon development, so why was this hire made and picked to run the entire division? 2. The original group, Technology, Systems Architecture and Client Group (TSAC) is monolithic. For as a critical item as fabrication node development, that seems counter-intuitive.
- Bud 6y ago
  Qualcomm was and still is kicking Intel's ass at making modem chips, and I'd imagine that's why this hire was made. At that time, Apple was having Intel attempt to build modem chips for iPhones so that Apple could have an option other than Qualcomm. That didn't pan out.
  - paulpan 6y ago
    I don't disagree that Intel failed to make competitive modem chips but that's not their proverbial bread and butter. Instead it was making x86 chips that, while Qualcomm's Snapdragon lineup held a virtual monopoly in mobile space, it's a very much apples and oranges comparison - thermal envelopes, performance targets, size, use cases, etc. In hindsight perhaps it's unsurprising this hire didn't pan out and unfortunately it may have torpedoed Intel's short term competitiveness.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    We don’t know if it is going to pan out or not. Apple bought Intel’s modem business.
    - toast0 6y ago
      It didn't make a lasting revenue stream for Intel, and Apple didn't take the ex-qualcomm exec with the business.
      - 6y ago
justAnotherNET 6y ago
About time, and I hope they don’t stop here. Time to clean house in upper management! Intel was the crown jewel of the semiconductor industry in 2015. Their collapse is a travesty and leadership deserve to lose for this.
spydum 6y ago
Wonder if this has anything to do with Jim Keller also leaving about a month ago? https://www.anandtech.com/show/15846/jim-keller-resigns-from-intel-effective-immediately https://www.anandtech.com/show/15846/jim-keller-resigns-from...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- ksec 6y ago
  Thinking of the same thing. Really wonder what sort of politics and power play is happening behind the scene. I thought Jim Keller lost when he was obviously pushing for using TSMC.
- pushkar2911 6y ago
  This YT video covers this issue. Lot of politics and power struggles in Intel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nsX9nUFIBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nsX9nUFIBc
- shaklee3 6y ago
  To be fair, Keller never stays anywhere long
  - saberience 6y ago
    Two years is his shortest tenure, not enough time to make a massive difference to a company as big as Intel.
    - yvdriess 6y ago
      He carries enough weight in this industry to have no problem changing the orbit of even a company the size of Intel. It depends how hard the managers are going to try and pull it back in the old direction.
  - piva00 6y ago
    But he's almost never left without making an impact where he worked at, no matter how short of a sting: DEC (21164/21264) -> AMD (K7/K8) -> SiByte/Broadcom -> P.A. Semi (bought by Apple, A4/A5) -> AMD (Ryzen) -> Tesla (not sure about his impact) -> Intel (no visible impact so far). Also, from those only his first stint at AMD can be considered "not staying long", most of the other positions were held for some years.
kilo_bravo_3 6y ago
If it was just a firing I would be hopeful. But a firing coupled with a reorg? Good luck! Even a fingerless man could hold up the correct number of digits needed to express the number of times a reorg has solved a problem.
- tgtweak 6y ago
  I would say that is untrue. In the case of Intel and their issues as of late, some reorganization at this level will go a long way.
  - CyberDildonics 6y ago
    What are you basing that on?
    - tgtweak 6y ago
      5 years of running a 200 person company. There is such thing as a constructive reorganization. The original comment read a bit like that of someone who was south of a reorg.
      - CyberDildonics 6y ago
        How does that relate to Intel though? How do you know that reorganization will solve their problems?
        tgtweak 6y ago
        Issues as systematic as this often point to poor execution or weak teams in the organization. Reorganizing them to allow for better focus or better alignment (or in many cases just better leadership to a business unit that is struggling) can lead to some pretty dramatic results even with the majority of the organization remaining the same. Look at Microsoft - both in size (~100-150k employees) and challenges (market share loss, lack of innovation in key areas, delayed deliveries) - and the impact of Satya on the organization at large with regards to that. Intel's fab has been lackluster for the last 5 years and the only solution at this point is to reorganize for better results. 10nm is unfathomably late and 7nm slipping like this is another red flag. I think too much tolerance for failure was given to the unit in charge of fabrication and I would be curious to see an organizational post mortem done on that. In the interest of seeing continued competition in the processor world (which we're already seeing the numerous advantages of with AMD now) and also in the fabrication space (TSMC is getting very close to monopoly) I really hope that Intel solves this issue.
baybal2 6y ago
> Renduchintala, > widely seen as a No. 2 to Swan, > has been on Accenture’s (ACN.N) board since April 2018. > Renduchintala eventually took responsibly for turning around Intel’s process technology, A very odd choice of a person to develop a fab process
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- qppo 6y ago
  Here is is bio page from intel: > Renduchintala has spent a substantial part of his career in the SoC, mobile and internet of things areas. Prior to joining Intel, he was executive vice president of Qualcomm Technologies Inc. and co-president of Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, where he led its semiconductor business in the computing and mobile segments. He joined Qualcomm in 2004 from Skyworks Solutions Inc./Conexant Systems Inc., where he was vice president and general manager of the company’s Cellular Systems Division. Prior to Skyworks, he spent a decade with Philips Electronics, where he progressed to become vice president of engineering for its consumer communications business. https://newsroom.intel.com/biography/dr-murthy-renduchintala/ https://newsroom.intel.com/biography/dr-murthy-renduchintala...
  - baybal2 6y ago
    But I don't see anything that suggests that he had any practical, and hands on experience with microelectronics, or just EE in general. Per my standards, the word "Accenture" in the resume alone is just such a giant red flag...
    - madengr 6y ago
      Well, if you want to fire all the old, white guys who actually knew how to make stuff and replace them with H1B, he’s an excellent choice.
    - truth_be_told 6y ago
      From https://newsroom.intel.com/biography/dr-murthy-renduchintala/ https://newsroom.intel.com/biography/dr-murthy-renduchintala... Renduchintala holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, a PhD in digital communications and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Bradford in England.
supernova87a 6y ago
So what was the underlying story? Progress not as rapid as they had put out as plan, and direct reports to Swan afraid to break the bad news early?
InTheArena 6y ago
A CEO who is really a CFO is probably not what Intel needs right now. It's clear that their engineering culture is compromised, and i would hope that Intel would go back to their roots.
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  Yep, it was clear when they chose Swan to be the CEO that they were prioritizing cost-cutting over innovation.
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    It apparently cost them the Apple deal. At the end of the day, even a CFO-CEO isn't happy about that.
    - andrewstuart 6y ago
      CFO-CEO's don't know what to do about it though.
      - bcrosby95 6y ago
        Cut more costs.
        mtgx 6y ago
        Do they know where from exactly? Something that costs a lot and isn't looking very profitable right now could be critical for Intel in a few years.
        lumberingjack 6y ago
        They had that problem for a long time too. See the failed mobile phone chip that wing in that one Asus phone. Everyone looked at the specs two years before release said (that will suck all the battery and be slow) when it came out it sucked all the battery and was slow leading Intel to fire 12k people canceling the program
ArkVark 6y ago
Fire all H1Bs, fire all contractors and Intel will be a better place.
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  It's about half contractors at this point.
- jagger27 6y ago
  Or promote them all to be blue badges and end the caste system.
  - Firerouge 6y ago
    The distinction between blue and green badges does sorta create very visibly labeled classes at Intel. (Disclosure, I worked a summer in Hillsboro as a green badge) It seems much more likely that mismanagement is the problem with Intel, not discontent/classism amongst contractors and the core staff. Though Intel could maybe cost save if they folded these subcontacted business units directly into it's staffing, it would probably further increase their management load, and might cost more by decreasing competitive bidding for work. This doesn't seem to be their core problem, but I'm interested in hearing why you think this is an important issue for Intel to change
    - selimthegrim 6y ago
      What pissed me off the most as a green badge was having to pay for the fruit (and the tea!) free to blue badges (which I hear they only limit to 1 now)
    - jagger27 6y ago
      I’m not an Intel employee or contractor, I’m only going off what I’ve heard from about contractors being treated poorly on campus as you described. More crucially, the red tape around information access severely limits contractor’s abilities to actually do their jobs. From what I understand, certain tasks require a their blue badge manager to sign off on and grant access, but the managers have giant dispersed teams to manage and are hard to get to.
maxpert 6y ago
Apple moving away, AMD kick in, ARM taking dominance. I guess we are about to witness the fall (may be death) of another titan.
- Zenst 6y ago
  For me the first sign will be Intel going thru their patent pool and seeing who they can sue.
  - mappu 6y ago
    "Intel fires warning shots at Microsoft, claims x86 emulation is a patent minefield" (2017) https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/intel-fires-warning-shots-at-microsoft-claims-x86-emulation-is-a-patent-minefield/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/intel...
    - sjwright 6y ago
      Meanwhile, Apple is gearing up for extensive x86 emulation capability within macOS on Apple Silicon, so I guess the minefield isn't as dangerous as Intel implies. Or perhaps Apple is happily licensing patents? If so, that suggests that Rosetta 2 will be a limited-time feature just like Rosetta 1. Apple won't be interested in paying for patent licenses forever.
      - mappu 6y ago
        Patents have a 20-year lifespan so the common x86_32 patents must have already expired. As for x86_64, the patents would expire in either 2020 or 2023 depending on if you count from the first published documentation or from the first shipping CPU (IANAL). Of course that is only the baseline ISA (and SSE2). The future extensions (SSE3+/FMA/AVX and AES-NI/RDRAND/...) would not yet be patent-free but most software is really just compiled against the baseline. Apple managed to split x86_64 into a sub-architecture x86_64h for post-Haswell, but broadly speaking, nobody else has: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/x86-64_micro-architecture_update https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/x86-64_micro-architec...
vondur 6y ago
Well, even using older 14nm tech, their CPUs are still competitive.
- theevilsharpie 6y ago
  Intel's 14nm processors are only competitive for low-core count, high-clock frequency applications, and only if you disregard power usage. For use cases where power usage is an important component of performance (e.g., mobile, servers), AMD hardware _substantially_ outperforms Intel's.
- Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  The Intel i9 is about 1/3 slower than the ryzen 9. It also costs more and uses more power. Intel cpus are such bad value right now its insane.
  - misanthropian00 6y ago
    I cannot afford $1000+ CPUs, but can you link to a review that actually shows this? I just read an anandtech review that compares AMD and Intel and I am not seeing that at all. In fact it looks like Intel still has a lead on single threaded performance which is really pathetic at this point. Maybe AMD should start firing and reorganizing too. I also am not thrilled with the engineering logic of bimodality and other compromises that AMD seems to have made in their engineering to beat Intel on core count. As a purist I hate these sorts of shortcuts. On that alone I would favor Intel. History shows that they tend to go for engineering purity over shotgun approaches, but of course that sort of corporate culture can change at any time. There is something to say for engineering elegance and purity over meaningless benchmarks.
    - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
      Intel has the tiniest advantage in single threaded which results in close to 0 noticeable improvement. Having double the cores on your cpu results in a massive noticeable improvement. When performing CPU intensive tasks like compiling code, AV1 encoding, etc, its all about core count. AMD also manages to have so much greater performance with a lower power consumption.
zamalek 6y ago
Intel has been fumbling stupid executive decisions that are eroding both their competitive advantage and consumer loyalty. Most recently, they decided to lock memory speed behind enthusiast chipsets. And they oust an engineer? They are clearly searching for blame in all the wrong places.
- MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
  They fired a politician, just a bit too late: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nsX9nUFIBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nsX9nUFIBc
steelframe 6y ago
Is it reasonable to oust a lead engineer because of a product delay while COVID-19 is causing such a massive disruption? Are any tech companies seriously expecting that their engineers can turn on a dime and perform at the same level they were before the sudden mass exodus to WFH?
- pushkar2911 6y ago
  According to reddit comments he was not a good leader https://old.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/hz0ynt/intel_makes_changes_to_technology_organization/fzgddi4/ https://old.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/hz0ynt/intel_makes_c...
- theevilsharpie 6y ago
  Intel's manufacturing troubles have been ongoing for years. This is just the latest episode.
mastazi 6y ago
So they promoted the CFO to CEO and now they are firing the chief engineer - that tells a lot on where the company is going and I'm afraid it's not a good place.
- b34r 6y ago
  Boeing 2.0
  - HenryKissinger 6y ago
    At least no one will die from Intel's mistakes.
    - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
      Who knows? I can imagine there’s an Intel CPU in a life critical application in more than a few places.
      - sjwright 6y ago
        Such life critical applications would be validated for safety by the product manufacturer/integrator, not by Intel.
        read_if_gay_ 6y ago
        How can they validate a CPU if Intel can’t?
        sjwright 6y ago
        The same way as they validate the serial UART: by validating its application. Does the CPU fail if it’s close to an x-ray machine or an MRI? Intel isn’t going to tell you that.
        6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
MangoCoffee 6y ago
its interesting how Intel and TSMC all use ASML EUV and maybe some of machines from the same vendor like LAM research. TSMC make it work while Intel struggle. craft is real.
- edude03 6y ago
  My understand is intel is in this situation exactly because they don't use EUV - but "older gen" DUV - deep ultra violet and are pushing the technology farther by upping the scaling factor see[0] for more information [0]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13683/intel-euvenabled-7nm-process-tech-is-on-track https://www.anandtech.com/show/13683/intel-euvenabled-7nm-pr...
mhh__ 6y ago
If I'm not mistaken, Intel's financials are still very good. Will the rot set in before they run out of safety net?
usr1106 6y ago
Intel processor architecture is not a leading design for 2020. Intel security is a nightmare, think Meltdown and many others. The whole BIOS and ME stuff are nightmares. So every setback for Intel could be a step forward for the IT industry and for software development. Who is worried that we don't use steam engines any more and their manufacturers have disappeared from the market? Unfortunately the long-lasting close-to-monopoly of Intel has not left too much room for new winners to develop.
- g-b-r 6y ago
  AMD is not that much better, unfortunately
  - usr1106 6y ago
    How would it be. It's mostly compatible.
    - g-b-r 6y ago
      Processor architecture, most bugs, ME and a lot of other things would not need to be "compatible". Still they copied ME with the same stubborness in refusing to make it more transparent, they stopped allowing open-source initialization and they don't have a much better record in security
jamessmith74 6y ago
Intel is a dying company
dschuetz 6y ago
And now I understand why Jim Keller left Intel. It's not technology that is lacking at Intel, it's the management.
purpleidea 6y ago
Do Intel's U.S. based fab's really matter _that much_ when all the high-end machines that do the lithography all come from one company (ASML) anyways? I'd say it's important, and it's an advantage for Intel, but not as big as anyone is making it out to be.
- travbrack 6y ago
  Isn't that the "hard part"? I wonder why they're having so much trouble compared to tsmc.
purpleidea 6y ago
I was cautiously optimistic for Intel, when they bought Altera in 2015. I was also simultaneously worried for innovation in the FPGA industry. AFAICT Intel has dropped the ball and failed to produce anything particularly amazing as a result of the 2015 acquisition. I would have been all over that. Did I miss something? Why didn't they run with this.
headmelted 6y ago
"Renduchintala was one of several key hires from outside Intel, which had been famous in Silicon Valley for developing and promoting talent from within. He was hired as part of a strategy to go after broader markets than the central processing units, or CPUs, the company became known for in the PC era." I feel like this will go down in history as one of technology's most expensive decisions (that's not a knock on Renduchintala as much as it's my own astonishment at Intel thinking they were safe as recently as 2015). I'm also a bit saddened by this. It confirms what we all suspected but what I secretly hoped wasn't true. Intel for over a decade coyly hinted they had aces up their sleeves that would already have been played if they faced more competition. Graphene got kicked around in conversations for a while and then when that turned out to be a no go they talked about black phosphorus. So after all that, aside from marginal tweaks and pretty meager die shrinks here and there, they were doing.. nothing?.. for ten years?
- smabie 6y ago
  I mean, trying and failing isn't the same as doing nothing. But regardless, necessity is the mother of invention, so I'm sure they'll figure something out. They have 20b of cash (1/4 of AMD's total market cap) and their profits are damn good. Make no mistake, Intel is very much aware this is a do or die situation, and I expect them to deploy all the resources at their disposal to fight both AMD and ARM. They don't have much debt and can borrow heavily and at great rates if necessary.
  - misanthropian00 6y ago
    Why is it do or die just because they can't make faster CPUs? AMD can't make them either. It's the end of an entire era technologically. We all knew this day would come.It's a hard problem that requires a whole new paradigm probably. Hopefully both AMD and Intel will have enough money to keep doing research by trying and failing with various radical approaches or we may never see faster CPUs again. Why would they need to worry about ARM? That is low power mobile devices, a sector they got out of a while ago.
    - 6y ago
blargmaster33 6y ago
CFO->CEO EJECT!!
atq2119 6y ago
The title is misleading. From the article it sounds like the chief engineering manager is leaving. Still not a great sign, but quite different from a chief engineer leaving. Some might argue that that's what happened with the earlier departure if Jim Keller, but Keller probably didn't do that much engineering anymore either.
andrew3019 6y ago
> Intel said it is reorganizing its technology, systems architecture and client group. Its new leaders will report directly to Chief Executive Officer Bob Swan. This is similar to Apple in 1997, when the CEO was ousted and Jobs stepped in as interim CEO to restructure Apple's product line. Maybe this will be Intel's comeback?
gigatexal 6y ago
Is he a fall guy? A patsy?
klelatti 6y ago
How many hardware engineers were lost in the layoffs in 2016? [1] How much aggregate experience at developing a new process node and fixing the issues was lost in those layoffs? It's often the senior staff who go in these exercises - they are more expensive and are more likely to be attracted to early retirement. [1] https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2016/04/intel_quarterly_results.html https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2016/04/intel_quar...
elnik 6y ago
Nobody seems to want to talk about delays. I work at a hard tech startup, and all I have been seeing are delays in launching our product. I keep seeing more work as work gets done. Much of our progress till date has been incremental. It came from either fixing bugs in sprints or unlocking new capabilities by solving hard problems. I have never understood the point of timing work. Work takes as much "time" as it needs for getting done. It can't be accurately estimated with out actually spending time actually working on it. Clarity seems to be the most critical piece for productivity for me. Drive that, and people just can't help but work. Dealing with drudgery seems inevitable. Add on top of this people's incompetence or I should say unreadiness for situation, it irks the managers and people responsible for delivery. Delays cascade up. But I think most delays are due to unrealistic expectations of people higher up. Irony being the expectations set by the ones that are supposed to carry out the work.
- robviren 6y ago
  It is human issue. Business requires goals and timelines. I agree that the issue comes from a lack of transparency, poor culture, and the human desire to be "right". Not setting a deadline is unacceptable to business though. I can't imagine sales or the end customer would ever accept not knowing when they can expect product delivery. If delays are communicated, engineering is respected, and no one is looking to blame someone for delays then the whole thing runs fine. As long as company culture does not run around making people feel bad about not hitting timelines you get more honest timelines from people. But as a product manager I am forced to ask engineering to try and deliver some things sooner than they estimated. Just like I have to disappoint customers by saying products are delayed, or sales that something is more expensive, I have to disappoint engineering with getting something out there sooner than people are comfortable with. Obvious exceptions are when we are confident we cannot hit the timeline with even an MVP.
yadavrohit 6y ago
https://analyticsdrift.com/intels-misery-from-losing-42-billion-to-changing-leadership/ https://analyticsdrift.com/intels-misery-from-losing-42-bill...
perseusprime11 6y ago
Wow! They are losing a genius in Murthy. This is a bear case for Intel.
lbill 6y ago
I really hope that Intel wakes up: struggling with fab processes is not their biggest problem, their marketing strategy is. There are some really talented engineers in there, but the product segmentation and the way the "features" are sold is in my opinion not good at all. Linus Tech Tips made a great video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Skry6cKyz50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Skry6cKyz50
g-b-r 6y ago
How much of this TSMC dominance is due to the patent system? Could it be that there is no way to manufacture chips at these sizes without using some TSMC patent?

> Ann Kelleher, a 24-year Intel veteran, will lead development of 7-nanometer and 5-nanometer chip technology processes. Last week, the company had said the smaller, faster 7-nanometer chipmaking technology was six months behind schedule and it would have to rely more on outside chipmakers to keep its products competitive. I hope Intel keeps its US-based fabs and continues to upgrade them. It would be a mistake to cede this capacity to outsourcing like so much of our other manufacturing capacity. Interestingly, it seems the US is almost unique in our mass deindustrialization. Japan, Germany and South Korea have avoided this.

criddell 6y ago
Another article I just read says Intel is talking to TSMC. I think they are trying to get out of manufacturing.
- segfaultbuserr 6y ago
  While I'm not a fan of Intel's monopolistic position on x86, but if Intel really gets rid of manufacturing, it's going to be another accelerator of consolidation in the semiconductor industry. I see it as a threat and I hope it will not happen. The timeline which Intel's in-house fabs survive, is a better timeline.
  - harpratap 6y ago
    Samsung has pledged to heavily invest in fabs and try to beat TSMC while SMIC is gaining historic momentum too. Looks like good competition in the upcoming decade to me.
  - scarface74 6y ago
    A monopoly is not defined as you’re the only one that can make your own products. Intel doesn’t have a “monopoly” in the processor space.
- DC-3 6y ago
  It is going to be a little bit geopolitically terrifying if Taiwan/TSMC monopolizes cutting edge chip fab.
  - Bud 6y ago
    TSMC is building a $12B factory in Arizona.
    - jorblumesea 6y ago
      It will never be the latest chips. TSMC will never let their cutting edge fab machines out of Taiwan. If they're on 3nm then Arizona will make 7nm or something.
      - ethbro 6y ago
        We'll see. Bargains come in many forms, and Taiwan certainly has things they want from the US.
        TheGrassyKnoll 6y ago
        Like what ? F16s ?
        wahern 6y ago
        Aircraft carriers and nuclear ICBMs. F-16s and missiles are merely to buy enough time for the U.S. to respond, which in a surprise attack with a minimal initial invasion force probably doesn't require as much sophisticated equipment as Taiwan has to preserve a viable defensive line for if and when the U.S. intervenes. If China (PRC) was smart, it'd have invaded Taiwan two years ago as Trump's resolve to backup commitments to Taiwan, or pretty much any military commitments to any ally, with force is basically nil. Nearing the election it's less clear as retaliation and a standoff crisis might better suit his reelection bid under present circumstances (e.g. COVID-19 sentiment). China missed its opportunity, but if Trump were to win re-election China would have much less to lose given their rejection of one country, two systems, the deterioration of trade ties, etc. In a lame duck Trump presidency invasion would have an even better cost+benefit profile for China.
- baybal2 6y ago
  Yes, I myself heard that Intel CEO been frequenting visits to Hsinchu last year. There is only one company out there worth visiting in person for a man of his calibre.
  - devmunchies 6y ago
    Can you elaborate? I just learned about https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hsinchu_Science_Park https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hsinchu_Science_Park Would this be to acquire, poach, invest, or relocate?
    - baybal2 6y ago
      The biggest company there is TSMC. The murmur been that Intel gave up on 10nm, and wanted to do a tapeout at TSMC's fab as a stopgap measure until they can make a new process from scratch.
- jhallenworld 6y ago
  Maybe for Altera FPGAs? I don't really understand the scale Intel needs and whether TSMC offers enough for their micros.
rehitman 6y ago
half of chip making is in manufacturing it. If they out source it, not much would be left.
- hardikgupta 6y ago
  This is clearly false. None of Nvidia, AMD, or Qualcomm manufacture their own chips. These companies are valuable despite not having in-house manufactures, perhaps because of it.
  - segfaultbuserr 6y ago
    > half of chip making is in manufacturing it. Correctness of this statement also depends on the type of chips. Not everything needs the latest and greatest process node (which is predominately a fabless industry) except for advanced microprocessors, SoCs, or storage. On the other hand, 65 nm is perfectly fine for 90% of chips in existence, even 0.18 microns is still often used. You don't need EUV for a good LED driver, a serial port, or a battery charger controller. If we talk in this context, indeed, companies like Texas Instruments, NXP, ONSemi, Analog Devices, Microchip, etc, usually make chips in-house.
- ksec 6y ago
  They dont have to outsource their Core Asset. If Intel ships 250M CPU annually there are also 250M Chipset going alongside with it. Those can go to TSMC or Samsung. ( Or in a turn of an event, Global Foundry )
jjcon 6y ago
> Interestingly, it seems the US is almost unique in our mass deindustrialization The US manufacturing share of real GDP has been pretty much unchanged since the 40s - ie it’s growth has kept up with the rest of the economy. https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/Blog/2017/April/BlogImage_ManuRealGDPShare_041117.jpg https://www.stlouisfed.org/~/media/Blog/2017/April/BlogImage...
- chrisjarvis 6y ago
  this image contradicts everything I've maybe ever heard about "American manufacturing"'s decline. Not saying the image is wrong, it's just impressive how much one segment of industry has been politicized.
  - jjcon 6y ago
    I imagine a lot of it is due to automation - there are in fact less assembly line jobs than there were in the 40s but economically the sector has continued to grow.
    - varjag 6y ago
      Automation in the industry is a big lie, the degree of it since post-WW2 days (when most of modern mass production methods were perfected) is greatly overstated. It is mostly due to outsourcing the labor-intensive parts to cheaper labor markets. The hypothetical robots are people working elsewhere.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    It's important to note that the number of manufacturing jobs has fallen significantly. Manufacturing has gotten way more efficient since the 40s, so a lot fewer people are necessary. That's why it's so politicized. Manufacturing is about 12% of GDP. That 12% used to go to a lot of people. Now it goes to the few people who own all the factories and the robots inside them.
    - baybal2 6y ago
nabla9 6y ago
> it seems the US is almost unique in our mass deindustrialization. Japan, Germany and South Korea have avoided this. This is very common misconception. The US has not deindustrialized other sectors have grown faster. US is the second largest country by industrial output. Third largest if you count EU as comparable unit. Industrial era is over in all advanced economies. We live in post-industrial societies.
- ghostcluster 6y ago
  It's not in China, Germany, Japan, or South Korea. They still have a huge manufcaturing presence. Samsung builds its products in South Korea. Everything has to get manufactured somewhere and, in my view, the US has made a mistake by outsourcing this capacity more than other countries. As I said elsewhere in the thread, chip manufacturing is a special category as well, and Intel has the only US-based fabrication that is competitive with the state of the art. It should be as important to protect that capacity as other industrial sectors, like Boeing.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Ericson2314 6y ago
    I recently read this review https://phenomenalworld.org/reviews/trade-wars https://phenomenalworld.org/reviews/trade-wars book sounds quite good as a sober explanation without the blinders of neoliberalism or industrial romanticism.
    - Ericson2314 6y ago
      https://phenomenalworld.org/interviews/trade-wars-are-class-wars https://phenomenalworld.org/interviews/trade-wars-are-class-... interview is nice too.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Yeah, China is a manufacturing powerhouse. But the world system has moved beyond that. The US can't compete on price. Germany and Japan have stagnant economies. South Korea and the US grow at similar rates but the US has a massive base to grow on. America's economy grows at 2.9% every year. The largest in the world and it's still growing at this rate. I take this trade every single time. It's why Americans are so wealthy in general.
vkou 6y ago
> I hope Intel keeps its US-based fabs and continues to upgrade them. It would be a mistake to cede this capacity to outsourcing like so much of our other manufacturing capacity. Intel is a publicly traded internationally-owned corporation, with no obligations to the long-term welfare of the United States. If you'd like a chip manufacturer to make decisions based on what is good for the US, I would recommend bribing it, nationalizing it, or starting a government-backed competitor. Any of those would be more effective at accomplishing this than hope and prayers. The free market itself is not necessarilly going to deliver the results you wish for, just because you wish for them.
- chottocharaii 6y ago
  Gee save us the free market lecture friend. What he said doesn’t exclude any of the options you’ve brought up. Also I note you’ve raised carrot strategies when stick strategies exist also.
- stass 6y ago
  You are correct about having no obligations, but as a company that is based in US and employs a large US-based workforce it benefits a lot from US itself being successful.
  - shi314 6y ago
    In Today's World, Countries should be grateful to a company when they employ people. There is no lack of highly skilled workforce in entire world. US with it's abysmal education system should be grateful to intel that it attracts semi conductor industry talents from all over the world which maintains US's hegemony in the world. If intel doesn't employ them, they would start companies like TSMC in their countries, hell if US didn't discriminate against Asians in 1980s maybe TSMC wouldn't even exist in the first place. Benefits that US provides to companies is way less than benefits companies provide to US.
hammock 6y ago
>Interestingly, it seems the US is almost unique in our mass deindustrialization. Japan, Germany and South Korea have avoided this. Related to the dollar being global reserve currency, which encourages a trade deficit. The US has a deficit equal to the next 15 biggest deficits combined. On the other hand, Germany, Japan and South Korea are top 5 trade surpluses.
jake_morrison 6y ago
This deindustrialization was driven by Wall Street. The important metric is return on invested capital. Manufacturing companies use a lot of capital for their factories. Shut down the factory and outsource to China, and you have the same sales with a lot less capital, so the stock goes up. Great success. Maybe repeat by having your suppliers do more and more of the engineering. At a certain point, you are just a brand, with no actual engineering capability. You can't compete with the people who actually know how to make the things. Then you die. See Hewlett Packard. The US taxing companies on global income at high rates also has an effect. Say you have 50% of your sales outside the US. You pay taxes in the country where you sell the product. Then you have profits overseas. If you bring that cash back to the US, you pay the difference between the corporate rate in country X and the US, which can be a lot, say 15%. Might as well take that money and use it to pay for manufacturing at e.g. Foxconn. So it's 15% better to invest in manufacturing capacity outside the US. The poor health care system in the US drives up costs as well, twice what it is in other industrialized countries for worse outcome. Same for cost of housing because zoning laws won't allow building. Google was allowed to build offices in Mountain View but not residential property for the employees to live in. So everyone has to commute from somewhere else, and cost of rent is driven by how much misery you can handle. Failures in government policy make US workers much more expensive without creating any more value or improving the quality of life for the employees.
- kiba 6y ago
  Reminds me of the old joke about the ideal company is having one person to turn on a factory and then place a logo on it, while engineering and everything else is outsourced.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    It's like celebrities launching lines of cosmetics products - all they do is contribute a picture of their face, and then they rake in the money.
    - sharken 6y ago
      Sadly a very effective strategy until you develop critical thinking, some struggle their entire life to achieve it.
quotemstr 6y ago
Yes. Intel's failure demonstrates that the US no longer knows how to make chips as good as those of our geopolitical rivals. We're kept safe in large part by our technological edge. If we start falling behind in technology, it's not just a bad decade for Intel, but a hole in national security.
- Symmetry 6y ago
  Taiwan and South Korea are hardly our geopolitical rivals.
  - quotemstr 6y ago
    Oh, come on. We both know that in a war, our main geopolitical rival would conquer both on turn 1.
    - Symmetry 6y ago
      We really don't. Naval invasions are hard, particularly when the US is the world's dominant sea power. Theoretically China could invade South Korea through North Korea but North Korea wouldn't like that and they have nukes. But conquest of them is what happens when WWIII cooks off - we were talking about geopolitical rivalry.
      - quotemstr 6y ago
        Even if China can't invade Taiwan right away, China can set up a naval and air blockade. And if they can't do that, they can destroy the very delicate fabs using short-range conventional missiles. China is a high-tech peer adversary, not a bunch of desert guys in pickup trucks. As a matter of national security, we need a secure (and E2E-trusted!) supply chain for advanced technology.
whazor 6y ago
But running a fab is a huge cost and liability while all the competition is outsourcing to TSMC. Because the process is so difficult, I think it makes sense to only have fabs that work for multiple companies. I do think US chip companies (Intel, AMD, Nvidia) and government should get together and start a fab by themselves.
- beaunative 6y ago
  The reason market challengers outsource to TSMC is because they don't have enough revenue to support their own fab line, with Intel taking majority of the revenue. The precise reason Intel kept their own fab is because it's the makret leader that wants to keep their competitive edge, that is under the assumption their own fab is more advance, and for their use only. However, now that TSMC as a fab somehow got more advanced. It meant Intel's in-house fab has failed in that mission. That doesn't mean Intel's challenger's gonna hand their production to Intel's fab. Intel obviously won't just turn over their technology for their competitors to use either. It's quite impossible and unconventional to do.
qserasera 6y ago
We really, really, really NEED US based fabs. >US is almost unique in our mass deindustrialization. Japan, Germany and South Korea have avoided this. yup, I wouldn't necessarily include SK in that list but I'm very displeased at our deindustrialization process. Most/all of it does not make sense outside a tenuous abstract global finance system. We are losing knowledge and control every time and every day factories are allowed to leave the country.
beaunative 6y ago
There is of little significance advocating a company to do that. Unless it's regulated and legislated. Any company who willingly gave up such advantange in cost would be a fool and lost its market due to such policies unless that company has other unique advantange to keep their market position. People like to talk about how they love "locally-sourced products" until they realized they had to pay double or triple.
oblio 6y ago
> Interestingly, it seems the US is almost unique in our mass deindustrialization. The UK, Belgium did the same. The whole Communist Bloc also did it (for different reasons).
- dgellow 6y ago
  France too.
burntoutfire 6y ago
> it seems the US is almost unique in our mass deindustrialization. Japan, Germany and South Korea have avoided this. Entire Central Europe (Poland, Slovakia, Hungary etc.) is filled with German manufacturing plants. The Germans have done plenty of deindustrialization themselves.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  47% of German GDP is manufacturing. Hardly deindustrialisation. https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/german-economy-3-reasons-economy-is-flopping-headed-for-recession-2019-8-1028484056#:~:text=In%20fact%2C%2047%25%20of%20Germany%27s%20GDP%20is%20made,an%20economy%20that%27s%20four%20times%20as%20much%20 https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/german-econo...
  - burntoutfire 6y ago
    I wonder how is that counted - i.e. can for example Mercedes contribute a lot towards the part of GDP counted as production even if most of its cars are produced outside Germany. Or, is that counted as engineering and branding.
numlock86 6y ago
> make a lot of short term profit (cut expenses) > invest into long term stability Well, you have to choose one.
gmtx725 6y ago
> Interestingly, it seems the US is almost unique in our mass deindustrialization The UK has vast swathes of poverty in the deindustrialised north of England and other areas. Former mining and heavy industry towns that even today almost 40 years on from deindustrialisation are dominated by insecure, unskilled work and unemployment
noir_lord 6y ago
Not that unique. UK did it as well, we let Arm be sold to foreign investors - I wonder if the French or German government would have allowed that sale.
- gspr 6y ago
  Arm is hardly a company that manufactures anything. An impressive tech company for sure, but I don't understand how the foreign takeover of a company that licenses processor designs is an example of loss of British manufacturing.
knubie 6y ago
> Interestingly, it seems the US is almost unique in our mass deindustrialization. Japan, Germany and South Korea have avoided this. Those countries also have much higher trade barriers. The US is almost unique in how few trade trade restrictions they (used to) have.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  >Those countries also have much higher trade barriers. This isn't true. Here's a comparison of the EU, several individual European countries, Japan and the US[1], and there isn't much difference tariffs or trade barriers. Global trade-barriers have been reduced to virtually nothing among developed economies, the US isn't unique at all. This is a stale old meme that seems to be popular in the US because it frames the US as a sort of victim of global trade which is a popular political narrative but not evidence backed. The real difference is in the overfinancialised, laissez-faire capitalism of the anglosphere (the UK suffers from the same issue of deindustrialisation, Australia as well), comopared to the industrial policy and state/big business dominated capitalism of Japan, Germany, France and so on. [1]https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2017/10/24/the-eu-isnt-protectionist-its-one-of-the-most-open-economies-in-the-world/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2017/10/24/the-eu-isnt-protec...
curiousllama 6y ago
The US hasn't deindustrialized at all. Industrial production has increased pretty consistently as far back as I can find data. What has increased in pace, though, is capacity per person, so manufacturing _jobs_ have decreased. It's less of a geopolitical issue and more of a domestic employment issue. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/INDPRO https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/INDPRO https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CAPB50001SQ https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CAPB50001SQ
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  Ironically, those numbers were cooked up by counting Intel as manufacturing and over-weighting its success with a hedonic multiplier: https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-thats-cost-americans-millions-of-jobs/ https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-...
  - curiousllama 6y ago
    Idk what a hedonic multiplier is, but my understanding of that article is that production numbers measure the real $ value of output, not the actual quantity, making the production index misleading (e.g., if the US manufactured totally stopped except to make 1 computer chip costing $100 trillion, then manufacturing would seem to shoot up, even as it actually collapsed.) If that's correct, then it's interesting: we're making few, valuable items now, rather than many, cheap items. It follows that automation isn't a drive towards cheaper production, but more a drive towards higher quality goods that simply require machines to make. But it all takes me back to my point: from a geopolitical perspective, being good at highly-differentiated, tech-intensive, difficult-to-execute manufacturing is a great position. It's just a disaster from an employment perspective, because to get there, we traded away all our labor-intensive manufacturing.
    - jjoonathan 6y ago
      Hedonic multiplier is the idea that a CPU that's twice as good should count for twice the GDP even if it doesn't actually sell for that. It's a strategy for overweighting our strengths in those manufacturing indices by confusing the relationship between money and value. Intel was the lynchpin of this lie. We are in a thread about Intel becoming non-competitive at highly-differentiated, tech-intensive, difficult-to-execute manufacturing. No, that is not a great geopolitical position to be in.
chkaloon 6y ago
Just spent 3 months in Hillsboro, Oregon, and Intel construction work there is full speed ahead it seems. Of course that could change pretty quickly, but right now it sure looks like they intend to keep fabs going in the US.

Uhhrrr 6y ago

Why does Renduchintala's head roll and not Swan's?

metalliqaz 6y ago
We'll never know, but I imagine strategic positioning in the blame game is very important at the upper rungs of a company like Intel.
- exmadscientist 6y ago
  Reliable sources from within Intel have long indicated that you don't have to imagine :) The biggest question I have about this news is how much of it is really Murthy's fault, and how much of it is an excuse for Swan to get rid of his biggest rival at the company? It could easily go either way. The previous succession battle can't have left a strong executive team behind... but what else is new for Intel?
  - kps 6y ago
    > but what else is new for Intel? “Only the paranoid survive” — Andy Grove
  - ksec 6y ago
    >The biggest question I have about this news is how much of it is really Murthy's fault, I dont know for how long he was looking after Fabs, surely wasn't from the beginning.
emmelaich 6y ago
Complete speculation but perhaps Renduchintala wasn't providing the full accurate info to Swan.
KSS42 6y ago
Swan has only been CEO for 18 months. Renduchintala has been charge of technology group including fabs for 5 years.

metalliqaz 6y ago

Intel getting beat by both AMD and TSMC. I'm not surprised a Qualcomm guy would be at the helm of that listing ship.

ghostcluster 6y ago
AMD uses TSMC for manufacturing.
- reducesuffering 6y ago
  GP probably meant AMD is beating them on CPU design and TSMC at fab.
  - metalliqaz 6y ago
    yep
  - nomel 6y ago
    > AMD is beating them on CPU design How is this possible to know?
    - Teever 6y ago
      Can you elaborate on why it isn't possible to know this?
      - andrewprock 6y ago
        It's probably not true with respect to design. Intel chips are still the fastest cores out there. The difference is that AMD can pack more cores into their 7nm process and not break thermals.
        t-writescode 6y ago
        There is real benefit to the chiplet design that shouldn’t be understated. Not needing a full set of cores successfully made every time to have a useful wafer must seriously save AMD money and that’s all in the design.

paulpan 6y ago

Expected outcome for the delays in 10nm and now the 7nm fabrication nodes... What I find surprising is: 1. This former chief engineer was originally poached from Qualcomm back in 2016. Qualcomm was (and remains) not comparable to Intel for market and silicon development, so why was this hire made and picked to run the entire division? 2. The original group, Technology, Systems Architecture and Client Group (TSAC) is monolithic. For as a critical item as fabrication node development, that seems counter-intuitive.

Bud 6y ago
Qualcomm was and still is kicking Intel's ass at making modem chips, and I'd imagine that's why this hire was made. At that time, Apple was having Intel attempt to build modem chips for iPhones so that Apple could have an option other than Qualcomm. That didn't pan out.
- paulpan 6y ago
  I don't disagree that Intel failed to make competitive modem chips but that's not their proverbial bread and butter. Instead it was making x86 chips that, while Qualcomm's Snapdragon lineup held a virtual monopoly in mobile space, it's a very much apples and oranges comparison - thermal envelopes, performance targets, size, use cases, etc. In hindsight perhaps it's unsurprising this hire didn't pan out and unfortunately it may have torpedoed Intel's short term competitiveness.
- scarface74 6y ago
  We don’t know if it is going to pan out or not. Apple bought Intel’s modem business.
  - toast0 6y ago
    It didn't make a lasting revenue stream for Intel, and Apple didn't take the ex-qualcomm exec with the business.
    - 6y ago

justAnotherNET 6y ago

About time, and I hope they don’t stop here. Time to clean house in upper management! Intel was the crown jewel of the semiconductor industry in 2015. Their collapse is a travesty and leadership deserve to lose for this.

spydum 6y ago

Wonder if this has anything to do with Jim Keller also leaving about a month ago? https://www.anandtech.com/show/15846/jim-keller-resigns-from-intel-effective-immediately https://www.anandtech.com/show/15846/jim-keller-resigns-from...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ksec 6y ago
Thinking of the same thing. Really wonder what sort of politics and power play is happening behind the scene. I thought Jim Keller lost when he was obviously pushing for using TSMC.
pushkar2911 6y ago
This YT video covers this issue. Lot of politics and power struggles in Intel. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nsX9nUFIBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nsX9nUFIBc
shaklee3 6y ago
To be fair, Keller never stays anywhere long
- saberience 6y ago
  Two years is his shortest tenure, not enough time to make a massive difference to a company as big as Intel.
  - yvdriess 6y ago
    He carries enough weight in this industry to have no problem changing the orbit of even a company the size of Intel. It depends how hard the managers are going to try and pull it back in the old direction.
- piva00 6y ago
  But he's almost never left without making an impact where he worked at, no matter how short of a sting: DEC (21164/21264) -> AMD (K7/K8) -> SiByte/Broadcom -> P.A. Semi (bought by Apple, A4/A5) -> AMD (Ryzen) -> Tesla (not sure about his impact) -> Intel (no visible impact so far). Also, from those only his first stint at AMD can be considered "not staying long", most of the other positions were held for some years.

kilo_bravo_3 6y ago

If it was just a firing I would be hopeful. But a firing coupled with a reorg? Good luck! Even a fingerless man could hold up the correct number of digits needed to express the number of times a reorg has solved a problem.

tgtweak 6y ago
I would say that is untrue. In the case of Intel and their issues as of late, some reorganization at this level will go a long way.
- CyberDildonics 6y ago
  What are you basing that on?
  - tgtweak 6y ago
    5 years of running a 200 person company. There is such thing as a constructive reorganization. The original comment read a bit like that of someone who was south of a reorg.
    - CyberDildonics 6y ago
      How does that relate to Intel though? How do you know that reorganization will solve their problems?
      - tgtweak 6y ago
        Issues as systematic as this often point to poor execution or weak teams in the organization. Reorganizing them to allow for better focus or better alignment (or in many cases just better leadership to a business unit that is struggling) can lead to some pretty dramatic results even with the majority of the organization remaining the same. Look at Microsoft - both in size (~100-150k employees) and challenges (market share loss, lack of innovation in key areas, delayed deliveries) - and the impact of Satya on the organization at large with regards to that. Intel's fab has been lackluster for the last 5 years and the only solution at this point is to reorganize for better results. 10nm is unfathomably late and 7nm slipping like this is another red flag. I think too much tolerance for failure was given to the unit in charge of fabrication and I would be curious to see an organizational post mortem done on that. In the interest of seeing continued competition in the processor world (which we're already seeing the numerous advantages of with AMD now) and also in the fabrication space (TSMC is getting very close to monopoly) I really hope that Intel solves this issue.

baybal2 6y ago

> Renduchintala, > widely seen as a No. 2 to Swan, > has been on Accenture’s (ACN.N) board since April 2018. > Renduchintala eventually took responsibly for turning around Intel’s process technology, A very odd choice of a person to develop a fab process

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
qppo 6y ago
Here is is bio page from intel: > Renduchintala has spent a substantial part of his career in the SoC, mobile and internet of things areas. Prior to joining Intel, he was executive vice president of Qualcomm Technologies Inc. and co-president of Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, where he led its semiconductor business in the computing and mobile segments. He joined Qualcomm in 2004 from Skyworks Solutions Inc./Conexant Systems Inc., where he was vice president and general manager of the company’s Cellular Systems Division. Prior to Skyworks, he spent a decade with Philips Electronics, where he progressed to become vice president of engineering for its consumer communications business. https://newsroom.intel.com/biography/dr-murthy-renduchintala/ https://newsroom.intel.com/biography/dr-murthy-renduchintala...
- baybal2 6y ago
  But I don't see anything that suggests that he had any practical, and hands on experience with microelectronics, or just EE in general. Per my standards, the word "Accenture" in the resume alone is just such a giant red flag...
  - madengr 6y ago
    Well, if you want to fire all the old, white guys who actually knew how to make stuff and replace them with H1B, he’s an excellent choice.
  - truth_be_told 6y ago
    From https://newsroom.intel.com/biography/dr-murthy-renduchintala/ https://newsroom.intel.com/biography/dr-murthy-renduchintala... Renduchintala holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, a PhD in digital communications and a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Bradford in England.

supernova87a 6y ago

So what was the underlying story? Progress not as rapid as they had put out as plan, and direct reports to Swan afraid to break the bad news early?

InTheArena 6y ago

A CEO who is really a CFO is probably not what Intel needs right now. It's clear that their engineering culture is compromised, and i would hope that Intel would go back to their roots.

UncleOxidant 6y ago
Yep, it was clear when they chose Swan to be the CEO that they were prioritizing cost-cutting over innovation.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  It apparently cost them the Apple deal. At the end of the day, even a CFO-CEO isn't happy about that.
  - andrewstuart 6y ago
    CFO-CEO's don't know what to do about it though.
    - bcrosby95 6y ago
      Cut more costs.
      - mtgx 6y ago
        Do they know where from exactly? Something that costs a lot and isn't looking very profitable right now could be critical for Intel in a few years.
        lumberingjack 6y ago
        They had that problem for a long time too. See the failed mobile phone chip that wing in that one Asus phone. Everyone looked at the specs two years before release said (that will suck all the battery and be slow) when it came out it sucked all the battery and was slow leading Intel to fire 12k people canceling the program

ArkVark 6y ago

Fire all H1Bs, fire all contractors and Intel will be a better place.

UncleOxidant 6y ago
It's about half contractors at this point.
jagger27 6y ago
Or promote them all to be blue badges and end the caste system.
- Firerouge 6y ago
  The distinction between blue and green badges does sorta create very visibly labeled classes at Intel. (Disclosure, I worked a summer in Hillsboro as a green badge) It seems much more likely that mismanagement is the problem with Intel, not discontent/classism amongst contractors and the core staff. Though Intel could maybe cost save if they folded these subcontacted business units directly into it's staffing, it would probably further increase their management load, and might cost more by decreasing competitive bidding for work. This doesn't seem to be their core problem, but I'm interested in hearing why you think this is an important issue for Intel to change
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
    What pissed me off the most as a green badge was having to pay for the fruit (and the tea!) free to blue badges (which I hear they only limit to 1 now)
  - jagger27 6y ago
    I’m not an Intel employee or contractor, I’m only going off what I’ve heard from about contractors being treated poorly on campus as you described. More crucially, the red tape around information access severely limits contractor’s abilities to actually do their jobs. From what I understand, certain tasks require a their blue badge manager to sign off on and grant access, but the managers have giant dispersed teams to manage and are hard to get to.

maxpert 6y ago

Apple moving away, AMD kick in, ARM taking dominance. I guess we are about to witness the fall (may be death) of another titan.

Zenst 6y ago
For me the first sign will be Intel going thru their patent pool and seeing who they can sue.
- mappu 6y ago
  "Intel fires warning shots at Microsoft, claims x86 emulation is a patent minefield" (2017) https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/intel-fires-warning-shots-at-microsoft-claims-x86-emulation-is-a-patent-minefield/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/intel...
  - sjwright 6y ago
    Meanwhile, Apple is gearing up for extensive x86 emulation capability within macOS on Apple Silicon, so I guess the minefield isn't as dangerous as Intel implies. Or perhaps Apple is happily licensing patents? If so, that suggests that Rosetta 2 will be a limited-time feature just like Rosetta 1. Apple won't be interested in paying for patent licenses forever.
    - mappu 6y ago
      Patents have a 20-year lifespan so the common x86_32 patents must have already expired. As for x86_64, the patents would expire in either 2020 or 2023 depending on if you count from the first published documentation or from the first shipping CPU (IANAL). Of course that is only the baseline ISA (and SSE2). The future extensions (SSE3+/FMA/AVX and AES-NI/RDRAND/...) would not yet be patent-free but most software is really just compiled against the baseline. Apple managed to split x86_64 into a sub-architecture x86_64h for post-Haswell, but broadly speaking, nobody else has: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/x86-64_micro-architecture_update https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/x86-64_micro-architec...

vondur 6y ago

Well, even using older 14nm tech, their CPUs are still competitive.

theevilsharpie 6y ago
Intel's 14nm processors are only competitive for low-core count, high-clock frequency applications, and only if you disregard power usage. For use cases where power usage is an important component of performance (e.g., mobile, servers), AMD hardware _substantially_ outperforms Intel's.
Polylactic_acid 6y ago
The Intel i9 is about 1/3 slower than the ryzen 9. It also costs more and uses more power. Intel cpus are such bad value right now its insane.
- misanthropian00 6y ago
  I cannot afford $1000+ CPUs, but can you link to a review that actually shows this? I just read an anandtech review that compares AMD and Intel and I am not seeing that at all. In fact it looks like Intel still has a lead on single threaded performance which is really pathetic at this point. Maybe AMD should start firing and reorganizing too. I also am not thrilled with the engineering logic of bimodality and other compromises that AMD seems to have made in their engineering to beat Intel on core count. As a purist I hate these sorts of shortcuts. On that alone I would favor Intel. History shows that they tend to go for engineering purity over shotgun approaches, but of course that sort of corporate culture can change at any time. There is something to say for engineering elegance and purity over meaningless benchmarks.
  - Polylactic_acid 6y ago
    Intel has the tiniest advantage in single threaded which results in close to 0 noticeable improvement. Having double the cores on your cpu results in a massive noticeable improvement. When performing CPU intensive tasks like compiling code, AV1 encoding, etc, its all about core count. AMD also manages to have so much greater performance with a lower power consumption.

zamalek 6y ago

Intel has been fumbling stupid executive decisions that are eroding both their competitive advantage and consumer loyalty. Most recently, they decided to lock memory speed behind enthusiast chipsets. And they oust an engineer? They are clearly searching for blame in all the wrong places.

MrBuddyCasino 6y ago
They fired a politician, just a bit too late: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nsX9nUFIBc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nsX9nUFIBc

steelframe 6y ago

Is it reasonable to oust a lead engineer because of a product delay while COVID-19 is causing such a massive disruption? Are any tech companies seriously expecting that their engineers can turn on a dime and perform at the same level they were before the sudden mass exodus to WFH?

pushkar2911 6y ago
According to reddit comments he was not a good leader https://old.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/hz0ynt/intel_makes_changes_to_technology_organization/fzgddi4/ https://old.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/hz0ynt/intel_makes_c...
theevilsharpie 6y ago
Intel's manufacturing troubles have been ongoing for years. This is just the latest episode.

mastazi 6y ago

So they promoted the CFO to CEO and now they are firing the chief engineer - that tells a lot on where the company is going and I'm afraid it's not a good place.

b34r 6y ago
Boeing 2.0
- HenryKissinger 6y ago
  At least no one will die from Intel's mistakes.
  - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
    Who knows? I can imagine there’s an Intel CPU in a life critical application in more than a few places.
    - sjwright 6y ago
      Such life critical applications would be validated for safety by the product manufacturer/integrator, not by Intel.
      - read_if_gay_ 6y ago
        How can they validate a CPU if Intel can’t?
        sjwright 6y ago
        The same way as they validate the serial UART: by validating its application. Does the CPU fail if it’s close to an x-ray machine or an MRI? Intel isn’t going to tell you that.
        6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

MangoCoffee 6y ago

its interesting how Intel and TSMC all use ASML EUV and maybe some of machines from the same vendor like LAM research. TSMC make it work while Intel struggle. craft is real.

edude03 6y ago
My understand is intel is in this situation exactly because they don't use EUV - but "older gen" DUV - deep ultra violet and are pushing the technology farther by upping the scaling factor see[0] for more information [0]: https://www.anandtech.com/show/13683/intel-euvenabled-7nm-process-tech-is-on-track https://www.anandtech.com/show/13683/intel-euvenabled-7nm-pr...

mhh__ 6y ago

If I'm not mistaken, Intel's financials are still very good. Will the rot set in before they run out of safety net?

usr1106 6y ago

Intel processor architecture is not a leading design for 2020. Intel security is a nightmare, think Meltdown and many others. The whole BIOS and ME stuff are nightmares. So every setback for Intel could be a step forward for the IT industry and for software development. Who is worried that we don't use steam engines any more and their manufacturers have disappeared from the market? Unfortunately the long-lasting close-to-monopoly of Intel has not left too much room for new winners to develop.

g-b-r 6y ago
AMD is not that much better, unfortunately
- usr1106 6y ago
  How would it be. It's mostly compatible.
  - g-b-r 6y ago
    Processor architecture, most bugs, ME and a lot of other things would not need to be "compatible". Still they copied ME with the same stubborness in refusing to make it more transparent, they stopped allowing open-source initialization and they don't have a much better record in security

jamessmith74 6y ago

Intel is a dying company

dschuetz 6y ago

And now I understand why Jim Keller left Intel. It's not technology that is lacking at Intel, it's the management.

purpleidea 6y ago

Do Intel's U.S. based fab's really matter _that much_ when all the high-end machines that do the lithography all come from one company (ASML) anyways? I'd say it's important, and it's an advantage for Intel, but not as big as anyone is making it out to be.

travbrack 6y ago
Isn't that the "hard part"? I wonder why they're having so much trouble compared to tsmc.

purpleidea 6y ago

I was cautiously optimistic for Intel, when they bought Altera in 2015. I was also simultaneously worried for innovation in the FPGA industry. AFAICT Intel has dropped the ball and failed to produce anything particularly amazing as a result of the 2015 acquisition. I would have been all over that. Did I miss something? Why didn't they run with this.

headmelted 6y ago

"Renduchintala was one of several key hires from outside Intel, which had been famous in Silicon Valley for developing and promoting talent from within. He was hired as part of a strategy to go after broader markets than the central processing units, or CPUs, the company became known for in the PC era." I feel like this will go down in history as one of technology's most expensive decisions (that's not a knock on Renduchintala as much as it's my own astonishment at Intel thinking they were safe as recently as 2015). I'm also a bit saddened by this. It confirms what we all suspected but what I secretly hoped wasn't true. Intel for over a decade coyly hinted they had aces up their sleeves that would already have been played if they faced more competition. Graphene got kicked around in conversations for a while and then when that turned out to be a no go they talked about black phosphorus. So after all that, aside from marginal tweaks and pretty meager die shrinks here and there, they were doing.. nothing?.. for ten years?

smabie 6y ago
I mean, trying and failing isn't the same as doing nothing. But regardless, necessity is the mother of invention, so I'm sure they'll figure something out. They have 20b of cash (1/4 of AMD's total market cap) and their profits are damn good. Make no mistake, Intel is very much aware this is a do or die situation, and I expect them to deploy all the resources at their disposal to fight both AMD and ARM. They don't have much debt and can borrow heavily and at great rates if necessary.
- misanthropian00 6y ago
  Why is it do or die just because they can't make faster CPUs? AMD can't make them either. It's the end of an entire era technologically. We all knew this day would come.It's a hard problem that requires a whole new paradigm probably. Hopefully both AMD and Intel will have enough money to keep doing research by trying and failing with various radical approaches or we may never see faster CPUs again. Why would they need to worry about ARM? That is low power mobile devices, a sector they got out of a while ago.
  - 6y ago

blargmaster33 6y ago

CFO->CEO EJECT!!

atq2119 6y ago

The title is misleading. From the article it sounds like the chief engineering manager is leaving. Still not a great sign, but quite different from a chief engineer leaving. Some might argue that that's what happened with the earlier departure if Jim Keller, but Keller probably didn't do that much engineering anymore either.

andrew3019 6y ago

> Intel said it is reorganizing its technology, systems architecture and client group. Its new leaders will report directly to Chief Executive Officer Bob Swan. This is similar to Apple in 1997, when the CEO was ousted and Jobs stepped in as interim CEO to restructure Apple's product line. Maybe this will be Intel's comeback?

gigatexal 6y ago

Is he a fall guy? A patsy?

klelatti 6y ago

How many hardware engineers were lost in the layoffs in 2016? [1] How much aggregate experience at developing a new process node and fixing the issues was lost in those layoffs? It's often the senior staff who go in these exercises - they are more expensive and are more likely to be attracted to early retirement. [1] https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2016/04/intel_quarterly_results.html https://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/2016/04/intel_quar...

elnik 6y ago

Nobody seems to want to talk about delays. I work at a hard tech startup, and all I have been seeing are delays in launching our product. I keep seeing more work as work gets done. Much of our progress till date has been incremental. It came from either fixing bugs in sprints or unlocking new capabilities by solving hard problems. I have never understood the point of timing work. Work takes as much "time" as it needs for getting done. It can't be accurately estimated with out actually spending time actually working on it. Clarity seems to be the most critical piece for productivity for me. Drive that, and people just can't help but work. Dealing with drudgery seems inevitable. Add on top of this people's incompetence or I should say unreadiness for situation, it irks the managers and people responsible for delivery. Delays cascade up. But I think most delays are due to unrealistic expectations of people higher up. Irony being the expectations set by the ones that are supposed to carry out the work.

robviren 6y ago
It is human issue. Business requires goals and timelines. I agree that the issue comes from a lack of transparency, poor culture, and the human desire to be "right". Not setting a deadline is unacceptable to business though. I can't imagine sales or the end customer would ever accept not knowing when they can expect product delivery. If delays are communicated, engineering is respected, and no one is looking to blame someone for delays then the whole thing runs fine. As long as company culture does not run around making people feel bad about not hitting timelines you get more honest timelines from people. But as a product manager I am forced to ask engineering to try and deliver some things sooner than they estimated. Just like I have to disappoint customers by saying products are delayed, or sales that something is more expensive, I have to disappoint engineering with getting something out there sooner than people are comfortable with. Obvious exceptions are when we are confident we cannot hit the timeline with even an MVP.

yadavrohit 6y ago

https://analyticsdrift.com/intels-misery-from-losing-42-billion-to-changing-leadership/ https://analyticsdrift.com/intels-misery-from-losing-42-bill...

perseusprime11 6y ago

Wow! They are losing a genius in Murthy. This is a bear case for Intel.

lbill 6y ago

I really hope that Intel wakes up: struggling with fab processes is not their biggest problem, their marketing strategy is. There are some really talented engineers in there, but the product segmentation and the way the "features" are sold is in my opinion not good at all. Linus Tech Tips made a great video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Skry6cKyz50 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Skry6cKyz50

g-b-r 6y ago

How much of this TSMC dominance is due to the patent system? Could it be that there is no way to manufacture chips at these sizes without using some TSMC patent?