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Pat's a great guy and first class engineer, but I think it's just too late for him to turn Intel around at this point. The problems have become too entrenched.
by UncleOxidant 6y ago
Pat's a great guy and first class engineer, but I think it's just too late for him to turn Intel around at this point. The problems have become too entrenched. They needed someone like him at the helm 10 years ago. Apple's M1 shows that the world has passed Intel by.
I wish him luck, though.
- AWildC182 6y agoYea, I'm not sure what their plan is other than to keep trying to sell to institutions until everyone makes the switch to someone else. If they actually want to survive long term, there are two paths as I see it: A) Be legitimately better than AMD, this could include opening up the management engine, much higher performance chips at lower price points, or some sort of space magic utilizing their Altera acquisition. B) Embrace RISC-V and push it to laptops and desktops HARD, while not pulling the Microsoft Embrace Extend Extinguish™ play. If they go this route then their stock becomes an exceptionally strong buy IMO.
- fossuser 6y agoThey could give up on design and just try to be an American TSMC. There's a lot of interest in that from a national security perspective anyway.
- foobiekr 6y agoWith Intel's cashflow, they can do both without any difficulty. But yes, they should be the american TSMC.
- fossuser 6y agoI'm not sure they really can do both (because doing the TSMC model well intentionally excludes the other). Part of TSMC's offer is that they won't do design, they won't compete with you on design etc. They specialize in the best possible fab and service for your design and that's it.
- KirillPanov 6y ago> Part of TSMC's offer is that they won't do design That's kind of a hoax. GUC (Global Uni Chip) is huge, and a nearly-wholly-owned subsidiary of TSMC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Unichip_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Unichip_Corporation TSMC has a large design operation. It simply is part of a subsidiary rather than the parent company, that's all. There are a lot of shady links between TSMC and GUC. I was once pressured to "collaborate" with GUC as an explicit condition of getting access to the then-bleeding-edge 16nm PDK. I turned it down. A competitor of mine (with whose chief engineer I am friends) had the same screws put to them.
- foobiekr 6y agoSomeone else mentioned it, but that's really not true about TSMC.
- zaphirplane 6y agoDoesn’t Samsung make a whole bunch of components and use the components to create products laptops tv phones storage
- sulam 6y agoI would LOVE them to be an American TSMC. Would save so much pain.
- thu2111 6y agoThat makes no sense. Intel's designs are fine, industry leading actually. Intel's biggest problem by far is the repeated inability to launch new process nodes. It makes no sense for Intel to give up on what it's good at to focus on the part where it's struggling.
- xiphias2 6y agoI would love a RISC-V laptop, but only if the vector and matrix extensions can be used for training and inferring neural networks. Having separated vectorized processing for CPU (SSE) and a neural engine doesn't make sense to me. I want to be able to train NNs with a laptop that can normally last 20 hours.
- varispeed 6y agoImagine what Apple does to x64 to work on ARM, Intel having Altera, could do x86 translation to FPGA gates... It wouldn't take whole programs, but it could reconfigure itself to run most commonly executed routines on FPGA.
- felipesoc 6y agoThe same could have been said about AMD 7 years ago. Then Lisa Su came.
- UncleOxidant 6y agoDon't forget Keller's contributions there. It was a much smaller operation so it was easier for a couple of people to change it. Intel, on the other hand, is a supertanker that's going to be very difficult to turn around in time.
- nicoburns 6y agoConsider how quickly Nadella turned around Microsoft. It's not impossible.
- TuringNYC 6y agoI recently purchased a MacbookPro w/ an M1 chip and i'm taken aback at the value/dollar, compute/power, compute/heat, compute/noise. I love the MBP-m1. I realize that WinTel machines arent going anywhere because of entrenched business use -- but between NVIDIA GPUs for heavy workloads and M1s for day-to-day activities -- what is the feeling inside Intel right now? Is this like a Microsoft-Netscape moment in the 90s?
- taf2 6y agoMaybe more like Apple in the 90s?
- mhh__ 6y agoAn M1 equipped Mac Mini with 16 GB of ram and some more storage is still more than £1000. The M1 has to get a lot cheaper to be anything more than a warning shot for Intel. What it should definitely be, however, is a death-sentence for x86. I bet Intel are proud of it, but ultimately they must be at least somewhat jealous of those who don't have to use it.
- znpy 6y agoyou can get a 6c/12t, 64gb ram, 1tb nvme disk intel nuc for that price.
- microtherion 6y ago"It's just too late to turn them around" is pretty much what people said about Apple when Steve Jobs returned, though (in fact, it's more or less what I thought as well). As Adam Smith said, "there is a great deal of ruin in a nation", and likewise, big companies generally get more opportunities to reinvent themselves than one would expect.
- shredprez 6y ago> As Adam Smith said, "there is a great deal of ruin in a nation" Tired brain read this as "there's a great deal in a ruin of a nation." Close enough, I guess?
- kwertyoowiyop 6y agoMust have been reading the news while typing it!
- microtherion 6y agoThat would make a truly horrifying business book: "The Art of the Deal of Ruin in a Nation"
- wombatmobile 6y agoEvidently, 40% of people would buy it.
- somethoughts 6y agoSimilarly some (many?) thought Microsoft was a lost cause due to Ballmer (sales/business development background), but they seem to be doing okay under Nadella (engineering background). That said, only time will tell.
- caycep 6y agoI think the telling thing is would you see a Nadella (and indeed, a Jobs)-like pivot when he takes over. i.e. axe old design/business models that don't work and fully embrace new ones.
- nicoburns 6y agoThey still have a lot of money in the bank (and more coming in). I see no reason why they can't turn things around if the right people are in charge.
- UncleOxidant 6y agoConvince Keller to go back to Intel too and I'll think there could be a chance. (not likely to happen, of course)
- thu2111 6y agoNo? It might. Keller's new startup doesn't sound particularly impactful or likely to satisfy a need for big career kills (assuming he has any such need). We don't really know why Keller left. All we can say is that from the outside it looks like he might have just given up in disgust. Having an engineer at the helm again can make a big difference to an engineering organisation.