20 ms·

Intel is dying and we can’t save it

• xwdv 6y ago
  Good.
• albalus 6y ago
  And that's okay.
  • mhh__ 6y ago
    If Taiwan ends up getting trampled by China, we'd effectively only have Samsung for cutting edge lithography.
    • monocasa 6y ago
      IMO, China will be careful to crush Taiwan economically first so that no one cares when they roll tanks in. Well, no one other than Taiwan I guess.
      • dathinab 6y ago
        Given how dependent high end computing is on TSMC (Amd, Apple, Nvidea, + more) it's quite unlikely to be a viable strategy. But given how messed up & fragmented the EU military is if the US stops military support for Taiwan china will likely directly declare War and Attack. (To be precise there is no EU military, just that of all members which makes it fragmented and in many cases is their military isn't in the best condition. Also China wouldn't declare War as it doesn't recognizance Taiwan, i.e. they would instead "use military force to attack rebels and terrorists" or something like that).
        • monocasa 6y ago
          > Given how dependent high end computing is on TSMC (Amd, Apple, Nvidea, + more) it's quite unlikely to be a viable strategy. That's a temporary advantage for Taiwan, and pretty much their only one. A silicon atom is only around 0.1nm wide, so the end of scaling is coming up like a brick wall. We've got maybe a half dozen nodes left. After that, industrial espionage, pumping up SMIC or some other new Chinese domestic equivalent at the time, and literally just leaking info publicly so the EU, US, and ROK are viable replacements once chips become truly a commodity will cut the dependence on Taiwan. At that point it's not worth facing China's nukes to tell them that they can't have Crimea^H^H^H^H^H^H Taiwan.
          • mhh__ 6y ago
            > A silicon atom is only around 0.1nm wide, so the end of scaling is coming up like a brick wall. We've got maybe a half dozen nodes left. That's still something like a hundred thousand to a million times smaller that what we can actually fabricate, right?
            • monocasa 6y ago
              You also can't make a transistor out of a single atom. The fact that you need doped silicon to have a semiconductor rather than just silicon as an insulator means that we'll be cut off well before then. A ~50x reduction in feature size (so that's 6ish nodes of shrink) is about what I've heard about industry expectations. That being said the future never ceases to surprise.
        • coliveira 6y ago
          > china will likely directly declare War and Attack. This is the American dream. But no, China is not that stupid. Sure, they want Taiwan back, but they will not declare war and create global instability right in their backyard. Only stupid people would do this, and the Chinese are not stupid. They are in a marathon. They see the goal in 30, 50, 100 years. They will not give this gift to the American government.
          • Decade 6y ago
            We thought the US was not stupid, and then we elected Trump. Never underestimate emotional motivations. P.S., not saying that China will attack Taiwan, just not ruling it out.
    • gscott 6y ago
      We should just bomb Taiwan's chip plants in case the Chinese take over. We can do that from pretty far away so not too much danger.
      • monocasa 6y ago
        Rumor is that Taiwan already has this handled. That there are rooms with explosives to scuttle the plants if the China lands troops on the island. Removes the option of a painless transfer of power so that the US is still geopolitically interested in a independent Taiwan.
      • NonEUCitizen 6y ago
        You are American ("We should just bomb...")? A better idea is to give a US passport to every TSMC employee NOW (exempt them from having to hold a green card and live in USA for 5 years first). And change the law so that US citizens residing overseas with no US-sourced income are exempted from filing and paying taxes. Other countries that wish to have leading edge commercial fabs, e.g. Germany or Netherlands, should compete with USA and try to get their passports to TSMC employees first. Tell them your country does not tax citizens on overseas income, and like Taiwan, has universal healthcare, high-speed rail, and gun control. Netherlands can also advertise that TSMC employees likely already have some Dutch friends at ASML.
    • ativzzz 6y ago
      China doesn't need to trample Taiwan, they can simply afford to hire the best engineers out of TSMC at 2.5x pay because Chinese companies are backed directly by the Chinese government and can afford to throw tons of money at this problem. https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/China-hires-over-100-TSMC-engineers-in-push-for-chip-leadership https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/China-hires-over... I'm sure not all engineers at TSMC are willing to relocate from Taiwan to China but pretty much everything is for sale if the price is high enough.
    • arp242 6y ago
      TSMC's lithography machines come from ASML, which is in the Netherlands. I always find it surprising that people talk about TSMC so much and not mention ASML; people talk about "TSMC's 5nm process", but it's really ASML's tech that powers all of that. Setting up a new factory to replace TSMC is not trivial of course, as it's operationally hard, but none of the core tech would be "in China's hands".
• softwaredoug 6y ago
  Feels like Microsoft during the Balmer years. Instead of Linux and Mac ascendant, you have AMD and ARM... it doesn’t seem impossible to think a Satya Nadella could turn things around.
  • SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
    Good observation. The only thing that kept MS going was the massive inertia of Win & Office. It bought them time to pivot to the cloud. And now we have things like VSCode, an ElectronJS app, which is the first microsoft product I've adored in two decades. And TypeScript, which has made the world a better place.
  • mhh__ 6y ago
    Realistically, Intel only have to get one process node right to either be right back in the game or buy themselves years more time to play with. They are currently somewhere between 3-5 times behind TSMC lithographically, but nowhere near that far behind in raw performance, which suggests that they could at very least knock AMD off their perch in single-threaded work. Obviously process nodes are much harder than pretty much anything in the cloud, but this is a serious test of (pure and simple) whether their leadership has the (gender-neutral) balls to not back down.
    • SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
      > 3-5 times behind TSMC lithographically, I'm not entirely sure that is true. TSMC plays fast and loose with their definition of node. Any fab folks want to speak up? What I mean by that: https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/tsmc-7nm-5nm-and-3nm-are-just-numbers https://www.pcgamesn.com/amd/tsmc-7nm-5nm-and-3nm-are-just-n... "And also goes some way to explaining why, despite TSMC offering a nominally 7nm process, the general consensus has been that Intel’s 10nm design is pretty much analogous. But what’s 3nm between fabs? At that level, probably quite a lot. But if the 7nm node is more of a branding exercise than genuinely denoting the physical properties of that production process then you can understand why there’s supposedly not a lot in it."
      • 6y ago
• SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
  Intel innovates in process. Everything else is ruled by backwards compatibility and frenetic management scared to stay the course. (The vast majority of projects are killed if they don't tape out in ~2 years.) Intel will shift to a TSMC model. They have the best fabs on the planet, and the best fab engineers. I believe it is something like a 3 millions dollars lost per minute if they are idle. They have already started doing that a few years ago, I suspect this will be their final form. IMHO: The only thing holding them back from the transition are the hundreds of small boondoggle-groups staffed by old-timers too scared to retire, and too scared to do something daring, yet still somehow hang on to their hidey-holes. They lost a ton of key architects to Apple a few years ago, which I also suspect was the reason why the M1 is so badass. ...and if you really want to get sentimental, here's an AMD poster we had in our cubes back in ~1991: https://linustechtips.com/uploads/monthly_2016_03/Szg2Ppo.jpg.50131cfba4af86263bc0f3ff2b0e5559.jpg https://linustechtips.com/uploads/monthly_2016_03/Szg2Ppo.jp... The Sanders-as-Indiana was both funny and infuriating.... (The Farrah Fawcett looking woman was Sander's bombshell wife, compared to Grove at the time, who drove a beat up old car.)
  • mhh__ 6y ago
    > Intel will shift to a TSMC model. I think fabbing for outsiders would probably be a good idea, but splitting the fabs out from the designers seems like a bad idea.
    • SoSoRoCoCo 6y ago
      Yeah, agreed. The designers / integration will probably get the newest nodes--and the headaches with getting their yields up! I suspect the older high-yield nodes will be filled with tenants pretty quickly. I don't have much knowledge of how this is going, at least from the inside.
      • ChrisIsTaken 6y ago
        "Higher yield nodes" are full, that's why Intel is outsourcing to TSMC. Intel has already sold every 14nm, 22nm, 32nm and 45nm wafer it can make. They have zero capacity, which is an amazing problem for a "dying" company to have. Even if they axed all process R&D and returned the cash to shareholders, due to the eye watering costs of designing at 10nm and lower I expect there will be a lot of business to keep their fabs turning over for the next decade.
• monocasa 6y ago
  Any analysis that says that Intel's death is being precipitated by AMD and Apple rather than by TSMC is pretty much worth ignoring. The fact that they're almost equivalent to those two at 5nm when Intel is at 14nm+++++++++ shows how killer the RTL and tape out folk are at Intel. The real fight has always been at the fab layer.
  • mardiyah 6y ago
    Anyone know who pars TSMC?
    • monocasa 6y ago
      What do you mean by "pars TSMC"?
      • mardiyah 6y ago
        On par with it as client fab
        • monocasa 6y ago
          They are the leading edge currently with no competitors that don't come with their own performance compromises.
          • posguy 6y ago
            Samsung has 8nm, but Nvidia has had a bit of a rocky ride on it as it was not tuned for large die area chips, but rather small Exynos SoCs.
            • monocasa 6y ago
              Sure, but that's only a cute hack due to Apple bidding to eat up literally all of the TSMC 5nm capacity. I'm sure Nvidia would prefer TSMC 5nm to Samsung 8nm if they could put their hands on it.
• jasoneckert 6y ago
  I'd be cautious about the use of "We Can't Save It" in the title of this article. This industry has a history of big players losing steam and then making big comebacks.
  • mhh__ 6y ago
    That and if you asked 20 years ago what CPUs our desktops will be running, not only would Intel not necessarily have been a popular answer (Many compiler books were written around that time, giving us a guess as to what the academic groupthink was, and they generally treat x86 as a weird ISA soon-to-be obsolete or dead) but Intel's main architectural competitor (ARM) might not've even been mentioned at all.
    • kristopolous 6y ago
      The answer would have likely been SuperH and Transmeta, both way dead. Things change fast.
      • Decade 6y ago
        I would not have guessed SuperH, but I did not use Dreamcast or Jornada. 32-bit CPU with 16-bit instructions seems weird. VLIW had a lot of hype. DSPs had already proven it, and Itanium, Transmeta, and various embedded processors were using it. As a mostly Mac-user back then, I liked PowerPC, and POWER3 was leading the way to 64-bit, but I wasn’t expecting PCs to switch to PowerPC. The RISC systems had not all been executed in the face of the not-yet-released threat of Itanium. I was expecting the diversity to continue, for cross-architecture programming to be the rule and not the exception.
  • kllrnohj 6y ago
    Including Intel themselves, who came back from the Pentium 4 Prescott design disaster, late dual-core support, and late x86_64 support. And then promptly ate everyone's lunch with the Core 2 Duo and ruled unchallenged for a decade.
    • 6y ago
• mrkstu 6y ago
  The question is can Intel find a way to be more AMD than Global Foundries? Or can it just find its fabrication mojo again? It almost seems like take a conspiracy or sabotage for Intel to fumble such a large lead in process. But all it takes it self-sabotage in forced retirements and financial engineering ahead of innovation. America really needs it's CEOs to re-learn the lessons of the global behemoths of manufacturing we used to have- that re-investing in your own future growth is just as or more important than growing your dividends.
• hwlim 6y ago
  On the grant scheme of things nothing truly ever NEED to exist, but that being said, I would rather have more competition than less of it, for the sake of future innovation and consumers' interest.
• xyst 6y ago
  My AMD positions like this
• ekianjo 6y ago
  How is Intel dying if AMD can't even produce enough chips to avoid being out of stock the whole time? Production bottlenecks with TSMC are a thing.
  • gchamonlive 6y ago
    This is not limited to AMD. Gpu manufacturers are also experiencing supply shortages. The problem is that even if supply normalises, Intel has to work harder than usual to regain both consumer trust and innovation lead
    • ekianjo 6y ago
      > Intel has to work harder than usual to regain both consumer trust and innovation lead Not in the enterprise market where AMD is almost completely absent so far.
      • gchamonlive 6y ago
        What do you mean by "almost completely absent"? A quick search showed that in 2017, AMD server market share was 1%, and in 2020 is expected to have reached nearly 10%[1] in 2019. This is still not the same as 15 years ago, but the market is also not the same, with cloud computing, and this increase is very expressive. They are bringing IPC improvement with Epyc Milan and is pushing the same innovations towards the server market. [1] https://www.hardwaretimes.com/amd-server-market-share-grows-from-1-to-nearly-10-in-just-2-years/ https://www.hardwaretimes.com/amd-server-market-share-grows-...
        • ekianjo 6y ago
          Enterprise market does not mean servers only. Look at enterprise laptops which make for several dozens of millions every year and AMD is pretty tiny still.
          • gchamonlive 6y ago
• dathinab 6y ago
  I see Intel not being dominant, having to take a back seat, shrinking a bit. But dying?? Nup, I'm not seeing this at all. I mean AMD for years survived in a situation much worse then Intel currently is. Intel's productions nodes might be behind TSMC's but they are still quite valuable, not all chips need 5nm processes. Heck we could say most chips don't need it. Intel is still innovating, just because they currently lack behind doesn't mean that will stay that way. Even when lacking behind wrt. the production node Intel still manged to produce Chips which are often not much worse then the competition. Intel is not just about CPU's. Etc. So no Intel is not dying at all. It's taking damage, and lost dominance but it still has a fairly good shot at survival and might even take back dominance (in a 2-3 years). Or it might not but still stay competitive. And if we look at the world situation TSMC might not be a think anymore in a view years. It would make me supper angry but thinks are heading in that direction (China Taiwan conflict).
  • icedchai 6y ago
    Indeed, a similar situation happened in the mid 2000's before Intel moved to the Core architecture. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this happened again.
    • chrisseaton 6y ago
      I’m almost positive Intel have tech ready to deploy to be on top again. They will have been developing it... but not needed to use it until they came under competition pressure.
      • monocasa 6y ago
        Jim Keller's apparent rage quit has me questioning that. I was bullish on Intel until quite recently. I was able to convince myself that they were taking the L on 10nm to focus completely on a full, true EUV transition, in order to be at the top of the game just everyone else was hitting that wall in order to dominate again. That turned out to be overly optimistic.
• dh303 6y ago
  "I’m no market analyst or trader, and it would be a massive stretch to call me an expert in the tech world." If the author would have put this at the beginning instead of the end, I wouldn't have read it. Kudos. Still, not sure it's worth reading...
• henry_bone 6y ago
  Is it sensible (viable, potentially profitable, possible) for Intel to build RISC-V CPUs? Could they collaborate with Dell or Lenovo and make RISC-V based SoCs to go into laptops to compete with the macs?
  • mardiyah 6y ago
    for - ROI/profit? as RISC-V CPUs are rolling out in hundred PCs now
• mellow-lake-day 6y ago
  We need Intel as a competitor to TSMC and AMD. Also we need Intel from a national security point of view. Intel is definitely facing tough competition but that's not new for them. Intel will definitely have to reimagine the SoC but this is far from over.
• exintelwithop 6y ago
  I worked at Intel years ago. At that time, The ratio of excellent to useless people I experienced there was 1:40. That is way out of whack. I am certain it only got worse because all the 1/40’s I knew left. They are going to have to go and get people who have modern skillsets and mindsets and those people don’t want to live in Hillsboro. And it’s going to be expensive. And those people don’t tolerate dead weight. My take is that Bob Swan was only ever a placeholder. The board needed to be put in the worst possible negotiating position: Literally on their knees begging because they are getting their asses kicked in every single competitor category. A smart guy like Pat wouldn’t take the CEO job until they (a) are crawling on all fours and (b) give him the latitude to clean house as vigorously as he wants and (c) a preposterous paycheck. No one intelligent would want that job without all three. That’s why Bob got to babysit that role for two years.
  • chx 6y ago
    Agreed on serious house cleaning. There were rumors the single, absolutely botched CPU in the Cannon Lake family was released because certain Intel managers had bonuses tied to a 10nm launch. All those people need to be fired, that's for sure.
  • MichaelApproved 6y ago
    > The ratio of excellent to useless people I experienced there was 1:40 This has to be hyperbole but the rest of your comment makes me think you're being serious. I have only worked at small companies <50 people, so I don't have first hand experience with how waste can hide in large companies but 1:40 excellent to useless people? I can't believe it'd even be half that. My guess is you thought those people were useless because you didn't understand the role they played in the company. However, I'll admin again that I don't have first hand experience. I'd genuinely love to hear from others who have experience with large companies.
    • schmookeeg 6y ago
      Oh it's reality. My experience at Sony was about 1:25, but other big dumb companies I have worked for have met and exceeded the 1:40 rule. It is amazing how process generates dead weight and worthless humans and nobody seems to care. At one point I posited that Sony USA were merely a political pawn for Sony Japan. Hire a few tens of thousands of Americans, gain political capital -- and care not what they actually do all day. In our case, it was death by scrum and sticky notes.
• ethbr0 6y ago
  What exactly is the content here? This feels like (repeat popular opinion) retreading.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• CyberRabbi 6y ago
  Intel has at least 20 more years and probably dozens of real chances to reclaim past market position and maybe even more so. Intel is a large company with a massive market cap. The bigger they are, the longer they fall. They just have so much runway and market gravity. For comparison, Apple shot itself in the foot repeatedly for at least 10 years before Steve Jobs rejoined, and it took 10 more years after that before the iPhone came out, which no layman could have predicted.
  • fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
    I don’t think this is right: it completely ignores the iPod, for one. And the iMac plays a role here too.
    • jhbadger 6y ago
      And OSX (which came from Jobs via NeXT).
  • ChrisIsTaken 6y ago
    Intel has a very impressive balance sheet for a failing company, it has almost no debt and is generating double-digit billions in free cash flow from almost state of the art fabs. They are still number three on process technology, and number one on volume. The fact that Intel's management have chosen to spend two decades flushing that amazing free cashflow down the M&A toilet instead of fixing their workplace culture and getting their design house in order is what Pat Gelsinger needs to fix.
    • exmadscientist 6y ago
      Just an extended +1 here. I think you're exactly on point. Intel is definitely in a hole (that they watched being dug below them and did nothing...), but they can get out. They have plenty of time to do so. The only real problems to overcome are their own internal culture and the sheer difficulty of single-digit-nanometer manufacturing. And the second one is easier. Don't count them out yet. (But do laugh at them. Because they definitely deserve it, and it just might motivate them.)
• Nacdor 6y ago
  Does AMD really dominate the gaming market? I was still under the impression that AMD is what you buy when you're on a budget and Intel is what you get if you care about gaming performance. I just did a quick search and it looks like most people are still saying single core performance is better on Intel chips?
  • Aunche 6y ago
    That changed with Zen 3 CPUs that shipped out recently. Now AMD has better multicore and single-core performance.
  • Decade 6y ago
    In addition, NVIDIA is the GPU to get for gaming, not AMD. NVIDIA and AMD trade blows in terms of price for performance throughout the product range, but there are no scenarios where the fastest AMD is decidedly faster than the fastest NVIDIA, and there are many scenarios where the NVIDIA is faster than the AMD. The NVIDIA software is also possibly less aggravating than the AMD software (for Windows games, not necessarily Linux games). If you want to video-stream your game, then NVIDIA beats AMD silly. But for casuals, the PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One series, and Xbox Series X all use AMD APUs.
  • LegitShady 6y ago
    single core performance on zen2 competes or beats current generation intel chips, and tends to offer more cores and lower power usage as well.
  • llampx 6y ago
    AMD has been dominating the gaming market since the Ryzen 3000 series. The Ryzen 3600X was the gaming chip to beat last year. Also if you were not playing at 4K or competitive e-sports, you probably wanted an 8-core Ryzen chip for multi-threaded tasks even if it was marginally worse at CS:GO with >200 fps.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• Waterluvian 6y ago
  The fact that these big chip companies keep jockeying for position tells a big-picture-luddite like me that the market must, broadly speaking, be pretty healthy.
• tw04 6y ago
  Let's all just come to a common agreement: there's no planet on which the US military allows Intel to die. Period. End of story. Having a US based company with fabrication facilities on US soil is vital to national security and will be for the entirety of my lifetime and likely my grandchildren's lifetime (if I ever have any). For all the bluster of the investors wanting to chop Intel up: they will find a swift and full rejection from the government unless their plan includes selling the assets to another US firm. TSMC building a fab in the US won't be "good enough" - the US military will not allow the security of our country to be in the hands of a foreign corporation. Now whether Intel remains a dominant player? Who knows, but they aren't going anywhere. I wouldn't be even a little bit surprised if for instance the 3-letter agencies cloud contracts suddenly included a clause that all of their infrastructure must run on Intel CPUs. I'm not saying it's right, I'm not saying it's fair, but I don't see any other outcome.
  • WanderPanda 6y ago
    This kind of protectionism will only worsen Intels efficiency and will drain taxpayers pockets. Why can’t people learn from all the instances where a government tried to micromanage and horribly failed in the mid/long run?
    • tw04 6y ago
      Who said anything about micromanaging? I simply said the government both won't let Intel fail, and won't let their assets be sold off to foreign companies. It's easy to say "that's dumb" - but what's your alternative? If it includes "just buy CPUs from insert foreign entity" - that's a nonstarter for myriad reasons.
      • Shared404 6y ago
        I don't know whether or not I agree/think it's a good idea, but I think you are correct. There is no way the USG will let Intel fail.
      • PartiallyTyped 6y ago
        > Who said anything about micromanaging? I simply said the government both won't let Intel fail, and won't let their assets be sold off to foreign companies. Internal information on stuff we don't know about, especially apropos of ring -1 (or even lower if that's even possible), will never leave US soil.
• modzu 6y ago
  lol, written by a kid who likes computers. um, no insight into anything at intel, or any real analysis. $10 says intel lives.
• RobLach 6y ago
  Intel could stop making CPUs altogether and would still be a huge player. This is all the result of Intel fab failings. They have the talent to compete, dunno if the leadership wants to take to it.
  • jabl 6y ago
    Well, the other viewpoint is that Intel is really a fab company, which is in the business of selling silicon real estate. The CPU design business is just a tiny part, most of the investment goes into fabs and process.
• ThrowMeAwayOkay 6y ago
  Cool. I’m buying deep on intc. When there’s fear, be greedy.
• crb002 6y ago
  Intel was bleeding by not using TSMC for parity after they stumbled. If they bring in custom ASIC chiplets that are already TSMC taped it could catapult them ahead in several markets.
• throwitaway1235 6y ago
  Which former heavy weight champion has more staying power, Intel or IBM?
• sahin 6y ago
  Like everything is life, there is the circle of birth, growth, death. Intel contributed too much. The world owes them a lot. Thanks for contributions. Intel is dying is totally ok, it will open up more competition and innovation.
• usr1106 6y ago
  I would not mind Intel going Nokia (phone business). From world market leader to out of business in 7 years. CPUs that are fundamentally insecure (meltdown and all the subsequent microcode level vulnerabilities). Mandatory backdoor called ME. We would not miss a lot. But where is the competitor that will replace it? Actually healthily competing competitors, not just one would be ideal. Even Boeing has a stronger competitor.
• emrah 6y ago
  Exaggeration sells newspapers and blog posts :D That's what they said about Microsoft but it was able to reinvent itself and get back in the game with new leadership. Intel certainly had its share of problems in the recent years but has plenty of cash in hand, I imagine it can do the same if it really tries.
• numlock86 6y ago
  This has to be the most opinionated article I've read in 2021. Plus there are like thousands of this kind of articles with every new AMD release. Why are they so obsessed with Intel?
• pjmlp 6y ago
  Yeah, wishful thinking for those too deep down in coffee shops using Apple laptops in tier 1 countries.
• lightgreen 6y ago
  Never listen to people who write doomsday predictions on Medium. If they are so smart, they should go buy stock options against the company, they quickly become enormously rich. Money talks, bullshit walks. Intel stocks show Intel is doing fine. Which means people who are accountable for their predictions, do not consider Intel dying.
• iphorde 6y ago
  Sucks. Politics created a horrible company. Yay diversity! You have people in positions that shouldn't be there. For instance, Ann Kelleher is an idiot. She will not get Intel to 7nm. Period. She has the position because she is a woman. When you point out her mistakes, deficiencies, you get fired. How about hiring a woman that knows what she is doing? Lisa Su seems to know what she is doing. No. Not Intel. Let's promote solely because she is a woman, then spend every 6 weeks celebrating her promotion, the diversity, and how woke we are.
• mikewarot 6y ago
  Intel could pull themselves back from the brink, if they had a rapidly reconfigurable computing fabric that used RAM instead of FLASH for its gates. It would be a killer product, and could outperform almost anything, given the proper software.
• paulmendoza 6y ago
  M1 is a giant flashing sign showing that x86 as we know it is dead. Intel is doomed.
• amelius 6y ago
  They are just one technology step behind. And from now on the large fabs will take turns in who is the leader. That's all there is to it.
• webosdude 6y ago
  Why should we listen to this person? Is he famous or well known person in the semiconductor industry? Seems to be a college kid.
• throwawaytolk 6y ago
  It always blows me away to see so much brand loyalty about cpus. I really couldn't care less what architecture my chips are, or who fabricates them. All I care about is price and performance. I write application software, the underlying hardware is pretty irrelevant to me and most of my peers too. I think that as we lost national sources of pride and community structures at a local level, people transferred their loyalties to brands. LETS RISE ABOVE!
  • robertlagrant 6y ago
    I haven't really seen any brand loyalty here so far.
  • llampx 6y ago
    > I think that as we lost national sources of pride and community structures at a local level, people transferred their loyalties to brands. LETS RISE ABOVE! Fully agree. This is a phenomenon that goes beyond tech. Personally I have always rooted for AMD as the underdog and because Intel was the Goliath that held back CPU performance so it could squeeze more dollars out of consumers.
• qwerty456127 6y ago
  It just has to become more [power]user-friendly and concentrate on making as great CPUs and chip-sets as possible rather than on how to make people's life harder and extort additional money for every feature you reasonably want. Every CPU should support multiprocessor configurations, every CPU should support ECC memory and VT-x, upgradability should be maximized (so you wouldn't necessarily need a new mainboard for a new CPU), the socket and the instruction set should be licensed to as many competitors as possible. Like in good old 90ies.
• kryptiskt 6y ago
  A company losing their moat isn't the prelude to death, it's market economy functioning like it's supposed to. If Intel can't handle the newly competitive environment, then they will get swallowed up, for sure. But I hope they hang around and put out great product for competitive prices, so we get to enjoy the competition for longer. Now, let's take a sledgehammer to some other moats and make the rent seekers work a little for their profits.
• throwawayriver 6y ago
  They just need more diversity and SJW initiatives! They spent hundreds of millions on them the past five years, to great effect!
• ckozlowski 6y ago
  I’m not convinced by that Intel is doomed, especially by allegations that they can no longer design a performant chip, and especially that AMD has them finished. Not that they’re entirely without merit; Intel faces challenges that, left resolved, will spell the end of the company. Just like any other firm that ignores problems. Most of these arguments, especially the ones of “what are they going to do about AMD?” seem short-sighted. Intel has been here plenty of times before, facing down strong AMD competition only to come back and crush them a few product cycles later. Jim Keller can only come around so often. No, AMD’s issue is that they can never hold onto that lead through enough product cycles to really make a lasting dent in market share. It’s especially unfortunate for AMD right now, as supply constraints are choking what is its best performing product in years. Can’t really claw back a ton of market share when no one can get your chips. It’s asked by the tech tubers and other observers why Intel continues to ship old Skylake variants. Process issues with 10nm are a factor here. But I suspect there’s a big one that no one’s really discussing. And that’s the fallout from Spectre and Meltdown. Keep in mind that the exploits in these flaws were found in products that were 10 years back at the time they were discovered. Each new chip isn’t a ground up design, but iterations on designs that stretch back years. I suspect, that the reason we haven’t seen truly new designs in over several product cycles is that Intel is having to redo large parts of their architecture that would have otherwise been carried forward in a normal setting. Gamers and enthusiasts may not have seen much of an impact to their apps as a result of these; none of the microcode updates results in big FPS drops in any games that I am aware of. But there were notable enterprise workloads that did. It’s often overlooked that the consumer marketplace is just one part of the larger IT ecosystem, so a redesign there is a must. The timing of this is horrible of course, as it comes right when their new process is failing. So double-whammy there. Fortunately, or unfortunately, worldwide lack of fab capacity I think is preventing their rivals from exploiting this as much as they could. As for RISC, I think that is an entirely different threat, and to me, far more threatening and plausible. Intel saw this and tried to get into mobile chips, But I feel x86 is intrinsically at a disadvantage there. I’m interested to see where Intel will be at once they have a new design ready to go. We’ve been here before. Pentium 4 ended up scaling far better than the Athlon XP did, and Core 2 and Nehalem utterly crushed AMD’s offerings when they were launched after a few years of AMD on top. There’s good reason to believe they can do so again, and a big reason why we haven’t seen an attempt is because they’re continuing to undo their mistakes of the past. We’ll have to see if they can. My two cents. (Disclaimer: Not a fanboy, I’m writing this on my AMD 3700X. =P )