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I don’t invest in Intel, but I am bullish on their prospects in general. I love that they are an American company that has large production facilities in the US

I don’t invest in Intel, but I am bullish on their prospects in general. I love that they are an American company that has large production facilities in the US. I would have no qualms with increasing government aid and subsidies to them. I’m rooting for them to succeed. But I do follow the Warren Buffett methodology. I personally have had very good experiences with most Intel products. So that positive experience may color my views a little bit. It’s like all of my friends that have owned Toyota products, it’s almost universally a good experience from what I can tell. I wish Toyota was also an American company.

ffffwe3rq352y3 5y ago
From what I've seen Intel has not been nice to consumers or smart with their chips so far. For many years they just pumped the prices with mediocre processors because of their dominance. However, now the tables have turned and AMD is crushing them almost everywhere! I feel like they get what they deserve for being lazy and not innovating and we shouldn't reward that.
- BuckRogers 5y ago
  That hasn't been my experience as a consumer. I've had 4 Ryzen systems over the last 4 years (owned nearly every generation), and also my Intel systems. My experience has been less "crushing Intel" and more "crushing me" and my time. From what I've experienced, the price increases in Intel platforms are just from added quality assurance in their engineering. Obviously I wanted my Zen, Zen+, and Zen3 systems to work well but they all had something ranging from weird idiosyncrasy to major flaw. I just sold off my last Zen3, as I greatly prefer my 11th gen board and chip. That's just my experience and my perspective at this point. Other people seem to love them so there's a market for everything.
  - ffffwe3rq352y3 5y ago
    Yeah I'm really only talking about processing power! I don't own as many computer as you do so you might have a more accurate experiences with that.
- paulmd 5y ago
  > From what I've seen Intel has not been nice to consumers or smart with their chips so far. For many years they just pumped the prices with mediocre processors because of their dominance. Intel was pretty aggressively driving down price-per-core up until the 6000 series/ 14nm chips. For example here's the price series for a 6-core chip from each of their series: i7 970 (Nehalem-E, July 2010): $885 i7 3930K (Sandy Bridge-E, Nov 2011): $583 i7 5820K (Haswell-E, Aug 2014): $389 i7 6800K (Broadwell-E, May 2016): $434 So in basically 4 years (+1 month) they reduced the price of their entry-level 6-core processors by more than half (56% reduction), comparing 970 vs 5820K. It specifically is Broadwell (the first 14nm chip) where intel lost the plot and prices started increasing. People also dump on Intel for not increasing core count in the consumer platform chips, which I think is a deeper subject than people treat it as. Certainly by the 6000 series they should have pushed the consumer platform up to 6 cores, but fundamentally the consumer socket is driven by the economics of office machines and walmart PCs. Up through Haswell, 4 cores was the right amount for an average desktop for the average office worker (not talking about powerful workstations for developers here, those users always had the option of the HEDT platform with more cores/memory) or the average home user (again, not talking about power gamers, and if you wanted more HEDT was always a fairly reasonably-priced option too, especially during the Haswell generation). There was, at the time, no 6-core die, the next step upwards was the 8-core HEDT die with quad-channel RAM and all that other stuff, and I doubt that would have fit into a consumer socket even if you wanted it to, and having 6-core chips with dual-channel RAM probably would have impacted performance until DDR4 came along with the 6000 series. On the whole Intel didn't actually do too bad up until the 6000 series, when the combination of a complete shitshow of a 14nm node (in these latter years of 14++++ people forget what a mess early 14nm was), the lack of competition, and the beancounters gaining firm control of the company all combined. But that's really a specific, narrow range of time - 2016 and 2017 mostly. Then in 2017 Intel shit their pants after seeing Ryzen and released the 8700K, which was a wildly aggressive product for Intel at the time - same i7 pricing but 50% more cores, and such a solid product that it basically forced AMD into similar price reductions (abandoning the $500+ segment for a generation, and big price cuts on their existing products). I really see the "intel got greedy" thing as being specifically 2016-2017. 5820K was extremely good value for a 6-core (even if it did need a "more expensive motherboard", those are cheaper than a high-end X570 now and far far cheaper than sTRX40), the problem was the 6000 series and failing to push core count up on the consumer socket at that time, and I think that is largely attributable to early 14nm woes. Certainly by the 7000 series yields would have improved and Intel could have pushed core counts up, 7000 series is arguably one of the worst releases Intel has done in terms of how rapidly it aged out of the market. (although to be fair - up until like 2018/2019 you could easily sell a 7700K and get almost all your money back and do a straight upgrade to a 8700K, so it wasn't the end of the world from a user perspective.)
CyberRage 5y ago
Intel is facing some difficult times ahead. they were the kings of the industry for a while but now there is a lot of pressure and competition coming. AMD is re-surging with great technology, they already chipped away some market share in key sectors and I see that continuing for a while. TSMC has closed the gap and exceeded Intel in manufacturing, Samsung is not too far behind. Intel is no longer the market leader in chip fabrication. Nvidia is buying ARM and aiming to start competing in the CPU space, with their GPU leadership that could be huge. x86 is starting to lose it's complete dominance & new players coming in(Apple M1, RISC-V, Nuvia, Ampere) Cloud vendors are starting to build their own chips and tech instead of buying them(Graviton, TPU) I see Intel still being profitable and stable but losing their truly unprecedented grasp on the industry.
- BuckRogers 5y ago
  That's been the general theme for years now. For their own products, as long as they maintain their quality levels, I think they'll be fine on design. My understanding is they've been pivoting to become an alternative to TSMC and Samsung as a foundry source, and will be assisting with 3rd party designs similar to ARM for interested parties such as cloud vendors. But potentially with x86 compatibility for some, which would only strengthen it. Intel has needed to do all of this for a while now but if they execute properly (which is the hard part), I think the future is bright. I do agree they won't have "truly unprecedented grasp on the industry", because I think they lost that a long time ago with globalization. The existence of TSMC/Samsung etc. I do think that means simply a larger market with more players and customers, rather than a shrinking Intel. Microsoft evolved their business with the times and came out stronger, I think Intel will as well. I know they've been in talks with Nvidia to manufacture some of their stuff due to offshore supply being uncertain at best. If the world continues to be as uncertain as it has been, I think they're in a very different position than the widely held popular notions that you described. It was all good, even preferable, to outsource that dirty manufacturing in the good times. I believe all the commonly held analysis that Intel is set for decline no longer has legs to stand on. I don't view fabless design firms like NV/AMD/Apple/ARM as competition. In these dark days, if you can't make things, you basically have nothing. Just a piece of paper.
- colinmhayes 5y ago

ffffwe3rq352y3 5y ago

From what I've seen Intel has not been nice to consumers or smart with their chips so far. For many years they just pumped the prices with mediocre processors because of their dominance. However, now the tables have turned and AMD is crushing them almost everywhere! I feel like they get what they deserve for being lazy and not innovating and we shouldn't reward that.

BuckRogers 5y ago
That hasn't been my experience as a consumer. I've had 4 Ryzen systems over the last 4 years (owned nearly every generation), and also my Intel systems. My experience has been less "crushing Intel" and more "crushing me" and my time. From what I've experienced, the price increases in Intel platforms are just from added quality assurance in their engineering. Obviously I wanted my Zen, Zen+, and Zen3 systems to work well but they all had something ranging from weird idiosyncrasy to major flaw. I just sold off my last Zen3, as I greatly prefer my 11th gen board and chip. That's just my experience and my perspective at this point. Other people seem to love them so there's a market for everything.
- ffffwe3rq352y3 5y ago
  Yeah I'm really only talking about processing power! I don't own as many computer as you do so you might have a more accurate experiences with that.
paulmd 5y ago
> From what I've seen Intel has not been nice to consumers or smart with their chips so far. For many years they just pumped the prices with mediocre processors because of their dominance. Intel was pretty aggressively driving down price-per-core up until the 6000 series/ 14nm chips. For example here's the price series for a 6-core chip from each of their series: i7 970 (Nehalem-E, July 2010): $885 i7 3930K (Sandy Bridge-E, Nov 2011): $583 i7 5820K (Haswell-E, Aug 2014): $389 i7 6800K (Broadwell-E, May 2016): $434 So in basically 4 years (+1 month) they reduced the price of their entry-level 6-core processors by more than half (56% reduction), comparing 970 vs 5820K. It specifically is Broadwell (the first 14nm chip) where intel lost the plot and prices started increasing. People also dump on Intel for not increasing core count in the consumer platform chips, which I think is a deeper subject than people treat it as. Certainly by the 6000 series they should have pushed the consumer platform up to 6 cores, but fundamentally the consumer socket is driven by the economics of office machines and walmart PCs. Up through Haswell, 4 cores was the right amount for an average desktop for the average office worker (not talking about powerful workstations for developers here, those users always had the option of the HEDT platform with more cores/memory) or the average home user (again, not talking about power gamers, and if you wanted more HEDT was always a fairly reasonably-priced option too, especially during the Haswell generation). There was, at the time, no 6-core die, the next step upwards was the 8-core HEDT die with quad-channel RAM and all that other stuff, and I doubt that would have fit into a consumer socket even if you wanted it to, and having 6-core chips with dual-channel RAM probably would have impacted performance until DDR4 came along with the 6000 series. On the whole Intel didn't actually do too bad up until the 6000 series, when the combination of a complete shitshow of a 14nm node (in these latter years of 14++++ people forget what a mess early 14nm was), the lack of competition, and the beancounters gaining firm control of the company all combined. But that's really a specific, narrow range of time - 2016 and 2017 mostly. Then in 2017 Intel shit their pants after seeing Ryzen and released the 8700K, which was a wildly aggressive product for Intel at the time - same i7 pricing but 50% more cores, and such a solid product that it basically forced AMD into similar price reductions (abandoning the $500+ segment for a generation, and big price cuts on their existing products). I really see the "intel got greedy" thing as being specifically 2016-2017. 5820K was extremely good value for a 6-core (even if it did need a "more expensive motherboard", those are cheaper than a high-end X570 now and far far cheaper than sTRX40), the problem was the 6000 series and failing to push core count up on the consumer socket at that time, and I think that is largely attributable to early 14nm woes. Certainly by the 7000 series yields would have improved and Intel could have pushed core counts up, 7000 series is arguably one of the worst releases Intel has done in terms of how rapidly it aged out of the market. (although to be fair - up until like 2018/2019 you could easily sell a 7700K and get almost all your money back and do a straight upgrade to a 8700K, so it wasn't the end of the world from a user perspective.)

CyberRage 5y ago

Intel is facing some difficult times ahead. they were the kings of the industry for a while but now there is a lot of pressure and competition coming. AMD is re-surging with great technology, they already chipped away some market share in key sectors and I see that continuing for a while. TSMC has closed the gap and exceeded Intel in manufacturing, Samsung is not too far behind. Intel is no longer the market leader in chip fabrication. Nvidia is buying ARM and aiming to start competing in the CPU space, with their GPU leadership that could be huge. x86 is starting to lose it's complete dominance & new players coming in(Apple M1, RISC-V, Nuvia, Ampere) Cloud vendors are starting to build their own chips and tech instead of buying them(Graviton, TPU) I see Intel still being profitable and stable but losing their truly unprecedented grasp on the industry.

BuckRogers 5y ago
That's been the general theme for years now. For their own products, as long as they maintain their quality levels, I think they'll be fine on design. My understanding is they've been pivoting to become an alternative to TSMC and Samsung as a foundry source, and will be assisting with 3rd party designs similar to ARM for interested parties such as cloud vendors. But potentially with x86 compatibility for some, which would only strengthen it. Intel has needed to do all of this for a while now but if they execute properly (which is the hard part), I think the future is bright. I do agree they won't have "truly unprecedented grasp on the industry", because I think they lost that a long time ago with globalization. The existence of TSMC/Samsung etc. I do think that means simply a larger market with more players and customers, rather than a shrinking Intel. Microsoft evolved their business with the times and came out stronger, I think Intel will as well. I know they've been in talks with Nvidia to manufacture some of their stuff due to offshore supply being uncertain at best. If the world continues to be as uncertain as it has been, I think they're in a very different position than the widely held popular notions that you described. It was all good, even preferable, to outsource that dirty manufacturing in the good times. I believe all the commonly held analysis that Intel is set for decline no longer has legs to stand on. I don't view fabless design firms like NV/AMD/Apple/ARM as competition. In these dark days, if you can't make things, you basically have nothing. Just a piece of paper.
colinmhayes 5y ago