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I’m always slightly confused at how easily intel is written off. They still generate more revenue than AMD and Nvidia combined, they have a huge foundry busines

I’m always slightly confused at how easily intel is written off. They still generate more revenue than AMD and Nvidia combined, they have a huge foundry business attached, their processors are competitive and they are making the necessary investments to catch up. AMD and Nvidia will always be beholden to TSMC - yes, they avoid the capital outlay and risk of foundries, but they also give up the possible upside of owning the foundry. Perhaps intel will never be as dominant as they once were, but as the computing market grows there’s a growing pie to share in regardless.

throwaway4good 4y ago
Apple is not going back to x86; and server side computing is also moving away from x86 - either to ARM or specialised AI hardware.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  So far, I have been able to pull out a lot more perf/$ from Intel CPUs on AWS than from ARM. I know the ARM cores benchmark well for certain applications, but at the moment, the Intel SIMD instructions are a little too powerful, so if you can take advantage of them, you will win on x86.
- aNoob7000 4y ago
  I agree that Intel is in trouble on many front, but I don't see the x86 instruction set going away anytime soon. The desktop and server world is basically running on x86 at this time.
  - dboreham 4y ago
    There are big cracks appearing though in this edifice. Thanks to ARM Macbook, it's now expected that projects ship ARM packages, ARM containers etc. And therefor it's practical to deploy on ARM servers. Raspberry Pi also helped with this historically. Even Windows -- I use a Surface Pro X which provides a wonderful travel experience.
- foobiekr 4y ago
  It isn't like Apple hasn't jumped ship before. It remains to be seen if Apple can stay on top of the performance curve. Right now they are doing it, primarily, through capital intensive means. They have the best fab process, bought with capital investment and order guarantees, and some of the best ASIC and CPU arch heads in the world, bought with comp packages. It's like like there's some law of nature that means Apple will always be on top. We'll see what Intel does - they might go down the RISCV path for all we know, wherein their own talent richness may well put them at an advantage.
  - sliken 4y ago
    Sure. But keep in mind that say Apple's future arm designs fail to be market leading, without much pain they could switch to any number of other arm cores. Similarly is TSMC falls behind there's other fabs out there, like Samsung, or even Intel.
klelatti 4y ago
The problem is that at the moment Intel only really have one business - selling CPUs for desktop/laptops and servers. In the latter market they are under severe pressure from AMD and Arm based CPUs. The former is relatively low growth. They might want to have a third party foundry business but at the moment they don't have a credible one. So they have massive historic and prospective capital investment and a cost base focused on difficult or uncertain markets. Add to this poor recent execution and you have a toxic mix.
- pclmulqdq 4y ago
  IMO at 14 nm (when it was the leading-edge process), they should have spun off the foundry business. They had accepted a few customers at 22 nm, which allowed them to work out the kinks as a pure play foundry, but instead they acquired their biggest customer. They wanted to keep their CPU hegemony so much that they couldn't see the big opportunity.
  - klelatti 4y ago
    Agreed. Also there has been a tendency to see losing / turning down the iPhone as the pivotal moment but I think it was the years after that which were crucial. They relentlessly pushed x86 on mobile when it was clear there was little or no appetite. If they'd built Arm based SoCs for Qualcomm etc (inc maybe Apple) then it might have been a very different story.
- open-paren 4y ago
  You clearly didn't see their quarterly earnings¹, where the only business units with growth were graphics, network, and MobileEye. --- 1: https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1563/intel-reports-second-quarter-2022-financial-results https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1563/...
  - klelatti 4y ago
    Not sure what I didn't see. The CPUs are around 4x the everything else put together so to first order of magnitude Intel is a CPU business.
gwbas1c 4y ago
Because people think "disruption" is the bible in business. (See The Innovator's Dillema: https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Technologies-Management-Innovation-dp-1633691780/dp/1633691780/ref=dp_ob_title_bk https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Technologies-Manag...) Basically, as a former Intel employee, Intel is ripe for being disrupted. (The employees only want to follow the rules and believe the rules will last forever.) Why it hasn't been disrupted yet, is a bit harder to explain.
- BuckRogers 4y ago
  I'd argue that it's the holy grail of business, not the bible. I realize you weren't claiming it is. Disruption is overrated. It's a lot harder to do than it is to think about or wish for. Neither Nvidia or AMD have "disrupted" Intel. Only Apple came close to that and even then only in theory, and only in their own walled garden market. If they were selling M-chips to everyone, you MIGHT have disruption, but that's easier said than done because there's an enormous list of tasks that need executed to a T that has to be completed. Everyone wants to be the disruptor, usually without the vision, talent, or execution, when "just making a lot of money" is also a fine goal that seems to be overlooked. Nvidia was always more likely to disrupt Intel with their ARM chips, but again, easier to dream about than execute. Hasn't happened. It's not that easy nor is it truly done often. Especially the concept of sustainably making money is dismissed outright by nearly everyone. Here in the US it's all about the "bottom line" and quarterly executive bonuses. They love their reorgs. It's a broken model. While the Japanese, such as at Toyota, do a good job out of national honor. We can't compete with that sense of national pride. Western employees are broken culturally, and largely due to decades of watching the rich take it all as their prospects dwindle. Most of it lay at the feet of management though, as we made quality stuff in decades past. I'd prefer to execute in a disciplined manner with quality output, something I could be proud of and fairly compensated for. Sustainably "just getting rich", Toyota style. That's not good enough in the US, we prefer booms and bust, then ending up broke. Best case for an American company is ending up a zombie corporation reliant on endless bailouts while claiming they're too big to fail. Even financial organizations that do nothing but sign documents as "product", reissuing Federal Reserve loans at usury rates, and would leave no gap upon disappearing overnight. To be replaced with a more rational actor that will be more responsible with such an easy way to make money. At some point the Americans are going to have to realize that disruption can also be simply be delivering quality, reliably for decades. Toyota vs GM/Ford is a perfect example, as they were definitely disrupted. Being the market leader, dominating while getting rich is too longterm for us though. Apologies for this excessive screed. This topic always bugs me. If I'm wrong, I'd appreciate it someone correct me so I can be a bit less pessimistic.
MomoXenosaga 4y ago
Nvidia itself is a multi billion dollar corporation that has dominated GPUs for 20 years now. I don't write Intel of but they have a LOT of catching up to do.
- colinmhayes 4y ago
  Nvidia is worth like 3 times as much as intel. I believe it’s one of the 20 largest cap companies. Just doesn’t make sense to me when TSMC will suck most of their profit margins up in the medium run, especially if intel can’t figure it’s foundry business.
sliken 4y ago
Things aren't going well. New fab shrinks and CPUs are years late. Apple ditched Intel chips for desktop/laptops. Various large clouds (like Amazon) are pushing ARM based systems. Even Microsoft is starting to push arm. Promised fab shrinks and CPUs are years behind schedule. The sapphire rapids Xeon chip is in it's 12th revision and despite being 1.5 years late looks to be another 6-7 months out. It was originally going to compete with Zen3 Epyc chips and now looks like the Zen 4 Epycs will have a good head start. Apparently the GPU effort is also years behind, failing to meet numerous previous timelines, and still has an uncertain future. Optane never quite delivered and has been killed off. So major setbacks in servers, fabs, desktop chips, storage and GPUs. The semiconductor shortage has helped intel, better to buy an Intel server than wait a year for an AMD ... but that only works until AMD can meet demand. Can Intel turn it around, sure. Will that happen? Seems far from sure. Today's situation has been years in the making and it's far from clear if the fixes have been made.

throwaway4good 4y ago

Apple is not going back to x86; and server side computing is also moving away from x86 - either to ARM or specialised AI hardware.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
So far, I have been able to pull out a lot more perf/$ from Intel CPUs on AWS than from ARM. I know the ARM cores benchmark well for certain applications, but at the moment, the Intel SIMD instructions are a little too powerful, so if you can take advantage of them, you will win on x86.
aNoob7000 4y ago
I agree that Intel is in trouble on many front, but I don't see the x86 instruction set going away anytime soon. The desktop and server world is basically running on x86 at this time.
- dboreham 4y ago
  There are big cracks appearing though in this edifice. Thanks to ARM Macbook, it's now expected that projects ship ARM packages, ARM containers etc. And therefor it's practical to deploy on ARM servers. Raspberry Pi also helped with this historically. Even Windows -- I use a Surface Pro X which provides a wonderful travel experience.
foobiekr 4y ago
It isn't like Apple hasn't jumped ship before. It remains to be seen if Apple can stay on top of the performance curve. Right now they are doing it, primarily, through capital intensive means. They have the best fab process, bought with capital investment and order guarantees, and some of the best ASIC and CPU arch heads in the world, bought with comp packages. It's like like there's some law of nature that means Apple will always be on top. We'll see what Intel does - they might go down the RISCV path for all we know, wherein their own talent richness may well put them at an advantage.
- sliken 4y ago
  Sure. But keep in mind that say Apple's future arm designs fail to be market leading, without much pain they could switch to any number of other arm cores. Similarly is TSMC falls behind there's other fabs out there, like Samsung, or even Intel.

klelatti 4y ago

The problem is that at the moment Intel only really have one business - selling CPUs for desktop/laptops and servers. In the latter market they are under severe pressure from AMD and Arm based CPUs. The former is relatively low growth. They might want to have a third party foundry business but at the moment they don't have a credible one. So they have massive historic and prospective capital investment and a cost base focused on difficult or uncertain markets. Add to this poor recent execution and you have a toxic mix.

pclmulqdq 4y ago
IMO at 14 nm (when it was the leading-edge process), they should have spun off the foundry business. They had accepted a few customers at 22 nm, which allowed them to work out the kinks as a pure play foundry, but instead they acquired their biggest customer. They wanted to keep their CPU hegemony so much that they couldn't see the big opportunity.
- klelatti 4y ago
  Agreed. Also there has been a tendency to see losing / turning down the iPhone as the pivotal moment but I think it was the years after that which were crucial. They relentlessly pushed x86 on mobile when it was clear there was little or no appetite. If they'd built Arm based SoCs for Qualcomm etc (inc maybe Apple) then it might have been a very different story.
open-paren 4y ago
You clearly didn't see their quarterly earnings¹, where the only business units with growth were graphics, network, and MobileEye. --- 1: https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1563/intel-reports-second-quarter-2022-financial-results https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1563/...
- klelatti 4y ago
  Not sure what I didn't see. The CPUs are around 4x the everything else put together so to first order of magnitude Intel is a CPU business.

gwbas1c 4y ago

Because people think "disruption" is the bible in business. (See The Innovator's Dillema: https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Technologies-Management-Innovation-dp-1633691780/dp/1633691780/ref=dp_ob_title_bk https://www.amazon.com/Innovators-Dilemma-Technologies-Manag...) Basically, as a former Intel employee, Intel is ripe for being disrupted. (The employees only want to follow the rules and believe the rules will last forever.) Why it hasn't been disrupted yet, is a bit harder to explain.

BuckRogers 4y ago
I'd argue that it's the holy grail of business, not the bible. I realize you weren't claiming it is. Disruption is overrated. It's a lot harder to do than it is to think about or wish for. Neither Nvidia or AMD have "disrupted" Intel. Only Apple came close to that and even then only in theory, and only in their own walled garden market. If they were selling M-chips to everyone, you MIGHT have disruption, but that's easier said than done because there's an enormous list of tasks that need executed to a T that has to be completed. Everyone wants to be the disruptor, usually without the vision, talent, or execution, when "just making a lot of money" is also a fine goal that seems to be overlooked. Nvidia was always more likely to disrupt Intel with their ARM chips, but again, easier to dream about than execute. Hasn't happened. It's not that easy nor is it truly done often. Especially the concept of sustainably making money is dismissed outright by nearly everyone. Here in the US it's all about the "bottom line" and quarterly executive bonuses. They love their reorgs. It's a broken model. While the Japanese, such as at Toyota, do a good job out of national honor. We can't compete with that sense of national pride. Western employees are broken culturally, and largely due to decades of watching the rich take it all as their prospects dwindle. Most of it lay at the feet of management though, as we made quality stuff in decades past. I'd prefer to execute in a disciplined manner with quality output, something I could be proud of and fairly compensated for. Sustainably "just getting rich", Toyota style. That's not good enough in the US, we prefer booms and bust, then ending up broke. Best case for an American company is ending up a zombie corporation reliant on endless bailouts while claiming they're too big to fail. Even financial organizations that do nothing but sign documents as "product", reissuing Federal Reserve loans at usury rates, and would leave no gap upon disappearing overnight. To be replaced with a more rational actor that will be more responsible with such an easy way to make money. At some point the Americans are going to have to realize that disruption can also be simply be delivering quality, reliably for decades. Toyota vs GM/Ford is a perfect example, as they were definitely disrupted. Being the market leader, dominating while getting rich is too longterm for us though. Apologies for this excessive screed. This topic always bugs me. If I'm wrong, I'd appreciate it someone correct me so I can be a bit less pessimistic.

MomoXenosaga 4y ago

Nvidia itself is a multi billion dollar corporation that has dominated GPUs for 20 years now. I don't write Intel of but they have a LOT of catching up to do.

colinmhayes 4y ago
Nvidia is worth like 3 times as much as intel. I believe it’s one of the 20 largest cap companies. Just doesn’t make sense to me when TSMC will suck most of their profit margins up in the medium run, especially if intel can’t figure it’s foundry business.

sliken 4y ago

Things aren't going well. New fab shrinks and CPUs are years late. Apple ditched Intel chips for desktop/laptops. Various large clouds (like Amazon) are pushing ARM based systems. Even Microsoft is starting to push arm. Promised fab shrinks and CPUs are years behind schedule. The sapphire rapids Xeon chip is in it's 12th revision and despite being 1.5 years late looks to be another 6-7 months out. It was originally going to compete with Zen3 Epyc chips and now looks like the Zen 4 Epycs will have a good head start. Apparently the GPU effort is also years behind, failing to meet numerous previous timelines, and still has an uncertain future. Optane never quite delivered and has been killed off. So major setbacks in servers, fabs, desktop chips, storage and GPUs. The semiconductor shortage has helped intel, better to buy an Intel server than wait a year for an AMD ... but that only works until AMD can meet demand. Can Intel turn it around, sure. Will that happen? Seems far from sure. Today's situation has been years in the making and it's far from clear if the fixes have been made.