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Early in my career I got to meet Pat Gelsinger so I know firsthand he's smart, very energetic, and he has been in IC engineering since masks were cut from Rubyl

by Zigurd 4y ago

Early in my career I got to meet Pat Gelsinger so I know firsthand he's smart, very energetic, and he has been in IC engineering since masks were cut from Rubylith. He has all the background and knowledge to do the right things. But what I have heard so far is scattershot: Be proprietary, be open, be exclusive, be a foundry, own an ADAS company, be nowhere in cars but wish you were, etc. Totally unsurprising to find that leads to starts and stops like this one. Intel had a recipe that worked. It no longer does. Intel needs a new strategy as coherent as the old one but that fits the modern environment.

college_physics 4y ago
> Intel needs a new strategy as coherent as the old one you are assuming such as strategy exists. The future need not look like the past. In fact on pretty much all counts (geopolitics, sustainability, commoditization) the future seems to be branching unpredictably
- Zigurd 4y ago
  I don't assume one exists. Intel could be strategically screwed. Even if they had a hypothesis for how to create a similarly insurmountable strategy like the combination of fab capability and chip design they had before, what if the hypothesis is wrong or unimplementable?
  - hasmanean 4y ago
    Strategy for a multibillion dollar behemoth is not the same as a strategy for a nimble startup. For years Intel provided just enough cpu power and cultivated a broad ecosystem of software developers such that any new hardware solution had to compete against the enormously more fun and flexible general purpose software solutions running on windows (and before that, dos). Custom closed source Hardware was a dead end. It either worked or it didn’t. Software could be infinitely flexible and was fast to iterate on. And every kid could train themselves to write software almost for free. This is why software ate the world. Closed source and complex compiler toolchains with hardware interfaces that require closed source drivers are practically just as inflexible as hardware. They should be avoided at all costs.
  - college_physics 4y ago
    > what if the hypothesis is wrong or unimplementable? yep. the febrile nature of this decade means many hypotheses will be wrong.

by Zigurd 4y ago

college_physics 4y ago

> Intel needs a new strategy as coherent as the old one you are assuming such as strategy exists. The future need not look like the past. In fact on pretty much all counts (geopolitics, sustainability, commoditization) the future seems to be branching unpredictably

Zigurd 4y ago
I don't assume one exists. Intel could be strategically screwed. Even if they had a hypothesis for how to create a similarly insurmountable strategy like the combination of fab capability and chip design they had before, what if the hypothesis is wrong or unimplementable?
- hasmanean 4y ago
  Strategy for a multibillion dollar behemoth is not the same as a strategy for a nimble startup. For years Intel provided just enough cpu power and cultivated a broad ecosystem of software developers such that any new hardware solution had to compete against the enormously more fun and flexible general purpose software solutions running on windows (and before that, dos). Custom closed source Hardware was a dead end. It either worked or it didn’t. Software could be infinitely flexible and was fast to iterate on. And every kid could train themselves to write software almost for free. This is why software ate the world. Closed source and complex compiler toolchains with hardware interfaces that require closed source drivers are practically just as inflexible as hardware. They should be avoided at all costs.
- college_physics 4y ago
  > what if the hypothesis is wrong or unimplementable? yep. the febrile nature of this decade means many hypotheses will be wrong.