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I find it kind of amazing that Intel haven't found a way to profit during the global chip shortage. Look at food and energy over the past year or so: supermarke

by jl6 4y ago

I find it kind of amazing that Intel haven't found a way to profit during the global chip shortage. Look at food and energy over the past year or so: supermarket and oil & gas companies are posting record profits. They are riding the wave of price rises and supply constraints. What's different about CPUs?

stephen_g 4y ago
They are very different types of goods... Food and energy are required by everyone, so when the supermarkets and energy companies decide to price gouge and profiteer (as they have been), people have few other options than just to pay the higher prices... People and businesses can mostly just delay buying new computers if they are too expensive.
jnovek 4y ago
If I understand the situation correctly, most of the chips in short supply use old fab processes which are not Intel's specialty.
pjc50 4y ago
There was huge purchasing of equipment at the start of the pandemic to enable work-from-home. Most of which is still current enough to not need replacing. Meanwhile it's possible that the high food and energy prices are impacting the amount of money available to spend on tech goods ..
windowsrookie 4y ago
At the beginning of the chip shortage, Intel's CPU just weren't very good. AMD was beating them at performance and efficiency. Intel has caught up now, but their chips still use significantly more power than the current AMD chips. Intel spent a lot of time and money developing their new Arc GPUs. They were delayed and they missed the crypto boom. Drivers and GPU performance were disappointing even after delaying the launch. This first generation of intel GPUs will be a huge loss for them. Intel is less diversified today. They sold their LTE modem business to apple a few years ago. Intel exited the ARM chip business ~15 years ago, right before the smartphone took off. Intel is now losing the server chip business. AMD is making competitive sever chips for a lower price. Larger companies are developing their own ARM-based server chips. Intel is going to start using their foundries to manufacture chips for other customers. It remains to be seen if Intel can compete with TSMC.
- rektide 4y ago
  To their credit, the gpu drivers have continued getting much much better, much faster. Intel has long understood the value of drivers, has been one of the primary contributors & drivers of really good open source (albeit with some frustrating areas of sore neglect, like GMA500/Poulso) (But also rip the incredible http://01.org http://01.org those folks were amazing at finding high value open source work to do!). Im glad to see making an already quite reasonable priced value GPU a lot better. But yeah the timing is after the GPU craze. And Intel has been tweaking the same way-too-big big core for too too long & is uncompetitive. And they've been hurting to get a 7nm process (Intel 4) going. A lot of change is necessary.
  - seunosewa 4y ago
    AI has kickstarted a new GPU craze. Hope they catch this one.
  - philistine 4y ago
    One could conceivably assume that they're talking to Sony and Microsoft about putting their GPUs in their next consoles. I'm not sure Microsoft would bite for compatibility reasons but Sony seems ready to make another blunder.
    - windowsrookie 4y ago
      It's possible, but AMD has supplied console APUs for two generations now because they are willing to sell them for cheap. Intel has never been interested in low-margin items, but they may need to be in the future. AMD has really targeted the gaming APU market. They make the chips for the Playstation, Xbox, and Steam deck. They also recently announced a new chip for gaming handhelds that Asus is using in their new ROG Ally device.
  - zvr 4y ago
    https://open.intel.com https://open.intel.com is the successor of 01.org.
- dralley 4y ago
Aromasin 4y ago
In 2020, Intel generated a record $35.4 billion cash from operations and $21.1 billion of free cash flow (FCF) and returned $19.8 billion to shareholders. They profited massively, and put their dividend up 5%. They brought in Gelsinger and used that cash to build 2 new leading edge fans, and upgrade capacity on newer ones. Then the economic downturn happened, and sales dwindled. They're making less revenue but still funding the production of new fabs. That coincided with a weak roadmap. Sapphire Rapids is only just starting to ramp, after a nearly 3 year gap in their Xeon roadmap.
- mrtweetyhack 4y ago
  [dead]
steveBK123 4y ago
They missed the boat on 2 biggest growth areas: ARM (mobile) & GPU (gaming, crypto, AI), and screwed up x86 (AMD made some better chips / Apple walked away). Screwing 1 of those up is a problem, screwing up all 3 simultaneously is near-bankrupting.
- karmakaze 4y ago
  Their development model was 'tick / tock'[0] with the tick being smaller processes, increased frequency, lower-power. All of those are largely outsourced (or outsourceable) to a fab. The tock step was introduction of new microarchitectures. Intel has been historically hit or miss with this, the default is to take what they did and do more of it rather than come up with entirely new and sound designs. I would say for large established companies the greatest factor in these kinds of differences is how high the engineering culture goes up the reporting chain. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick%E2%80%93tock_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick%E2%80%93tock_model
  - steveBK123 4y ago
    Yeah that was their well known dev model for many decades. However they seem to have missed a number of tick cycles as of late, so their efficiency gap to ARM got worse and worse.
- dehrmann 4y ago
  > AMD made some better chips / Apple walked away This means Intel didn't lose Apple just because of execution because Apple could have trivially gone to AMD.
- Clamchop 4y ago
  As a casual observer, Intel seems to have commitment issues. It's not like they haven't made or are not making attempts in some of these markets but they can seem half-hearted even when those ventures aren't mothballed or sold off outright.
stefan_ 4y ago
CPUs are made on cutting-edge processes, the chip shortage was about jellybean or specialty chips made on very different (generally older) processes.

by jl6 4y ago

stephen_g 4y ago

They are very different types of goods... Food and energy are required by everyone, so when the supermarkets and energy companies decide to price gouge and profiteer (as they have been), people have few other options than just to pay the higher prices... People and businesses can mostly just delay buying new computers if they are too expensive.

jnovek 4y ago

If I understand the situation correctly, most of the chips in short supply use old fab processes which are not Intel's specialty.

pjc50 4y ago

There was huge purchasing of equipment at the start of the pandemic to enable work-from-home. Most of which is still current enough to not need replacing. Meanwhile it's possible that the high food and energy prices are impacting the amount of money available to spend on tech goods ..

windowsrookie 4y ago

At the beginning of the chip shortage, Intel's CPU just weren't very good. AMD was beating them at performance and efficiency. Intel has caught up now, but their chips still use significantly more power than the current AMD chips. Intel spent a lot of time and money developing their new Arc GPUs. They were delayed and they missed the crypto boom. Drivers and GPU performance were disappointing even after delaying the launch. This first generation of intel GPUs will be a huge loss for them. Intel is less diversified today. They sold their LTE modem business to apple a few years ago. Intel exited the ARM chip business ~15 years ago, right before the smartphone took off. Intel is now losing the server chip business. AMD is making competitive sever chips for a lower price. Larger companies are developing their own ARM-based server chips. Intel is going to start using their foundries to manufacture chips for other customers. It remains to be seen if Intel can compete with TSMC.

rektide 4y ago
To their credit, the gpu drivers have continued getting much much better, much faster. Intel has long understood the value of drivers, has been one of the primary contributors & drivers of really good open source (albeit with some frustrating areas of sore neglect, like GMA500/Poulso) (But also rip the incredible http://01.org http://01.org those folks were amazing at finding high value open source work to do!). Im glad to see making an already quite reasonable priced value GPU a lot better. But yeah the timing is after the GPU craze. And Intel has been tweaking the same way-too-big big core for too too long & is uncompetitive. And they've been hurting to get a 7nm process (Intel 4) going. A lot of change is necessary.
- seunosewa 4y ago
  AI has kickstarted a new GPU craze. Hope they catch this one.
- philistine 4y ago
  One could conceivably assume that they're talking to Sony and Microsoft about putting their GPUs in their next consoles. I'm not sure Microsoft would bite for compatibility reasons but Sony seems ready to make another blunder.
  - windowsrookie 4y ago
    It's possible, but AMD has supplied console APUs for two generations now because they are willing to sell them for cheap. Intel has never been interested in low-margin items, but they may need to be in the future. AMD has really targeted the gaming APU market. They make the chips for the Playstation, Xbox, and Steam deck. They also recently announced a new chip for gaming handhelds that Asus is using in their new ROG Ally device.
- zvr 4y ago
  https://open.intel.com https://open.intel.com is the successor of 01.org.
dralley 4y ago

Aromasin 4y ago

In 2020, Intel generated a record $35.4 billion cash from operations and $21.1 billion of free cash flow (FCF) and returned $19.8 billion to shareholders. They profited massively, and put their dividend up 5%. They brought in Gelsinger and used that cash to build 2 new leading edge fans, and upgrade capacity on newer ones. Then the economic downturn happened, and sales dwindled. They're making less revenue but still funding the production of new fabs. That coincided with a weak roadmap. Sapphire Rapids is only just starting to ramp, after a nearly 3 year gap in their Xeon roadmap.

mrtweetyhack 4y ago
[dead]

steveBK123 4y ago

They missed the boat on 2 biggest growth areas: ARM (mobile) & GPU (gaming, crypto, AI), and screwed up x86 (AMD made some better chips / Apple walked away). Screwing 1 of those up is a problem, screwing up all 3 simultaneously is near-bankrupting.

karmakaze 4y ago
Their development model was 'tick / tock'[0] with the tick being smaller processes, increased frequency, lower-power. All of those are largely outsourced (or outsourceable) to a fab. The tock step was introduction of new microarchitectures. Intel has been historically hit or miss with this, the default is to take what they did and do more of it rather than come up with entirely new and sound designs. I would say for large established companies the greatest factor in these kinds of differences is how high the engineering culture goes up the reporting chain. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick%E2%80%93tock_model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick%E2%80%93tock_model
- steveBK123 4y ago
  Yeah that was their well known dev model for many decades. However they seem to have missed a number of tick cycles as of late, so their efficiency gap to ARM got worse and worse.
dehrmann 4y ago
> AMD made some better chips / Apple walked away This means Intel didn't lose Apple just because of execution because Apple could have trivially gone to AMD.
Clamchop 4y ago
As a casual observer, Intel seems to have commitment issues. It's not like they haven't made or are not making attempts in some of these markets but they can seem half-hearted even when those ventures aren't mothballed or sold off outright.

stefan_ 4y ago

CPUs are made on cutting-edge processes, the chip shortage was about jellybean or specialty chips made on very different (generally older) processes.