8 ms·

Funny enough, I predicted this in a previous HZ comment 3 months ago when they cut their server systems business. > "My guess is that they're cutting the portf

Funny enough, I predicted this in a previous HZ comment 3 months ago when they cut their server systems business. > "My guess is that they're cutting the portfolio down to feature only chipsets and add-in cards. Just CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, ASICs, networking. It makes sense if anything - it really focuses on their core business. No more side-projects with questionable profitability. In the last 2 years since Pat Gelsinger took over, they've cut RealSense, Movidius, Optane Memory, IPO'd MobileEye, and now exited the Server Systems business. The only odd-ball left are their NUC business." If any hedge funds are looking for analysts, I'm always open to offers... It's sad to NUCs go, but it was inevitable. They made products for customers, while simultaneously competing with said customers. It's hard to build any decent partnerships on that premise. I'm currently typing this on a Serpent Canyon NUC though, so it's certainly bittersweet.

mschuster91 3y ago
> It's sad to NUCs go, but it was inevitable. No business decision is inevitable and we should stop acting otherwise.
touisteur 3y ago
A bit off mark on networking, looking at Tofino there. Could have maybe left barefoot alone, but no, buy it, hype it, actually tape out and start delivering nextgen, then cancel before people rack them.
- unmole 3y ago
  > then cancel before people rack them It's worse than that. We built Tofino powered boxes. We have multiple paying customers who bought and deployed them. Intel then cancelled it, screwing us and our customers.
- Aromasin 3y ago
  I was thinking more so their Ethernet and Wireless product portfolio than the Tofino line: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/overview.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/overview.ht... With regards to Tofino, I think they've looked at the portfolio and realized they can fill that niche with their FPGA products. Looks like they've stripped out all the useful IP from Barefoot and repackaged it to be used on a Stratix/Agilex chips, or as tiles on their other devices.
  - touisteur 3y ago
    I didn't want to be a pain, but I'm still waiting on a 200G (QSFP56) 400G (QSFP-DD or QSFP112) Ethernet NIC and some kind of user-programmable (and no FPGA isn't a panacea here for many reasons) packet pipelining. Connect-X (from 5 onward) is king there and of course it's all closed. You also get Broadcom stuff there. But no Intel. Oh you can build crazy 800G (or up to 1200G) stuff (that don't fit PCIe bandwidth) but the entry price is quite steep, see https://www.reflexces.com/pcie-boards/intel-stratix-10-fpga/xpressgx-s10-fh800g https://www.reflexces.com/pcie-boards/intel-stratix-10-fpga/... The real interesting part of the Tofino line was the advent of P4, for smart network switch and eventually some processing in network, scatter-gather support or all-reduce. Some competition for nvswitches but on standard Ethernet for example.
nextos 3y ago
Sad news. NUCs could have been an excellent platform if they had tried to work a bit more on cooling. On third-party cases, NUCs were great. But on stock cases, some models were too noisy. Still, they provided great value. Nonetheless, I agree it's better for Intel to focus on their core business and leave this market to others. Some niche PC makers such as Cirrus7 offer great NUC-like systems.
- gowld 3y ago
  Apple worked hard to make cooling work in the Mac Mini, and now the M series of CPUs. Intel just slapped a chip in a generic case.
  - mike_d 3y ago
    > Intel just slapped a chip in a generic case. The "NUC" was actually an Intel developed form factor, smaller than Micro ATX. They had to engineer motherboards, power supplies, and cooling for the extremely small footprint. They were available as barebones kits (without a CPU), so literally the exact opposite of what you suggest.
    - simondotau 3y ago
      An alternative take is that the NUC is made of laptop parts, with a footprint, thermal capacity and level of bespoke-ness similar to a typical laptop.
  - wpm 3y ago
    My 2018 i7 begs to differ. The cooling was never adequate enough for that chip even at 65W. Now it’s comically overpowered. For 25-35W TDPs the chassis is fine, but Intel couldn’t deliver performance there. Apple should have retooled the case, not slapped it in there anyways. At one point when I had to use that i7 everyday I debated if it would be worth it to hack a proper PC tower cooler onto it and operate it outside the case.
- windexh8er 3y ago
  NUC, depending on the model, had decent cooling. I've owned a few of them over the years. My Skull Canyon having been my longest desktop computer ever and always had great Linux support. Funny enough the fan on that unit was recalled and Intel happily replaced it well out of warranty. But with the advent of Minisforum, Beelink and all the other random options on AliExpress I would gather it's been getting harder and harder to command a premium price because it says Intel on the box. In fact I just ordered a Topton SFF that STH recommended but was waiting until the i3-N305 was available for a new OpnSense build. I wonder how this impacts emerging markets for Intel. If they've got no outlets to test their own product uptake and get people excited about the brand I feel like that's a missed opportunity and the cost of doing business. I saw a lot of NUC devices in data centers in the VMware hayday because they were so widely popular on TinkerTry and Virtually Gheto (i.e. William Lam) at the time. I saw security vendors copy that play making SFF firewalls to incent stakeholders to run at home that turned into 7-figure deals over the long term. I don't think Gelsinger is doing a lot of good for Intel. You didn't need him to cut costs. He's had plenty of time behind the wheel at this point, Intel should be on a more interesting trajectory by now.
rcme 3y ago
Isn’t this basically the innovator’s dilemma? You can call it focusing the core business, but you can also call it dropping investment in long term cash flows.
- anonylizard 3y ago
  That's not the innovator's dilemma. The dilemma is when you have tech A: Profitable and large. Tech B: Unprofitable and small, but the tech itself improves at a faster rate than tech A. GPUs were their true dilemma. GPUs were only good for gamers, who are picky and extremely value sensitive. Whereas CPUs could be sold to datacenters and enterprises, very high profit margins. Hence CPUs were core at intel, no one has the balls to bet on GPUs and go all in. But CPUs ran out of performance improvements, GPUs continue to scale up because of parallelism. Then suddenly, new valuable applications started to be based on GPUs, first Crypto, now AI. Now CPUs are completely commoditized, and Nvidia dominates the money-printing GPU market, and worth 8x of intel. NUCs are not some rapidly improving tech, they are just some minor market that is profitable but never that large.
  - unixhero 3y ago
    > NUCs are not some rapidly improving tech, they are just some minor market that is profitable but never that large. Everything doesn't have to be
- scarface_74 3y ago
  The NUC was never going to be a mass market product. Sure Apple sells the Mac Mini. But the entire Mac line is only 10% of Apple’s revenue and most of that is laptops. But Apple has to support its ecosystem as its only supplier. Intel doesn’t And besides, a NUC based on x86 chips is by definition going to suck at either performance or heat.
  - DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
    > Sure Apple sells the Mac Mini. But the entire Mac line is only 10% of Apple’s revenue and most of that is laptops The 10% figure is spot-on and that really threw me - I was expecting something like 25-30%: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/FY22_Q4_Consolidated_Financial_Statements.pdf https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/FY22_Q4_Consolidated_Fin... It’s unnerving that Apple is effectively dependent on a single product line to subsidise everything: Apple Silicon must have cost tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars to get to where the M2 chip is today (including acquisitions) - but it only exists today all because of the A-series SoC in the iPhone: without the iPhone Apple would likely be still dependent on Intel for Mac chips. The iPhone isn’t going away any time soon - but when/if that day comes, Apple is going to be faced with having to maintain all those iPhone-originated projects with no easy way to walk them down (e.g. switching from Apple Silicon back to Intel - or stock ARM - is going to damage Apple’s credibility for years). I’m concerned Apple might be painting themselves into a corner by continuing to shed businesses it isn’t interested in that might be a useful lifeline in a post-iPhone world, like their XServe hardware - or even their MacPro workstations: Apple has seemingly intentionally priced themselves out of reach of smaller and indie creative-types - while at the high-end (movies, etc) the great migration from FCP-on-Mac to Avid-on-Windows took place almost a decade ago - and the lack of PCI-Ex GPUs in the 2023 M2 MacPro is further evidence, to me at-least, that Apple is increasingly uninterested in the Workstation market - which leaves them with less access to trend-setting professionals - which erodes their ability to compete, long-term, imo. Intel killing-off the NUC is unfortunate, but ultimately is not Intel’s core business (chipmaking) which remains their priority. I don’t blame Intel for doing that; but it would be the same thing if Apple killed-off their Mac Studio line (they even look-alike): it isn’t their (current) core-business - but as Apple sheds - or neglects - its old core-businesses (i.e. computers) it leaves them with fewer contingency options.
kfinley 3y ago
> If any hedge funds are looking for analysts, I'm always open to offers... How would you invest based on this prediction?
- Aromasin 3y ago
  Depends on the portfolio and strategy, but personally I think Intel is a Buy. They're burning money building new fabs with little indication that they can execute on their node or product roadmaps, but they've really took a chunk out of their cost-centre to the point where even during one of their worst quarters in the last 30+ years in terms of sales, they're still turning a profit. The Saphire Rapids Xeon is out finally out and making money after 3+ years of delays. The client products are the best they've looked in 15 years. They've got some big customers lined up for IFS. Considering the market was happy to price them at ~$64 just two years ago without all that information, makes me believe $33 is a poor market for where they're at. That's near enough their asset price.
halicarnassus 3y ago
> It's sad to NUCs go, but it was inevitable. They made products for customers, while simultaneously competing with said customers. That is true, but they're already a decade into shipping NUCs. Maybe it wasn't a problem after all. It could also be just a move to show the stock market that they focus on getting leaner. RIP NUC :'(
- Aromasin 3y ago
  You can then argue that they've spent the last decade slipping into irrelevance, so perhaps the NUC focus was a distraction from their core issues. They're at an inflection point in the company where either they turn the ship around and successfully become the second largest foundry, closing their technology gap with TSMC, or they continue losing market share. They can't fund new fabs and new nodes without a massive reduction in their cost center.
etempleton 3y ago
I always saw the NUCs as proof of concept for small form factor PCs and to that end I think they have succeeded. There are a ton of different form factors now.
- basch 3y ago
  Didn’t Intel used to be pretty up front that the NUC was a way to push computer manufacturers to be more innovative? Sort of like a widely available reference computer. By making them without RAM and SSD they were never going to be that profitable. It was nice being able to buy boxes without wasted parts you knew you didn’t want.
- gloryjulio 3y ago
  The probably is that the amd apu is just better and more balanced now. You get lower tdp + better graphic cards. So ppl would just buy the amd counter part
berkle4455 3y ago
> If any hedge funds are looking for analysts, I'm always open to offers... $INTC has done a whole lot of nothing for the past 9 months, I don’t think any hedge funds care short or long.
- Aromasin 3y ago
  I just said that as joke; you couldn't get me into finance unless you had a gun to my head. I do think long though, Intel makes for an interesting investment. It plays in about the 70th percentile for stock volatility for the year, which for a name like Intel is quite surprising. Analysts put it somewhere between -50% and +100% by this time next year. I've read of hedge funds making big bets on way smaller spreads than that. They're 25% YTD, so it's by know means "nothing".
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
hodgesrm 3y ago
> It's sad to NUCs go, but it was inevitable. Nooooo! This is a tragedy. I love my NUC. It's totally handy to have a little computer on my desk to load up with whatever Linux distro I please and play around. NUC is way better than Raspberry PI.
undersuit 3y ago
As an everyday user of an Intel Compute Stick I can empathize with this. I think you're wrong about the Intel portfolio though; Arc GPUs are another line that is going to be unceremoniously cut in a few years. I mean I could be wrong, but Intel has gotta be looking at Nvidia's Hopper or AMD's MI300 DATA oriented architectures and wondering why the Arc team is trying to make $750 gaming computers. Xe GPUs are going a different direction from consumer Arc GPUs already anyways.
- paulmd 3y ago
  > I mean I could be wrong, but Intel has gotta be looking at Nvidia's Hopper or AMD's MI300 DATA oriented architectures and wondering why the Arc team is trying to make $750 gaming computers. That's the same strategy AMD has tried with ROCm (de-facto pro-only compute ecosystem) and it hasn't worked. Nobody is going to buy a $5000 accelerator card (or even rent AWS time) just to tinker with your ecosystem unless it's already known to be the bees' knees. NVIDIA built their success by making sure their cards were the first thing people reached for when they wanted to build a high-performance application on a compute accelerator. Further, there's a lot of redundant work and overlapping lines of business here. You have to develop game drivers for the iGPU for anyone to take you seriously, so at that point why not make the dGPU cards and increase the ROI multiplier of your work? Or are you planning on outsourcing the whole shebang and just licensing a hardware SIP core and a driver stack? There's really only two other names with a credible Windows/Linux driver stack... NVIDIA and AMD. Imagination/PowerVR don't have any windows presence, and Intel already tried this back in the early Atom era and it fucking sucked. Like yea you've actually pointed out the exact reason they won't cut it: Hopper or MI300 is where the HPC and performance-compute segments are going and you can't be credible in that space without an internal solution for the accelerator half. It doesn't have to be GPUs, or they don't need to have graphics pipelines, but once you are doing all the work to develop the GPGPU side, you might as well make a variant with a pixel pipeline and display outputs and sell it to enthusiasts too. The semiconductor space has a lot of these overlaps in product verticals, and if you choose not to be in them, you're leaving revenue on the table that is relatively "cheap" to access. The same CPU uarchs that work in enterprise work in consumer, and in the grand scheme of things re-using the same uarch for a low-margin product is fine. You'd never pay to develop the product from scratch just for the consumer market, but once you've done the work, you might as well sell it to consumers too. If you're doing consumer, you probably want to be doing laptop too, but those need iGPUs. Which need drivers, and if you're doing drivers you might as well do dGPUs too. Intel doesn't need to be exactly AMD, but AMD has gone through this and already cut to the bone on everything they didn't need. You can draw a circle around the product verticals they're in and they've pretty much identified the core business requirements for the CPU/GPU markets. You're right though that Gelsinger is obviously stripping the business down to his own vision of those essentials. I just think right now the evidence indicates that GPUs are still a part of that vision. You can't be competitive in HPC without GPGPU, you can't do laptop without iGPU, they might as well do gaming GPUs too, especially since a lot of the GPGPU research will overlap. The drivers don't, but you have to do them for iGPU anyway for laptops. The fabs are the rough one though. They're expensive as shit, but all intel's legacy IP uses them, and the only thing the fabs run is Intel's IP. I think he's serious about building the wall between IP and fab at intel, and about bringing in external business, but right now there is no hope of even a GloFo-style spinoff working. It would absolutely take down both halves of the company to even try. He's definitely got a tough road, Intel's pain is only just beginning and it's going to be a long time to profitability.
paulmd 3y ago
> They made products for customers, while simultaneously competing with said customers. It's hard to build any decent partnerships on that premise. I once talked to an AMD engineer and asked why they didn't just build a barebones NAS chassis with some of their ryzen embedded stuff since Ryzen is quite popular but there's very few Ryzen products in that segment. Obviously QNAP and Synology have some decent demand. That's basically what they said, didn't want to compete with customers. GPUs are sort of the opposite example where I don't really feel any particular attachment to MSI, Gigabyte, Asus, PowerColor, etc. EVGA and Sapphire are the only ones that have managed to claw together some consumer mindshare through their warranties. But the rest are essentially customizing an AMD/NVIDIA reference design PCB and a cooler that's perfectly forgettable and interchangeable with any other offering in their price class. They're not even allowed to do double VRAM configs anymore because that would cut into Radeon Pro and Quadro revenue etc. In that scenario I don't see a lot of value to having another middleman taking a 10% cut, and to me the value of products being available at MSRP, with no diffusion of blame through the supply chain, would be worth losing the partners over. And while systems integration (NUCs, servers, etc) are clearly something where there's a lot of value from this kind of diversity, motherboards really are not. AMD and Intel have both killed off third-party chipsets like nForce, Abit, etc, and locked everything down to their one ecosystem they control, much like GPUs. It's not quite as pronounced as GPUs, and previously there was a lot of diversity in features, but PCIe 5.0 motherboards tend to reverse this, almost every board has exactly 2 PCIe slots and more or less the exact same featureset elsewhere. And the trend is towards more and more being onboard the CPU itself anyway (AMD chips the chipset is literally just an IO expander and is completely uninvolved in management tasks) and once onboard voltage regulators (FIVR, DLVR, etc) really start to take off in the next 10-15 years the motherboard is only going to become dumber and dumber. And in that world there's less and less of a need for a partner anyway - the CPU is all self-contained and locked down anyway, partners can't experiment and do cool things, they are a dumb pipe that pumps in 2V for the DLVR to step down at point-of-use. So why pay a 10% margin for their "value-add"? It slays me that AMD is talking a big game about "open platform" and everyone is still locking down third-party chipsets and even the Platform Lock. If you want to lock the chip to the board for security, fine, but locking it to the brand doesn't do anything except ruin the secondhand market. Oh no I have to swap it out with another lenovo chip if I steal it, what exactly does that accomplish? And if you accept the conceit of the PSP there's no reason it has to be permanent anyway, you can allow the PSP to unlock it instead of permanently blowing e-fuses. And again, third-party chipsets are where a ton of innovation happened, it's better for the market if third parties can make those double-VRAM models and undercut AMD/NVIDIA's ridiculous margins on those workstation products, or shanghai a Celeron 300A into being a dual-socket system like Abit. What we have right now is tivoization in support of product segmentation, branded as a "security feature".

mschuster91 3y ago

> It's sad to NUCs go, but it was inevitable. No business decision is inevitable and we should stop acting otherwise.

touisteur 3y ago

A bit off mark on networking, looking at Tofino there. Could have maybe left barefoot alone, but no, buy it, hype it, actually tape out and start delivering nextgen, then cancel before people rack them.

unmole 3y ago
> then cancel before people rack them It's worse than that. We built Tofino powered boxes. We have multiple paying customers who bought and deployed them. Intel then cancelled it, screwing us and our customers.
Aromasin 3y ago
I was thinking more so their Ethernet and Wireless product portfolio than the Tofino line: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/overview.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/overview.ht... With regards to Tofino, I think they've looked at the portfolio and realized they can fill that niche with their FPGA products. Looks like they've stripped out all the useful IP from Barefoot and repackaged it to be used on a Stratix/Agilex chips, or as tiles on their other devices.
- touisteur 3y ago
  I didn't want to be a pain, but I'm still waiting on a 200G (QSFP56) 400G (QSFP-DD or QSFP112) Ethernet NIC and some kind of user-programmable (and no FPGA isn't a panacea here for many reasons) packet pipelining. Connect-X (from 5 onward) is king there and of course it's all closed. You also get Broadcom stuff there. But no Intel. Oh you can build crazy 800G (or up to 1200G) stuff (that don't fit PCIe bandwidth) but the entry price is quite steep, see https://www.reflexces.com/pcie-boards/intel-stratix-10-fpga/xpressgx-s10-fh800g https://www.reflexces.com/pcie-boards/intel-stratix-10-fpga/... The real interesting part of the Tofino line was the advent of P4, for smart network switch and eventually some processing in network, scatter-gather support or all-reduce. Some competition for nvswitches but on standard Ethernet for example.

nextos 3y ago

Sad news. NUCs could have been an excellent platform if they had tried to work a bit more on cooling. On third-party cases, NUCs were great. But on stock cases, some models were too noisy. Still, they provided great value. Nonetheless, I agree it's better for Intel to focus on their core business and leave this market to others. Some niche PC makers such as Cirrus7 offer great NUC-like systems.

gowld 3y ago
Apple worked hard to make cooling work in the Mac Mini, and now the M series of CPUs. Intel just slapped a chip in a generic case.
- mike_d 3y ago
  > Intel just slapped a chip in a generic case. The "NUC" was actually an Intel developed form factor, smaller than Micro ATX. They had to engineer motherboards, power supplies, and cooling for the extremely small footprint. They were available as barebones kits (without a CPU), so literally the exact opposite of what you suggest.
  - simondotau 3y ago
    An alternative take is that the NUC is made of laptop parts, with a footprint, thermal capacity and level of bespoke-ness similar to a typical laptop.
- wpm 3y ago
  My 2018 i7 begs to differ. The cooling was never adequate enough for that chip even at 65W. Now it’s comically overpowered. For 25-35W TDPs the chassis is fine, but Intel couldn’t deliver performance there. Apple should have retooled the case, not slapped it in there anyways. At one point when I had to use that i7 everyday I debated if it would be worth it to hack a proper PC tower cooler onto it and operate it outside the case.
windexh8er 3y ago
NUC, depending on the model, had decent cooling. I've owned a few of them over the years. My Skull Canyon having been my longest desktop computer ever and always had great Linux support. Funny enough the fan on that unit was recalled and Intel happily replaced it well out of warranty. But with the advent of Minisforum, Beelink and all the other random options on AliExpress I would gather it's been getting harder and harder to command a premium price because it says Intel on the box. In fact I just ordered a Topton SFF that STH recommended but was waiting until the i3-N305 was available for a new OpnSense build. I wonder how this impacts emerging markets for Intel. If they've got no outlets to test their own product uptake and get people excited about the brand I feel like that's a missed opportunity and the cost of doing business. I saw a lot of NUC devices in data centers in the VMware hayday because they were so widely popular on TinkerTry and Virtually Gheto (i.e. William Lam) at the time. I saw security vendors copy that play making SFF firewalls to incent stakeholders to run at home that turned into 7-figure deals over the long term. I don't think Gelsinger is doing a lot of good for Intel. You didn't need him to cut costs. He's had plenty of time behind the wheel at this point, Intel should be on a more interesting trajectory by now.

rcme 3y ago

Isn’t this basically the innovator’s dilemma? You can call it focusing the core business, but you can also call it dropping investment in long term cash flows.

anonylizard 3y ago
That's not the innovator's dilemma. The dilemma is when you have tech A: Profitable and large. Tech B: Unprofitable and small, but the tech itself improves at a faster rate than tech A. GPUs were their true dilemma. GPUs were only good for gamers, who are picky and extremely value sensitive. Whereas CPUs could be sold to datacenters and enterprises, very high profit margins. Hence CPUs were core at intel, no one has the balls to bet on GPUs and go all in. But CPUs ran out of performance improvements, GPUs continue to scale up because of parallelism. Then suddenly, new valuable applications started to be based on GPUs, first Crypto, now AI. Now CPUs are completely commoditized, and Nvidia dominates the money-printing GPU market, and worth 8x of intel. NUCs are not some rapidly improving tech, they are just some minor market that is profitable but never that large.
- unixhero 3y ago
  > NUCs are not some rapidly improving tech, they are just some minor market that is profitable but never that large. Everything doesn't have to be
scarface_74 3y ago
The NUC was never going to be a mass market product. Sure Apple sells the Mac Mini. But the entire Mac line is only 10% of Apple’s revenue and most of that is laptops. But Apple has to support its ecosystem as its only supplier. Intel doesn’t And besides, a NUC based on x86 chips is by definition going to suck at either performance or heat.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y ago
  > Sure Apple sells the Mac Mini. But the entire Mac line is only 10% of Apple’s revenue and most of that is laptops The 10% figure is spot-on and that really threw me - I was expecting something like 25-30%: https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/FY22_Q4_Consolidated_Financial_Statements.pdf https://www.apple.com/newsroom/pdfs/FY22_Q4_Consolidated_Fin... It’s unnerving that Apple is effectively dependent on a single product line to subsidise everything: Apple Silicon must have cost tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars to get to where the M2 chip is today (including acquisitions) - but it only exists today all because of the A-series SoC in the iPhone: without the iPhone Apple would likely be still dependent on Intel for Mac chips. The iPhone isn’t going away any time soon - but when/if that day comes, Apple is going to be faced with having to maintain all those iPhone-originated projects with no easy way to walk them down (e.g. switching from Apple Silicon back to Intel - or stock ARM - is going to damage Apple’s credibility for years). I’m concerned Apple might be painting themselves into a corner by continuing to shed businesses it isn’t interested in that might be a useful lifeline in a post-iPhone world, like their XServe hardware - or even their MacPro workstations: Apple has seemingly intentionally priced themselves out of reach of smaller and indie creative-types - while at the high-end (movies, etc) the great migration from FCP-on-Mac to Avid-on-Windows took place almost a decade ago - and the lack of PCI-Ex GPUs in the 2023 M2 MacPro is further evidence, to me at-least, that Apple is increasingly uninterested in the Workstation market - which leaves them with less access to trend-setting professionals - which erodes their ability to compete, long-term, imo. Intel killing-off the NUC is unfortunate, but ultimately is not Intel’s core business (chipmaking) which remains their priority. I don’t blame Intel for doing that; but it would be the same thing if Apple killed-off their Mac Studio line (they even look-alike): it isn’t their (current) core-business - but as Apple sheds - or neglects - its old core-businesses (i.e. computers) it leaves them with fewer contingency options.

kfinley 3y ago

> If any hedge funds are looking for analysts, I'm always open to offers... How would you invest based on this prediction?

Aromasin 3y ago
Depends on the portfolio and strategy, but personally I think Intel is a Buy. They're burning money building new fabs with little indication that they can execute on their node or product roadmaps, but they've really took a chunk out of their cost-centre to the point where even during one of their worst quarters in the last 30+ years in terms of sales, they're still turning a profit. The Saphire Rapids Xeon is out finally out and making money after 3+ years of delays. The client products are the best they've looked in 15 years. They've got some big customers lined up for IFS. Considering the market was happy to price them at ~$64 just two years ago without all that information, makes me believe $33 is a poor market for where they're at. That's near enough their asset price.

halicarnassus 3y ago

> It's sad to NUCs go, but it was inevitable. They made products for customers, while simultaneously competing with said customers. That is true, but they're already a decade into shipping NUCs. Maybe it wasn't a problem after all. It could also be just a move to show the stock market that they focus on getting leaner. RIP NUC :'(

Aromasin 3y ago
You can then argue that they've spent the last decade slipping into irrelevance, so perhaps the NUC focus was a distraction from their core issues. They're at an inflection point in the company where either they turn the ship around and successfully become the second largest foundry, closing their technology gap with TSMC, or they continue losing market share. They can't fund new fabs and new nodes without a massive reduction in their cost center.

etempleton 3y ago

I always saw the NUCs as proof of concept for small form factor PCs and to that end I think they have succeeded. There are a ton of different form factors now.

basch 3y ago
Didn’t Intel used to be pretty up front that the NUC was a way to push computer manufacturers to be more innovative? Sort of like a widely available reference computer. By making them without RAM and SSD they were never going to be that profitable. It was nice being able to buy boxes without wasted parts you knew you didn’t want.
gloryjulio 3y ago
The probably is that the amd apu is just better and more balanced now. You get lower tdp + better graphic cards. So ppl would just buy the amd counter part

berkle4455 3y ago

> If any hedge funds are looking for analysts, I'm always open to offers... $INTC has done a whole lot of nothing for the past 9 months, I don’t think any hedge funds care short or long.

Aromasin 3y ago
I just said that as joke; you couldn't get me into finance unless you had a gun to my head. I do think long though, Intel makes for an interesting investment. It plays in about the 70th percentile for stock volatility for the year, which for a name like Intel is quite surprising. Analysts put it somewhere between -50% and +100% by this time next year. I've read of hedge funds making big bets on way smaller spreads than that. They're 25% YTD, so it's by know means "nothing".

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

hodgesrm 3y ago

> It's sad to NUCs go, but it was inevitable. Nooooo! This is a tragedy. I love my NUC. It's totally handy to have a little computer on my desk to load up with whatever Linux distro I please and play around. NUC is way better than Raspberry PI.

undersuit 3y ago

As an everyday user of an Intel Compute Stick I can empathize with this. I think you're wrong about the Intel portfolio though; Arc GPUs are another line that is going to be unceremoniously cut in a few years. I mean I could be wrong, but Intel has gotta be looking at Nvidia's Hopper or AMD's MI300 DATA oriented architectures and wondering why the Arc team is trying to make $750 gaming computers. Xe GPUs are going a different direction from consumer Arc GPUs already anyways.

paulmd 3y ago
> I mean I could be wrong, but Intel has gotta be looking at Nvidia's Hopper or AMD's MI300 DATA oriented architectures and wondering why the Arc team is trying to make $750 gaming computers. That's the same strategy AMD has tried with ROCm (de-facto pro-only compute ecosystem) and it hasn't worked. Nobody is going to buy a $5000 accelerator card (or even rent AWS time) just to tinker with your ecosystem unless it's already known to be the bees' knees. NVIDIA built their success by making sure their cards were the first thing people reached for when they wanted to build a high-performance application on a compute accelerator. Further, there's a lot of redundant work and overlapping lines of business here. You have to develop game drivers for the iGPU for anyone to take you seriously, so at that point why not make the dGPU cards and increase the ROI multiplier of your work? Or are you planning on outsourcing the whole shebang and just licensing a hardware SIP core and a driver stack? There's really only two other names with a credible Windows/Linux driver stack... NVIDIA and AMD. Imagination/PowerVR don't have any windows presence, and Intel already tried this back in the early Atom era and it fucking sucked. Like yea you've actually pointed out the exact reason they won't cut it: Hopper or MI300 is where the HPC and performance-compute segments are going and you can't be credible in that space without an internal solution for the accelerator half. It doesn't have to be GPUs, or they don't need to have graphics pipelines, but once you are doing all the work to develop the GPGPU side, you might as well make a variant with a pixel pipeline and display outputs and sell it to enthusiasts too. The semiconductor space has a lot of these overlaps in product verticals, and if you choose not to be in them, you're leaving revenue on the table that is relatively "cheap" to access. The same CPU uarchs that work in enterprise work in consumer, and in the grand scheme of things re-using the same uarch for a low-margin product is fine. You'd never pay to develop the product from scratch just for the consumer market, but once you've done the work, you might as well sell it to consumers too. If you're doing consumer, you probably want to be doing laptop too, but those need iGPUs. Which need drivers, and if you're doing drivers you might as well do dGPUs too. Intel doesn't need to be exactly AMD, but AMD has gone through this and already cut to the bone on everything they didn't need. You can draw a circle around the product verticals they're in and they've pretty much identified the core business requirements for the CPU/GPU markets. You're right though that Gelsinger is obviously stripping the business down to his own vision of those essentials. I just think right now the evidence indicates that GPUs are still a part of that vision. You can't be competitive in HPC without GPGPU, you can't do laptop without iGPU, they might as well do gaming GPUs too, especially since a lot of the GPGPU research will overlap. The drivers don't, but you have to do them for iGPU anyway for laptops. The fabs are the rough one though. They're expensive as shit, but all intel's legacy IP uses them, and the only thing the fabs run is Intel's IP. I think he's serious about building the wall between IP and fab at intel, and about bringing in external business, but right now there is no hope of even a GloFo-style spinoff working. It would absolutely take down both halves of the company to even try. He's definitely got a tough road, Intel's pain is only just beginning and it's going to be a long time to profitability.

paulmd 3y ago

> They made products for customers, while simultaneously competing with said customers. It's hard to build any decent partnerships on that premise. I once talked to an AMD engineer and asked why they didn't just build a barebones NAS chassis with some of their ryzen embedded stuff since Ryzen is quite popular but there's very few Ryzen products in that segment. Obviously QNAP and Synology have some decent demand. That's basically what they said, didn't want to compete with customers. GPUs are sort of the opposite example where I don't really feel any particular attachment to MSI, Gigabyte, Asus, PowerColor, etc. EVGA and Sapphire are the only ones that have managed to claw together some consumer mindshare through their warranties. But the rest are essentially customizing an AMD/NVIDIA reference design PCB and a cooler that's perfectly forgettable and interchangeable with any other offering in their price class. They're not even allowed to do double VRAM configs anymore because that would cut into Radeon Pro and Quadro revenue etc. In that scenario I don't see a lot of value to having another middleman taking a 10% cut, and to me the value of products being available at MSRP, with no diffusion of blame through the supply chain, would be worth losing the partners over. And while systems integration (NUCs, servers, etc) are clearly something where there's a lot of value from this kind of diversity, motherboards really are not. AMD and Intel have both killed off third-party chipsets like nForce, Abit, etc, and locked everything down to their one ecosystem they control, much like GPUs. It's not quite as pronounced as GPUs, and previously there was a lot of diversity in features, but PCIe 5.0 motherboards tend to reverse this, almost every board has exactly 2 PCIe slots and more or less the exact same featureset elsewhere. And the trend is towards more and more being onboard the CPU itself anyway (AMD chips the chipset is literally just an IO expander and is completely uninvolved in management tasks) and once onboard voltage regulators (FIVR, DLVR, etc) really start to take off in the next 10-15 years the motherboard is only going to become dumber and dumber. And in that world there's less and less of a need for a partner anyway - the CPU is all self-contained and locked down anyway, partners can't experiment and do cool things, they are a dumb pipe that pumps in 2V for the DLVR to step down at point-of-use. So why pay a 10% margin for their "value-add"? It slays me that AMD is talking a big game about "open platform" and everyone is still locking down third-party chipsets and even the Platform Lock. If you want to lock the chip to the board for security, fine, but locking it to the brand doesn't do anything except ruin the secondhand market. Oh no I have to swap it out with another lenovo chip if I steal it, what exactly does that accomplish? And if you accept the conceit of the PSP there's no reason it has to be permanent anyway, you can allow the PSP to unlock it instead of permanently blowing e-fuses. And again, third-party chipsets are where a ton of innovation happened, it's better for the market if third parties can make those double-VRAM models and undercut AMD/NVIDIA's ridiculous margins on those workstation products, or shanghai a Celeron 300A into being a dual-socket system like Abit. What we have right now is tivoization in support of product segmentation, branded as a "security feature".