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Apparently they announced this in October. They are kicking Altera, which they acquired for 16.7 billion back out into the world to live or die on its own. Whic

Apparently they announced this in October. They are kicking Altera, which they acquired for 16.7 billion back out into the world to live or die on its own. Which feels a bit weird given what feels like AMD's relative success with Xilinx. It also dampens their "US developed" technology pitch (which they had been pushing pretty hard vs other solutions that were fabbed at TSMC) I wonder if they will also give up on their third party use of their fabs. Intel was the first "real" job I ever had and it was during Andy Grove's tenure as CEO and his "paranoid" attitude was really pervasive. I had been working on graphics chip which were the next big thing until the chip recession and then they weren't. And it followed a long series of Intel sending out tendrils outside its core microcomputer (eventually x86/x51 only) winners only to snap them back at the first sign of challenges. I wonder if we can get better open source tool support from the new entity. That would be a win.

AceJohnny2 3y ago
> I wonder if we can get better open source tool support from the new entity. That would be a win. Tragically, I wouldn't bet on it. In fact, I'd be shocked if that were to happen.
AceJohnny2 3y ago
> only to snap them back at the first sign of challenges. It's really quite impressive how bad Intel's track record has been. Would you say it's a broad cultural problem within Intel? Bad incentives? (I'b be interested if someone could come up with a list of all of Intel's failed ventures. StrongARM, Optane, Altera... Obviously some of these are par for the course for such a large company as Intel, but Intel still seems to stand out) (I know one reason Apple is so secretive about its ventures is because it knows many of them won't pan out, and it knows that due to its size anything it does has huge repercussions, and wants to avoid that)
- 1-6 3y ago
  When Intel does something like this, it reveals how tight their operating margin is. This is not a good sign. Intel has never been able to push away from the fact that they'll always be a hardware first company. It's a very tight market out there. TSMC was able to make it with very tight partnerships with OEMs and I doubt Intel can pull off something like that.
- ChuckMcM 3y ago
  I agree with 1-6 that they have always been really focused on their margins, they were never a company that wanted to go into debt for something that was 'unproven.' They have had lots of things they stopped doing, the graphics chip I was involved in (82786) was one, the speech chips, the iAPX431, the modem chips, their digital watch was an early one. I always saw it as an exceptionally low tolerance for risk. When I was their the 386 had just fabbed and I was one of the people watching when the very first chip was powered up and it actually worked (which amazed pretty much everyone). Sun Microsystems was a little startup in Mountain View using the 68000 and getting some traction I suggested to Intel that if they used the graphic chip I was working on and the 386 they could build an Intel branded "Workstation" and both replace the VAXStations they were using for CAD work internally and sell them as part of Intel's initiative to become a "systems company." I got a response to my memo[1] from Dave House who was later CEO but at the time just the head of Microprocessor Operation (MIPO) Marketing explaining to this lowly NCG (new college grad) that Workstations were not much of a market and Intel was only interested in pursuing the "big" opportunities. Six months later I joined Sun (just after they IPO'd sadly) and didn't look back. :-) [1] Yes memo, as in typed up and printed out and put in a manilla envelope where on the last line of the front had it coming from Dave and being addressed to me. And yes, it started as a memo I had printed out and given to my manager because while Intel had "heard" of electronic mail they preferred the "durability" of actual mail and forcing people to use actual mail cut down on "frivolous" communications.
  - FirmwareBurner 3y ago
    >I always saw it as an exceptionally low tolerance for risk. Big laugh at the claim of intel having a exceptionally low tolerance to risk when they're the only semi company left still running their own fabs, decades after AMD sold off their own for being too risky of a venture to keep running by themselves. And every fab company out there will vouch for how risky that line of business is. Even more so to pour billions into a business like this while knowing Samsung/TSMC might beat you. More correct would be that Intel has a low tolerance to risk for things that are way outside of their core competencies which have traditionally been designing X86 CPUs and fabbing them, and that's mostly it. I commend them for not giving up on advancing their fab nodes despite the massive issues and setbacks(they could have spun it off like AMD did), and for building the ARC GPUs and keep improving them despite low sales.
- drjasonharrison 3y ago
  Wikipedia has a partial list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Intel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... what it is missing is the eventual disposition of the acquisition (product brought to market, unit pushed out, unit closed down, ...).
raverbashing 3y ago
I think Intel is living their Nokia moment, except their lunch will be eaten much more slowly by the competition
burnte 3y ago
They do this so often, buy a company, sell it a few years later. So weird.
- lisper 3y ago
  Sometimes they don't even bother to sell it. In the case of Barefoot Networks, they bought it, spent three years developing the next-generation product, got it to within 80-90% of being ready for tapeout, and then just pulled the plug.
  - andrewia 3y ago
    One of my relatives is a high level Barefoot employee who was integrated into Intel leadership after the acquisition. I was told that it was killed because of worries about internal competition with Intel IPUs. It still seems like a ridiculously foolish idea, considering how much money Intel spent acquiring Barefoot. Not that the founders and CEO care, they got their money! The whole thing definitely seems symptomatic of Intel's extreme caution. I wonder why they didn't apply the same caution when buying Barefoot. Intel obviously didn't have a great idea on how to leverage them. This is all in stark contrast to AMD buying Pensando, a company that my SO works for. It makes sense for AMD to acquire Pensando to expand their data center offerings and compete directly with Intel. I think AMD made a smart buy.
    - burnte 3y ago
      > it was killed because of worries about internal competition with Intel IPUs So insane. It's always better in invent the next big thing that changes the market than a competitor, even if it kills another product of your own.
    - lisper 3y ago
      I was a part-time contractor for Barefoot, and came along for the ride during the acquisition, so I have some first-hand knowledge of this. I am very much out of the managerial loop so I have no insight into the actual motives for killing the project, but I can tell you that at least one of the founders cared very much and fought tooth and nail to keep it alive. > It still seems like a ridiculously foolish idea, considering how much money Intel spent acquiring Barefoot Acquiring companies in order to kill them is a horrible business practice but not unusual. The thing that makes no sense to me is why they kept it going for three years before killing it. If they bought it in order to kill it, they should have done that before spending another hundred million on it.
7speter 3y ago
I don’t know I don’t have the credentials to be an engineer at Intel, but I think they know its a bad idea to end or spin off their foundry service, especially now that they have a new client that will know the ins and outs of their fabrication process.
- nsteel 3y ago
  > will know the ins and outs of their fabrication process. What do you mean by this? When working with a fab you get to know their design rules and that's about it.
  - cma 3y ago
    I believe I've read that design rules give away parts of the process so usually you have to sign anexclusivity agreement not to work with another vendor for a while, or firewall teams that work with different vendors.
    - nsteel 3y ago
      I can't imagine what you could take from one place to another that isn't trivial if they've got to the point of being even able to provide the technology. In the grand scheme of things, these rules are relatively high level. There are NDAs but that's more about non-public roadmaps, timelines and specialised IP i.e. future things that a competitor could then have time to work towards. The point being, there's no world where a fab would worry about sharing their design rules.
      - cma 3y ago
        This is old and not the one I read, but what I could find through search: > Engineers needed manufacturing process information to verify that designs were free from systematic yield limiters, but foundries were reluctant to distribute process information that could reveal best practices and trade secrets. Encryption enabled the protection of selected design rules, process data and other information while still giving customers the details they needed. > In this discussion, you must understand that the required protection is much more than just an obfuscation of rule definitions so they are no longer human readable. The process also includes the encryption of related files and control over all the outputs from the tool environment that provide information about any checks. https://www.techdesignforums.com/practice/technique/protecting-ip-collaborative-signoff-environment/ https://www.techdesignforums.com/practice/technique/protecti... The design rules themselves could yield info to competitors about what processes are being used in the upcoming gen.
UncleOxidant 3y ago
> I wonder if we can get better open source tool support from the new entity. That would be a win. Unfortunately, this seems unlikely. The FPGA vendor tools are a complete shit show and open source tools would be greatly welcomed - they're doing really well in the Lattice/ICE40 space but those are small FPGAs. But Altera and Xilinx don't seem at all inclined to encourage the development of open source alternatives.
- chrsw 3y ago
  That's not where the money is. They don't care about hobbyists, startups or schools. In FPGA world is about big contracts, big design wins. Networking, defense, space, industrial control etc. It's why the design tools are so bad too: there's no reason for the FPGA vendors to invest in those tools when the design wins come from size and performance. In fact, giving customers an escape hatch from vendor lock in would be a Very Bad Idea.
  - UncleOxidant 3y ago
    Indeed. I was working at a startup doing some FPGA work about 10 years ago. We ran into several bugs in the Xilinx software. Initially we could submit bug reports, but about 6 months in Xilinx suddenly changed their policy and decreed that only tier 1 customers (definitely not us) could submit bugs - everyone else had to look for help on the forums. We spent a lot of our time just working around the bugs in their tools. At that point I determined that, though FPGA development was kind of fun and interesting, I would not go into a field where I was going to be dependent on such buggy software and went back to the software side (where pretty much all the development tools are open source and if you run into trouble you're going to be able to get help).
  - crote 3y ago
    It does beg the question whether this is simply a chicken-and-egg problem. When it is almost impossible to develop for, you only get big contracts because nobody else has the resources to design products for it. On the other hand, with good and free design tools the toy projects done by hobbyists and schools can serve as the catalyst for using it in medium-scale projects. There are plenty of applications imaginable for something like Intel's SmartNIC platform - but you're not going to see any of them unless tinkerers can get their hands on them.
wslh 3y ago
Side question, how do you see the future of Intel? Do you share the doom perspective or think that they continue to have opportunities ot catch up? Thanks!
- ethbr1 3y ago
  The answer to that is the intersection of thousands of state of the art fab technical issues and management decisions. Recent hindsight with TSMC makes it look "easy", but it's incredibly uncertain simply due to the complexity and number of pieces that have to align.
- CoastalCoder 3y ago
  My best guess is that Gelsinger is planning to eventually split the fabs into a separate corporation.
opello 3y ago
I actually went to see if the EE Journal article I saw on this back then was already posted here, but apparently not. https://www.eejournal.com/article/intel-plans-to-spin-off-fpga-group-as-an-independent-company-nine-years-after-buying-altera/ https://www.eejournal.com/article/intel-plans-to-spin-off-fp... I remember finding it rather funny at the time that Altera would go "full circle" so quickly.
Thimothy 3y ago
When Intel acquired Altera, they scrapped the old catalog of Altera FPGAs. A few corps I was working with, who had heavy lock in to Altera due to those FPGAs, got royally screwed (had to suddenly redesign, and re-certify a bunch of boards that they where selling to happy costumers). Of course they went with Xilinx at the redesign, because f*ck you, and it didn't hurt that the SoC offerings of Xilinx where very superior at the time. I don't think it was a cost reduction issue, Altera was selling those old FPGAs at a BIG markup. The amount of market I saw dissolve for Altera in a puff was incredible. To this day one of the most shortsighted corp decisions I have ever witnessed.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  yeah, FPGAs are commonly used in market segments which value long-term availability and support of components (>10 years at least). Definitely not something to churn like consumer CPUs.

AceJohnny2 3y ago

> I wonder if we can get better open source tool support from the new entity. That would be a win. Tragically, I wouldn't bet on it. In fact, I'd be shocked if that were to happen.

AceJohnny2 3y ago

> only to snap them back at the first sign of challenges. It's really quite impressive how bad Intel's track record has been. Would you say it's a broad cultural problem within Intel? Bad incentives? (I'b be interested if someone could come up with a list of all of Intel's failed ventures. StrongARM, Optane, Altera... Obviously some of these are par for the course for such a large company as Intel, but Intel still seems to stand out) (I know one reason Apple is so secretive about its ventures is because it knows many of them won't pan out, and it knows that due to its size anything it does has huge repercussions, and wants to avoid that)

1-6 3y ago
When Intel does something like this, it reveals how tight their operating margin is. This is not a good sign. Intel has never been able to push away from the fact that they'll always be a hardware first company. It's a very tight market out there. TSMC was able to make it with very tight partnerships with OEMs and I doubt Intel can pull off something like that.
ChuckMcM 3y ago
I agree with 1-6 that they have always been really focused on their margins, they were never a company that wanted to go into debt for something that was 'unproven.' They have had lots of things they stopped doing, the graphics chip I was involved in (82786) was one, the speech chips, the iAPX431, the modem chips, their digital watch was an early one. I always saw it as an exceptionally low tolerance for risk. When I was their the 386 had just fabbed and I was one of the people watching when the very first chip was powered up and it actually worked (which amazed pretty much everyone). Sun Microsystems was a little startup in Mountain View using the 68000 and getting some traction I suggested to Intel that if they used the graphic chip I was working on and the 386 they could build an Intel branded "Workstation" and both replace the VAXStations they were using for CAD work internally and sell them as part of Intel's initiative to become a "systems company." I got a response to my memo[1] from Dave House who was later CEO but at the time just the head of Microprocessor Operation (MIPO) Marketing explaining to this lowly NCG (new college grad) that Workstations were not much of a market and Intel was only interested in pursuing the "big" opportunities. Six months later I joined Sun (just after they IPO'd sadly) and didn't look back. :-) [1] Yes memo, as in typed up and printed out and put in a manilla envelope where on the last line of the front had it coming from Dave and being addressed to me. And yes, it started as a memo I had printed out and given to my manager because while Intel had "heard" of electronic mail they preferred the "durability" of actual mail and forcing people to use actual mail cut down on "frivolous" communications.
- FirmwareBurner 3y ago
  >I always saw it as an exceptionally low tolerance for risk. Big laugh at the claim of intel having a exceptionally low tolerance to risk when they're the only semi company left still running their own fabs, decades after AMD sold off their own for being too risky of a venture to keep running by themselves. And every fab company out there will vouch for how risky that line of business is. Even more so to pour billions into a business like this while knowing Samsung/TSMC might beat you. More correct would be that Intel has a low tolerance to risk for things that are way outside of their core competencies which have traditionally been designing X86 CPUs and fabbing them, and that's mostly it. I commend them for not giving up on advancing their fab nodes despite the massive issues and setbacks(they could have spun it off like AMD did), and for building the ARC GPUs and keep improving them despite low sales.
drjasonharrison 3y ago
Wikipedia has a partial list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitions_by_Intel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio... what it is missing is the eventual disposition of the acquisition (product brought to market, unit pushed out, unit closed down, ...).

raverbashing 3y ago

I think Intel is living their Nokia moment, except their lunch will be eaten much more slowly by the competition

burnte 3y ago

They do this so often, buy a company, sell it a few years later. So weird.

lisper 3y ago
Sometimes they don't even bother to sell it. In the case of Barefoot Networks, they bought it, spent three years developing the next-generation product, got it to within 80-90% of being ready for tapeout, and then just pulled the plug.
- andrewia 3y ago
  One of my relatives is a high level Barefoot employee who was integrated into Intel leadership after the acquisition. I was told that it was killed because of worries about internal competition with Intel IPUs. It still seems like a ridiculously foolish idea, considering how much money Intel spent acquiring Barefoot. Not that the founders and CEO care, they got their money! The whole thing definitely seems symptomatic of Intel's extreme caution. I wonder why they didn't apply the same caution when buying Barefoot. Intel obviously didn't have a great idea on how to leverage them. This is all in stark contrast to AMD buying Pensando, a company that my SO works for. It makes sense for AMD to acquire Pensando to expand their data center offerings and compete directly with Intel. I think AMD made a smart buy.
  - burnte 3y ago
    > it was killed because of worries about internal competition with Intel IPUs So insane. It's always better in invent the next big thing that changes the market than a competitor, even if it kills another product of your own.
  - lisper 3y ago
    I was a part-time contractor for Barefoot, and came along for the ride during the acquisition, so I have some first-hand knowledge of this. I am very much out of the managerial loop so I have no insight into the actual motives for killing the project, but I can tell you that at least one of the founders cared very much and fought tooth and nail to keep it alive. > It still seems like a ridiculously foolish idea, considering how much money Intel spent acquiring Barefoot Acquiring companies in order to kill them is a horrible business practice but not unusual. The thing that makes no sense to me is why they kept it going for three years before killing it. If they bought it in order to kill it, they should have done that before spending another hundred million on it.

7speter 3y ago

I don’t know I don’t have the credentials to be an engineer at Intel, but I think they know its a bad idea to end or spin off their foundry service, especially now that they have a new client that will know the ins and outs of their fabrication process.

nsteel 3y ago
> will know the ins and outs of their fabrication process. What do you mean by this? When working with a fab you get to know their design rules and that's about it.
- cma 3y ago
  I believe I've read that design rules give away parts of the process so usually you have to sign anexclusivity agreement not to work with another vendor for a while, or firewall teams that work with different vendors.
  - nsteel 3y ago
    I can't imagine what you could take from one place to another that isn't trivial if they've got to the point of being even able to provide the technology. In the grand scheme of things, these rules are relatively high level. There are NDAs but that's more about non-public roadmaps, timelines and specialised IP i.e. future things that a competitor could then have time to work towards. The point being, there's no world where a fab would worry about sharing their design rules.
    - cma 3y ago
      This is old and not the one I read, but what I could find through search: > Engineers needed manufacturing process information to verify that designs were free from systematic yield limiters, but foundries were reluctant to distribute process information that could reveal best practices and trade secrets. Encryption enabled the protection of selected design rules, process data and other information while still giving customers the details they needed. > In this discussion, you must understand that the required protection is much more than just an obfuscation of rule definitions so they are no longer human readable. The process also includes the encryption of related files and control over all the outputs from the tool environment that provide information about any checks. https://www.techdesignforums.com/practice/technique/protecting-ip-collaborative-signoff-environment/ https://www.techdesignforums.com/practice/technique/protecti... The design rules themselves could yield info to competitors about what processes are being used in the upcoming gen.

UncleOxidant 3y ago

> I wonder if we can get better open source tool support from the new entity. That would be a win. Unfortunately, this seems unlikely. The FPGA vendor tools are a complete shit show and open source tools would be greatly welcomed - they're doing really well in the Lattice/ICE40 space but those are small FPGAs. But Altera and Xilinx don't seem at all inclined to encourage the development of open source alternatives.

chrsw 3y ago
That's not where the money is. They don't care about hobbyists, startups or schools. In FPGA world is about big contracts, big design wins. Networking, defense, space, industrial control etc. It's why the design tools are so bad too: there's no reason for the FPGA vendors to invest in those tools when the design wins come from size and performance. In fact, giving customers an escape hatch from vendor lock in would be a Very Bad Idea.
- UncleOxidant 3y ago
  Indeed. I was working at a startup doing some FPGA work about 10 years ago. We ran into several bugs in the Xilinx software. Initially we could submit bug reports, but about 6 months in Xilinx suddenly changed their policy and decreed that only tier 1 customers (definitely not us) could submit bugs - everyone else had to look for help on the forums. We spent a lot of our time just working around the bugs in their tools. At that point I determined that, though FPGA development was kind of fun and interesting, I would not go into a field where I was going to be dependent on such buggy software and went back to the software side (where pretty much all the development tools are open source and if you run into trouble you're going to be able to get help).
- crote 3y ago
  It does beg the question whether this is simply a chicken-and-egg problem. When it is almost impossible to develop for, you only get big contracts because nobody else has the resources to design products for it. On the other hand, with good and free design tools the toy projects done by hobbyists and schools can serve as the catalyst for using it in medium-scale projects. There are plenty of applications imaginable for something like Intel's SmartNIC platform - but you're not going to see any of them unless tinkerers can get their hands on them.

wslh 3y ago

Side question, how do you see the future of Intel? Do you share the doom perspective or think that they continue to have opportunities ot catch up? Thanks!

ethbr1 3y ago
The answer to that is the intersection of thousands of state of the art fab technical issues and management decisions. Recent hindsight with TSMC makes it look "easy", but it's incredibly uncertain simply due to the complexity and number of pieces that have to align.
CoastalCoder 3y ago
My best guess is that Gelsinger is planning to eventually split the fabs into a separate corporation.

opello 3y ago

I actually went to see if the EE Journal article I saw on this back then was already posted here, but apparently not. https://www.eejournal.com/article/intel-plans-to-spin-off-fpga-group-as-an-independent-company-nine-years-after-buying-altera/ https://www.eejournal.com/article/intel-plans-to-spin-off-fp... I remember finding it rather funny at the time that Altera would go "full circle" so quickly.

Thimothy 3y ago

When Intel acquired Altera, they scrapped the old catalog of Altera FPGAs. A few corps I was working with, who had heavy lock in to Altera due to those FPGAs, got royally screwed (had to suddenly redesign, and re-certify a bunch of boards that they where selling to happy costumers). Of course they went with Xilinx at the redesign, because f*ck you, and it didn't hurt that the SoC offerings of Xilinx where very superior at the time. I don't think it was a cost reduction issue, Altera was selling those old FPGAs at a BIG markup. The amount of market I saw dissolve for Altera in a puff was incredible. To this day one of the most shortsighted corp decisions I have ever witnessed.

rcxdude 3y ago
yeah, FPGAs are commonly used in market segments which value long-term availability and support of components (>10 years at least). Definitely not something to churn like consumer CPUs.