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Part of this I'm sure is management style and culture (Nvidia famously has a very strong get-it-done-at-all-costs culture for example) but I think the reason th

Part of this I'm sure is management style and culture (Nvidia famously has a very strong get-it-done-at-all-costs culture for example) but I think the reason these ventures were persisted is because the founder (Jensen Huang) is still CEO and controls the majority of the company. Intel now, without Andy Grove and the founders steering the culture[0] it seems there is no-one who is able to steer this ship past quarterly results anymore. AMD had suffered decades of mishaps and near bankruptcy to finally find competent leadership in recent years which turned the company. [0]: After all, one core virtue that Andy Grove had was "only the paranoid survive", which in context, was all about never getting too comfortable with your market position. Granted, they also engaged in many illegal practices as essentially a monopoly in the 90s. I guess they lost his second virtue of Competitive Mindset which as Grove saw it viewed competition as the key driver of innovation and progress. This was out the window by then, though I don't know if he was effectively leading the company by 96. He stepped down in 98, but he had health problems before that - eventually diagnosed with prostate cancer. This is all to say that Intel's culture is a mixed bag of unhealthy paranoia and being used to being #1 in their categories, which is all incoming executives and major shareholders see when they think Intel. There's no-one to faithfully steer the ship back to clear waters it seems

soulbadguy 3y ago
I think you might be attributing too much agency to the CEO and management of both companies. IMO there are a lot of external factors too. It might be the case that Andy Grove "only the paranoid survive" was really a factor. Or simply the fact that under Andy, the tech sector was really different : X86-64 market was the dominant and growing platform of compute, they pretty much had a strong set of patent around X86-64. The initial military and gov contract give them enough run away money to build a moat around having a fab. Also let's not forget despite all those advantage, intel was also fine 3 or time, for more than a billion each time for very anti competitive practice. It's unclear to me that intel was never the great company they think they are. Fast forward to now, X86-64 is no longer growing as fast, having a fab is no longer a moat with TSCM around (might even be seen as a liability), the WinTel monopoly doesn't have strength he had...etc... etc... The game is just much harder now. For nvidia, they had a triple boom market with first PC gaming, then crypto,the now AI... Hard to distinguish CEO performance from market performance.
- no_wizard 3y ago
  Companies tend to graft their culture from the founders establishing it with early employees and outgrowth from there, it does say something. Now the market moving to mobile ARM chipsets definitely damaged Intel, though Intel had years to come up with a viable alternative and ways to re-capitalize its fab infrastructure etc. They let their own moat run dry. Theories abound as to why, and since I'm not CEO nor do I have access to Intels internal records, I can only speculate, however from available information I've been able to read, it seems that they became more risk adverse as time has gone on, due in part, because there is immense pressure for any new thing to quickly produce margins similar to that of their main CPU business. Which of course, is a conundrum, as barring any major breakthrough that puts them well and above any alternative, these sorts of things to diversify into strong businesses often take alot of time. Compare that to Nvidia: the market dynamics is what is allowing them to capitalize on 2 booms that ultimately leveraged GPUs for compute over traditional processors, but the foundation for all this was laid in ~2007 (CUDA first came out then) and Nvidia had to both improve CUDA over time and invested in research around parallelized computing. If were not for their long horizon investment in this, they would not have been primed to take advantage of both crypto and AI. I'd argue that gaming while lucrative no doubt, is comparatively modest to what they are raking in over crypto and AI, all the while still investing in CPU / GPU integrated chipsets[0] and CPUs tailored to massive data center requirements around AI specifically[1], all of which they wouldn't be able to really take advantage of it not for their long term investment in things like CUDA and parallelized computing. I suspect quite strongly that without the founder at the helm, there would have been little internal cover to continue investing in these things at the rate Nvidia was prior to the boom times. [0]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-make-arm-based-pc-chips-major-new-challenge-intel-2023-10-23/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-make-arm-based-pc-... [1]: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/grace-cpu/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/grace-cpu/
  - ak217 3y ago
    Yep. Nvidia spent 20 years maneuvering and creating the trends and markets they are now benefiting from. Anyone saying they've just been benefiting from a boom like it was some sort of complete externality has not been paying attention. If that was the case, ATI would still be an independent company, and Nvidia would have overextended themselves trying to chase the crypto mining market. No, it took 20 years of courting academics and iterating on technologies capable of replacing pre-CUDA "supercomputers" to get Nvidia and the AI industry to where it is today. 20 years of cajoling TSMC to take the next leap of faith on scaling processes for them. 20 years of maneuvering to avoid overextending themselves while also avoiding platforms and integrators trying to suck margin away from them. And if you look at their stock price over those 20 years, there were times when the market took a very dim view of these efforts. Times that many other CEOs would have thrown in the towel and shut down projects. Without CUDA and Nvidia silicon, I'm not convinced the AI boom would have happened any time within this decade.

soulbadguy 3y ago

I think you might be attributing too much agency to the CEO and management of both companies. IMO there are a lot of external factors too. It might be the case that Andy Grove "only the paranoid survive" was really a factor. Or simply the fact that under Andy, the tech sector was really different : X86-64 market was the dominant and growing platform of compute, they pretty much had a strong set of patent around X86-64. The initial military and gov contract give them enough run away money to build a moat around having a fab. Also let's not forget despite all those advantage, intel was also fine 3 or time, for more than a billion each time for very anti competitive practice. It's unclear to me that intel was never the great company they think they are. Fast forward to now, X86-64 is no longer growing as fast, having a fab is no longer a moat with TSCM around (might even be seen as a liability), the WinTel monopoly doesn't have strength he had...etc... etc... The game is just much harder now. For nvidia, they had a triple boom market with first PC gaming, then crypto,the now AI... Hard to distinguish CEO performance from market performance.

no_wizard 3y ago
Companies tend to graft their culture from the founders establishing it with early employees and outgrowth from there, it does say something. Now the market moving to mobile ARM chipsets definitely damaged Intel, though Intel had years to come up with a viable alternative and ways to re-capitalize its fab infrastructure etc. They let their own moat run dry. Theories abound as to why, and since I'm not CEO nor do I have access to Intels internal records, I can only speculate, however from available information I've been able to read, it seems that they became more risk adverse as time has gone on, due in part, because there is immense pressure for any new thing to quickly produce margins similar to that of their main CPU business. Which of course, is a conundrum, as barring any major breakthrough that puts them well and above any alternative, these sorts of things to diversify into strong businesses often take alot of time. Compare that to Nvidia: the market dynamics is what is allowing them to capitalize on 2 booms that ultimately leveraged GPUs for compute over traditional processors, but the foundation for all this was laid in ~2007 (CUDA first came out then) and Nvidia had to both improve CUDA over time and invested in research around parallelized computing. If were not for their long horizon investment in this, they would not have been primed to take advantage of both crypto and AI. I'd argue that gaming while lucrative no doubt, is comparatively modest to what they are raking in over crypto and AI, all the while still investing in CPU / GPU integrated chipsets[0] and CPUs tailored to massive data center requirements around AI specifically[1], all of which they wouldn't be able to really take advantage of it not for their long term investment in things like CUDA and parallelized computing. I suspect quite strongly that without the founder at the helm, there would have been little internal cover to continue investing in these things at the rate Nvidia was prior to the boom times. [0]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-make-arm-based-pc-chips-major-new-challenge-intel-2023-10-23/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/nvidia-make-arm-based-pc-... [1]: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/grace-cpu/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/grace-cpu/
- ak217 3y ago
  Yep. Nvidia spent 20 years maneuvering and creating the trends and markets they are now benefiting from. Anyone saying they've just been benefiting from a boom like it was some sort of complete externality has not been paying attention. If that was the case, ATI would still be an independent company, and Nvidia would have overextended themselves trying to chase the crypto mining market. No, it took 20 years of courting academics and iterating on technologies capable of replacing pre-CUDA "supercomputers" to get Nvidia and the AI industry to where it is today. 20 years of cajoling TSMC to take the next leap of faith on scaling processes for them. 20 years of maneuvering to avoid overextending themselves while also avoiding platforms and integrators trying to suck margin away from them. And if you look at their stock price over those 20 years, there were times when the market took a very dim view of these efforts. Times that many other CEOs would have thrown in the towel and shut down projects. Without CUDA and Nvidia silicon, I'm not convinced the AI boom would have happened any time within this decade.