17 ms·

Intel's Humbling

569 points by jseliger 3y ago

noopl 3y ago
As someone that doesn’t really understand the space and stuff that the article is talking about, I was surprised that “Apple Silicon” didn’t appear here since from my perspective having used both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, it’s a huge “wow” change. Was Apple leaving and Apple Silicon Macs being so incredibly better than Intel ones not actually a big deal for Intel?
- spenczar5 3y ago
  TSMC manufactures Apple Silicon. It’s a good example of the foundry model that the article is talking about.
  - jsheard 3y ago
    Not only do they manufacture Apple Silicon, but Apple usually buys out the first runs of their new processes so they have a head-start against even other TSMC customers. I believe every 3nm wafer that TSMC makes is still going to Apple, hence the just-released Qualcomm SD8G3 flagship chip still being made on TSMC 4nm.
    - timschmidt 3y ago
      Nvidia's AI $trillions may influence this arrangement in the near future. In the recent past Nvidia has bid Samsung against TSMC in attempts to save costs, but Apple's strategy works well for as long as one foundry has a process advantage.
      - mdasen 3y ago
        I think Apple's advantages are that it has a lot of cash and a very predictable business. I'm not arguing that Nvidia doesn't have a good business, but it seems to be a bit less predictable and a bit less regular than Apple's business. Apple really knows how many chips it's going to want years in advance. Even if Nvidia also wants TSMC's latest process, that could work to Apple's advantage. Right now it's looking like Apple might end up with TSMC's 3nm process for 18 months. If Apple and Nvidia split the initial 2nm capacity, it could be 3+ years before AMD and Qualcomm can get to 2nm. If Nvidia launches the RTX 50 series in late 2024 or early 2025 on TSMC's 3nm (which seems to be the rumor), what does that do for availability for AMD and Qualcomm? Maybe what we'll see going forward is Apple taking the capacity for the first year and Nvidia taking the capacity for the second year leaving AMD and Qualcomm waiting longer. That would certainly benefit Apple. Apple isn't competing against Nvidia. If Nvidia uses up TSMC capacity leaving Apple's actual competitors at a bigger disadvantage, that's pretty great for Apple.
      - frankchn 3y ago
        The chips Nvidia requires are a lot bigger (>800 mm2 sometimes) and they are much more expensive to make on a cutting edge process with relatively low yields compared to the 100-150 mm2 chips Apple wants for its Axx iPhone chips.
    - Rapzid 3y ago
      Not a good deal for consumer IMHO. Intel is floundering and AMD is now always a node behind. Seems very anti-competitive.
- timschmidt 3y ago
  Apple had been sandbagging the Intel chips for several generations of macbook with anemic cooling solutions, poor thermal throttling curves, and fans that wait until the last moment to turn on. To the extent that the fastest CPUs available in Macbook Pros did not outperform lower models, because both became thermally saturated. When properly cooled, the Intel silicon tends to perform a lot better. Additionally, both Intel and AMD manufacturer CPUs for HEDT and servers which are far beyond anything Apple is fabricating at the moment. Apple has no response to Epyc, Threadripper, or higher end Xeon. Similarly, Apple has no equivalent to Intel, AMD, and Nvidia discrete GPUs. Apple made a quality cell phone chip, and managed to exploit chiplets and chip-to-chip interconnects to double and quadruple it into a decent APU. But it's still an APU, just one segment addressed by current x86 designs.
  - kristianp 3y ago
    > Apple had been sandbagging the Intel chips for several generations of macbook with anemic cooling solutions I don't think that was deliberate. Apple has a long history of not cooling their computers enough.
    - yakz 3y ago
      I had never even considered it was deliberate. In hindsight, doing it deliberately seems pretty smart, at least from a “let’s juice the intro” perspective, but that would have been a really big bet.
      - timschmidt 3y ago
        It's an interesting question right? Do you think Apple never tested multiple configurations of their leading computer (specifically the higher end ones) over multiple generations, or do you think they knew what they were doing?
      - evilduck 3y ago
        Microsoft Surface Laptops were trying for similar form factors and having the same thermal problems at the same time, this isn't a grand conspiracy, all Intel laptops were suffering.
- javier2 3y ago
  There are many different reasons. Firstly, Apple built experience over a decade designing and building the chips, taking over more and more of the design and IP. Then making these chips at a Intel competitor TSMC, who has a different business model to Intel. Apple were also willing to compromise. The first years had weird experiences for customers with Rosetta, broken apps and Macs that could only drive a single external monitor and connect to few devices. Yet we clearly saw the power efficiency from the better foundry tech at TSMC, coupled with decade of saving watts for mobile phone batteries.
- sillywalk 3y ago
  I don't think Macs really amounted to much $ in sales for Intel, compared to e.g. Dell etc.
deleted 3y ago
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autokad 3y ago
Intel's 2010 7.6B$ purchase of mcafee was a sign that Intel doesn't know what its doing. In the CEO's words: The future of chips is security on the chip. I was like no, no its not! I wanted them to get into mobile and GPUs at the time. Nvdia's market cap was about 9B at the time. I know it would have been a larger pill to swallow, and likely had to bid a bit more than 9B, but I thought it was possible for Intel at the time.
- deleted 3y ago
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- captn3m0 3y ago
  It would have had the same fate as the NVIDIA ARM deal.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - adventured 3y ago
    Maybe, however, the GPU market was not considered so incredibly valuable at the time (particularly by eg politicians in the US, Europe or China). Today it's a critical national security matter, and Nvidia is sitting on the most lucrative semiconductor business in history. Back then it was overwhelmingly a segment for gaming.
  - tw04 3y ago
    Unlikely with AMD owning ATI. The reason NVidia was blocked from buying ARM was because of the many, many third parties that were building chips off ARM IP. Nvidia would have become their direct competitor overnight with little indication they would treat third parties fairly. Regulators were rightly concerned it would kill off third party chips. Not to mention the collective lobbying might of all the vendors building ARM chips. There were and are exactly zero third parties licensing nvidia IP to build competing GPU products.
    - paulmd 3y ago
zer00eyz 3y ago
>>> Notice what is happening here: TSMC, unlike its historical pattern, is not keeping (all of its) 5nm capacity to make low-cost high-margin chips in fully-depreciated fabs; rather, it is going to repurpose some amount of equipment — probably as much as it can manage — to 3nm, which will allow it to expand its capacity without a commensurate increase in capital costs. This will both increase the profitability of 3nm and also recognizes the reality that is afflicting TSMC’s 7nm node: there is an increasingly large gap between the leading edge and “good enough” nodes for the vast majority of use cases. My understanding is that 5nm has been and continues to be "problematic" in terms of yield. The move to 3nm seems to not be afflicted by as many issues. There is also a massive drive to get more volume (and a die shrink will do that), due to the demands of all things ML. I suspect that TSMC's move here is a bit more nuanced than the (valid) point that the article is making on this step...
- bgnn 3y ago
  5nm is good yield at the moment. It's even fully automotive qualified, which is a testament to its yield. But performance advantage vs cost doesn't justify to move from 7nm for a lot of designs. So tech adoption is getting stickier. For hogh performance designs like Apple CPUs going to the cutting edge is a given. So since 3nm is available 5nm lost its appeal. This is a new territory for TSMC but I think they handled it well. Just last year they were gearing up a lot of 5nm capacity in anticipation of people moving from 12 and 7nm to 5nm. It quickly became clear that this isn't happening. So they moved some of this to 3nm and some is going back to 7nm and 6nm (shrunk 7nm) I think. They are also cautious about buying the newest equipment from ASML unlike Intel and Samsung. This seems to play well for TSMC. I think TSMC learned from Intel's downfall more than Intel. I don't see any industry traction from IFS. They can research any new technology they want. Without wafer orders it's a recipe for a quick cash burn..
  - ColonelPhantom 3y ago
    > some is going back to 7nm and 6nm (shrunk 7nm) I think You can also see the lasting popularity of 7nm-class nodes in consumer products. For example, RDNA3 uses 5nm for the core parts (GCD), but the peripheral parts (the memory chiplets/MCDs) are built on 6nm, and the monolithic low-end parts (RX 7600) are even fully built on 6nm.
RicoElectrico 3y ago
Humble people don't allude to snake oil when dissing competition's naming scheme. Edit: relevant video, because whoever downvoted did not get what I was referring to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUT4d5IVY0A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUT4d5IVY0A
- timerol 3y ago
  TFA is about Intel's humbling not Intel's humility. If Intel was already humble, there would be no need for a humbling
this_user 3y ago
Intel has truly been on a remarkable spree of extremely poor strategic decisions for the last 20 years or so. Missed the boat on mobile, missed the boat on GPUs and AI, focused too much on desktop, and now AMD and ARM-based chips are eating their lunch in the data centre area.
- danielmarkbruce 3y ago
  They ran it for max profit in an era when strategic investments needed to be made. It's remarkably common and heavily incentivized.
- RachelF 3y ago
  No, they were on the boat, they just mis-managed it. They used to make Arm chips, but sold it off just before the first iPhone was released as they saw no future in mobile CPUs. Same with network processors for routers around the same time. They have been trying half-heartedly with GPUs on and off since the late 1990's i740 series. The root cause is probably the management mantra "focus on core competencies". They had an effective monopoly on fast CPUs from 2007 until 2018. This monopoly meant very little improvement in CPU speed.
- Mistletoe 3y ago
  Is it just the fate of large successful companies? The parallels with Boeing always come to mind. We’ve seen this play out so many times through history, it’s why investing in the top companies of your era is a terrible idea. https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_archive/full/1981/ https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_archive/f... I wonder how many of our companies will survive at the top for even 20 more years? https://companiesmarketcap.com/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/ Berkshire is the only one I feel sure about because they hold lots of different companies.
  - tru3_power 3y ago
    Market forces are hard to fight sometimes. Look at Meta- they were beaten like hell cuz of their metaverse bet.
hakdbha 3y ago
[dead]
nimbius 3y ago
Honestly I think the real deathwatch started during spectre/meltdown. Intel had a real choice. They could own the issue, patch and use it as a chance to retool a largely broken architecture when corporate money was still 0% interest or negative interest. They didnt. Every press conference downplayed deflected and denied the performance issues, every patch to the Linux kernel was "disabled by default." They lied through their teeth and real players like amazon vultr and other hosting providers in turn left for AMD.
- orev 3y ago
  I think you’re vastly overestimating how much Wall Street cares about technical issues like this. Spectre/meltdown barely registers on the radar of issues that Intel has. People are still mostly buying Intel CPUs in laptops, desktops, and servers, and the N100 seems to be gaining ground in the Raspberry Pi space. Maybe it gave an opening for AMD in some markets, but Intel really hasn’t seen some huge tarnished reputation because of it. The far greater threats are that they missed the phone market, and are missing the GPU/AI market. Those are entirely new markets where growth would happen, instead of the mostly fixed size of the current CPU market where the same players are just trading small percentage points.
  - someguydave 3y ago
    It matters alot in places where customers get a vote, like net revenue.
lvl102 3y ago
Intel is a product of corporate cancer that is management consulting.
- pm90 3y ago
  tbh that applies to all fortune 500 at this point
- tru3_power 3y ago
  What does this even mean? (not sarcastic)
  - jbm 3y ago
    I worked at (American drink company in Japan) previously and saw what the poster may be referring to. Management Consulting sells ideas, many of them silly or not important that are marketed and packaged as era-defining. A manager who implements #FASHIONABLE_IDEA can look forward to upwards mobility, while boring, realistic, business-focused ideas from people in the trenches usually get ignored (unless you want a lateral transfer to a similar job). hashtag-collection-of-ideas is much easier to explain when the time comes for the next step up. This explains why you get insane things like Metaverse fashion shows that barely manage to look better than a liveleak beheading video. These sorts of things might seem like minor distractions, but getting these sorts of boondoggles up and running creates stress and drowns out other concerns. Once the idea is deployed, the success or failure of the idea is of minimal importance, it must be /made/ successful so that $important_person can get their next job. These projects starve companies of morale, focus and resources. I recall the struggle for a ~USD $20k budget on a project to automate internal corporate systems, while some consultants received (much) more than 10 times that amount for a report that basically wound up in the bin. Oddly, this sort of corporate supplication to management consultants worked out for me (personally). I was a dev who wound up as a manager and was able to deliver projects internally, while other decent project managers could not get budget and wound up looking worse for something that wasn't their fault. I don't think any of the projects brought by management consultants really moved the needle in any meaningful way while I worked for any BigCos.
topspin 3y ago
"Intel’s argument is that backside power will make chips much easier to design, since the power is separated from the communications layer, eliminating interference" That makes a lot of sense to me: that's how and why PCBs are usually designed as they are. How true it that there is an actual advantage vs TSMC?
- mdasen 3y ago
  It all depends on timing. TSMC is also working on backside power delivery. Intel's roadmap looks great. However, I'm skeptical of whether they're actually meeting that roadmap. Meteor Lake was launched last month using Intel 4, but it looks like Intel 4 has lower transistor density than TSMC's 5nm. Intel 3 is listed on their roadmap as second-half 2023, but we've yet to see any Intel 3 parts. Realistically, there won't be too much of an advantage for Intel. It's pretty clear that even when Intel ships things, they aren't shipping these new nodes in volume. Intel 4 is only being used for some laptop processors and they're even using TSMC's 5nm and 6nm processes for the graphics and IO on those chips. They canceled the desktop version of Meteor Lake so desktops are staying on Intel 7 for now. Intel's latest server processors launched last month are also Intel 7. If Intel were able to get a year or two ahead of TSMC, then I could see a nice advantage. However, it looks like Intel's a year behind its roadmap and even being a year behind they're only shipping laptop parts (and not even able to fab the whole chip themselves). But past success/failure doesn't predict the future. Maybe Intel will be shipping 20A with backside power in 2024 and it'll be 2025 before TSMC gives Apple a 2nm chip with backside power. But given that we haven't seen them shipping Intel 3 and they haven't taken Intel 3 off their roadmap, I'm going to be a bit skeptical. Intel is doing way better than they had been doing. However, I've yet to see something convincing that they're doing better than TSMC. That's not to say they aren't going to do better than TSMC, but at this point Intel is saying "we're going to jump from slightly worse than 5nm (Intel 4) to 2nm in a year or less!" Maybe Intel is doing that well, but it's a tall ask. TSMC launched 5nm in 2020 and 3 years later got to 3nm. It doesn't take as long to catch up because technology becomes easier over time, but Intel is kinda claiming it can compress 5-6 years worth of work into a single year. Again, maybe Intel has been pouring its resources into 20A and 18A and maybe some of it is more on ASML and maybe Intel has been neglecting Intel 4 and Intel 3 because it knows it's worth putting its energy toward something actually better. But it also seems reasonable to have a certain amount of doubt about Intel's claims. I'd love for Intel to crush its roadmap. Better processors and better competition benefit us all. But I'm still wondering how well that will go. TSMC seems to be having a bit of trouble with their 3nm process. 2024's flagship Android processors will remain on 4nm and it looks like the 2024 Zen 5 processors will be 4nm as well (with 3nm parts coming in 2025). So it looks like 3nm will basically just be Apple until 2025 which kinda indicates that TSMC isn't doing wonderfully with its 3nm process. Android processors moved to 5nm around 6 months after Apple did, but it looks like they'll move to 3nm around 18 months after Apple. But just because TSMC isn't doing great at 3nm doesn't mean Intel will face similar struggles. It just seems likely that if TSMC (a company that has been crushing it over the past decade) is facing higher struggles at 3nm, it's a bit of wishful thinking to believe Intel won't face similar struggles at 3nm and below.
BirAdam 3y ago
Everyone acts as though Intel should have seen everything coming. Where was AMD? Was AMD really competitive before Ryzen? Nope. Core 2 series blew them out of the water. Was ARM really competitive until recently? Nope. Intel crushed them. The problem for Intel is the inertia of laziness due to a lack of competition. I wouldn’t count them out just yet, however. The company’s first true swing at modern GPU was actually good for a first attempt. Their recent CPUs while not quite as good as Ryzen aren’t exactly uncompetitive. Their foundry business faltered because they were trying a few things never before and not because they were incompetent. Also, 20A and 18A are coming along. I am not an Intel fan at all. I run AMD and ARM. My dislike isn’t technological though, it’s just that I hate their underhanded business practices.
- nine_k 3y ago
  ARM has been really competitive since, well, 2007, when the first iPhone hit the market, and when Android followed in 2008. That is, last 15 years or so. Not noticing a hugely growing segment that was bringing insane reams of cash to Apple, and Qualcomm, Samsung and others involved is not something I could call astute. Pretty certainly, Intel is improving, and of course should not be written off. But they did get themselves into a hole to dig out from, and not just because the 5nm process was really hard to get working.
  - vineyardmike 3y ago
    > Not noticing a hugely growing segment that was bringing insane reams of cash to Apple, and Qualcomm, Samsung and others involved is not something I could call astute. And it's not like they didn't notice either. Apple literally asked intel to supply the chips for the first iPhone, but the intel CEO at the time "didn't see it". https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/16/4337954/intel-could-have-been-inside-the-original-iphone-says-outgoing-ceo https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/16/4337954/intel-could-have-...
    - eslaught 3y ago
      I agree mobile was a miss but the linked article actually quotes Intel's former COE making a pretty good argument why they missed: > "The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do... At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought." In that circumstance, I think most people would have made the same decision.
ken47 3y ago
This reminds me of the situation at Boeing, albeit w/ less fatal consequences. For a long time, it's been a company that has focused on maximizing profits through "innovative" business practices, first and foremost, rather than innovative R&D. It's completely unsurprising that Intel has been struggling lately against its genuinely inventive competition.
fortran77 3y ago
I was a huge Intel fanboy for years...and then I got my first Windows Arm laptop (Lenovo X13s). Intel has a lot of catching up to do.
- StillBored 3y ago
  I take that to mean you haven't tried any recent (zen3/4 U series) AMD laptops then, or for that matter the M1/2/3's. I've heard this from a number of people who are comparing the x13s or new mac's with their 14nm intel that has a discrete nvidia gpu (which is eating another 10W+) from 2017/8 or so. I have a pile of laptops including the x13s, and that part burns a good ~30W for a couple minutes, while running ~30% (or worse) slower, then thermally throttles and drops another ~30% in performance. For light browsing it manages to stay under 5W and gets 10h from its 50Wh battery. This is also doable on just about any AMD or Mac laptop. The AMD machine I'm typing this on tells me I have more than 12 hours remaining and i'm sitting at 81% battery (67Wh). And this machine is a good 3x faster compiling code, or running simple benchmarks like speedometer when its plugged in or allowed to burn 35W. Except it also has a fan that turns on when its under heavy load to keep it from thermally throttling. Yes the x13s is cute, it is a thin/light laptop and is probably the first windows on arm machine that isn't completely unusable. But, its going to take another leap or two to catch-up with current top of the line machines. Everyone loves geekbench so, here is an obviously unthrottled x13s vs a similarly rated 28W AMD 7840U. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/21596449 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/21596449 https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-7-7840u https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-7-7840u That Amd is 2x the single threaded perf, and 50% faster multithreaded, and anything graphics related is going to look even worse.
wolfspider 3y ago
My own humble opinion is that Intel has always suffered from market cannibalization. They are a brand I look for but many times the iteration of products will force me to go a generation or two older because I can’t argue with the price and features. By the time I was sold on a NUC they were discontinued. I wanted a discrete GPU when they announced Xe but it has become Xe ARC alchemist, battlemage, celestial, and druid. By the time I’m ready to spend some money it will become something else usually. Also, they should have snapped up Nuvia. I’m still rooting for them but really if they could streamline their products and be willing to take a leap of faith on others in the same space it would help out a lot.
- rudedogg 3y ago
  I felt that way about their Optane persistent RAM memory (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/05/intel-finally-announces-ddr4-memory-made-from-persistent-3d-xpoint/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/05/intel-finally-announ...).
- Night_Thastus 3y ago
  >I wanted a discrete GPU when they announced Xe but it has become Xe ARC alchemist, battlemage, celestial, and druid. They've made this situation fairly clear, in my eyes. Alchemist is the product line for their first attempt at true dedicated GPUs like those Nvidia and AMD produce. It's based on Intel Xe GPU architecture. It's done decently well, and they've been very diligent about driver updates. Battlemage is the next architecture that will replace it when it's ready, which I believe was targeted for this year. Similar to how the Nvidia 4k series replaced the 3k before it. Celestial comes a couple years later, then druid a couple years after that, etc. They don't exist simultaneously, they're just the names they use for generations of their GPUs.
kbutler 3y ago
Andy Grove's philosophy was "Only the paranoid survive". Intel seemed to rest on its laurels, divesting ARM, casually developing casual GPUs, and being complacent about their biggest direct competitor. They needed (and need) a lot more paranoia.
andrewstuart 3y ago
Off topic but I find it weird that Intel CEO does so much religious quoting under the Intel corporate logo: Here's one examples but there's a pile of them. https://twitter.com/PGelsinger/status/1751653865009631584 https://twitter.com/PGelsinger/status/1751653865009631584 I guess Intel does need the help of a higher power at the stage.
- MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
  Almost as if "doing the right thing" requires an underlying moral framework.
  - andrewstuart 3y ago
    I' not sure I would agree that you need any sort of "moral framework" to know how to do the right thing, such as religion. Knowing how to do the right thing is simple human decency.
- bpt3 3y ago
  That's not under the Intel corporate logo. It's a personal account. His comments aren't my cup of tea but they certainly aren't generally offensive.
  - JonChesterfield 3y ago
    It has implications for his decision making process though. Christianity requires comfortably handling internally inconsistent information and taking a superficial approach to evidence. Whether that is an advantage in a CEO is unclear. It probably helps him remain confident in Intel's outlook.
    - Boatfaceing 3y ago
      [dead]
- deleted 3y ago
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mjevans 3y ago
Wasn't the region around 12-7nM around where flash and RAM style memory were more reliable? If the new process works well for those but is cheaper that could be very good for bulk (value focused) non-volatile and volatile memory.
oldgradstudent 3y ago
> I thought that Krzanich should do something similar: Intel should stop focusing its efforts on being an integrated device manufacturer (IDM) — a company that both designed and manufactured its own chips exclusively — and shift to becoming a foundry that also served external customers. That would only work if Intel has a competitive foundry. Intel produces very high margin chips. Can it be competitive with TSMC in low margin chips where costs must be controlled? The rumors I've heard (not sure about their credibility) is that Intel is simply not competitive in terms of costs and yields. And that's even before considering it doesn't really have an effective process competitive with TSMC. It's easy to say it should become a foundry, it's much harder to actually do that.
BonoboIO 3y ago
Intel: The Boeing of semiconductors
ycsux 3y ago
Boycott Intel
- koshergweilo 3y ago
  Why
  - selimthegrim 3y ago
    Israeli fabs?
quickthrower2 3y ago
Good. Evolution! Competition still works and regulatory capture can’t help every corp.
mmaunder 3y ago
Intel is just like Boeing: A company with legendary engineering roots taken over by myopic financial engineers who can’t think further than next quarters stock price, which is their only measure, their only target, and to which all their bonuses are attached.
- danielmarkbruce 3y ago
  Good analogy.
- kaliqt 3y ago
  Funnily enough, this is EXACTLY what has happened to the video game and movie/series industry. They jump onto the latest trend, e.g. ESG to get in good with the banks and funds without thinking about what long term damage it is doing to their brands and products.
  - matheusmoreira 3y ago
    To be fair, they jump on that particular trend because the banks will punish them if they don't. They have tens of trillions in assets under their management and they make sure that capital won't flow to companies that refuse their agenda. In effect the banks dictate the direction society moves towards. And people say it's a conspiracy theory. > ESG investment funds in the United States saw capital inflows of $3.1 billion in 2022 while non-ESG investment funds saw capital outflows of $370 billion during the stock market decline that year
    - rpmisms 3y ago
      It's not a conspiracy theory if it's on their website...
    - hdtyyf 3y ago
      This is utterly incorrect. The amount of funds with an environmental or social mandate is trivial; and nearly all of those mandates require essentially nothing. It is sad how easy it is to dupe mediocre men into believing thinking they are victims, when in fact they are simply whiny little snowflake losers.
tgtweak 3y ago
I'm kind of bullish on Intel right now. They've moved up so many process nodes so quickly and have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab. Let's ignore the elephant in the room which is taiwan and it's sovereignty, and only focus on the core r&d. Intel flopped so hard on process nodes for 4 years up until Gelsinger took the reigns... it was honestly unprecedented levels of R&D failure. What happened over the 8 years prior was hedge funds and banks had saddled up on Intel stock which was paying healthy dividends due to cost cutting and "coasting". This sudden shock of "we're going to invest everything in R&D and catch back up" was news that a lot of intel shareholders didn't want to hear. They dumped the stock and the price adjusted in kind. Intel's 18A is roughly 6 months ahead of schedule, set to begin manufacturing in the latter half of 2024. Most accounts put this ahead of TSMC's equivalent N2 node... Fab investments have a 3 year lag on delivering value. We're only starting to see the effect of putting serious capital and focus on this, as of this year. I also think we'll see more companies getting smart about having all of their fabrication eggs in one of two baskets (samsung or tsmc) both within a 500 mile radius circle in the south china sea. Intel has had 4 years of technical debt on it's fabrication side, negative stock pressure from the vacuum created by AMD and Nvidia, and is still managing to be profitable. I think the market (and analysts like this) are all throwing the towel in on the one company that has quite a lot to gain at this point after losing a disproportionate amount of share value and market. I just hope they keep Pat at the helm for another 2 years to fully deliver on his strategy or Intel will continue where it was headed 4 years ago.
- SchumerGrift 3y ago
  > They've moved up so many process nodes so quickly and have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab. I'd buy this if they'd actually built a fab, but right now this seems too-little, too-late for a producer's economy. The rest frankly doesn't matter much. Intel processors are only notable in small sections of the market. And frankly—as counter-intuitive as this may seem to such an investor-bullish forum—the death knell was the government chip subsidy. I simply can't imagine american government and private enterprise collaborating to produce anything useful in 2024, especially when the federal government has shown such a deep disinterest in holding the private economy culpable to any kind of commitment. Why would intel bother?
krautt 3y ago
i worked at intel between 97 and 07. MFG was absolute king. Keeping that production line stable and active was the priority that eclipsed all. i was a process engineer, and to change a gas flow rate on some part of the process by a little bit, i'd have to design an experiment, collect data for months, work with various upstream/downstream teams, and write a change control proposal that would exceed a hundred pages of documentation. AFAIK, that production line was the most complex human process that had happened to date. It was mostly ran by 25-30 yo engineers. That in itself was a miracle.
- dr_quacksworth 3y ago
  Semiconductor manufacturing is brutal. I'm glad I no long work for 24/7 fabs & foundries. I have similar stories where adding a standard wafer-rinse step took a year of testing, documenting, pitching to customers, etc.
Sparkyte 3y ago
You can not innovate without competition. AMD will stagnate too without Intel or another company competing. I am hoping Intel rights its wrongs so they can stay competitive. It takes a good amount of competition to keep businesses honest.
dcdc123 3y ago
Stop humbling them, I still own a bunch of stock.
culebron21 3y ago
That much of text, of no use to most in the tech field... Discussions on big tech seem to me like those on geopolitics.
bernardlunn 3y ago
Brilliant article. He is totally right that what Pat Gelsinger is doing is as brave as what Andy Grove did and just as essential. In hindsight Andy Grove was 100% right and I hope Pat Gelsinger is proved right. The fact that Intel stock went up during the Brian Krzanich tenure as CEO is simply a reflection of that being the free money era that lifted all boats/stocks. Without that we would be writing Intel’s epitaph now. You cannot play offense in tech when there is a big market shift.
mixedbit 3y ago
Isn't the current GPU-based stack which drives the progress of AI an early stage architecture which will become sub-optimal and obsolete in a longer term? Having separate processors with separate memory and separate software stack to do matrix operations works, but it would be much more convenient and productive to have a system with one RAM and CPUs that can efficiently do matrix operations and would not require the programmer to delegate these operations to a separate stack. Event the name 'Graphics Processing Unit' suggest that the current approach for AI is rather hacky. Because of this, in a long run there can an opportunity for Intel and other CPU manufacturers to regain the lucrative market from NVIDIA.
- mike_hearn 3y ago
  The software stack co-evolves with the hardware, if the hardware can't do something fast then the software guys can't necessarily even try it out. People have been trying to break NVIDIA's moat by creating non-GPU accelerators. The core maths operations aren't that varied so it's an obvious thing to try. Nothing worked, not even NVIDIA's own attempts. AI researchers have a software stack oriented around devices with separate memory and it's abstracted, so unifying CPU and GPU ram doesn't seem to make a big difference for them. Don't be fooled by the name GPU. It's purely historical. "GPUs" used for AI don't have any video output capability. I think you can't even render with them. They are just specialised computers come with their own OS ("driver"), compilers, APIs and dev stack, which happen to need a CPU to bring them online and which communicate via PCIe instead of ethernet.
  - drBonkers 3y ago
    How do the new “TPUs” and “NPUs” slot into your perspective of GPUs? Just nomenclature catching up to describe matrix math, ML GPUs without video output?
    - mike_hearn 3y ago
      TPU is a Google thing. It shows how far NVIDIA has gone from classical GPUs that Google made ML specific silicon and it's not a clear winner over NVIDIA chips (or in some cases is a clear loser, from what I understand). I don't know about NPUs. Do you mean Apple? Apple silicon is interesting because of the unified memory architecture, but beyond letting you save RAM by using it for both graphics and app code simultaneously I'm not sure it has much benefit. Certainly, datacenters will remain on NVIDIA for the time being unless AMD manage to catch up on their software stack. Intel is the dark horse here. I hear rumblings that their first offering is actually quite good.
drumhead 3y ago
With the US re-industrialising, semi-conductors are a strategic priority so Intel will be at the heart of the process. They're going to be a major beneficiary of the process, here and in Europe. They'll be a significant player. They got lazy and sat on their laurels when AMD was struggling and they didnt view ARM as a threat. TSMC was a probably a joke to them...until everyone brought out killer products and Intel had no response to them. They could have been way ahead of the pack by now but they decided to harvest the market instead of innovating aggresively. Right now they're worth less than $200bn, which is less than half of Broadcom or TSMC, its 30% less than AMD and 10% of Nvidia. Is it intrisically worth that little? Probably not, I think its a buy at this price.
d_burfoot 3y ago
Intel has made a lot of mistakes, but I'm reluctant to bash a company that's contributed such a vast amount to human civilization. The insights and innovations pushed forward by Intel in its heyday have delivered incalculable benefits to billions of humans and will benefit billions more for the rest of human history. Their recent history is checkered but the overall grade for Intel is A+ : staggering success.
Paianni 3y ago
If they can get Horse Creek out the door, I'm interested, if not, I'm not.

569 points by jseliger 3y ago

As someone that doesn’t really understand the space and stuff that the article is talking about, I was surprised that “Apple Silicon” didn’t appear here since from my perspective having used both Intel and Apple Silicon Macs, it’s a huge “wow” change. Was Apple leaving and Apple Silicon Macs being so incredibly better than Intel ones not actually a big deal for Intel?

spenczar5 3y ago
TSMC manufactures Apple Silicon. It’s a good example of the foundry model that the article is talking about.
- jsheard 3y ago
  Not only do they manufacture Apple Silicon, but Apple usually buys out the first runs of their new processes so they have a head-start against even other TSMC customers. I believe every 3nm wafer that TSMC makes is still going to Apple, hence the just-released Qualcomm SD8G3 flagship chip still being made on TSMC 4nm.
  - timschmidt 3y ago
    Nvidia's AI $trillions may influence this arrangement in the near future. In the recent past Nvidia has bid Samsung against TSMC in attempts to save costs, but Apple's strategy works well for as long as one foundry has a process advantage.
    - mdasen 3y ago
      I think Apple's advantages are that it has a lot of cash and a very predictable business. I'm not arguing that Nvidia doesn't have a good business, but it seems to be a bit less predictable and a bit less regular than Apple's business. Apple really knows how many chips it's going to want years in advance. Even if Nvidia also wants TSMC's latest process, that could work to Apple's advantage. Right now it's looking like Apple might end up with TSMC's 3nm process for 18 months. If Apple and Nvidia split the initial 2nm capacity, it could be 3+ years before AMD and Qualcomm can get to 2nm. If Nvidia launches the RTX 50 series in late 2024 or early 2025 on TSMC's 3nm (which seems to be the rumor), what does that do for availability for AMD and Qualcomm? Maybe what we'll see going forward is Apple taking the capacity for the first year and Nvidia taking the capacity for the second year leaving AMD and Qualcomm waiting longer. That would certainly benefit Apple. Apple isn't competing against Nvidia. If Nvidia uses up TSMC capacity leaving Apple's actual competitors at a bigger disadvantage, that's pretty great for Apple.
    - frankchn 3y ago
      The chips Nvidia requires are a lot bigger (>800 mm2 sometimes) and they are much more expensive to make on a cutting edge process with relatively low yields compared to the 100-150 mm2 chips Apple wants for its Axx iPhone chips.
  - Rapzid 3y ago
    Not a good deal for consumer IMHO. Intel is floundering and AMD is now always a node behind. Seems very anti-competitive.
timschmidt 3y ago
Apple had been sandbagging the Intel chips for several generations of macbook with anemic cooling solutions, poor thermal throttling curves, and fans that wait until the last moment to turn on. To the extent that the fastest CPUs available in Macbook Pros did not outperform lower models, because both became thermally saturated. When properly cooled, the Intel silicon tends to perform a lot better. Additionally, both Intel and AMD manufacturer CPUs for HEDT and servers which are far beyond anything Apple is fabricating at the moment. Apple has no response to Epyc, Threadripper, or higher end Xeon. Similarly, Apple has no equivalent to Intel, AMD, and Nvidia discrete GPUs. Apple made a quality cell phone chip, and managed to exploit chiplets and chip-to-chip interconnects to double and quadruple it into a decent APU. But it's still an APU, just one segment addressed by current x86 designs.
- kristianp 3y ago
  > Apple had been sandbagging the Intel chips for several generations of macbook with anemic cooling solutions I don't think that was deliberate. Apple has a long history of not cooling their computers enough.
  - yakz 3y ago
    I had never even considered it was deliberate. In hindsight, doing it deliberately seems pretty smart, at least from a “let’s juice the intro” perspective, but that would have been a really big bet.
    - timschmidt 3y ago
      It's an interesting question right? Do you think Apple never tested multiple configurations of their leading computer (specifically the higher end ones) over multiple generations, or do you think they knew what they were doing?
    - evilduck 3y ago
      Microsoft Surface Laptops were trying for similar form factors and having the same thermal problems at the same time, this isn't a grand conspiracy, all Intel laptops were suffering.
javier2 3y ago
There are many different reasons. Firstly, Apple built experience over a decade designing and building the chips, taking over more and more of the design and IP. Then making these chips at a Intel competitor TSMC, who has a different business model to Intel. Apple were also willing to compromise. The first years had weird experiences for customers with Rosetta, broken apps and Macs that could only drive a single external monitor and connect to few devices. Yet we clearly saw the power efficiency from the better foundry tech at TSMC, coupled with decade of saving watts for mobile phone batteries.
sillywalk 3y ago
I don't think Macs really amounted to much $ in sales for Intel, compared to e.g. Dell etc.

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autokad 3y ago

Intel's 2010 7.6B$ purchase of mcafee was a sign that Intel doesn't know what its doing. In the CEO's words: The future of chips is security on the chip. I was like no, no its not! I wanted them to get into mobile and GPUs at the time. Nvdia's market cap was about 9B at the time. I know it would have been a larger pill to swallow, and likely had to bid a bit more than 9B, but I thought it was possible for Intel at the time.

deleted 3y ago
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captn3m0 3y ago
It would have had the same fate as the NVIDIA ARM deal.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- adventured 3y ago
  Maybe, however, the GPU market was not considered so incredibly valuable at the time (particularly by eg politicians in the US, Europe or China). Today it's a critical national security matter, and Nvidia is sitting on the most lucrative semiconductor business in history. Back then it was overwhelmingly a segment for gaming.
- tw04 3y ago
  Unlikely with AMD owning ATI. The reason NVidia was blocked from buying ARM was because of the many, many third parties that were building chips off ARM IP. Nvidia would have become their direct competitor overnight with little indication they would treat third parties fairly. Regulators were rightly concerned it would kill off third party chips. Not to mention the collective lobbying might of all the vendors building ARM chips. There were and are exactly zero third parties licensing nvidia IP to build competing GPU products.
  - paulmd 3y ago

zer00eyz 3y ago

>>> Notice what is happening here: TSMC, unlike its historical pattern, is not keeping (all of its) 5nm capacity to make low-cost high-margin chips in fully-depreciated fabs; rather, it is going to repurpose some amount of equipment — probably as much as it can manage — to 3nm, which will allow it to expand its capacity without a commensurate increase in capital costs. This will both increase the profitability of 3nm and also recognizes the reality that is afflicting TSMC’s 7nm node: there is an increasingly large gap between the leading edge and “good enough” nodes for the vast majority of use cases. My understanding is that 5nm has been and continues to be "problematic" in terms of yield. The move to 3nm seems to not be afflicted by as many issues. There is also a massive drive to get more volume (and a die shrink will do that), due to the demands of all things ML. I suspect that TSMC's move here is a bit more nuanced than the (valid) point that the article is making on this step...

bgnn 3y ago
5nm is good yield at the moment. It's even fully automotive qualified, which is a testament to its yield. But performance advantage vs cost doesn't justify to move from 7nm for a lot of designs. So tech adoption is getting stickier. For hogh performance designs like Apple CPUs going to the cutting edge is a given. So since 3nm is available 5nm lost its appeal. This is a new territory for TSMC but I think they handled it well. Just last year they were gearing up a lot of 5nm capacity in anticipation of people moving from 12 and 7nm to 5nm. It quickly became clear that this isn't happening. So they moved some of this to 3nm and some is going back to 7nm and 6nm (shrunk 7nm) I think. They are also cautious about buying the newest equipment from ASML unlike Intel and Samsung. This seems to play well for TSMC. I think TSMC learned from Intel's downfall more than Intel. I don't see any industry traction from IFS. They can research any new technology they want. Without wafer orders it's a recipe for a quick cash burn..
- ColonelPhantom 3y ago
  > some is going back to 7nm and 6nm (shrunk 7nm) I think You can also see the lasting popularity of 7nm-class nodes in consumer products. For example, RDNA3 uses 5nm for the core parts (GCD), but the peripheral parts (the memory chiplets/MCDs) are built on 6nm, and the monolithic low-end parts (RX 7600) are even fully built on 6nm.

RicoElectrico 3y ago

Humble people don't allude to snake oil when dissing competition's naming scheme. Edit: relevant video, because whoever downvoted did not get what I was referring to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUT4d5IVY0A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUT4d5IVY0A

timerol 3y ago
TFA is about Intel's humbling not Intel's humility. If Intel was already humble, there would be no need for a humbling

this_user 3y ago

Intel has truly been on a remarkable spree of extremely poor strategic decisions for the last 20 years or so. Missed the boat on mobile, missed the boat on GPUs and AI, focused too much on desktop, and now AMD and ARM-based chips are eating their lunch in the data centre area.

danielmarkbruce 3y ago
They ran it for max profit in an era when strategic investments needed to be made. It's remarkably common and heavily incentivized.
RachelF 3y ago
No, they were on the boat, they just mis-managed it. They used to make Arm chips, but sold it off just before the first iPhone was released as they saw no future in mobile CPUs. Same with network processors for routers around the same time. They have been trying half-heartedly with GPUs on and off since the late 1990's i740 series. The root cause is probably the management mantra "focus on core competencies". They had an effective monopoly on fast CPUs from 2007 until 2018. This monopoly meant very little improvement in CPU speed.
Mistletoe 3y ago
Is it just the fate of large successful companies? The parallels with Boeing always come to mind. We’ve seen this play out so many times through history, it’s why investing in the top companies of your era is a terrible idea. https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_archive/full/1981/ https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_archive/f... I wonder how many of our companies will survive at the top for even 20 more years? https://companiesmarketcap.com/ https://companiesmarketcap.com/ Berkshire is the only one I feel sure about because they hold lots of different companies.
- tru3_power 3y ago
  Market forces are hard to fight sometimes. Look at Meta- they were beaten like hell cuz of their metaverse bet.

hakdbha 3y ago

[dead]

nimbius 3y ago

Honestly I think the real deathwatch started during spectre/meltdown. Intel had a real choice. They could own the issue, patch and use it as a chance to retool a largely broken architecture when corporate money was still 0% interest or negative interest. They didnt. Every press conference downplayed deflected and denied the performance issues, every patch to the Linux kernel was "disabled by default." They lied through their teeth and real players like amazon vultr and other hosting providers in turn left for AMD.

orev 3y ago
I think you’re vastly overestimating how much Wall Street cares about technical issues like this. Spectre/meltdown barely registers on the radar of issues that Intel has. People are still mostly buying Intel CPUs in laptops, desktops, and servers, and the N100 seems to be gaining ground in the Raspberry Pi space. Maybe it gave an opening for AMD in some markets, but Intel really hasn’t seen some huge tarnished reputation because of it. The far greater threats are that they missed the phone market, and are missing the GPU/AI market. Those are entirely new markets where growth would happen, instead of the mostly fixed size of the current CPU market where the same players are just trading small percentage points.
- someguydave 3y ago
  It matters alot in places where customers get a vote, like net revenue.

lvl102 3y ago

Intel is a product of corporate cancer that is management consulting.

pm90 3y ago
tbh that applies to all fortune 500 at this point
tru3_power 3y ago
What does this even mean? (not sarcastic)
- jbm 3y ago
  I worked at (American drink company in Japan) previously and saw what the poster may be referring to. Management Consulting sells ideas, many of them silly or not important that are marketed and packaged as era-defining. A manager who implements #FASHIONABLE_IDEA can look forward to upwards mobility, while boring, realistic, business-focused ideas from people in the trenches usually get ignored (unless you want a lateral transfer to a similar job). hashtag-collection-of-ideas is much easier to explain when the time comes for the next step up. This explains why you get insane things like Metaverse fashion shows that barely manage to look better than a liveleak beheading video. These sorts of things might seem like minor distractions, but getting these sorts of boondoggles up and running creates stress and drowns out other concerns. Once the idea is deployed, the success or failure of the idea is of minimal importance, it must be /made/ successful so that $important_person can get their next job. These projects starve companies of morale, focus and resources. I recall the struggle for a ~USD $20k budget on a project to automate internal corporate systems, while some consultants received (much) more than 10 times that amount for a report that basically wound up in the bin. Oddly, this sort of corporate supplication to management consultants worked out for me (personally). I was a dev who wound up as a manager and was able to deliver projects internally, while other decent project managers could not get budget and wound up looking worse for something that wasn't their fault. I don't think any of the projects brought by management consultants really moved the needle in any meaningful way while I worked for any BigCos.

topspin 3y ago

"Intel’s argument is that backside power will make chips much easier to design, since the power is separated from the communications layer, eliminating interference" That makes a lot of sense to me: that's how and why PCBs are usually designed as they are. How true it that there is an actual advantage vs TSMC?

mdasen 3y ago
It all depends on timing. TSMC is also working on backside power delivery. Intel's roadmap looks great. However, I'm skeptical of whether they're actually meeting that roadmap. Meteor Lake was launched last month using Intel 4, but it looks like Intel 4 has lower transistor density than TSMC's 5nm. Intel 3 is listed on their roadmap as second-half 2023, but we've yet to see any Intel 3 parts. Realistically, there won't be too much of an advantage for Intel. It's pretty clear that even when Intel ships things, they aren't shipping these new nodes in volume. Intel 4 is only being used for some laptop processors and they're even using TSMC's 5nm and 6nm processes for the graphics and IO on those chips. They canceled the desktop version of Meteor Lake so desktops are staying on Intel 7 for now. Intel's latest server processors launched last month are also Intel 7. If Intel were able to get a year or two ahead of TSMC, then I could see a nice advantage. However, it looks like Intel's a year behind its roadmap and even being a year behind they're only shipping laptop parts (and not even able to fab the whole chip themselves). But past success/failure doesn't predict the future. Maybe Intel will be shipping 20A with backside power in 2024 and it'll be 2025 before TSMC gives Apple a 2nm chip with backside power. But given that we haven't seen them shipping Intel 3 and they haven't taken Intel 3 off their roadmap, I'm going to be a bit skeptical. Intel is doing way better than they had been doing. However, I've yet to see something convincing that they're doing better than TSMC. That's not to say they aren't going to do better than TSMC, but at this point Intel is saying "we're going to jump from slightly worse than 5nm (Intel 4) to 2nm in a year or less!" Maybe Intel is doing that well, but it's a tall ask. TSMC launched 5nm in 2020 and 3 years later got to 3nm. It doesn't take as long to catch up because technology becomes easier over time, but Intel is kinda claiming it can compress 5-6 years worth of work into a single year. Again, maybe Intel has been pouring its resources into 20A and 18A and maybe some of it is more on ASML and maybe Intel has been neglecting Intel 4 and Intel 3 because it knows it's worth putting its energy toward something actually better. But it also seems reasonable to have a certain amount of doubt about Intel's claims. I'd love for Intel to crush its roadmap. Better processors and better competition benefit us all. But I'm still wondering how well that will go. TSMC seems to be having a bit of trouble with their 3nm process. 2024's flagship Android processors will remain on 4nm and it looks like the 2024 Zen 5 processors will be 4nm as well (with 3nm parts coming in 2025). So it looks like 3nm will basically just be Apple until 2025 which kinda indicates that TSMC isn't doing wonderfully with its 3nm process. Android processors moved to 5nm around 6 months after Apple did, but it looks like they'll move to 3nm around 18 months after Apple. But just because TSMC isn't doing great at 3nm doesn't mean Intel will face similar struggles. It just seems likely that if TSMC (a company that has been crushing it over the past decade) is facing higher struggles at 3nm, it's a bit of wishful thinking to believe Intel won't face similar struggles at 3nm and below.

BirAdam 3y ago

Everyone acts as though Intel should have seen everything coming. Where was AMD? Was AMD really competitive before Ryzen? Nope. Core 2 series blew them out of the water. Was ARM really competitive until recently? Nope. Intel crushed them. The problem for Intel is the inertia of laziness due to a lack of competition. I wouldn’t count them out just yet, however. The company’s first true swing at modern GPU was actually good for a first attempt. Their recent CPUs while not quite as good as Ryzen aren’t exactly uncompetitive. Their foundry business faltered because they were trying a few things never before and not because they were incompetent. Also, 20A and 18A are coming along. I am not an Intel fan at all. I run AMD and ARM. My dislike isn’t technological though, it’s just that I hate their underhanded business practices.

nine_k 3y ago
ARM has been really competitive since, well, 2007, when the first iPhone hit the market, and when Android followed in 2008. That is, last 15 years or so. Not noticing a hugely growing segment that was bringing insane reams of cash to Apple, and Qualcomm, Samsung and others involved is not something I could call astute. Pretty certainly, Intel is improving, and of course should not be written off. But they did get themselves into a hole to dig out from, and not just because the 5nm process was really hard to get working.
- vineyardmike 3y ago
  > Not noticing a hugely growing segment that was bringing insane reams of cash to Apple, and Qualcomm, Samsung and others involved is not something I could call astute. And it's not like they didn't notice either. Apple literally asked intel to supply the chips for the first iPhone, but the intel CEO at the time "didn't see it". https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/16/4337954/intel-could-have-been-inside-the-original-iphone-says-outgoing-ceo https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/16/4337954/intel-could-have-...
  - eslaught 3y ago
    I agree mobile was a miss but the linked article actually quotes Intel's former COE making a pretty good argument why they missed: > "The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do... At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought." In that circumstance, I think most people would have made the same decision.

ken47 3y ago

This reminds me of the situation at Boeing, albeit w/ less fatal consequences. For a long time, it's been a company that has focused on maximizing profits through "innovative" business practices, first and foremost, rather than innovative R&D. It's completely unsurprising that Intel has been struggling lately against its genuinely inventive competition.

fortran77 3y ago

I was a huge Intel fanboy for years...and then I got my first Windows Arm laptop (Lenovo X13s). Intel has a lot of catching up to do.

StillBored 3y ago
I take that to mean you haven't tried any recent (zen3/4 U series) AMD laptops then, or for that matter the M1/2/3's. I've heard this from a number of people who are comparing the x13s or new mac's with their 14nm intel that has a discrete nvidia gpu (which is eating another 10W+) from 2017/8 or so. I have a pile of laptops including the x13s, and that part burns a good ~30W for a couple minutes, while running ~30% (or worse) slower, then thermally throttles and drops another ~30% in performance. For light browsing it manages to stay under 5W and gets 10h from its 50Wh battery. This is also doable on just about any AMD or Mac laptop. The AMD machine I'm typing this on tells me I have more than 12 hours remaining and i'm sitting at 81% battery (67Wh). And this machine is a good 3x faster compiling code, or running simple benchmarks like speedometer when its plugged in or allowed to burn 35W. Except it also has a fan that turns on when its under heavy load to keep it from thermally throttling. Yes the x13s is cute, it is a thin/light laptop and is probably the first windows on arm machine that isn't completely unusable. But, its going to take another leap or two to catch-up with current top of the line machines. Everyone loves geekbench so, here is an obviously unthrottled x13s vs a similarly rated 28W AMD 7840U. https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/21596449 https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/21596449 https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-7-7840u https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-7-7840u That Amd is 2x the single threaded perf, and 50% faster multithreaded, and anything graphics related is going to look even worse.

wolfspider 3y ago

My own humble opinion is that Intel has always suffered from market cannibalization. They are a brand I look for but many times the iteration of products will force me to go a generation or two older because I can’t argue with the price and features. By the time I was sold on a NUC they were discontinued. I wanted a discrete GPU when they announced Xe but it has become Xe ARC alchemist, battlemage, celestial, and druid. By the time I’m ready to spend some money it will become something else usually. Also, they should have snapped up Nuvia. I’m still rooting for them but really if they could streamline their products and be willing to take a leap of faith on others in the same space it would help out a lot.

rudedogg 3y ago
I felt that way about their Optane persistent RAM memory (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/05/intel-finally-announces-ddr4-memory-made-from-persistent-3d-xpoint/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/05/intel-finally-announ...).
Night_Thastus 3y ago
>I wanted a discrete GPU when they announced Xe but it has become Xe ARC alchemist, battlemage, celestial, and druid. They've made this situation fairly clear, in my eyes. Alchemist is the product line for their first attempt at true dedicated GPUs like those Nvidia and AMD produce. It's based on Intel Xe GPU architecture. It's done decently well, and they've been very diligent about driver updates. Battlemage is the next architecture that will replace it when it's ready, which I believe was targeted for this year. Similar to how the Nvidia 4k series replaced the 3k before it. Celestial comes a couple years later, then druid a couple years after that, etc. They don't exist simultaneously, they're just the names they use for generations of their GPUs.

kbutler 3y ago

Andy Grove's philosophy was "Only the paranoid survive". Intel seemed to rest on its laurels, divesting ARM, casually developing casual GPUs, and being complacent about their biggest direct competitor. They needed (and need) a lot more paranoia.

andrewstuart 3y ago

Off topic but I find it weird that Intel CEO does so much religious quoting under the Intel corporate logo: Here's one examples but there's a pile of them. https://twitter.com/PGelsinger/status/1751653865009631584 https://twitter.com/PGelsinger/status/1751653865009631584 I guess Intel does need the help of a higher power at the stage.

MrBuddyCasino 3y ago
Almost as if "doing the right thing" requires an underlying moral framework.
- andrewstuart 3y ago
  I' not sure I would agree that you need any sort of "moral framework" to know how to do the right thing, such as religion. Knowing how to do the right thing is simple human decency.
bpt3 3y ago
That's not under the Intel corporate logo. It's a personal account. His comments aren't my cup of tea but they certainly aren't generally offensive.
- JonChesterfield 3y ago
  It has implications for his decision making process though. Christianity requires comfortably handling internally inconsistent information and taking a superficial approach to evidence. Whether that is an advantage in a CEO is unclear. It probably helps him remain confident in Intel's outlook.
  - Boatfaceing 3y ago
    [dead]
deleted 3y ago
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mjevans 3y ago

Wasn't the region around 12-7nM around where flash and RAM style memory were more reliable? If the new process works well for those but is cheaper that could be very good for bulk (value focused) non-volatile and volatile memory.

oldgradstudent 3y ago

> I thought that Krzanich should do something similar: Intel should stop focusing its efforts on being an integrated device manufacturer (IDM) — a company that both designed and manufactured its own chips exclusively — and shift to becoming a foundry that also served external customers. That would only work if Intel has a competitive foundry. Intel produces very high margin chips. Can it be competitive with TSMC in low margin chips where costs must be controlled? The rumors I've heard (not sure about their credibility) is that Intel is simply not competitive in terms of costs and yields. And that's even before considering it doesn't really have an effective process competitive with TSMC. It's easy to say it should become a foundry, it's much harder to actually do that.

BonoboIO 3y ago

Intel: The Boeing of semiconductors

ycsux 3y ago

Boycott Intel

koshergweilo 3y ago
Why
- selimthegrim 3y ago
  Israeli fabs?

quickthrower2 3y ago

Good. Evolution! Competition still works and regulatory capture can’t help every corp.

mmaunder 3y ago

Intel is just like Boeing: A company with legendary engineering roots taken over by myopic financial engineers who can’t think further than next quarters stock price, which is their only measure, their only target, and to which all their bonuses are attached.

danielmarkbruce 3y ago
Good analogy.
kaliqt 3y ago
Funnily enough, this is EXACTLY what has happened to the video game and movie/series industry. They jump onto the latest trend, e.g. ESG to get in good with the banks and funds without thinking about what long term damage it is doing to their brands and products.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  To be fair, they jump on that particular trend because the banks will punish them if they don't. They have tens of trillions in assets under their management and they make sure that capital won't flow to companies that refuse their agenda. In effect the banks dictate the direction society moves towards. And people say it's a conspiracy theory. > ESG investment funds in the United States saw capital inflows of $3.1 billion in 2022 while non-ESG investment funds saw capital outflows of $370 billion during the stock market decline that year
  - rpmisms 3y ago
    It's not a conspiracy theory if it's on their website...
  - hdtyyf 3y ago
    This is utterly incorrect. The amount of funds with an environmental or social mandate is trivial; and nearly all of those mandates require essentially nothing. It is sad how easy it is to dupe mediocre men into believing thinking they are victims, when in fact they are simply whiny little snowflake losers.

tgtweak 3y ago

I'm kind of bullish on Intel right now. They've moved up so many process nodes so quickly and have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab. Let's ignore the elephant in the room which is taiwan and it's sovereignty, and only focus on the core r&d. Intel flopped so hard on process nodes for 4 years up until Gelsinger took the reigns... it was honestly unprecedented levels of R&D failure. What happened over the 8 years prior was hedge funds and banks had saddled up on Intel stock which was paying healthy dividends due to cost cutting and "coasting". This sudden shock of "we're going to invest everything in R&D and catch back up" was news that a lot of intel shareholders didn't want to hear. They dumped the stock and the price adjusted in kind. Intel's 18A is roughly 6 months ahead of schedule, set to begin manufacturing in the latter half of 2024. Most accounts put this ahead of TSMC's equivalent N2 node... Fab investments have a 3 year lag on delivering value. We're only starting to see the effect of putting serious capital and focus on this, as of this year. I also think we'll see more companies getting smart about having all of their fabrication eggs in one of two baskets (samsung or tsmc) both within a 500 mile radius circle in the south china sea. Intel has had 4 years of technical debt on it's fabrication side, negative stock pressure from the vacuum created by AMD and Nvidia, and is still managing to be profitable. I think the market (and analysts like this) are all throwing the towel in on the one company that has quite a lot to gain at this point after losing a disproportionate amount of share value and market. I just hope they keep Pat at the helm for another 2 years to fully deliver on his strategy or Intel will continue where it was headed 4 years ago.

SchumerGrift 3y ago
> They've moved up so many process nodes so quickly and have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab. I'd buy this if they'd actually built a fab, but right now this seems too-little, too-late for a producer's economy. The rest frankly doesn't matter much. Intel processors are only notable in small sections of the market. And frankly—as counter-intuitive as this may seem to such an investor-bullish forum—the death knell was the government chip subsidy. I simply can't imagine american government and private enterprise collaborating to produce anything useful in 2024, especially when the federal government has shown such a deep disinterest in holding the private economy culpable to any kind of commitment. Why would intel bother?

krautt 3y ago

i worked at intel between 97 and 07. MFG was absolute king. Keeping that production line stable and active was the priority that eclipsed all. i was a process engineer, and to change a gas flow rate on some part of the process by a little bit, i'd have to design an experiment, collect data for months, work with various upstream/downstream teams, and write a change control proposal that would exceed a hundred pages of documentation. AFAIK, that production line was the most complex human process that had happened to date. It was mostly ran by 25-30 yo engineers. That in itself was a miracle.

dr_quacksworth 3y ago
Semiconductor manufacturing is brutal. I'm glad I no long work for 24/7 fabs & foundries. I have similar stories where adding a standard wafer-rinse step took a year of testing, documenting, pitching to customers, etc.

Sparkyte 3y ago

You can not innovate without competition. AMD will stagnate too without Intel or another company competing. I am hoping Intel rights its wrongs so they can stay competitive. It takes a good amount of competition to keep businesses honest.

dcdc123 3y ago

Stop humbling them, I still own a bunch of stock.

culebron21 3y ago

That much of text, of no use to most in the tech field... Discussions on big tech seem to me like those on geopolitics.

bernardlunn 3y ago

Brilliant article. He is totally right that what Pat Gelsinger is doing is as brave as what Andy Grove did and just as essential. In hindsight Andy Grove was 100% right and I hope Pat Gelsinger is proved right. The fact that Intel stock went up during the Brian Krzanich tenure as CEO is simply a reflection of that being the free money era that lifted all boats/stocks. Without that we would be writing Intel’s epitaph now. You cannot play offense in tech when there is a big market shift.

mixedbit 3y ago

Isn't the current GPU-based stack which drives the progress of AI an early stage architecture which will become sub-optimal and obsolete in a longer term? Having separate processors with separate memory and separate software stack to do matrix operations works, but it would be much more convenient and productive to have a system with one RAM and CPUs that can efficiently do matrix operations and would not require the programmer to delegate these operations to a separate stack. Event the name 'Graphics Processing Unit' suggest that the current approach for AI is rather hacky. Because of this, in a long run there can an opportunity for Intel and other CPU manufacturers to regain the lucrative market from NVIDIA.

mike_hearn 3y ago
The software stack co-evolves with the hardware, if the hardware can't do something fast then the software guys can't necessarily even try it out. People have been trying to break NVIDIA's moat by creating non-GPU accelerators. The core maths operations aren't that varied so it's an obvious thing to try. Nothing worked, not even NVIDIA's own attempts. AI researchers have a software stack oriented around devices with separate memory and it's abstracted, so unifying CPU and GPU ram doesn't seem to make a big difference for them. Don't be fooled by the name GPU. It's purely historical. "GPUs" used for AI don't have any video output capability. I think you can't even render with them. They are just specialised computers come with their own OS ("driver"), compilers, APIs and dev stack, which happen to need a CPU to bring them online and which communicate via PCIe instead of ethernet.
- drBonkers 3y ago
  How do the new “TPUs” and “NPUs” slot into your perspective of GPUs? Just nomenclature catching up to describe matrix math, ML GPUs without video output?
  - mike_hearn 3y ago
    TPU is a Google thing. It shows how far NVIDIA has gone from classical GPUs that Google made ML specific silicon and it's not a clear winner over NVIDIA chips (or in some cases is a clear loser, from what I understand). I don't know about NPUs. Do you mean Apple? Apple silicon is interesting because of the unified memory architecture, but beyond letting you save RAM by using it for both graphics and app code simultaneously I'm not sure it has much benefit. Certainly, datacenters will remain on NVIDIA for the time being unless AMD manage to catch up on their software stack. Intel is the dark horse here. I hear rumblings that their first offering is actually quite good.

drumhead 3y ago

With the US re-industrialising, semi-conductors are a strategic priority so Intel will be at the heart of the process. They're going to be a major beneficiary of the process, here and in Europe. They'll be a significant player. They got lazy and sat on their laurels when AMD was struggling and they didnt view ARM as a threat. TSMC was a probably a joke to them...until everyone brought out killer products and Intel had no response to them. They could have been way ahead of the pack by now but they decided to harvest the market instead of innovating aggresively. Right now they're worth less than $200bn, which is less than half of Broadcom or TSMC, its 30% less than AMD and 10% of Nvidia. Is it intrisically worth that little? Probably not, I think its a buy at this price.

d_burfoot 3y ago

Intel has made a lot of mistakes, but I'm reluctant to bash a company that's contributed such a vast amount to human civilization. The insights and innovations pushed forward by Intel in its heyday have delivered incalculable benefits to billions of humans and will benefit billions more for the rest of human history. Their recent history is checkered but the overall grade for Intel is A+ : staggering success.

Paianni 3y ago

If they can get Horse Creek out the door, I'm interested, if not, I'm not.