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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
by 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[deleted]
- captn3m0 3y agoIt would have had the same fate as the NVIDIA ARM deal.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- adventured 3y agoMaybe, 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 agoUnlikely 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 agoone example would be the semicustom deal with mediatek https://corp.mediatek.com/news-events/press-releases/mediatek-partners-with-nvidia-to-provide-full-scale-product-roadmap-to-the-automotive-industry https://corp.mediatek.com/news-events/press-releases/mediate... like it’s of course dependent on what “build competing products” means, but assuming you mean semicustom (like AMD sells to Sony or Samsung) then nvidia isn’t as intractibly opposed as you’re implying. regulators can be dumb fanboys/lack vision too, and nvidia very obviously was not spending $40b just to turn around and burn down the ecosystem. Being kingmaker on a valuable IP is far more valuable than selling some more tegras for a couple years. People get silly when nvidia is involved and make silly assertions, and most of the stories have become overwrought and passed into mythology. Bumpgate is… something that happened to AMD on that generation of gpus too, for instance. People baked their 7850s to reflow the solder back then too - did AMD write you a check for their defective gpu? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iLWkNPTyg2k https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iLWkNPTyg2k
- bombcar 3y agoHe was right but for the wrong reasons. Had Intel figured out hyperthreading security and avoided all the various exploits that later showed up …
- quatrefoil 3y agoThen they would have worse-performing chips and the market wouldn't care about the security benefits. Cloud providers may grumble, but they aren't the most important market anyway.
- nottorp 3y agoHas there ever been an exploit in the wild for rowhammer/whatever the other vulnerabilities were?
- anyfoo 3y ago> The future of chips is security on the chip. I was like no, no its not! Putting aside whether the statement is considered true or not, buying McAfee under the guise of the kind of security meant when talking about silicon is... weird, to say the least.
- lmm 3y agoMcAfee makes their money from people being required to run it for certification. Imagine government/healthcare/banking/etc. customers being obliged to use only Intel chips because they'll fail their audits (which mandate on-chip antivirus) otherwise. I hate it, but I can see the business sense in trying.
- mikepurvis 3y agoStill, $7.6B is ludicrous money for a "try", especially when everyone in the room should have known how shaky the fundamentals were for such a pitch.
- wredue 3y agoI’m not sure mcaffee is the go to for this requirement any longer. Maybe. Definitely across the 4 enterprise I’ve worked at, they all migrated away from mcaffee.
- dboreham 3y agoMBAs eating the world one acquisition at a time.
- selimthegrim 3y agoHe was a process engineer
- kibwen 3y agoIt's never too late to go back to school.
- NtochkaNzvanova 3y agoThe CEO at the time of the McAfee acquisition was Paul Otellini -- an MBA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otellini https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Otellini.
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- FullyFunctional 3y agoIntel has an amazing track record with acquisitions -- almost none of them work out. Even the tiny fraction of actually good companies they acquired, the Intel culture is one of really toxic politics and it's very hard for acquired people to succeed. I wish Pat well and I think he might be the only who could save the company if it's not already too late. Sourced: worked with many ex-Intel people. POSTSCRIPT: I have seen from the inside (not at Intel) how a politically motivated acquisition failed so utter spectacularly due to that same internal power struggle. I think there are some deeply flawed incentives in corporate America.
- tcmart14 3y agoNot gonna lie, I had a professor who retired from Intel as a director or something like that. Worst professor I had the entire time. We couldn't have class for a month because he 'hurt his back,' then half us saw him playing a round of golf two days later.
- jomohke 3y agoThere's definitely a lot that can be critiqued about that period. Famously they divested their ARM-based mobile processor division just before smartphones took off. The new CEO, as the article mentions, seems to have a lot more of a clue. We just hope he hasn't arrived too late.
- dralley 3y ago>Famously they divested their ARM-based mobile processor division just before smartphones took off. Wasn't that AMD (perhaps also AMD)? Qualcomm Adreno GPUs are ATi Radeon IP, hence the anagram.
- tverbeure 3y agoIntel divested their StrongARM/XScale product line.
- KerrAvon 3y agoYes, just before the iPhone came out and with Apple newly fully engaged as a major Intel CPU customer (for x86 Macs) for the first time ever. Kind of like Decca Records turning down The Beatles.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tirant 3y agoIntel sold their XScale family of processors to Marvell in 2006. I remember very well as back then I was working in University porting Linux to an Intel XScale development platform we had gotten recently. After I completed the effort, Android was released as a public beta and I dared to port it too to that Development Board as a side project. I thought back then Intel was making a big mistake by missing that opportunity. But Intel were firm believers in the x86 architecture, specially on their Atom Cores. Those little Intel PXA chips were actually very capable, I had back then my own Sharp Zaurus PDA running a full Linux system on an Intel ARM chip and I loved it. Great performance and great battery life.
- brutus1213 3y agoI remember when they did random stuff like the whole IoT push (frankly, their offerings made no sense to humble me .. Microsoft had a better IoT than Intel). They did drone crap .. gave a kick ass keynote at CES I recall .. also .. made little sense. Finally, the whole FPGA thing .. makes little sense. So much value being destroyed :(
- stefan_ 3y agoI remember when they bought a smart glasses company then refunded every buyer ever the full retail price. There hasn’t been an Intel acquisition that has worked out in some 20 years now it seems. Just utterly unserious people.
- CoastalCoder 3y ago> There hasn’t been an Intel acquisition that has worked out in some 20 years now it seems. Maybe Habana Labs? I can't really tell if it's working out for Intel, but I do hear them mentioned now and then.
- TylerE 3y agoIsn't that true for virtually EVERY big tech merger? Like, which ones have actually worked?
- dangrossman 3y agoGoogle built its core advertising ecosystem on acquisitions (Applied Semantics, DoubleClick, AdMob, etc) and extended it into the mobile space by buying Android.
- erik 3y agoYoutube was also an acquisition. Haven't heard much about successful Google acquisitions lately though.
- murderfs 3y ago
- mise_en_place 3y agoIntel pivoting to GPUs was a smart move but they just lacked the tribal knowledge needed to successfully ship a competitive GPU offering. We got Arc instead.
- solarkraft 3y agoIsn't Arc actually pretty okay?
- inversetelecine 3y agoIt's getting better and drivers are improving all the time. I personally liked the Arc for the hardware AV1 encoding. Quicksync (I use qsvencc) is actually pretty decent for a hardware encoder. It won't ever beat software encoding, but the speed is hard to ignore. I don't have any experience using it for streaming, but it seems pretty popular there too. Nvidia has nvenc, and reviews say it's good as well but I've never used it.
- FullyFunctional 3y agoThis. If you follow GamersNexus, there are stories every month about just how much the Arc drivers have improved. If this rate continues and the next-gen hardware (Battlemage) actually ships, then Intel might be a serious contender for the midrange. I really hope Intel sticks with it this time as we all know it takes monumental effort to enter the discrete GPU market.
- dralley 3y agoWhen it works, perhaps
- mastax 3y agoThey mostly work now and they are decent options at the low-end (what used to be the mid-range: $200) where there is shockingly little competition nowadays. However, they underperform greatly compared to competitors' cards with similar die areas and memory bus widths. For example the Arc A770 is 406mm^2 on TSMC N6 and a 256-bit bus and performs similarly to the RX 6650XT which is 237mm^2 on TSMC N7 with a 128-bit bus. They're probably losing a lot of money on these cards.
- bee_rider 3y agoIntel should have bought Nvidia. And acqu-hired Jensen as CEO.
- moffkalast 3y agoWould that make them Ntel or Invidia?
- bee_rider 3y agoInvidia is sort of how nvidia gets pronounced anyway, so I’d go with that one. Ntel sounds like they make telecommunications equipment in 1993.
- bonton89 3y agoI've heard the reason AMD bought ATI instead of Nvidia is Jensen wanted to be CEO of the combined company for it to go through. I actually AMD would be better off it they had taken that deal. Prior to the ATI acquisition nvidia actually had been the motherboard chipset manufacturer of choice for AMD cpus for a number of years.
- edgyquant 3y agoAMD is doing fantastic and it’s CEO is great. It would be a big let down if they had bought nvidia as we’d have a single well run company instead of two
- hakfoo 3y agoISTR there was sort of a love-hate relationship with a lot of nVidia chipsets. nVidia always had the trump card of saying "if you want SLI, you have to buy our chipset." But conversely, a lot of the options weren't great. VIA tended to alternate between decent and incompetent chipsets, SIS was mostly limited to the bottom of the market, and ATI's chipsets were very rare.
- thijson 3y agoMcAfee was Renee James idea, she was two in a box (Intel speak for sharing a management spot) with Brian Krzanich.