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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 ig

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?
- tgtweak 3y ago
  Licking County (next-gen, post-18A) has already broken ground and is in assembly, Magdeburg and Ireland (18A) also well underway and in production. Arizona's 20A facility (Fab 52 and Fab 62) have been done for half a year and are already in tape out. Not sure what is up for debate here, you can't really hide a $5BN infrastructure project from the public. I think it's safe to say that 80BN+ in subsidies are already well in the process of being deployed. Intel, along with Samsung and TSMC, are heavily subsidized and have been so for a very long time. Any government with modest intelligence understands the gravity of having microchip manufacturing secured.
mcint 3y ago
I appreciate the deep cut. I definitely do not follow companies internally closely enough to see this coming. > (samsung or tsmc) both within a 500 mile radius circle in the south china sea. Within 500 mile radius of great power competitor, perhaps. The closest points on mainland Taiwan and Korea are 700 miles apart. Fabs about 1000 miles, by my loose reckoning.
- hencoappel 3y ago
  A 500 mile radius circle has a diameter of 1000 miles, so you're both correct.
  - mcint 3y ago
    Ha, silly of me, quite right. Not exactly what comes to mind when drawing circles to include a city 2/3 south down Taiwan, and 2/3 north up RoK, but fair point.
livinginfear 3y ago
[flagged]
- tgtweak 3y ago
  Intel is recipient #1 of CHIPS and similar EU initiatives - and the government may pressure nvidia and other US companies (ie: apple) to move their procurement domestically. Intel being the only player outside of taiwan and south korea to have the capital and capacity to supply that.
dur-randir 3y ago
>have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab In the terms of end product - not really. Last 3-4 gens are indistinguishable to the end user. It's a combined effect of marketing failure and really underwhelming gains - when marketing screams "breakthrough gen", but what you get is +2%/ST perf for another *Lake, you can't sell it. They might've built a foundation and that might be a deliberate tactics to get back into the race, we'll see. But i'm not convinced for now.
- 14u2c 3y ago
  What you quoted refers to Intel's efforts to act as a fab for external customers.
- paulmd 3y ago
  raptor lake is the same as coffee lake/comet lake? nah
- TechnicalVault 3y ago
  Depends who your user is. From a desktop side you're probably not going to notice because desktop CPU requirements have been stagnant for years, desktop is all about GPU. On the server side Sapphire Rapids and Emerald Rapids is Intel getting back in the game and the game is power and market share. See there's only 2 or 3 more obvious generations of obvious die shrinks available. Beyond those generations we'll have to innovate some other way, so whoever grabs the fab market for these modes now gets a longer period to enjoy the fruits of their innovation. Meanwhile server CPU TDPs are hitting the 400W+ mark and DC owners are looking dubiously at big copper busbars, die shrinks tend to reduce the Watts per Calculation so they're appealing. In the current power market, more efficient computing translates into actual savings on your power bill. There's still demand for better processors, even if we are sweating those assets for 5-7 years now.
- tgtweak 3y ago
  Intel is still behind TSMC at this point in terms of raw process efficiency, but that rate of change is moving quickly and I posit that the products released later this year will have a process efficiency advantage over AMD's offerings for the first time since AMD abandoned global foundry.
RCitronsBroker 3y ago
i honestly don’t see what you are seeing in terms of taiwans future sovereignty. Of course, China would like to do something about Taiwan, especially now with their economy kind of in the dumps and a collapsing real estate bubble. But when you look at the facts of it all, there’s absolut ZERO chance chine can muster up what it takes to hold their own in such a conflict. Their military isn’t up to snuff and they are one broken dam away from a huge mass casualty event.
- riffraff 3y ago
  I think "economy in the dumps" is a bit too harsh. China is facing a deflating real estate bubble, but they still managed to grow the last year (official sources are disputed but independent estimates are still positive).
  - RCitronsBroker 3y ago
    it’s where the growth is coming from. Chinas growth (or even just sustenance) isn’t coming from a healthy job market and consumer spending. It’s mostly fueled by SOEs and prefectures going into debt to keep on investing, many local administration have found out they can trick debt limits by forming state-owned special purpose vehicles that aren’t bound to their debt limits. That’s not good at all. there’s a reason we are seeing tons of novel Chinese car brands being pushed here in Europe, they massively overproduced and cannot sell them in their own market anymore. It’s really not looking great atm. edit: one also should keep in mind that the Chinese real estate market is entirely different in its importance to its populations wealth. "Buying" real estate is pretty much the only sanctioned market to invest your earnings. They still pretend to be communist after all.
  - MR4D 3y ago
    I would refer you to these to take the counterpoint to your position [1][2] [3]. China is in a world of hurt, but the government is trying desperately to hide how bad it actually is. If this continues for a few more months, it will be an existential situation for their economy. [1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-31/china-home-sales-slump-persists-after-evergrande-liquidation https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-31/china-hom... [2] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-31/china-stocks-erase-gains-spurred-by-rescue-package-optimism https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-31/china-sto... [3] - https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/foreign-direct-investment-exiting-china-new-data-show https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/foreign-direct...
dchftcs 3y ago
>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" Not clear about what the role of activist hedge funds is here but Intel's top shareholders are mutual funds like Vanguard which are part of many people's retirement investments. If an activist hedge fund got to run the show, it means that they could get these passive shareholders on their side or to abstain. It would have meant those funds along with pension funds, who should have been in a place to push back against short term thinking, didn't push back. These funds should really be run much more competently given their outsized influence, but the incentives are not there.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- pas 3y ago
  there's probably no need to imagine this conspiracy-like machinations of shareholders. Intel fucked up bad and process development is certified crazytrain to la la land. (dropping molten tin 1000 times a second and then shooting it with a laser just to get a lamp that can bless you with the hard light you need for your fancy fine few nanometers thin shadows? sure, why not, but don't forget to shoot the plasma ball with a weaker pulse to nudge it into the shape of a lens, cheerio. and you know that all other parts are similarly scifi sounding. and their middle management got greedy and they were bleeding talent for a decade.)
throwaway4good 3y ago
What I worry about with Intel is that they have gotten too much into politics; relying on CHIPS act and other subsidies, encouraging sanctions on Chinese competitors while relying on full access to the Chinese market for sales. It is not a good long term strategy: The winds of politics may change, politicians may set more terms (labour and environment), foreign market access may become politicized too (US politicians will have to sell chips like they sell airplanes on foreign trips). So Intel will end up like the old US car makers or Boeing - no longer driven by technological innovation but instead by its relationship to Washington.
- hardware2win 3y ago
  Have you read chip war? It will challenge your concerns
  - throwaway4good 3y ago
    Yeah. Too much the cold war angle. I think he overstates the role of government/military and underestimates how much the consumer market has driven the process innovations that has made computing cheap and ubiquitous,
    - tgtweak 3y ago
      If you think the concern over China and Taiwan is understated I think you'd do well to look at how both the US and China are putting insane amounts of resources behind this.
- davidy123 3y ago
  "This investment, at a time when … wages war against utter wickedness, a war in which good must defeat evil, is an investment in the right and righteous values that spell progress for humanity" That is not a partner for creating logical systems. Very clear their current decisions are political.
  - throwaway4good 3y ago
epolanski 3y ago
> I think the market (and analysts like this) are all throwing the towel 1) Intel is up 100% from ten years ago when it was at $ 23. All that despite revenue being flat/negative, inflation and costs rising and margins collapsing. 2) Intel is up 60% in the last 12 months alone. Doesn't look to me like they throwing the towel at all.
- tgtweak 3y ago
  Intel was literally at $25 in February last year, that's the 10-years-ago stock price. Intel's P/E was about 50 at that time, AMD was over 1000. That's "throwing in the towel" in as pointed of a way that the market can possibly do.
rjzzleep 3y ago
You should be bullish on intel, they got so much TSMC and Samsung trade secrets through the chips act that it would be a miracle to mess that up.
- jonplackett 3y ago
  How did that work?
adrian_b 3y ago
There is a good chance for Intel to recover, but that remains to be proven. From their long pipeline of future CMOS manufacturing processes with which Intel hopes to close the performance gap between them and TSMC, for now there exists a single commercial product: Meteor Lake, which consists mostly of chips made by TSMC, with one single Intel 4 die, the CPU tile. The Meteor Lake CPU seems to have finally reached the energy efficiency of the TSMC 5-nm process of almost 4 years ago, but it also has obvious difficulties in reaching high clock frequencies, exactly like Ice Lake in the past, so once more Intel has been forced to accompany Meteor Lake with Raptor Lake Refresh made in the old technology, to cover the high-performance segment. Nevertheless, Meteor Lake demonstrates reaching the first step with Intel 4. If they will succeed to launch on time and with good performance, later this year, their server products based on Intel 3, that will be a much stronger demonstration of their real progress than this Meteor Lake preview, which has also retained their old microarchitecture for the big cores, so it shows nothing new there. Only by the end of 2024 it will become known whether Intel has really become competitive again, after seeing the Arrow Lake microarchitecture and the Intel 20A manufacturing process.
- formerly_proven 3y ago
  > TSMC 5-nm process of almost 4 years ago N5 is interesting because it's the first process fully designed around EUV and because it was pretty much exclusive to Apple for almost two years. It launched in Apple products in late 2020, then crickets until about late 2022 (Zen 4, RTX 4000, Radeon 7000). Launches of the other vendors were still on N7 or older processes in 2020 - RTX 3000 for example used some 10nm Samsung process in late 2020. All of those were DUV (including Intel 7 / 10ESF). That's the step change we are looking at.
  - ajross 3y ago
    Exactly. N5 is sort of an outlier, it's a process where a bunch of technology bets and manufacturing investment all came together to produce a big leap in competitive positioning. It's the same kind of thing we saw with Intel 22nm[1], where Ivy Bridge was just wiping the floor with the rest of the industry. Improvements since have been modest, to the extent that N3 is only barely any better (c.f. the Apple M3 is... still a really great CPU, but not actually that much of an upgrade over the M2). There's a hole for Intel to aim at now. We'll see. [1] Also 32nm and 45nm, really. It's easy to forget now, but Intel strung together a just shocking number of dominant processes in the 00's.
jillesvangurp 3y ago
There are a few areas where they are under pressure: - The wintel monopoly is losing its relevance now that ARM chips are creeping into the windows laptop market and now that Apple has proven that ARM is fantastic for low power & high performance solutions. Nobody cares about x86 that much any more. It's lost its shine as the "fastest" thing available. - AI & GPU market is where the action is and Intel is a no-show for that so far. It's not about adding AI/GPU features to cheap laptop chips but about high end workstations and dedicated solutions for large scale compute. Intel's GPUs lack credibility for this so far. Apple's laptops seem popular with AI researchers lately and the goto high performance solutions seem to be provided by NVidia. - Apple has been leading the way with ARM based, high performance integrated chips powering phones, laptops, and recently AR/VR. Neither AMD nor Intel have a good answer to that so far. Though AMD at least has a foothold in the door with e.g. Xbox and the Steam Deck depending on their integrated chips and them still having credible solutions for gaming. Nvidia also has lots of credibility in this space. - Cloud computing is increasingly shifting to cheap ARM powered hardware. Mostly the transition is pretty seamless. Cost and energy usage are the main drivers here.
- hardware2win 3y ago
  They will be manufacturing those ARM cpus
  - jillesvangurp 3y ago
    Has that been announced? Or is it more a matter of Intel producing some unannounced product on an unannounced timeline with a feature set that has yet to be announced on an architecture that may or may not involve arm? Intel walking away from x86 would be a big step for them. First they don't own arm and second all their high end stuff is x86.
    - hardware2win 3y ago
      They will be manufacturing them for their customers. Also arm isa is just isa You seem to focus on it too much when it isnt THAT relevant. Isa doesnt imply perf/energy characteristics
lr1970 3y ago
The biggest Intel's problem is that a lot of good people left over the previous years of shitty management. Pouring money into R&D certainly helps but with wrong people in key positions the efficiency of the investments will be low.
- tgtweak 3y ago
  Gelsinger put a $4BN compensation package in effect for securing and retaining talent within his first 6 months of taking the role, one of the first things noted was brain drain to competitors. >Intel Poaches Head Apple Silicon Architect Who Led Transition To Arm And M1 Chips. Intel has reacquired the services of Jeff Wilcox, who spearheaded the transition to Arm and M1 chips for Apple. Wilcox will oversee architecture for all Intel system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs note re-acquired. Raja Koduri also came back to Intel (from AMD Radeon) and only recently left to dabble in VFX, as opposed to working for a competitor to Intel. Anton Kaplanyan (father of RTX at nvidia) is at Intel now. I think people are not checking linkedin when they make the claim that Intel's talent has been drained and there is nobody left at home. Where there is remuneration and opportunity you will find talent. I think it's safe to say no industry experts have written down Intel. edit: first foundry customer online in New Mexico fab: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-opens-fab-9-new-mexico.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-...
PaulHoule 3y ago
This blog https://semiaccurate.com/ https://semiaccurate.com/ has told the story for more than a decade that Intel has been getting high on its own supply and that the media has been uncritical of the stories it tells. In particular I think when it comes to the data center they’ve forgotten their roots. They took over the data center in the 1990s because they were producing desktop PCs in such numbers they could afford to get way ahead of the likes of Sun Microsystems, HP, and SGI. Itanium failed out of ignorance and hubris but if they were true evil geniuses they couldn’t have made a better master plan to wipe out most of the competition for the x86 architecture. Today they take the desktop for granted and make the false claim that their data center business is more significant (not what the financial numbers show.). It’s highly self-destructive because when they pander to Amazon, Amazon takes the money they save and spends it on developing Graviton. There is some prestige in making big machines for the national labs but it is an intellectual black hole because the last thing they want to do is educate anyone else on how to simulate hydrogen bombs in VR. So we get the puzzle that most of the performance boost customers could be getting comes from SIMD instructions and other “accelerators” but Intel doesn’t make a real effort to get this technology working for anyone other than the Facebook and the national labs and, in particular, they drag their feet in getting it available on enough chips that it is is worth it for mainstream developers to use this technology. A while back, IBM had this thing where they might ship you a mainframe with 50 cores and license you to use 30 and if you had a load surge you could call you up and they could turn on another 10 cores at a high price. I was fooled when I heard this the first time and thought it was smart business but after years of thinking about how to deliver value to customers I realized it’s nothing more than “vice signaling”. It makes them look rapacious and avaricious but really somebody is paying for those 20 cores and if it is not the customer it is the shareholders. It’s not impossible that IBM and/or the customer winds up ahead in the situation but the fact is they paid to make those 20 cores and if those cores are sitting there doing nothing they’re making no value for anyone. If everything was tuned up perfectly they might make a profit by locking them down, but it’s not a given at all that it is going to work out that way. Similarly Intel has been hell-bent to fuse away features on their chips so often you get a desktop part that has a huge die area allocated to AVX features that you’re not allowed to use. Either the customer or the shareholders are paying to fabricate a lot of transistors the customer doesn’t get to use. It’s madness but except for Charlie Demerjian the whole computer press pretends it is normal. Apple bailed out on Intel because Intel failed to stick to its roadmap to improve their chips (they’re number one why try harder?) and they are lucky to have customers that accept that a new version of MacOS can drop older chips which means MacOS benefits from features that were introduced more than ten years ago. Maybe Intel and Microsoft are locked in a deadly embrace but their saving grace is that every ARM vendor other than Apple has failed to move the needle on ARM performance since 2017, which itself has to be an interesting story that I haven’t seen told.
Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
> 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. Why the fuck are shareholders often so short-sighted? Or do they just genuinely think the R&D investment won't pay off?
- tgtweak 3y ago
  They bought the stock on the principle that it was going to pay a consistent 5% dividend every year and weren't looking for moonshots at the cost of that consistent revenue.
  - Jensson 3y ago
    Yeah, just look into any investment thread on HN to see how shareholders thinks, nobody recommend investing in unconventional things. Shareholders are your everyday guy who decides where to put his pension, and that guy picks the safe bet with good returns.
Shocka1 3y ago
Correct me if I'm wrong on the timeline I think you are talking about, but Intel stock shed value like the rest of tech in 2021/22. IMO, your theory had a much smaller impact than you think in terms of the dump. They both dropped roughly the same amount from their frothy highs in 2021 to their 2022 lows, INTC and AMD at roughly 60ish%. For the rebound you're theory is probably more true. It has been better for AMD obviously, but INTC has almost doubled in value since its $25 low, which is not slouching by any means. I can agree on being bullish long term (I had short puts exercise back in the $20s). Like a lot of tech, INTC has more money than God and they'll get it right eventually.

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?

tgtweak 3y ago
Licking County (next-gen, post-18A) has already broken ground and is in assembly, Magdeburg and Ireland (18A) also well underway and in production. Arizona's 20A facility (Fab 52 and Fab 62) have been done for half a year and are already in tape out. Not sure what is up for debate here, you can't really hide a $5BN infrastructure project from the public. I think it's safe to say that 80BN+ in subsidies are already well in the process of being deployed. Intel, along with Samsung and TSMC, are heavily subsidized and have been so for a very long time. Any government with modest intelligence understands the gravity of having microchip manufacturing secured.

mcint 3y ago

I appreciate the deep cut. I definitely do not follow companies internally closely enough to see this coming. > (samsung or tsmc) both within a 500 mile radius circle in the south china sea. Within 500 mile radius of great power competitor, perhaps. The closest points on mainland Taiwan and Korea are 700 miles apart. Fabs about 1000 miles, by my loose reckoning.

hencoappel 3y ago
A 500 mile radius circle has a diameter of 1000 miles, so you're both correct.
- mcint 3y ago
  Ha, silly of me, quite right. Not exactly what comes to mind when drawing circles to include a city 2/3 south down Taiwan, and 2/3 north up RoK, but fair point.

livinginfear 3y ago

[flagged]

tgtweak 3y ago
Intel is recipient #1 of CHIPS and similar EU initiatives - and the government may pressure nvidia and other US companies (ie: apple) to move their procurement domestically. Intel being the only player outside of taiwan and south korea to have the capital and capacity to supply that.

dur-randir 3y ago

>have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab In the terms of end product - not really. Last 3-4 gens are indistinguishable to the end user. It's a combined effect of marketing failure and really underwhelming gains - when marketing screams "breakthrough gen", but what you get is +2%/ST perf for another *Lake, you can't sell it. They might've built a foundation and that might be a deliberate tactics to get back into the race, we'll see. But i'm not convinced for now.

14u2c 3y ago
What you quoted refers to Intel's efforts to act as a fab for external customers.
paulmd 3y ago
raptor lake is the same as coffee lake/comet lake? nah
TechnicalVault 3y ago
Depends who your user is. From a desktop side you're probably not going to notice because desktop CPU requirements have been stagnant for years, desktop is all about GPU. On the server side Sapphire Rapids and Emerald Rapids is Intel getting back in the game and the game is power and market share. See there's only 2 or 3 more obvious generations of obvious die shrinks available. Beyond those generations we'll have to innovate some other way, so whoever grabs the fab market for these modes now gets a longer period to enjoy the fruits of their innovation. Meanwhile server CPU TDPs are hitting the 400W+ mark and DC owners are looking dubiously at big copper busbars, die shrinks tend to reduce the Watts per Calculation so they're appealing. In the current power market, more efficient computing translates into actual savings on your power bill. There's still demand for better processors, even if we are sweating those assets for 5-7 years now.
tgtweak 3y ago
Intel is still behind TSMC at this point in terms of raw process efficiency, but that rate of change is moving quickly and I posit that the products released later this year will have a process efficiency advantage over AMD's offerings for the first time since AMD abandoned global foundry.

RCitronsBroker 3y ago

i honestly don’t see what you are seeing in terms of taiwans future sovereignty. Of course, China would like to do something about Taiwan, especially now with their economy kind of in the dumps and a collapsing real estate bubble. But when you look at the facts of it all, there’s absolut ZERO chance chine can muster up what it takes to hold their own in such a conflict. Their military isn’t up to snuff and they are one broken dam away from a huge mass casualty event.

riffraff 3y ago
I think "economy in the dumps" is a bit too harsh. China is facing a deflating real estate bubble, but they still managed to grow the last year (official sources are disputed but independent estimates are still positive).
- RCitronsBroker 3y ago
  it’s where the growth is coming from. Chinas growth (or even just sustenance) isn’t coming from a healthy job market and consumer spending. It’s mostly fueled by SOEs and prefectures going into debt to keep on investing, many local administration have found out they can trick debt limits by forming state-owned special purpose vehicles that aren’t bound to their debt limits. That’s not good at all. there’s a reason we are seeing tons of novel Chinese car brands being pushed here in Europe, they massively overproduced and cannot sell them in their own market anymore. It’s really not looking great atm. edit: one also should keep in mind that the Chinese real estate market is entirely different in its importance to its populations wealth. "Buying" real estate is pretty much the only sanctioned market to invest your earnings. They still pretend to be communist after all.
- MR4D 3y ago
  I would refer you to these to take the counterpoint to your position [1][2] [3]. China is in a world of hurt, but the government is trying desperately to hide how bad it actually is. If this continues for a few more months, it will be an existential situation for their economy. [1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-31/china-home-sales-slump-persists-after-evergrande-liquidation https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-31/china-hom... [2] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-31/china-stocks-erase-gains-spurred-by-rescue-package-optimism https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-31/china-sto... [3] - https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/foreign-direct-investment-exiting-china-new-data-show https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/foreign-direct...

dchftcs 3y ago

>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" Not clear about what the role of activist hedge funds is here but Intel's top shareholders are mutual funds like Vanguard which are part of many people's retirement investments. If an activist hedge fund got to run the show, it means that they could get these passive shareholders on their side or to abstain. It would have meant those funds along with pension funds, who should have been in a place to push back against short term thinking, didn't push back. These funds should really be run much more competently given their outsized influence, but the incentives are not there.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
pas 3y ago
there's probably no need to imagine this conspiracy-like machinations of shareholders. Intel fucked up bad and process development is certified crazytrain to la la land. (dropping molten tin 1000 times a second and then shooting it with a laser just to get a lamp that can bless you with the hard light you need for your fancy fine few nanometers thin shadows? sure, why not, but don't forget to shoot the plasma ball with a weaker pulse to nudge it into the shape of a lens, cheerio. and you know that all other parts are similarly scifi sounding. and their middle management got greedy and they were bleeding talent for a decade.)

throwaway4good 3y ago

What I worry about with Intel is that they have gotten too much into politics; relying on CHIPS act and other subsidies, encouraging sanctions on Chinese competitors while relying on full access to the Chinese market for sales. It is not a good long term strategy: The winds of politics may change, politicians may set more terms (labour and environment), foreign market access may become politicized too (US politicians will have to sell chips like they sell airplanes on foreign trips). So Intel will end up like the old US car makers or Boeing - no longer driven by technological innovation but instead by its relationship to Washington.

hardware2win 3y ago
Have you read chip war? It will challenge your concerns
- throwaway4good 3y ago
  Yeah. Too much the cold war angle. I think he overstates the role of government/military and underestimates how much the consumer market has driven the process innovations that has made computing cheap and ubiquitous,
  - tgtweak 3y ago
    If you think the concern over China and Taiwan is understated I think you'd do well to look at how both the US and China are putting insane amounts of resources behind this.
davidy123 3y ago
"This investment, at a time when … wages war against utter wickedness, a war in which good must defeat evil, is an investment in the right and righteous values that spell progress for humanity" That is not a partner for creating logical systems. Very clear their current decisions are political.
- throwaway4good 3y ago

epolanski 3y ago

> I think the market (and analysts like this) are all throwing the towel 1) Intel is up 100% from ten years ago when it was at $ 23. All that despite revenue being flat/negative, inflation and costs rising and margins collapsing. 2) Intel is up 60% in the last 12 months alone. Doesn't look to me like they throwing the towel at all.

tgtweak 3y ago
Intel was literally at $25 in February last year, that's the 10-years-ago stock price. Intel's P/E was about 50 at that time, AMD was over 1000. That's "throwing in the towel" in as pointed of a way that the market can possibly do.

rjzzleep 3y ago

You should be bullish on intel, they got so much TSMC and Samsung trade secrets through the chips act that it would be a miracle to mess that up.

jonplackett 3y ago
How did that work?

adrian_b 3y ago

There is a good chance for Intel to recover, but that remains to be proven. From their long pipeline of future CMOS manufacturing processes with which Intel hopes to close the performance gap between them and TSMC, for now there exists a single commercial product: Meteor Lake, which consists mostly of chips made by TSMC, with one single Intel 4 die, the CPU tile. The Meteor Lake CPU seems to have finally reached the energy efficiency of the TSMC 5-nm process of almost 4 years ago, but it also has obvious difficulties in reaching high clock frequencies, exactly like Ice Lake in the past, so once more Intel has been forced to accompany Meteor Lake with Raptor Lake Refresh made in the old technology, to cover the high-performance segment. Nevertheless, Meteor Lake demonstrates reaching the first step with Intel 4. If they will succeed to launch on time and with good performance, later this year, their server products based on Intel 3, that will be a much stronger demonstration of their real progress than this Meteor Lake preview, which has also retained their old microarchitecture for the big cores, so it shows nothing new there. Only by the end of 2024 it will become known whether Intel has really become competitive again, after seeing the Arrow Lake microarchitecture and the Intel 20A manufacturing process.

formerly_proven 3y ago
> TSMC 5-nm process of almost 4 years ago N5 is interesting because it's the first process fully designed around EUV and because it was pretty much exclusive to Apple for almost two years. It launched in Apple products in late 2020, then crickets until about late 2022 (Zen 4, RTX 4000, Radeon 7000). Launches of the other vendors were still on N7 or older processes in 2020 - RTX 3000 for example used some 10nm Samsung process in late 2020. All of those were DUV (including Intel 7 / 10ESF). That's the step change we are looking at.
- ajross 3y ago
  Exactly. N5 is sort of an outlier, it's a process where a bunch of technology bets and manufacturing investment all came together to produce a big leap in competitive positioning. It's the same kind of thing we saw with Intel 22nm[1], where Ivy Bridge was just wiping the floor with the rest of the industry. Improvements since have been modest, to the extent that N3 is only barely any better (c.f. the Apple M3 is... still a really great CPU, but not actually that much of an upgrade over the M2). There's a hole for Intel to aim at now. We'll see. [1] Also 32nm and 45nm, really. It's easy to forget now, but Intel strung together a just shocking number of dominant processes in the 00's.

jillesvangurp 3y ago

There are a few areas where they are under pressure: - The wintel monopoly is losing its relevance now that ARM chips are creeping into the windows laptop market and now that Apple has proven that ARM is fantastic for low power & high performance solutions. Nobody cares about x86 that much any more. It's lost its shine as the "fastest" thing available. - AI & GPU market is where the action is and Intel is a no-show for that so far. It's not about adding AI/GPU features to cheap laptop chips but about high end workstations and dedicated solutions for large scale compute. Intel's GPUs lack credibility for this so far. Apple's laptops seem popular with AI researchers lately and the goto high performance solutions seem to be provided by NVidia. - Apple has been leading the way with ARM based, high performance integrated chips powering phones, laptops, and recently AR/VR. Neither AMD nor Intel have a good answer to that so far. Though AMD at least has a foothold in the door with e.g. Xbox and the Steam Deck depending on their integrated chips and them still having credible solutions for gaming. Nvidia also has lots of credibility in this space. - Cloud computing is increasingly shifting to cheap ARM powered hardware. Mostly the transition is pretty seamless. Cost and energy usage are the main drivers here.

hardware2win 3y ago
They will be manufacturing those ARM cpus
- jillesvangurp 3y ago
  Has that been announced? Or is it more a matter of Intel producing some unannounced product on an unannounced timeline with a feature set that has yet to be announced on an architecture that may or may not involve arm? Intel walking away from x86 would be a big step for them. First they don't own arm and second all their high end stuff is x86.
  - hardware2win 3y ago
    They will be manufacturing them for their customers. Also arm isa is just isa You seem to focus on it too much when it isnt THAT relevant. Isa doesnt imply perf/energy characteristics

lr1970 3y ago

The biggest Intel's problem is that a lot of good people left over the previous years of shitty management. Pouring money into R&D certainly helps but with wrong people in key positions the efficiency of the investments will be low.

tgtweak 3y ago
Gelsinger put a $4BN compensation package in effect for securing and retaining talent within his first 6 months of taking the role, one of the first things noted was brain drain to competitors. >Intel Poaches Head Apple Silicon Architect Who Led Transition To Arm And M1 Chips. Intel has reacquired the services of Jeff Wilcox, who spearheaded the transition to Arm and M1 chips for Apple. Wilcox will oversee architecture for all Intel system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs note re-acquired. Raja Koduri also came back to Intel (from AMD Radeon) and only recently left to dabble in VFX, as opposed to working for a competitor to Intel. Anton Kaplanyan (father of RTX at nvidia) is at Intel now. I think people are not checking linkedin when they make the claim that Intel's talent has been drained and there is nobody left at home. Where there is remuneration and opportunity you will find talent. I think it's safe to say no industry experts have written down Intel. edit: first foundry customer online in New Mexico fab: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-opens-fab-9-new-mexico.html https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-...

PaulHoule 3y ago

This blog https://semiaccurate.com/ https://semiaccurate.com/ has told the story for more than a decade that Intel has been getting high on its own supply and that the media has been uncritical of the stories it tells. In particular I think when it comes to the data center they’ve forgotten their roots. They took over the data center in the 1990s because they were producing desktop PCs in such numbers they could afford to get way ahead of the likes of Sun Microsystems, HP, and SGI. Itanium failed out of ignorance and hubris but if they were true evil geniuses they couldn’t have made a better master plan to wipe out most of the competition for the x86 architecture. Today they take the desktop for granted and make the false claim that their data center business is more significant (not what the financial numbers show.). It’s highly self-destructive because when they pander to Amazon, Amazon takes the money they save and spends it on developing Graviton. There is some prestige in making big machines for the national labs but it is an intellectual black hole because the last thing they want to do is educate anyone else on how to simulate hydrogen bombs in VR. So we get the puzzle that most of the performance boost customers could be getting comes from SIMD instructions and other “accelerators” but Intel doesn’t make a real effort to get this technology working for anyone other than the Facebook and the national labs and, in particular, they drag their feet in getting it available on enough chips that it is is worth it for mainstream developers to use this technology. A while back, IBM had this thing where they might ship you a mainframe with 50 cores and license you to use 30 and if you had a load surge you could call you up and they could turn on another 10 cores at a high price. I was fooled when I heard this the first time and thought it was smart business but after years of thinking about how to deliver value to customers I realized it’s nothing more than “vice signaling”. It makes them look rapacious and avaricious but really somebody is paying for those 20 cores and if it is not the customer it is the shareholders. It’s not impossible that IBM and/or the customer winds up ahead in the situation but the fact is they paid to make those 20 cores and if those cores are sitting there doing nothing they’re making no value for anyone. If everything was tuned up perfectly they might make a profit by locking them down, but it’s not a given at all that it is going to work out that way. Similarly Intel has been hell-bent to fuse away features on their chips so often you get a desktop part that has a huge die area allocated to AVX features that you’re not allowed to use. Either the customer or the shareholders are paying to fabricate a lot of transistors the customer doesn’t get to use. It’s madness but except for Charlie Demerjian the whole computer press pretends it is normal. Apple bailed out on Intel because Intel failed to stick to its roadmap to improve their chips (they’re number one why try harder?) and they are lucky to have customers that accept that a new version of MacOS can drop older chips which means MacOS benefits from features that were introduced more than ten years ago. Maybe Intel and Microsoft are locked in a deadly embrace but their saving grace is that every ARM vendor other than Apple has failed to move the needle on ARM performance since 2017, which itself has to be an interesting story that I haven’t seen told.

Sohcahtoa82 3y ago

> 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. Why the fuck are shareholders often so short-sighted? Or do they just genuinely think the R&D investment won't pay off?

tgtweak 3y ago
They bought the stock on the principle that it was going to pay a consistent 5% dividend every year and weren't looking for moonshots at the cost of that consistent revenue.
- Jensson 3y ago
  Yeah, just look into any investment thread on HN to see how shareholders thinks, nobody recommend investing in unconventional things. Shareholders are your everyday guy who decides where to put his pension, and that guy picks the safe bet with good returns.

Shocka1 3y ago

Correct me if I'm wrong on the timeline I think you are talking about, but Intel stock shed value like the rest of tech in 2021/22. IMO, your theory had a much smaller impact than you think in terms of the dump. They both dropped roughly the same amount from their frothy highs in 2021 to their 2022 lows, INTC and AMD at roughly 60ish%. For the rebound you're theory is probably more true. It has been better for AMD obviously, but INTC has almost doubled in value since its $25 low, which is not slouching by any means. I can agree on being bullish long term (I had short puts exercise back in the $20s). Like a lot of tech, INTC has more money than God and they'll get it right eventually.