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Don't screw up running your own fab is the better lesson. * Intel foundry services were perhaps a decade or two too late. Running a fab needs scale. That had t

Don't screw up running your own fab is the better lesson. * Intel foundry services were perhaps a decade or two too late. Running a fab needs scale. That had to come before they lost the technology edge. * Intel treatment and mismanagement of engineers was well-known in 2000, and you need the best and brightest. * Leadership needs to understand core business / technology. Bob Swan. Arguably Brian Krzanich. Paul Otellini. Just a lot of clueless at the top. Etc. The point is Intel wasn't "everyone." Intel was at the very top of the game a quarter-century ago. That was their position to lose, which they did in a spectacular fashion. I continue to hope for a Microsoft-style comeback, but it's becoming increasingly unlikely.

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
Don't screw up? Sage advice! I agree they are mismanaged but it also takes luck to stay in the lead. I hope for a comeback too. My amateur worthless opinion is that Intel is struggling now but at least they have fabs. The fabless companies are going to be fucked in the long term- the fabs they contract to are all on shifting geopolitical sands!
- bornfreddy 2y ago
  > The fabless companies are going to be fucked in the long term- the fabs they contract to are all on shifting geopolitical sands! The fabless companies will also have a problem if only TSMC is left. What is there to keep them from rising the prices? Right now TSMC is afraid of Samsung and Intel, but if Samsung falls behind and Intel folds, AMD / NVDA / ... will have a crisis on their hands.
- hylaride 2y ago
  "but it also takes luck to stay in the lead." It's not luck if they were riding momentum that slowed because they shifted away from proper R&D. The fabless companies had nothing but R&D to live on and the costs of outsourcing the fab means the capital costs could be amortized over more customers (meaning intel should have probably split in two). Intel's fabs are a generation behind and now they're capital constrained. How do you get back ahead outside of China invading Taiwan?
  - WheatMillington 2y ago
    >they shifted away from proper R&D. Can you elaborate on this?
    - hylaride 2y ago
      I should elaborate on the word "proper" in this context. Intel rarely had the best technology, but it was often "good enough, cheap enough, and available enough" to succeed in the marketplace - this is a lesson SO MANY people forget. Sun, DEC, etc arguably had better hardware, but it was expensive. What Intel was very good at was iterating on the technology it had and making it faster within a reasonable budget. Microsoft is another good example of where "good enough, cheap enough, and available enough" is what usually matters in the market. Where they started to stumble is when they got greedy. The whole RAMBUS debacle back in the day is a good example of where they took more expensive and worse RAM and tried to make it mandatory. Then there was the whole Itanium debacle, where politics succeeded over engineering and they ended up with a worse, more expensive product that failed in the market. AMD, which had recently acquired a lot of talent from DEC's alpha chip design, then went on and made 64-bit extensions to x86 that Intel had to play catch up to. Intel (for the most part) ignored the performance per watt aspect of CPU design, which mattered in embedded, mobile, and dense datacentre environments. The result is that ARM came from the bottom up and is now eating Intel's lunch from all angles. Intel's fabs couldn't compete with TSMC and to a lesser extent Samsung, both of whom could focus on the intense CAPEX (which due to cultural reasons people in Asian countries are willing to take longer term outlooks). CAPEX looks bad on an american GAAP spreadsheet. TSMC literally could take upfront money from apple to build new state of the art fabs and guarantee them a certain number of chips (and keep the money if the iphone had failed in the market). Intel couldn't do that. Intel spent most of the 2000s era doing $130B in stock buybacks and even if it was run by engineers, they lost sight of the market. Stock buybacks and dividends are fine if you have surplus cash, but chip design is a high CAPEX business.
      - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
        > Then there was the whole Itanium debacle, where politics succeeded over engineering and they ended up with a worse, more expensive product that failed in the market. Why do you say Itanium was politics over engineering? It turned out to be a not-really-workable idea, sure. But if you looked at it, not knowing how it was going to work out, it was not an obviously bad idea. It was probably worth trying. (Or are you saying that politics succeeded over engineering in the process of implementation of Itanium? I have no view on that.)

2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago

Don't screw up? Sage advice! I agree they are mismanaged but it also takes luck to stay in the lead. I hope for a comeback too. My amateur worthless opinion is that Intel is struggling now but at least they have fabs. The fabless companies are going to be fucked in the long term- the fabs they contract to are all on shifting geopolitical sands!

bornfreddy 2y ago
> The fabless companies are going to be fucked in the long term- the fabs they contract to are all on shifting geopolitical sands! The fabless companies will also have a problem if only TSMC is left. What is there to keep them from rising the prices? Right now TSMC is afraid of Samsung and Intel, but if Samsung falls behind and Intel folds, AMD / NVDA / ... will have a crisis on their hands.
hylaride 2y ago
"but it also takes luck to stay in the lead." It's not luck if they were riding momentum that slowed because they shifted away from proper R&D. The fabless companies had nothing but R&D to live on and the costs of outsourcing the fab means the capital costs could be amortized over more customers (meaning intel should have probably split in two). Intel's fabs are a generation behind and now they're capital constrained. How do you get back ahead outside of China invading Taiwan?
- WheatMillington 2y ago
  >they shifted away from proper R&D. Can you elaborate on this?
  - hylaride 2y ago
    I should elaborate on the word "proper" in this context. Intel rarely had the best technology, but it was often "good enough, cheap enough, and available enough" to succeed in the marketplace - this is a lesson SO MANY people forget. Sun, DEC, etc arguably had better hardware, but it was expensive. What Intel was very good at was iterating on the technology it had and making it faster within a reasonable budget. Microsoft is another good example of where "good enough, cheap enough, and available enough" is what usually matters in the market. Where they started to stumble is when they got greedy. The whole RAMBUS debacle back in the day is a good example of where they took more expensive and worse RAM and tried to make it mandatory. Then there was the whole Itanium debacle, where politics succeeded over engineering and they ended up with a worse, more expensive product that failed in the market. AMD, which had recently acquired a lot of talent from DEC's alpha chip design, then went on and made 64-bit extensions to x86 that Intel had to play catch up to. Intel (for the most part) ignored the performance per watt aspect of CPU design, which mattered in embedded, mobile, and dense datacentre environments. The result is that ARM came from the bottom up and is now eating Intel's lunch from all angles. Intel's fabs couldn't compete with TSMC and to a lesser extent Samsung, both of whom could focus on the intense CAPEX (which due to cultural reasons people in Asian countries are willing to take longer term outlooks). CAPEX looks bad on an american GAAP spreadsheet. TSMC literally could take upfront money from apple to build new state of the art fabs and guarantee them a certain number of chips (and keep the money if the iphone had failed in the market). Intel couldn't do that. Intel spent most of the 2000s era doing $130B in stock buybacks and even if it was run by engineers, they lost sight of the market. Stock buybacks and dividends are fine if you have surplus cash, but chip design is a high CAPEX business.
    - AnimalMuppet 2y ago
      > Then there was the whole Itanium debacle, where politics succeeded over engineering and they ended up with a worse, more expensive product that failed in the market. Why do you say Itanium was politics over engineering? It turned out to be a not-really-workable idea, sure. But if you looked at it, not knowing how it was going to work out, it was not an obviously bad idea. It was probably worth trying. (Or are you saying that politics succeeded over engineering in the process of implementation of Itanium? I have no view on that.)