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At least in Intel's case, I can see why the US government wouldn't want to get rid of them. For one, Intel is a defense asset and there will generally be appreh

At least in Intel's case, I can see why the US government wouldn't want to get rid of them. For one, Intel is a defense asset and there will generally be apprehension of letting them slip under without the feds gutting what they want out of it. For two, I kinda think Intel did everything right from a US nationalism perspective even if their customers ditched them for it. Intel was never going to keep their Apple contract unless they outsourced to TSMC, abandoned any form of profitable margins and gave up on domestic chipmaking. From the perspective of US lawmakers, Intel is kinda damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't. I still support letting Intel fail, but I have absolutely no confidence anyone will let it happen.

PittleyDunkin 2y ago
> Intel is a defense asset So nationalize them and remove the waste
- naveen99 2y ago
  Nationalize and waste removal is an oxymoron.
  - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    I think the opposite is true! What bigger waste is there than profit? Schumpeter agrees with me. It would be different, of course, if intel were the bleeding edge of innovation.... but that hasn't been true for about twenty years. Maybe longer.
  - stego-tech 2y ago
    The IRS is one of the most effective government agencies out there, despite continued lack of funding and political mismanagement. NASA still leads space exploration, despite Congress intervening in its agendas. The mismanagement and waste come from a Congress more obsessed with its re-election and petty politics than it is actually running a gargantuan empire in a sustainable manner, not the agencies themselves, with one notable exception: the Department of Defense. That is a profoundly mismanaged and exploited department that drains valuable taxpayer money into fantasy boondoggles meant to get people promoted and swindle ever-more income from taxpayers in the process. At the very least, the government should be the baseline option, with Capitalism competing against it on either efficiency or outcome, ideally both. Instead, what we have are Capitalist companies who game the system to extract more wealth for themselves and from each other, and demand the government cover their own mismanagement under the guise of “National Security.” They cannot have it both ways. If they’re critical to the security of the country, they cannot exist as private enterprise. If they want maximum profit, then they cannot be of import to the government.
    - naveen99 2y ago
      Have you tried calling the irs ? If you gave google the authority to jail customers who didn’t buy their services with 25% of income, even google might provide some customer service, but would surely provide better api’s.
      - deleted 2y ago
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      - deleted 2y ago
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    - tredre3 2y ago
      > The IRS is one of the most effective government agencies out there It is one of the most cost effective agencies because their entire reason d'être is finding missing money and collecting it. It doesn't really say anything about them being one of the most effective in the sense of good management and having minimal waste. I had to deal with them as an immigrant and it was a nightmare of wait times.
      - stego-tech 2y ago
        To be fair, and having been through that hell myself, anything involving both American Bureaucracy AND immigration is just a gigantic suck salad.
        PittleyDunkin 2y ago
        I think americans call this "the economy" as if they read its liver for good luck
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
- typeofhuman 2y ago
  Nationalizing it would only increase the waste.
  - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    How do you figure? The profit motive isn't a factor when nationalized. Where would the waste come from?
    - from-nibly 2y ago
      From the fact that you can get profit by removing waste. Without profit there is no reason to remove waste. Waste isn't a thing you add intentionally if you have a reason. Waste is entropy it happens unless you continually clean it out. If you don't HAVE to clean out the waste it doesn't get cleaned out.
      - ocdtrekkie 2y ago
        You also apparently need to wipe out the profit occasionally or else the company gets sucked dry of functional capability out of greed. Perhaps we need a cycle of allowing capitalists to remove waste, nationalization to remove profit, and then capitalists to be allowed to begin again removing waste.
        deleted 2y ago
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        deleted 2y ago
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      - ta1243 2y ago
        Your definition of waste is likely different to other peoples.
        xhkkffbf 2y ago
        Seems like a good one to me. I suppose there are more blatant forms of waste and raw corruption, but the entropy kind seems like one of the most important for a society to tackle.
toast0 2y ago
> Intel was never going to keep their Apple contract unless they outsourced to TSMC, abandoned any form of profitable margins and gave up on domestic chipmaking. Intel switching to TSMC probably would have sidestepped their 10nm fab failures, and the resulting design pipeline bubble that meant a lot of stagnation after Kaby Lake instead of the tick/tock(/tock) cycle of sort of annual improvements. But, even if Intel was still doing its thing right, Apple prefers to vertically integrate, and Apple has a niche where their cpu requirements are different enough, that a custom solution is better. AFAIK, Intel hasn't been willing to make really custom CPUs. The Apple cpus target a lower clockspeed, and that enables a smaller chip, and makes wider execution more feasible, and generates less heat. Intel probably wasn't willing to make a high performance but clock limited design. And Apple might not have wanted to have people compare their laptops with an Intel CPU that only runs at say 3GHz when everyone else is using chips that turbo to 4.5Ghz.
- talldayo 2y ago
  > Intel switching to TSMC probably would have sidestepped their 10nm fab failures It would, but it would also drain a lot of investor confidence. Intel pulling the TSMC card in 2024 is acceptable, or even desirable, from a shareholder perspective. Doing it in 2017 would have been jaw-dropping, even if it came with the advantages of TSMC 7nm that AMD's mobile chipsets boasted. It might have been the right call, but it would be a kick in the pants to their fab business and a terrible omen of things to come. > But, even if Intel was still doing its thing right, Apple prefers to vertically integrate 100% agree, and I feel like it's more to my point. Intel was a holdover from an era where Apple had to ditch their reliance on PowerPC. Buying pre-designed chips was an opportunistic success story on a high-margin product like the Mac, and it worked both ways until Apple started designing their own cores. Once Apple could ship an SOC that outperformed Intel, it didn't matter how much it cost to make because there was no middleman to pay. By any means necessary, undercutting Intel was a business imperative for Apple. I guess the ultimate irony of this is how I hear people begging OEMs to license ARM tech for PCs now. Intel failed as a rent-seeking middleman for high-performance core designs, so now they will be supplanted by Arm, a rent-seeking middleman for low-performance core designs. All Arm Holdings has to do now is buy a fab and they'll be a dead ringer.

PittleyDunkin 2y ago

> Intel is a defense asset So nationalize them and remove the waste

naveen99 2y ago
Nationalize and waste removal is an oxymoron.
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  I think the opposite is true! What bigger waste is there than profit? Schumpeter agrees with me. It would be different, of course, if intel were the bleeding edge of innovation.... but that hasn't been true for about twenty years. Maybe longer.
- stego-tech 2y ago
  The IRS is one of the most effective government agencies out there, despite continued lack of funding and political mismanagement. NASA still leads space exploration, despite Congress intervening in its agendas. The mismanagement and waste come from a Congress more obsessed with its re-election and petty politics than it is actually running a gargantuan empire in a sustainable manner, not the agencies themselves, with one notable exception: the Department of Defense. That is a profoundly mismanaged and exploited department that drains valuable taxpayer money into fantasy boondoggles meant to get people promoted and swindle ever-more income from taxpayers in the process. At the very least, the government should be the baseline option, with Capitalism competing against it on either efficiency or outcome, ideally both. Instead, what we have are Capitalist companies who game the system to extract more wealth for themselves and from each other, and demand the government cover their own mismanagement under the guise of “National Security.” They cannot have it both ways. If they’re critical to the security of the country, they cannot exist as private enterprise. If they want maximum profit, then they cannot be of import to the government.
  - naveen99 2y ago
    Have you tried calling the irs ? If you gave google the authority to jail customers who didn’t buy their services with 25% of income, even google might provide some customer service, but would surely provide better api’s.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - tredre3 2y ago
    > The IRS is one of the most effective government agencies out there It is one of the most cost effective agencies because their entire reason d'être is finding missing money and collecting it. It doesn't really say anything about them being one of the most effective in the sense of good management and having minimal waste. I had to deal with them as an immigrant and it was a nightmare of wait times.
    - stego-tech 2y ago
      To be fair, and having been through that hell myself, anything involving both American Bureaucracy AND immigration is just a gigantic suck salad.
      - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
        I think americans call this "the economy" as if they read its liver for good luck
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
typeofhuman 2y ago
Nationalizing it would only increase the waste.
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  How do you figure? The profit motive isn't a factor when nationalized. Where would the waste come from?
  - from-nibly 2y ago
    From the fact that you can get profit by removing waste. Without profit there is no reason to remove waste. Waste isn't a thing you add intentionally if you have a reason. Waste is entropy it happens unless you continually clean it out. If you don't HAVE to clean out the waste it doesn't get cleaned out.
    - ocdtrekkie 2y ago
      You also apparently need to wipe out the profit occasionally or else the company gets sucked dry of functional capability out of greed. Perhaps we need a cycle of allowing capitalists to remove waste, nationalization to remove profit, and then capitalists to be allowed to begin again removing waste.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - ta1243 2y ago
      Your definition of waste is likely different to other peoples.
      - xhkkffbf 2y ago
        Seems like a good one to me. I suppose there are more blatant forms of waste and raw corruption, but the entropy kind seems like one of the most important for a society to tackle.

toast0 2y ago

> Intel was never going to keep their Apple contract unless they outsourced to TSMC, abandoned any form of profitable margins and gave up on domestic chipmaking. Intel switching to TSMC probably would have sidestepped their 10nm fab failures, and the resulting design pipeline bubble that meant a lot of stagnation after Kaby Lake instead of the tick/tock(/tock) cycle of sort of annual improvements. But, even if Intel was still doing its thing right, Apple prefers to vertically integrate, and Apple has a niche where their cpu requirements are different enough, that a custom solution is better. AFAIK, Intel hasn't been willing to make really custom CPUs. The Apple cpus target a lower clockspeed, and that enables a smaller chip, and makes wider execution more feasible, and generates less heat. Intel probably wasn't willing to make a high performance but clock limited design. And Apple might not have wanted to have people compare their laptops with an Intel CPU that only runs at say 3GHz when everyone else is using chips that turbo to 4.5Ghz.

talldayo 2y ago
> Intel switching to TSMC probably would have sidestepped their 10nm fab failures It would, but it would also drain a lot of investor confidence. Intel pulling the TSMC card in 2024 is acceptable, or even desirable, from a shareholder perspective. Doing it in 2017 would have been jaw-dropping, even if it came with the advantages of TSMC 7nm that AMD's mobile chipsets boasted. It might have been the right call, but it would be a kick in the pants to their fab business and a terrible omen of things to come. > But, even if Intel was still doing its thing right, Apple prefers to vertically integrate 100% agree, and I feel like it's more to my point. Intel was a holdover from an era where Apple had to ditch their reliance on PowerPC. Buying pre-designed chips was an opportunistic success story on a high-margin product like the Mac, and it worked both ways until Apple started designing their own cores. Once Apple could ship an SOC that outperformed Intel, it didn't matter how much it cost to make because there was no middleman to pay. By any means necessary, undercutting Intel was a business imperative for Apple. I guess the ultimate irony of this is how I hear people begging OEMs to license ARM tech for PCs now. Intel failed as a rent-seeking middleman for high-performance core designs, so now they will be supplanted by Arm, a rent-seeking middleman for low-performance core designs. All Arm Holdings has to do now is buy a fab and they'll be a dead ringer.