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Intel reminds me of a skyscraper demolition. At first, it barely falls, but then boy does it fall fast. They kept missing market after market after market. It’

Intel reminds me of a skyscraper demolition. At first, it barely falls, but then boy does it fall fast. They kept missing market after market after market. It’s insane how many chances they had, and they blew them all. Anyway, now they are a taxpayer’s problem, for the same reason that Boeing is.

jvanderbot 2y ago
I honestly think that they were just too big. People think of Intel as just doing CPUs, but they had a massively broad impact, from scientific computing libraries to compilers, to plenty of other hardware offerings. It's not actually obvious they needed to jump onto mobile, GPU, etc, they just needed to continue to have the best processors around. They don't any more, at least not obviously. They can 100% survive as the second-best US-based processor producer, esp if they focus and do well, but they cannot be as large as they are and be number 2. Intel has 5x the employees of AMD.
- whatever1 2y ago
  But they do have Fabs. Fabs are hard.
  - pavlov 2y ago
    Yeah. Process leadership was always Intel’s secret sauce. They could put out mediocre designs tied to the x86 albatross as long as they were consistently ahead of everyone else on process. When that stopped, they were left with mediocre designs and the albatross, but several process nodes behind others on TSMC. The hidden handicaps became apparent and made the problem worse.
- varjag 2y ago
  I'm not sure this perception is correct: Intel had diverse products from the earliest days with own series of ROM, SRAM and so on. They never were a cpu boutique.
- 7thpower 2y ago
  A few years ago while I was working for a large enterprise I was brought in by our CTO to understand what IoT problems Intel could help us solve. I remember saying ‘unless it has something to do with their connectivity solutions, none, because they no longer have a viable edge compute architecture for our use cases’, but I was assured they were willing to ‘co-develop’ and I may be surprised. Indeed the end of this statement alone was surprising, because why would any company of Intels scale want to co-develop with a mid size enterprise for an internal facing use case? I won’t go into great detail but it turns out: - they had no new product in the pipeline, I never did figure out what there was to ‘co-develop’ - their solution was to install $1k NUCs at the edge instead of $100 RPI derivatives - their busy bodies were willing to discuss just about anything because they evidently did not have a very firm remit, and we had our own busy bodies that also loved to pursue passion projects that had no business value - they evidently had a lot of these ‘solutions’ teams that were kind of roaming around to… do something… with large companies, that was not really related to selling hardware or services It just struck me as incredibly odd that a notoriously stubborn company that was so content to focus on ultra high margin products was wasting so many resources talking to customers about point solutions that would never scale into a meaningful business. I ended up giving the CTO my grim assessment on the initiative and going to focus on other things. A part of me thought maybe I was just missing something and the teams would come back with something useful, but I never heard about any of it again. Good riddance.
arp242 2y ago
Remember the Pentium 4/Netburst era? They bounced back pretty well from that with the Core CPUs. Intel is still tons more successful than 99.9% of companies out there. Specifically, they're still doing a $54 billion/year revenue, making it the ~260th largest company in the US (by revenue). This entire "if you're not leading, then you're losing" type of winner-takes-all mindset is fairly silly.
- whatever1 2y ago
  For processors it’s a bit different I believe. We care about cost, efficiency and raw power. If you are not leading in at least one dimension you are completely dead. You are literally leaving money on the table if you pick a processor not leading one of these (or being very good at 2-3 of these).
  - wizzwizz4 2y ago
    Ability to source replacements. Behavioural predictability (or, more specifically, correctness). Backwards-compatibility. Side-channels, or preferably lack thereof. So-called "trusted execution environments". Sure, Intel isn't leading in any of these either – except maybe backwards-compatibility –, but there are more characteristics we care about than just the three you listed.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - HelloNurse 2y ago
    It's simply the Pareto frontier: whatever you want, an option that is inferior in all possible ways is not preferable and nobody should choose it.
- Guthur 2y ago
  The Core were good but also AMD fumbled with bulldozer which left them floundering until the Zen era. AMD has been doing pretty well from a strategic point of view, specifically in high volume data centre SKUs, and so it's hard to see Intel being given as wide a window this time. And there are now also other players looking to take some market share, most notably Nvidia, but also all the big players are looking at their own in house ARM silicon. The road back for Intel is not going to be nearly as wide and smooth as it was for Core.
piva00 2y ago
> Anyway, now they are a taxpayer’s problem, for the same reason that Boeing is. And the same way as Boeing, Intel spent a fucking lot of money doing stock buybacks. Looking back at the charts it's to the tune of US$ 14bi just in 2020, another US$ 13bi in 2019, US$ 10bi in 2018 and the trend continues into 2011, a brief respite during the 2008-2010 crisis period. US$ 152bi has been spent by Intel since 1990 in stock buybacks but the largest share of it is from the past 10-15 years.
- Panzer04 2y ago
  While that is true, Intel has probably spent more on R&D than all of their competition put together. That they still fell behind is indicative of their failure to execute, but it's not for lack of spending.

jvanderbot 2y ago

I honestly think that they were just too big. People think of Intel as just doing CPUs, but they had a massively broad impact, from scientific computing libraries to compilers, to plenty of other hardware offerings. It's not actually obvious they needed to jump onto mobile, GPU, etc, they just needed to continue to have the best processors around. They don't any more, at least not obviously. They can 100% survive as the second-best US-based processor producer, esp if they focus and do well, but they cannot be as large as they are and be number 2. Intel has 5x the employees of AMD.

whatever1 2y ago
But they do have Fabs. Fabs are hard.
- pavlov 2y ago
  Yeah. Process leadership was always Intel’s secret sauce. They could put out mediocre designs tied to the x86 albatross as long as they were consistently ahead of everyone else on process. When that stopped, they were left with mediocre designs and the albatross, but several process nodes behind others on TSMC. The hidden handicaps became apparent and made the problem worse.
varjag 2y ago
I'm not sure this perception is correct: Intel had diverse products from the earliest days with own series of ROM, SRAM and so on. They never were a cpu boutique.
7thpower 2y ago
A few years ago while I was working for a large enterprise I was brought in by our CTO to understand what IoT problems Intel could help us solve. I remember saying ‘unless it has something to do with their connectivity solutions, none, because they no longer have a viable edge compute architecture for our use cases’, but I was assured they were willing to ‘co-develop’ and I may be surprised. Indeed the end of this statement alone was surprising, because why would any company of Intels scale want to co-develop with a mid size enterprise for an internal facing use case? I won’t go into great detail but it turns out: - they had no new product in the pipeline, I never did figure out what there was to ‘co-develop’ - their solution was to install $1k NUCs at the edge instead of $100 RPI derivatives - their busy bodies were willing to discuss just about anything because they evidently did not have a very firm remit, and we had our own busy bodies that also loved to pursue passion projects that had no business value - they evidently had a lot of these ‘solutions’ teams that were kind of roaming around to… do something… with large companies, that was not really related to selling hardware or services It just struck me as incredibly odd that a notoriously stubborn company that was so content to focus on ultra high margin products was wasting so many resources talking to customers about point solutions that would never scale into a meaningful business. I ended up giving the CTO my grim assessment on the initiative and going to focus on other things. A part of me thought maybe I was just missing something and the teams would come back with something useful, but I never heard about any of it again. Good riddance.

arp242 2y ago

Remember the Pentium 4/Netburst era? They bounced back pretty well from that with the Core CPUs. Intel is still tons more successful than 99.9% of companies out there. Specifically, they're still doing a $54 billion/year revenue, making it the ~260th largest company in the US (by revenue). This entire "if you're not leading, then you're losing" type of winner-takes-all mindset is fairly silly.

whatever1 2y ago
For processors it’s a bit different I believe. We care about cost, efficiency and raw power. If you are not leading in at least one dimension you are completely dead. You are literally leaving money on the table if you pick a processor not leading one of these (or being very good at 2-3 of these).
- wizzwizz4 2y ago
  Ability to source replacements. Behavioural predictability (or, more specifically, correctness). Backwards-compatibility. Side-channels, or preferably lack thereof. So-called "trusted execution environments". Sure, Intel isn't leading in any of these either – except maybe backwards-compatibility –, but there are more characteristics we care about than just the three you listed.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- HelloNurse 2y ago
  It's simply the Pareto frontier: whatever you want, an option that is inferior in all possible ways is not preferable and nobody should choose it.
Guthur 2y ago
The Core were good but also AMD fumbled with bulldozer which left them floundering until the Zen era. AMD has been doing pretty well from a strategic point of view, specifically in high volume data centre SKUs, and so it's hard to see Intel being given as wide a window this time. And there are now also other players looking to take some market share, most notably Nvidia, but also all the big players are looking at their own in house ARM silicon. The road back for Intel is not going to be nearly as wide and smooth as it was for Core.

piva00 2y ago

> Anyway, now they are a taxpayer’s problem, for the same reason that Boeing is. And the same way as Boeing, Intel spent a fucking lot of money doing stock buybacks. Looking back at the charts it's to the tune of US$ 14bi just in 2020, another US$ 13bi in 2019, US$ 10bi in 2018 and the trend continues into 2011, a brief respite during the 2008-2010 crisis period. US$ 152bi has been spent by Intel since 1990 in stock buybacks but the largest share of it is from the past 10-15 years.

Panzer04 2y ago
While that is true, Intel has probably spent more on R&D than all of their competition put together. That they still fell behind is indicative of their failure to execute, but it's not for lack of spending.