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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 librar

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.

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.