3 ms·

I feel like Intel was ahead for a very long time and perhaps intentionally coasting and then suddenly in the span of a few years they went from barely any compe

I feel like Intel was ahead for a very long time and perhaps intentionally coasting and then suddenly in the span of a few years they went from barely any competition to losing best in class in compute to three separate competitors. AMD having great consumer processors and now beating in sales in data centers, Apple having without a doubt the best consumer processor, NVIDIA completely owning the machine learning compute market which is now enormous. I think beat case is NVIDIA buys Intel and spins off some of the less mainline business units. In dire straights I don’t think the government would allow Intel to fall to vultures and instead would compel them to continue operating at any loss rate and then if they failed to avoid bankruptcy nationalize them in much the same way as AIG or General Motors for long term reorganization.

hulitu 2y ago
> , Apple having without a doubt the best consumer processor too bad it doesn't run (properly) other OS. than Apple's
- _w1tm 2y ago
  Linux support seems to be getting there. Windows support is on Microsoft to deliver.
Panzer04 2y ago
Literally all that happened is Intel lost the fab lead and then lost fab parity. Their CPUs were, and are, still competitive with AMD chips, or at least close enough that they can just adjust prices to make up the difference. Fabs are extremely expensive, and an uncompetitive fab is literally just a pit in which you toss money. That's Intel's current problem.
- throwaway2037 2y ago
  > uncompetitive fab I have seen this phrase used a few times here. Is there such a thing? Sure, a fab can be old and produce chips with larger transistor sizes, but there isn't a lack of demand. Only a tiny fraction of ICs need the latest transistor sizes. To be clear, do you any inside information / career experience that you know that existing Intel fabs are losing money? I have not read any such reports in media. As a counterpoint, Europe and Japan are no longer cutting edge in their fabs, but continue to produce many ICs for industry.
  - adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
    > Only a tiny fraction of ICs need the latest transistor sizes. The problem is that the latest transistor sizes are the ones that have profit margins. 90% of TSMCs chips aren't on EUV processes, but 50% of their profits come from EUV. If you don't have leading (or close to leading) processes, you're completely shut out of the phone, laptop, server, and GPU market. Intel could survive like that, but it would involve laying off ~90% of their staff and exiting all of their major markets.
  - adrian_b 2y ago
    Intel's financial reports show their fabs losing billions every quarter. Nevertheless, it is hard to know how real are these numbers, because the prices charged by the Intel fabs for making Intel CPUs are set internally, so they could be manipulated to move all losses on the fabs from the consumer and server product divisions. Moreover, for the latest Intel fabrication process for which anything is known, i.e. Intel 4, which is used for making the CPU tiles in the Meteor Lake CPUs, it is known that the fabrication yields have been much less than desirable, which had two outcomes, both less profit margins when selling Meteor Lake and the inability to produce as many Meteor Lake CPUs as they could have sold. Both effects have increased the financial losses suffered by Intel during 2024. In general, "uncompetitive fab" can mean two things. Either there are things that the fab cannot do at all or the fab has too low fabrication yields at the things that it can do. The Intel fabs are in the second situation. They can do about the same things that TSMC can do, but at much lower fabrication yields, which means much higher production costs. High production costs means low profits and Intel is a company that has been habituated to have huge profits, so it cannot manage well the case when its profit margins are very thin.
    - spacemanspiff01 2y ago
      But is this an issue of them only building their own chips? (Speaking of which, what does Intel do with old fabs for the past 20 years after moving to a new node?)
      - adrian_b 2y ago

hulitu 2y ago

> , Apple having without a doubt the best consumer processor too bad it doesn't run (properly) other OS. than Apple's

_w1tm 2y ago
Linux support seems to be getting there. Windows support is on Microsoft to deliver.

Panzer04 2y ago

Literally all that happened is Intel lost the fab lead and then lost fab parity. Their CPUs were, and are, still competitive with AMD chips, or at least close enough that they can just adjust prices to make up the difference. Fabs are extremely expensive, and an uncompetitive fab is literally just a pit in which you toss money. That's Intel's current problem.

throwaway2037 2y ago
> uncompetitive fab I have seen this phrase used a few times here. Is there such a thing? Sure, a fab can be old and produce chips with larger transistor sizes, but there isn't a lack of demand. Only a tiny fraction of ICs need the latest transistor sizes. To be clear, do you any inside information / career experience that you know that existing Intel fabs are losing money? I have not read any such reports in media. As a counterpoint, Europe and Japan are no longer cutting edge in their fabs, but continue to produce many ICs for industry.
- adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
  > Only a tiny fraction of ICs need the latest transistor sizes. The problem is that the latest transistor sizes are the ones that have profit margins. 90% of TSMCs chips aren't on EUV processes, but 50% of their profits come from EUV. If you don't have leading (or close to leading) processes, you're completely shut out of the phone, laptop, server, and GPU market. Intel could survive like that, but it would involve laying off ~90% of their staff and exiting all of their major markets.
- adrian_b 2y ago
  Intel's financial reports show their fabs losing billions every quarter. Nevertheless, it is hard to know how real are these numbers, because the prices charged by the Intel fabs for making Intel CPUs are set internally, so they could be manipulated to move all losses on the fabs from the consumer and server product divisions. Moreover, for the latest Intel fabrication process for which anything is known, i.e. Intel 4, which is used for making the CPU tiles in the Meteor Lake CPUs, it is known that the fabrication yields have been much less than desirable, which had two outcomes, both less profit margins when selling Meteor Lake and the inability to produce as many Meteor Lake CPUs as they could have sold. Both effects have increased the financial losses suffered by Intel during 2024. In general, "uncompetitive fab" can mean two things. Either there are things that the fab cannot do at all or the fab has too low fabrication yields at the things that it can do. The Intel fabs are in the second situation. They can do about the same things that TSMC can do, but at much lower fabrication yields, which means much higher production costs. High production costs means low profits and Intel is a company that has been habituated to have huge profits, so it cannot manage well the case when its profit margins are very thin.
  - spacemanspiff01 2y ago
    But is this an issue of them only building their own chips? (Speaking of which, what does Intel do with old fabs for the past 20 years after moving to a new node?)
    - adrian_b 2y ago