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It's not 20 years. Just 12 years ago Intel was launching Ivy Bridge on 22nm and was absolutely on top of the world. It's true they've completely fallen off th

• lotsofpulp 2y ago
  Mobile phones were picking up a lot of steam by the mid 2000s, and it doesn’t seem like Intel bothered to even investigate developing more power efficient chips. Seems like the leaders just lost the stomach for taking risks, a long time ago. No forays into mobile or GPUs, at least not in the billions of dollar and many years scale that was needed. No stomach to pay the competitive salaries necessary to compete with Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Netflix, etc for talent.
  • bee_rider 2y ago
    They did Atom. They just didn’t beat ARM.
    • szundi 2y ago
      Apple was an interested customer, but rumors are they perceived Intel extremely arrogant. The chip would have been to iPhone.
    • kasabali 2y ago
      Atom has always been a laptop chip. They tried to shoeshorn it to handhelds but it sucked for obvious reasons. Think Apple's chips started in iPhone, then iPads and finally very recently ramped up to Macbooks. Even Snapdragon has only very recently released a laptop worthy chip because of the design they've acquihired from Nuvia.
      • bee_rider 2y ago
        Basically agree. Well, it did good enough in netbooks. It could probably have been good in tablets if they kept trying (and if non-iPad tablets really caught on).
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
    • chithanh 2y ago
      "didn't beat" puts it mildly. Every attempt Intel made at entering the smartphone business was doomed because they were years behind ARM. Paul Thurrott confirmed this with HP when discussing the Elite x3 smartphone: https://www.thurrott.com/hardware/64677/elite-x3-hp-takes-windows-phone-enterprise https://www.thurrott.com/hardware/64677/elite-x3-hp-takes-wi...
  • ThrowawayB7 2y ago
    They did as recently as 2016 and then gave up on it: "Intel could be on the verge of exiting the market for smartphones and standalone tablets, wasting billions of dollars it spent trying to expand in those markets. The company is immediately canceling Atom chips, code-named Sofia and Broxton, for mobile devices, an Intel spokeswoman confirmed." (https://www.pcworld.com/article/414673/intel-is-on-the-verge-of-exiting-the-smartphone-and-tablet-markets-after-cutting-atom-chips.html https://www.pcworld.com/article/414673/intel-is-on-the-verge...)
    • easygenes 2y ago
      Yeah, Otellini famously turned down Steve Jobs' request to make the chip for the first iPhone, thinking the market wouldn't be big enough. When he got pie in his face, he tried to correct course. By the time he needed to retire, the board wanted to give up on mobile, thinking they would never catch up, and double down on data center.
      • twoodfin 2y ago
        AFAICT, this was a self-serving bit of reverse myth-making from Otellini. If there really had been a single binary decision Intel got wrong—saying no to Jobs when they might have said yes—then their collapse looks like bad luck: Nobody bats 1.000. But the way Apple insiders tells this story, there was no way Intel was even being considered in the (short!) window when the original iPhone was being built. Intel was in the middle of selling Xscale, and even that design was too power-hungry. Intel missing mobile was a long history of poor strategic and tactical choices, not one bad call.
        • easygenes 2y ago
          Jobs had two iPhone teams working in secret against each other, and was setting up things on the side. He likely approached Otellini before either team was far along.
  • usr1106 2y ago
    They did more than investigate. Nokia, at that time still market leader in mobile phones, wasted a lot of time and effort because management wanted them to move to Intel. Nokia engineers did not believe that Intel would ever reach the required power efficiency. Whether it was self-fullfilling prophecy or just technically impossible is anyone's guess. (No, Nokia did not fail because of Intel, but that miss certainly made the disaster more complete.)
    • Maakuth 2y ago
      Intel connection was not the sole reason for Nokia's demise in phones, but it contributed on the failure of their effort to recover from the tailspin. Symbian their old mobile platform was clearly due to be replaced and they had a pretty viable in-house Linux platform, Maemo, that already shipped with N900 in 2009. Instead of iterating on that, they decided to "join forces" with Intel and merged Maemo with Intel MobLin to create MeeGo. They wasted at least a year on that and not with a lot to show for it as the Intel chips they planned for never materialized. Obviously it was going to be very difficult to compete as a third platform with the behemoths iOS and Android become during those years. At least the MeeGo and Windows Phone cards were not the winning ones.
      • usr1106 2y ago
        That's the software part of the story, which became fully public in form of MeeGo. But there was also a hardware story how Nokia would start Intel silicon. I don't think anything of that has ever been publicly annouced before it failed. Wasting a year seems to be massive underestimate. I believe it must have been much longer. After Nokia started to fail Intel hired former Nokia engineers. I have no reliable insights what they did there, but I believe at least in the beginning they still worked with phone hardware on low-level software.
  • throwaway48476 2y ago
    You forget networks and atoms, and the horrible failure that was x86 android.
• wtallis 2y ago
  The 2017 "launch" of Cannonlake wasn't something that anyone inside or outside of Intel could have reasonably considered to be a "routine burp". It was a desperate move to avoid shareholder lawsuits and possible criminal prosecution. Intel had to ship something under the 10nm label before the end of the year, because they had made far too many (false) promises that 10nm would be working Soon. Cannonlake was a mostly-broken chip because their 10nm process did not work, and Intel never even tried to make significant revenue from it or ramp it to volume production (though they kept promising for months that they were going to ramp). And it was still two years late. Meanwhile, Intel's chip designers kept targeting an unusable process, and wasted years that they should have been iterating on designs for the fab process that actually worked. Skylake shipped in 2015. They didn't deliver a new CPU microarchitecture on 14nm until 5.5 years later, a year and a half after they shipped that same microarchitecture in a mobile-only form when their 10nm finally started to be somewhat usable (but not fast enough for desktop). What were the chip designers doing for all those years? In 2015, Intel knew that 14nm had been harder to bring up than any previous fab process, and they knew that 10nm was proving even harder, but they refused to try making an updated CPU design for 14nm. How could the management not have realized that spending multiple consecutive years not shipping new designs would cause long-term damage to their capability to iterate on CPU designs? Not participating in the feedback loop of actually shipping left Intel with an oversized P-core design and an E-core design that wasn't well-matched to it, making Alder Lake awkward and slapdash when they finally got 10nm working well enough for desktop CPUs.
  • spwa4 2y ago
    Sure ... THIS is what I don't get. Non-technical (ie. CEO + board before Gelsinger) people are responsible for a technical disaster. They did not, of course, stop creating new technical disasters. Which ended in complete panic and Pat Gelsinger on top. They complain about arrogance, but even if you accept that, it was arrogance BEFORE Gelsinger, with Intel under the control of MBAs that they're talking about. And can I just say, I've seen some seriously arrogant assholes in the tech departments I've worked ... but for absolute incredible arrogance, you need MBAs.
    • newsclues 2y ago
• Dalewyn 2y ago
  >Then TSMC quietly reached parity with 7nm The true embarrassment was when SMIC (read: China) reached 7nm and thereby surpassed Intel last year (or was that 2022?). Intel then proceeded to waste CHIPS monies and other aid on five digit layoffs and now ousted the one CEO who ostensibly at least had the right idea. At this point I want to see Intel fail (and Boeing too), American Exceptionalism(tm) absolutely needs to have its longass Pinocchio nose broken in half before we have any hope of rebooting ourselves.
• sangnoir 2y ago
  > ...Intel was falling behind even AMD The "even" makes the tone of your comment feel a tiny bit disrespectful towards AMD. By 2021, it was clear to me that AMD had their gloves off and were winning. Zen 3 was released in 2020 - the third generation of nearly flawless execution by AMD that Intel failed to respond to - outside of cutting the prices on some CPUs. For a while, Intel held onto the "fastest single-core speeds". Back in 2017, my first thought after being blown away by the performance of a first-gen Zen PC build was "I should buy shares in AMD" - AMD clearly had a superior product with an even better value proposition.
  • mmaniac 2y ago
    I think the point is that Intel had such a lead in the Bulldozer era that for AMD to overtake them was a tremendous failure. I would not say that the first gen of Zen is was a clear winner over Skylake. It took a couple iterations before AMD clearly took the lead. AMD was simply so far behind that several large generational improvements were needed to do better than Intel.
    • throwaway48476 2y ago
      Zen1 was 20% behind skylake but cheaper per core. Zen2 was 5% behind. Zen3 was faster.
    • sangnoir 2y ago
      > I would not say that the first gen of Zen is was a clear winner over Skylake. In 2017, I would not have said that either for Zen 1 without qualification[1]. Zen 3 on the other hand, was a winner. That said, 1st gen Zen had better bang-for-buck than Intel, for multicore workloads - in my case, I had built a workstation and thr equivalent intel build would have cost much more, expensive Ryzen motherboards notwithstanding. 1. In my comparison as I buyer, I didn't compare Intel and AMD processors by core count, but by what I'd get with my budget. The AMD build I eent with was better than an intel build for the same amount of money.
• telendram 2y ago
  As in many large projects, even more so with a large company, the point is not to react when the problems are happening, it is to preempt these problems, foresee them and prevent their happening. So indeed, by 2018, even though Intel has not yet fallen, it's actually already late. The roots of the problems seems to be earlier, and that's where the CEO, and the Board, should have reacted.