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What I really want to know, from someone who does know: Is Intel cooked? Like, will they be able to manufacture chips that compete with TSMC? They used to be

• akdev1l 1y ago
  Tldr; yes they are kind of cooked
  • echelon 1y ago
    Why is the government bailing them out then? Is that just good money thrown after bad? Regardless, it seems like the company leadership should be gutted (the same could be said of Boeing) and the company given over to a new technically-grounded leadership team.
    • vFunct 1y ago
      I'm surprised the US just doesn't fund a new fab company or consortium, like Japan did with Rapidus. But I guess "too much socialism"
      • sudofail 1y ago
        A lot of countries honestly should be taking this approach. Fabrication is just too important for national security. At least some domestic production is critical.
      • epistasis 1y ago
        I don't think the current Republican leadership has any opposition at all to handing over lots of government money to large business to do things! The problem is that they are far too incompetent and have zero clue about tech, and only understand real estate, that simplest of business that can be executed with mere lizard-brain intelligence. Tech is also about small startups disrupting large giants, which is completely antithetical to current Republican leadership ideals, where the wealthiest get all gains, regardless of who does the work. It will take many years of full-on Democratic leadership to reconfigure the Republican Party back to a somewhat innovation-friendly business party. Meanwhile the Democrats, under Biden, were by far some of the most business-friendly politicians we have seen in perhaps a century, spurring massive investment in factories and industry, mostly across red states. But because it's a politically incorrect fact, it never gets reported.
        • cjbgkagh 1y ago
          It irks me that the current administration points to the steel industry doing well as an example of bringing jobs back to the US. Like great you’ve made an uncompetitive industry more profitable at the expense of every downstream user of that material. Doing the very opposite of what should be done. We’re getting to the point, and have passed it in a few industries, where it’s more expensive to buy raw inputs in the US than refined outputs from China. That is a level of insanity that cannot last.
          • matwood 1y ago
            And to put some numbers on it, there are ~100k steel jobs in the US. So we have kneecapped a ton of other industries impacting millions all to maybe save 100k jobs.
      • benreesman 1y ago
        Seniconductor manufacturing was effectively centrally planned via SEMATEC and before that via de facto stewardship by things like the the Labs and later Intel as a vehicle for national policy. This neat little dichotomy between "free market capitalism" and "centrally planned socialism" is a cute story but also complete fiction. In "capitalist" countries the government basically always runs R&D during any period of time when the stakes are high, and in "communist" countries there are always markets, and they are always sanctioned to some degree. All of the foundational progress for American leadership in high technology was centrally planned and administered, all of it one way or another: through ATT, through NASA, through the DoD, through the universities. Value creation occurs under the watchful eye of the DoD. Once in a while we go on an orgy of extractive wealth transfer like now, instead of creative innovation like usually, and the top industry guys always fuck it up. And on cue, yeah this is going great.
    • epistasis 1y ago
      What is the alternative, except dependence on foreign countries for key economic inputs? Betting some on Intel is very wise when the alternatives are, as I see it: 1) investing in TSMC building fabs and creating more of an employee knowledge base and skill base on shore, 2) hoping a US-based startup gets enough traction to grow. Agreed on leadership. But selecting leadership teams, especially technically-grounded leadership teams is extremely difficult. Which is why companies revert to non-technical leadership so often.
    • Workaccount2 1y ago
      The inability to make SOTA silicon chips domestically would be catastrophic in a event of a war in the east. TSMC is making fabs in the US, but they are not SOTA fabs. Those are kept in Taiwan.
      • sho_hn 1y ago
        A lot of the more complicated equipment in TSMC fabs (e.g. EUV equipment) is from Europe. Building a fab is no mean feat and loss of infra is a major blow, but it's certainly not impossible to build these fabs in the West, just not economical. You are not starting from scratch.
        • deleted 1y ago
          [deleted]
      • wbl 1y ago
        Texas Instruments would like to say hi. You don't need SOTA chips for weapons, but exotic capabilities to process data and interact with the radio and infared world.
      • codedokode 1y ago
        Isn't building a TSMC factory in US a violation of a "don't build your home on someone's else land" principle? US will be able to shut down or even nationalize the factory, full of expensive equipment, at any moment. It's like lending a goose with golden eggs to your neighbour.
        • Ray20 1y ago
          What's the alternative? Literally one of the safest places for your golden goose on the planet
    • cjbgkagh 1y ago
      Throwing good money after bad sounds like something governments are prone to do. Dysfunctions tend to grow as those who benefited from corruption have more money now to spend on more corruption. Since Intel has been mismanaged for so long I don’t know how many good lower level employees they managed to retain, I doubt much would be left if they properly cleaned house.
    • tester756 1y ago
      >Why is the government bailing them out then? There wasn't any bailout on them, what do you mean?
      • _zoltan_ 1y ago
        ??? google://Intel chips act billions
        • doublepg23 1y ago
          I believe that was a reaction to the global chip shortage during COVID. An investment in domestic chip production capabilities not a bailout for bad moves. Intel was looking bad but not the dire state they’re in now.
        • tester756 1y ago
          How can you call it "Intel bailout" if it benefited many semico companies? >The CHIPS Act primarily benefits semiconductor manufacturers and related industries by providing substantial funding for domestic chip production and research. Companies like Intel, TSMC, Samsung, and Micron have received significant grants and loans to expand or establish new manufacturing facilities in the United States. >The act authorizes roughly $280 billion in new funding to boost domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in the United States, for which it appropriates $52.7 billion >The act includes $39 billion in subsidies for chip manufacturing on U.S. soil along with 25% investment tax credits for costs of manufacturing equipment, and $13 billion for semiconductor research and workforce training, with the dual aim of strengthening American supply chain resilience and countering China
    • Yossarrian22 1y ago
      They actually haven’t meet the requirements to get CHIPS funding, and they kinda got screwed with a military deal reducing the amount CHIPS allocated for them if they do. That being said the government will likely not allow them to fail completely out of the foundry business for geopolitical reasons
    • ryanobjc 1y ago
      Because there's a strategic benefit and the cost is practically negligible compared to the cost of this section of the economy going away. That is the political calculation, not "throw good money after bad" kind of economics 101.
  • qzw 1y ago
    Cooked in the short/medium term, yes, but remains to be seen in the longer term. I feel like they’re ironically in the same position AMD was in before AMD spun off Global Foundries: not being able to keep up with the new nodes on the manufacturing side, which also drags down the design side. They could follow the same playbook and sell off the foundries, which will be a blow to their pride, but should free them up to compete better on designs alone.
• klysm 1y ago
  I definitely get the vibe that they are rotten to the core from the same financialization strategies that have destroyed Boeing, TI, etc.
  • honkycat 1y ago
    Yep, bingo. They don't want to be competitive they want to bleed the company dry.
• lukevp 1y ago
  Intel is more than just fabs. AMD spun off digital foundry forever ago and just uses TSMC, no reason Intel couldn’t do the same. At this point their fabs are a liability. They have a new leader who’s from a semiconductor manufacturing background so I have some faith they’ll give up on the pursuit of next gen fabs and focus instead on their IP. There’s a huge opportunity in their GPU segment. They’ve gone from a joke to competitive in a couple years, and they offer more VRAM for the dollar. They could tailor towards AI and really get some traction there.
  • cogman10 1y ago
    > no reason Intel couldn’t do the same. Intel is doing the same. IDK if they are working on new fabs at this point, but the last few generations of chips from intel have used TSMC. My expectation is that Intel might still run fabs, but they'll be mostly contracting them out to people who want cheap ASICs and 10 year old fab tech.
    • vonneumannstan 1y ago
      How does this scale? TSMC can't literally be the only fab in the world...
      • treyd 1y ago
        They're the only fab company in the world with the technology to allow Intel, AMD, and Nvidia to compete with each other on the playing field they do.
        • vonneumannstan 1y ago
          Right but at some point does Nvidia use their muscle and block TSMC from making chips for anyone else? The demand for GPUs is just increasing too rapidly for this to make sense.
          • j_walter 1y ago
• VWWHFSfQ 1y ago
  > used to be a crown-jewel of US tech I feel like x86 itself is kinda legacy tech. So while AMD has made advancements, they're somewhat in the same boat as Intel. It seems like NVIDIA and Micron are the real "crown jewels" of US tech
  • sho_hn 1y ago
    Tech-wise places too much premium on the ISA. Modern processor design is fairly orthogonal to the ISA being exposed. Intel could make exciting RISC-V relatively quickly if they wanted to; what stops them and other companies like this is the strategic asset they perceive their existing ecosystem as.
    • codedokode 1y ago
      I don't think so. For example, if an ISA requires a strict memory ordering, this makes the architecture more complicated than an ISA with relaxed memory ordering, although the latter is a pain to write code for.
    • protimewaster 1y ago
      There's a nice interview with Mike Clark where he talks about this a bit. His take basically matches this. He says that, in his view, any efficiency benefits of ARM are just that's been the market for ARM. In his view, if x86 had a market motive for ARM levels of efficiency, they'd be able to deliver it. But, historically, the x86 market wants performance more than efficiency, so that's what it gets. https://www.computerenhance.com/p/an-interview-with-zen-chief-architect https://www.computerenhance.com/p/an-interview-with-zen-chie...
  • tester756 1y ago
    ISA is irrelevant It's like saying that programming language syntax/keywords are better than the other. Everything is about compiler, lib, runtime, etc. https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arm-or-x86-isa-doesnt-matter Also some people say that RISC-V is the way to go
• hajile 1y ago
  Intel's fab issues are overstated in my opinion. They were stuck on 14nm for a very long time because they bit off too much with 10nm. People act like that means ALL research in nodes smaller than 10nm must have stopped, but that's simply not true as research into tech and materials needed for smaller nodes happens in parallel. It's also noteworthy that GAAFET being a complete redesign of major parts of the manufacturing process levels the playing field significantly. A big example of this is Japan's Rapidus which was founded in 2022 and has managed to invent (and license) enough stuff to be prototyping GAA processes. Intel's 18a process seems to be quite good. It's behind TSMC in absolute transistor density (SRAM density seems to be the same as N3E), but ahead on hard features like BSPD and maybe on GAA too. I suspect that they didn't push transistor density as hard as they could because BSPD and GAA tech were already big, risky changes. We'll have a much better idea of Intel's fab future with 14a and 10a as they should show a trend of whether Intel's fabs can catch up and pass TSMC or if they run out of steam after the initial GAA bump.
  • FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
    They just farmed out the compute section of Nova Lake to TSMC which is a sad statement (probably a good business decision, though).
    • hajile 1y ago
      This isn't very surprising. Intel has already been making their GPUs at TSMC for quite a while now (I believe using N4). Porting and validating that GPU to Intel fabs would be expensive and take a lot of time. There is talk about the next version of Arc using 18a. If it does, I'd expect Intel to move that generation's compute tiles to 18a as well.
      • tacticus 1y ago
        I guess that explains why the current intel GPUs are actually good value and somewhat not terrible.
    • reaperducer 1y ago
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
  Intel made mistakes. TSMC can make mistakes. TSMC is also in geopolitically risky Taiwan. I'm not counting out Intel yet. They're also very unpopular online so it's tough to find solid unbiased info about them. Like is the stink about 18A true or do people just want to hate on Intel?
  • klooney 1y ago
    Yeah, TSMC reliance may look crazy by 2030
    • FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
      2027-28 is the high danger range. (Davidson Window https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2021/07/03/closing_the_davidson_window_784100.html https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2021/07/03/closing... )
    • preisschild 1y ago
      Honestly, I like it. It gives Taiwan revenue to be able to defend itself from an aggressor.
• rich_sasha 1y ago
  I'm not into hardware but I remember when AMD was sneered at, and all real CPUs were Intel. Then Ryzen happened. My meta conclusion is that its super hard to tell when someone is done, and it can change quickly. Or not. Sometimes it if looks like terminal decline, it simply is terminal decline.
  • Arainach 1y ago
    These things go in cycles and predate Ryzen by a lot. The late-model Pentium 4 chips were overheating power-guzzling garbage compared to the Athlon XP, and the Athlon 64 was a serious competitor to the Core 2 series. Ryzen is the current incarnation of AMD coming into vogue in desktop, but it's not like it took them 40 years to get there.
    • koverstreet 1y ago
      AMD had been gradually working their way up for a long time - the K6-III was an excellent CPU for the time.
      • cptskippy 1y ago
        The K6 line was a functional CPU but I wouldn't call them "excellent". The K6-III was basically a K6-2 with integrated cache, much the same way the Pentium III was a Pentium II with integrated cache. Despite the fact that AMD tried to replicate Pentium branding on the K6 line, they very much competed with Celerons in terms of market place and performance. Indeed that's how they were marketed where I worked (Office Max) and were priced and spec'd comparably to the Celeron based offerings from IBM, HP, and Packard Bell. Another issue with the K6 line was they were always a generation behind at a time when Intel was rapidly rolling out technologies like MMX and SSE. Intel coordinated with software manufacturers and had launch day examples that presented significant performance gaps between the CPU lines. The K6 also had a shorter execution pipeline than Pentium so it struggled to hit 400mhz when Intel was approaching 500mhz. That's why the Athlon was such a shock because it arrived at 700mhz and stomped everything. Looking back at the K6 line now, they likely perform far better then they did at the time because software eventually got around to supporting the hardware.
• ksec 1y ago
  >What I really want to know, from someone who does know: Is Intel cooked? I dont know if I count, but at least I wrote about TSMC before most if anyone knew much about TSMC. Which is when Apple brought them to spotlight. It depends on how you define or count as being able to compete with TSMC? If Intel technically leapfrog TSMC and their 18nm is better than TSMC 20nm this year but; It is 30 - 40% more expensive. It has lower Gross margin, or even negative margin. It has much lower volume and capacity. It is slower in ramping up capacity for future capacity planning. It has limited IP range for its foundry. It has less packaging options. It does not have other high speed, low power or analog node options. At what point does it count as competing? Because right now there isn't a single metric that Intel Foundry is winning. And they are feeling exactly the same as Global Foundry or AMD when Intel Foundry advancement is getting all the oxygens. And even if they did, with a magic wand got them to compete with TSMC on every single one of the item above, in medium to long term there isn't a single chance Intel could compete with their current board and management. TSMC leadership and management team is Nvidia's level great. I cant think of any other tech company that could rival them. Their only risk is China.
  • justapassenger 1y ago
    [dead]
  • etempleton 1y ago
    They don’t really need to be better than TSMC, they need to be one node behind and roughly competitive on price / performance. The first year of TSMCs latest process goes to Apple. And the second few years are booked completely full. There is room for Intel if they can just get in the ballpark of TSMC.
    • wbl 1y ago
      Price/performance, not node is what matters.
  • SkyMarshal 1y ago
    > If Intel technically leapfrog TSMC and their 18nm is better than TSMC 20nm this year but; Think you mean 1.8nm, aka 18A. We're way past 18nm and 20nm.
• fidotron 1y ago
  Some of us have been pointing out Intel was in a systematically impossible situation even back when they had that process advantage, now almost a decade ago. Quite simply imagine being dropped in as CEO of Intel in 2015. Could you have prevented the malaise of today?
  • grumpy_coder 1y ago
    A fine time to cancel Larabee properly and get serious about specialized GPU hardware five years earlier.
• dathinab 1y ago
  they seem very cooked I think they have a lot of potential in the dedicated GPU space, but that is a consumer market so profit margins are smaller and they have potential in the low-to-mid-end market so even less margin. It's really sad as the competition there would help consumers. the sad thing is, it was predictable. Wintel and other monopoly-like deals/situations had removed the need to compete/stay on edge from Intel. They then noticed it too late and made mistakes when trying to course correct/having to much innovation dept to effectively course correct screwed them up big At the same time AMD again and again re-invented and optimized their development flow and experimented with alternative approaches and did not shy away from cooperating with TSMC and implicitly through that Nivdea and other (sometimes also Intel). Intel on the other hand AFIK got stuck on a approach where they had a edge over AMD but which was seem to have turned out to be somewhat of a dead end. what is interesting is how TSMC has so far avoided the same kind of trap - by having competing customers and having deep research co-operations with all the customers they brought competition and innovation back into a monopoly in a round about way like position - having limited capacity of the newest tech which their competing customers bit for bring in monetary insensitive to innovate - and them being somewhat of a life line for their country put a lot of pressure onto them to not break their own innovation machine for greed (e.g. by intentionally not expanding the availability of the latest node even when they technically could)
  • phkahler 1y ago
    >> I think they have a lot of potential in the dedicated GPU space I think dedicated GPUs will be dead soon. AMD will beat nVidia with APUs that compete with midrange DGPU in performance with lower system cost. With AI using GPUs we want the shared memory of the APU rather than splitting RAM into two mutually exclusive areas - witness boards starting to use soldered ram in 64 and 128GB configurations. nVidia can't compete without x86 cores and Intel just cant compete for now.
    • dathinab 1y ago
      yeah that might happen I mean for gaming there is already the Ryzan Max+395 which already is beyond the level of low end graphics (at least if placed in a desktop where it's not heat/power throttled). But it's a bit of a unicorn (especially if you look for a system where it can run full throttle). but I'm not sure about the beat nVidea part, nVidea has some experience with putting ARM CPUs on their graphic cards and as far as I remember on for their server center solutions there is one which pairs up graphic cards (and their RAM) over PCIe and mostly cuts out the CPU
• ryao 1y ago
  Intel’s chances of being a foundry for others are close to 0. It does not matter how good their process technology is. The problem is that Intel was an IP thief in the 80s and 90s; being a foundry requires trusting Intel with the exact IP Intel was known for stealing and nobody wants to take the risk.
  • gond 1y ago
    Never heard of that one. Could you provide sources for the argument?
    • ryao 1y ago
      There were lawsuits against Intel for IP theft in the news 25+ years ago. It is hard to find articles on them these days as web searches are biased toward recent events, but I was able to find this: https://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/14/business/suit-by-digital-says-intel-stole-pentium-design.html https://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/14/business/suit-by-digital-... There were much more discussion of Intel stealing things in the 90s than today.
• drcongo 1y ago
  As a data point of one, and one that really doesn't know much about chip fabs, I tend to see the "Intel Inside" sticker as a warning. I have no idea how they ever win back consumer trust.
• honkycat 1y ago
  Intel needs to course correct. I live in the area and know a LOT of intel fab workers. The issue is not the workers: Intel has been captured by corporate raiders and toxic management. They aren't interested in making chips or an innovative company. They just want to squeeze the juice out of the company until it is dry. That is why it is so bad.
  • nobodyandproud 1y ago
    Does that mean Intel needs to go private?
    • phkahler 1y ago
      Hahaha that would nail the coffin shut!
      • nobodyandproud 1y ago
        Not private equity. Just a stock buyback in order to have full control. Listed companies are too vulnerable to short-term thinking, thanks to the meaningless “fiduciary duty”.
  • lotsofpulp 1y ago
    They were not caught by corporate raiders (feel free to provide names of outside investors that caused them to stagnate). Instead of investing in the future and paying top dollar for top employees, the Board paid the shareholders (even 20 years ago). They never even tried to compete for the best employees, and instead let them all go to Alphabet/Apple/Amazon/Meta/Microsoft/Nvidia/Netflix. This includes the employees in management.
    • phkahler 1y ago
      That became abundantly clear when Jim Keller walked in and out so quickly.
  • hollerith 1y ago
• jcalvinowens 1y ago
  > Is Intel cooked? IMHO the whole user-visible p-core/e-core thing on desktop CPUs is one of the worst decisions in the history of microprocessors. My gaming machines need to do double-duty as as build boxes, so they're just utterly unusable for me.
  • wtallis 1y ago
    Why is the asymmetry a show-stopper for you? It would seem like having lots of E-cores would be advantageous for compiling, and still having some P-cores means you don't lose performance when linking.
    • ls612 1y ago
      Because Windows has a pants on head design choice where processes that aren’t the active window get shunted onto the e cores regardless of whether they are doing lots of work or not. I halfway suspect that this is intended as a market segmentation trick by MS
• benreesman 1y ago
  Intel is a great example of the fact that between stupidity and low-integrity behavior as a default, the people in charge fuck up in ways that the man on the street would get right. Defense is starting to get a blank check with fairly bipartisan support for the first time in at least 30-40 years and it's centered on semiconductor supply chains. There has never been a better time to secure the fucking funding, have ASML send twice as many people as they already have, and power through it. The market is whatever you want and the margins are whatever you want: in a functioning system? You fucking do it. And while I will believe that Intel has suffered serious attrition in key posts, there's no way that the meta-knowledge of how to debug "we don't have the fabs running right, who do we hire, what so we need to give them to get it done" has evaporated in 5-10 years from the singular source of this institutional muscle memory in the history of the world. The failing here is more like a failing in courage, or stamina, grit, something. It's a failure of the will to do the right thing for both the shareholders and the country.
  • Spivak 1y ago
    tl;dr Intel desperately needs an activist investor.
    • benreesman 1y ago
      Only if that activist investor acts with decisiveness, vision, long-term goal orientation, and demonstrates consistently high-integrity behavior. What has much more commonly produced good outcomes in such situations is robust public-private partnerships like the ones that produced the semiconductor industry in the first place. Run the list of innovations in strategically key technology and what will you find at one remove in every instance? The DoD, NASA, the Labs and ATT more broadly, the university system. It's always a public/private partnership during periods of explosive value creation when the stakes are high, and it's always a private sector capture orgy during periods of extractive stagnation like the present.
      • Spooky23 1y ago
        Bad news. We’re exploding NSF, NASA and many parts of DoD. Universities are uncertain as those acts are digested. That era of American history has passed. Innovation gives way to consolidation and cronyism. Think Mussolini’s Italy.
• DiabloD3 1y ago
  Yes. I can give you a non-technical answer, since HN is ostensibly business as well. Intel fired the one CEO that spoke both engineer and business, and Gelsinger could have been their Lisa Su. They fired the only talented CEO they've had for years. This will be fatal. Gelsinger was the scapegoat for 20+ years of inability to compete with foreign companies, no matter how much money was poured into them. They used American exceptionalism as a cover to defraud shareholders and any government that invested in them. They used the relationship of AIPAC and Congress to build a fab and R&D lab in Israel (inserting yourself into global politics to make a buck is always spicy) at low cost to them. Taiwan became the capitol of electrical engineering in the world, and is a shining example of how to survive and thrive in a post-war era, and it absolutely shows. They caught up to Intel and zoomed right past. Gelsinger's crime was try to do what AMD did: they didn't have a fab that could make their chip BUT they had a fab that made chips that people wanted AND the foundry could take that work and survive if they legally split. GloFo is now the third largest semi foundry in the world today, and when it was part of AMD, it very much wasn't; I can't quite remember, but 5th or 6th? Something like that. GloFo is #3, TSMC is #1, Samsung is #2, and Intel could very well be that #4, and push out UMC (#4) and SMIC (#5) in the secondary chip foundry market. Gelsinger could have split Intel into Intel and IFoundry or something, and Intel could have profited on IFoundry taking off and taking external work. Right now, IFoundry can't compete on top nodes, but _could_ steal work from all other fabs for secondary larger nodes. Having a working 12 nm competitor as well as a working 7nm competitor is big business, which Intel currently has _ZERO_ of (since they don't take external contracts). Gelsinger was big on this potential revenue stream. Gelsinger's other crime was being part of the negotiation between TSMC and the Biden administration for the CHIPs act money: part of what built the TSMC fab right next door to Intel's in Arizona was Biden and Intel money. Intel was investing in it's future by playing the American exceptionalism card again, but now in everybody's favor. We _all_ benefit from this. Gelsinger wanted to have _somebody_ fab the chips, and if its good enough for AMD, Apple, and Nvidia, its good enough for Intel. There is zero indication that GAA 20A is ready, and Intel has a history of having leadership that says such-and-such is ready for it to either come out several gens later, or just vanish off the roadmap. Gelsinger's other OTHER crime is admitting to this and changing the direction of the Titanic before it hits the iceberg, for the CEO that replaced him just to steer right back into the iceberg. I have _zero_ faith in Intel's leadership if they can't bring Gelsinger back. Tan, Gelsinger's replacement, is a former board member. I have no reason to think he is not just going to further poison the company. Tan has not spoken about any plan that indicates he understands Intel is not competitive, Intel cannot competitively make 100% of the tiles, that Intel's Foveros tech stack is extremely valuable because the only truly comparative alternative is TSMC's CoWoS tech family and superior to it and people are willing to throw money at that problem but they can't license it as long as IFoundry is part of Intel. Intel is cooked imnsho.
• hawflakes 1y ago
  I find it somewhat ironic that many years ago HP’s PA-RISC chips were fabbed at Intel because contractually they had to supply chips due Itanium not yet taping out. But maybe it was more of an early foreshadowing. I had a housemate that worked on their internal CAD tools and it also sounded like a bit of a mess with NIH syndrome. (20+ years ago)
• IncreasePosts 1y ago
  Their market cap is $100B. A bunch of smart people who study this don't think it is fully cooked
  • phkahler 1y ago
    >> Their market cap is $100B. A bunch of smart people who study this don't think it is fully cooked nVidia market cap is 4T or about 40x Intels. Im not sure who those smart people are.
    • IncreasePosts 1y ago
      Nvidia is literally the most valuable company on the planet. That doesn't mean $100B market cap is anything to sneeze at.
• giantg2 1y ago
  I see them the same as GE, Boeing, etc. They culture from the top down is screwed. It will take years to undo what has been ingrained in the corporate machine. They will likely survive but as a shell of their former self. They'll probably spin off some promising business related to AI or embedded. I was disappointed with their offerings and went with AMD for my latested build. I don't know too many people who have built PCs recently, but the few I do know who have or are planning to, everyone is planning to use AMD. Similar to the GE example, it seems many people would recommend LG or Samsung appliances over GE.
• OrvalWintermute 1y ago
  Intel Financial Engineering & Operational Missteps is what led to this. "Over the past 10 years, Intel engaged in financial engineering, primarily through significant stock buybacks ($53 billion in 2011–2015) and stock-based executive compensation, which diverted resources from innovation and contributed to its lag in semiconductor fabrication. This financialization, as critiqued in the 2021 report, is a long-term factor in Intel’s weakened competitive position" https://semianalysis.com/2024/12/09/intel-on-the-brink-of-death/ https://semianalysis.com/2024/12/09/intel-on-the-brink-of-de... https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-intel-financialized-and-lost-leadership-in-semiconductor-fabrication https://www.ineteconomics.org/perspectives/blog/how-intel-fi... https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1726/intel-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-2024-financial https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1726/...
• bgnn 1y ago
  Yes, Intel is cooked. I think they won't recover anymore. Their fab business' fate will be similar to Global Foundaries: a second tier supplier of old tech nodes.
• johngalt 1y ago
  Intel has been cooked for years. Observable back in 2017, but more visible today. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14588429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14588429 The top of the market will go GPU and the bottom will go ARM, and the middle will be an ever shrinking x86 market share. The few places that will need heavy CPU resources will be the same people who can apply pressure to Intel's margins. The process of chip making will look very similar in the future, but the brand of the CPU will matter less every year. Intel's not "dead in five years", but Intel will definitely cross the point of no return in that timeframe. Shifting a big company's focus is more difficult than growing another company who already has the right focus.
• jbm 1y ago
  Apparently this happening was well telegraphed by people in the industry. A friend used to send me articles regularly from Semiaccurate in the mid 2010s. I thought it was "alternative truth" but it turns out to have been more, uh, accurate than I thought.
• elorant 1y ago
  Intel announced new GPUs back in December and seven months later they’re nowhere to be found. I’m pretty convinced at this point that the company has some systemic issues that prevent them from being competitive at any level.
• brianzelip 1y ago
  Here’s (one of) a recent Oxide & Friends podcast episode on Intel, https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/lip-bu-tans-intel https://oxide-and-friends.transistor.fm/episodes/lip-bu-tans....
• deleted 1y ago
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• fooker 1y ago
  Intel can, right now, make chips a generation ahead of what TSMC Arizona plant can make.
• AzzyHN 1y ago
  On the consumer side... Smart people know to choose AMD. OEMs heavily favor Intel for the brand recognition. It's the same on the workstation side, though AMD's market share has been rising quite fast (it's apparently at a 36.5% share) so I'm unsure if system integrators will keep pushing their Intel SKUs so heavily. So they're not cooked, but they're certainly not doing well and barring a massive jump in performance or efficiency, they're not going to be making a recovery any time soon.