4 ms·
What happened to Intel? Did they need a bailout?
by JKCalhoun 1y ago
What happened to Intel? Did they need a bailout?
- wmf 1y agoIntel fell behind TSMC around ten years ago and the resulting malaise—still not fixed—almost put them out of business. So yes, they needed a bailout and got one.
- melling 1y agoTSMC is now a monopoly with over 500 customers. It’s more than a money problem
- Hikikomori 1y agoIntel really never had big external customers and the ones that tried also failed, like LG.
- melling 1y agoYes, but without external customers to pay for the newer advanced fabs, Intel can no longer afford to invest in fabs.
- Hikikomori 1y agoAgreed. Their problem is both, struggles with new EUV fab and don't have the org capable of working with customers.
- iszomer 1y agoNot an American monopoly though.
- downrightmike 1y agoMy intel powered workstations from 2008 have chips that are more than decent enough for modern computing. But in reality, they gave up on R&D, Missed Apple mobile chips and then put a lot of MBAs in top leadership positions to make their financial schemes work. Those schemes did not work and they were left without technical leadership. When they got the tech leadership, the board just gave up and fired him and brought in a chop shop CEO to part intel out. For some reason, the US admin thinks this is a good buy. You probably would too, if you bankrupted multiple casinos. Intel is going the way of SunBeam, Sears and Toys r Us. The board failed to stop that. And failure attracts more failure.
- EFreethought 1y ago> put a lot of MBAs in top leadership positions to make their financial schemes work. Has it ever worked?
- hedora 1y agoIt usually does until it doesn’t, then stops working really fast. GE and Boeing are recent examples.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- darth_avocado 1y agoSo it never actually works, the momentum from before just hides the fact and makes it seem that it works until it doesn’t.
- popopo73 1y agoThey got incredibly lucky with IBM choosing the 386 for the PC platform and have been riding that wave ever since. Itanium was a flop from bad business decisions IIRC. Note too that x86-64 was developed by AMD, and Intel licensed it from them.
- bsder 1y ago> Itanium was a flop from bad business decisions IIRC. Itanium was a flop from a technical standpoint but not from a business one. Intel spent roughly a gigabuck and effectively scared every competitor out the pool except for IBM and AMD. Intel is suffering because their old fab folks all retired, and no young, smart engineer over the last 20 years wanted to work for any semiconductor company let alone Intel.
- jabl 1y ago> Itanium was a flop from a technical standpoint but not from a business one. Intel spent roughly a gigabuck and effectively scared every competitor out the pool except for IBM and AMD. Even without the Itanium, the economies of scale in the x86(-64) world would have driven the RISC vendors out of the game.
- adrian_b 1y agoTrue, but who knows how much later that would have happened, and how the market would have looked by then. The false information about the future of Itanium scared almost all of them to surrender, about in the same way as the fictional Strategic Defense Initiative had scared the Russians.
- sennalen 1y agoSDI was real and led to the missile defense systems that the US has fielded today.
- jabl 1y agoSure, the details would certainly have been different, but my argument is that the end result would not have been that different from what we saw playing out. My quick 5 cents for what might have happened in the interim: - Without a separate high-end offering in the form of the Itanium, Intel is quicker to adopt x86-64, and produce high-end server chips with extra RAS etc. features. - POWER and SPARC, being the last holdouts in the RISC market in our actual timeline and outliving Itanium, would likely not have been affected much wrt. Itanium existing or not. - SGI with MIPS would likely have been the first one to fold. Would SGI have pivoted to x86-64 & Linux sooner than they historically did, or would the company have gone bankrupt first? - HP/Compaq with PA-RISC and Alpha is perhaps the most interesting question. HP did a lot of early VLIW/EPIC research with an eye towards developing a successor to PA-RISC. Would they have thrown that R&D away and selected to focus on either PA-RISC or Alpha after failing to secure Intel as a partner in the Itanium? Or would they have tried to develop something Itanium-like without Intel? Another interesting what-if, if Itanium didn't exist, would instead 3rd-party manufacturing of high end chips (similar to TSMC today) have been developed sooner than historical? Keeping in mind that a large reason for the Itanium was accessing the semi process R&D and chip manufacturing prowess of Intel, as the thinking at the time was that tight (vertical!) integration of the chip design and manufacturing was a requirement for the highest end CPU's. And it was the spiraling costs and volume required of chip manufacturing that was the boat anchor around the necks of the RISC vendors moreso than the chip design itself.
- BobbyTables2 1y agoDumpster fires can’t burn forever!
- llm_nerd 1y agoThat's where the comparison with the auto bailout in the wake of the financial crash falls apart. Intel got no bailout. The government demanded 10% of the company for financial grants that Intel already received, largely under the Biden administration, under vehicles like the CHIPS act (you know -- the massively successful policy that is the actual reason that a bunch of latest tech chip plants are being built in the US). It's an absolutely bizarre situation, and the only reason Intel would even go along with it is that this administration operates like an extortion racket and would somehow cripple the company otherwise.
- neuronexmachina 1y agoIs this even legal? As far as I can tell, there's no provision in the CHIPS Act allowing grant funds to be used to buy equity.
- Tostino 1y agoVery little this admin does is legal. You need the justice system to actually work for that to matter though. So in effect, unless the next administration runs on punishing these abuses and actually follows through, may as well be legal.
- _DeadFred_ 1y agoHope Intel doesn't really need the 20%+ of profits that come from China, because the Intel/China/USA relationship just got really weird.