by jspann on 9/12/24, 6:45 PM with 118 comments
by elric on 9/12/24, 9:37 PM
I worry more about their inept handling of recent CPU bugs than I do about their stock price or reduced dividends.
by fefe23 on 9/12/24, 9:53 PM
Holy smokes. I just looked at the INTC 5 year chart and it is, in fact, a bath of blood. I don't think it happens very often that the market cap of a company is less than the worth of its physical assets.
by BoardsOfCanada on 9/12/24, 9:32 PM
by summerlight on 9/12/24, 10:17 PM
The real problem is the manufacturing process. This used to be the power house for Intel. They kept it 5 years ahead of their competitors before the Krzanich era. But in all the geopolitical and infrastructural contexts, is it even feasible to restore that in America? It is not very clear. Intel needs to build up all the ecosystems for semiconductor manufacturing but America is far, far behind of Taiwan (and eastern Asia in general).
by nabla9 on 9/12/24, 10:00 PM
So far 18A seems to be a success. Already sub-0.40 D0 defect density and launch at some time 2025Q3 and fully ramped up in 2026.
Fabs will bleed money 2024 and 2025, there is no way around it.
by dingi on 9/12/24, 9:50 PM
by JonChesterfield on 9/12/24, 9:50 PM
Intel certainly had those things. It has lots of interesting IP around processor design and tooling locked away in source control and so forth.
I think it is critically important whether Intel has retained the engineers who knew how to build world class products. Nehalem was excellent and shipped in 2008 so I'm sure they had the skills back then. They used to have a reputation for paying well.
It seems plausible that Intel is a bureaucratic horror show that no longer pays competitively, in which case it would be difficult to see why the engineers would still be there. Especially with redundancy offers waved around roughly annually.
I reckon they're dead.
by bane on 9/12/24, 11:51 PM
Prediction: Intel is done. It will become a zombie company like IBM or Oracle in a few years, without the license lock-in moat keeping those rotting corpses alive, but may be able to offer cheaper fab services for "it just was the state of the art" chip manufacturing market. They'll continue to focus on becoming a financial optimization organization and never return to being a technical leader. They've become a company of pure inertia.
Reasons for the prediction:
1. Intel is not longer the process node leader and hasn't been for a while (when even was that? 14nm? 2014?).
2. Intel seems to be struggling to keep lead engineering talent, board members, and leaders of all kinds. Jim Kelly, Lip-Bu Tan, and so on. They still have Jeff Wilcox, but who knows for how long? At least the CEO is an engineer finally...I guess.
3. They continue to launch then retract in otherwise profitable markets, not taking any particular lead, but not continuing to invest until they get it. They still have really only one core business.
4. Their branding strategy seems to be built around confusing consumers in the hopes that they accidentally buy the wrong things. Successful companies can be clear in their product naming, zombie companies end up trying to stuff every single market niche with as much microtuned, barely differentiated, SKUs as possible. In actuality it's probably financial engineering to figure out what to do with various classes of yield issues. Disable the bad part of the chip, slap a K or KS, or KF, or T, or whatever on it and get it on the shelf. I counted over a dozen different Core i5 14 gen SKUs, and over 20! 13 gen Core i5 SKUs. There's probably 200 different brand-new-from-Intel CPU SKUs on the market today. Insane.
5. They're getting feature for feature beaten by smaller, lower stakes competitors both in and out of their ISA. Those same competitors are almost always cheaper, and made at other fabs. In otherwords, Intel doesn't lead anywhere and has no lock-in.
6. Their main moat, their ISA, can be comfortably virtualized or emulated elsewhere, bugs and all, at entirely useful speeds meaning there is a ready exit ramp as customers wish to take it.
There's probably more, and it's probably continues to paint a very poor picture, but there is very little reason today, or in the near future, to stay with Intel as a manufacturer except for inertia.
by bsder on 9/12/24, 10:08 PM
This was like the stupid ass DEC hostile giveaway to Compaq while DEC had almost 2 gigabucks+ a year in enterprise services revenue that was going to continue forever. A single year of services revenue was almost as large as the entire merger deal.
And then, as PCs crashed and burned, Compaq couldn't figure out what to do with all that cash, either!
Executive morons all around.
by peppertree on 9/12/24, 9:59 PM
by 2OEH8eoCRo0 on 9/12/24, 9:50 PM
by Animats on 9/12/24, 10:06 PM
That's scary.
Fabs are so insanely expensive now. US$1 billion to US$4 billion each. Without the money to keep up, Intel becomes a niche player.
by jmclnx on 9/12/24, 9:42 PM
If I had to guess, I think the above is true. Well too bad Wall Street :)
If Intel is really in bad shape, then maybe it is time for some form of nationalization.
by lispisok on 9/12/24, 10:17 PM
* They missed out the rise of mobile
* They missed out on the rise of GPU computing
* AMD has been making gains in the server cpu market
What do they have left other than consumer computer market where their main advantage is name recognition?
by Joel_Mckay on 9/12/24, 10:23 PM
Keen to see what the team that split off to do a RISC-V DSP chip end up producing. Even if they added dual RX/TX SDR front ends on a SoC, than it could open up a single-chip smartphone solution etc.
Intel is entrenched with process-people obsessed with features no market asked for like hardware RATs, and betting on imaginary AI economies.
There are paths to move forwards technologically, but Intel as a company has structured itself to be its own worst problem. =3
by mensetmanusman on 9/12/24, 10:02 PM
by shrubble on 9/12/24, 9:56 PM
by soniman on 9/12/24, 9:48 PM
by segmondy on 9/13/24, 12:03 AM
by m3kw9 on 9/12/24, 10:01 PM
by antisthenes on 9/12/24, 9:58 PM
Yes, Intel is currently in a slump. Just like AMD was for a decade before Zen 2/3.
by mjfl on 9/12/24, 9:41 PM
by api on 9/12/24, 10:03 PM
by cue_the_strings on 9/12/24, 9:56 PM
Poor business? Gimme a break. They could exterminate a smaller ~~African~~ scratch that, Central or South American country with zero consequences.
Joking aside, I can see the US engaging in heavy-handed protectionism to help Intel.
by andrewstuart on 9/12/24, 9:50 PM
If it gives up on GPUs then its finished.