Nvidia is now worth more than Intel | Hacker News Reader

Nvidia is now worth more than Intel

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273 pointsneogodless199 comments

While I think CUDA has very little competition and seems to be de facto standard in the ML industry, judging from the comment on CUDA 11 post[1] Nvidia still have some low hanging fruit to fix.

I am still waiting for Nvidia to make their play in CPU Market. May be a move in ARM Server CPU space. They have AI/ML with GPGPU, High performance networking with Mellanox. Surely the next logical step should be HPC CPU? Or at least reselling ARM's N1 blueprint solution.

Nvidia has a Forward Earning Ratio of about 41. Which seems reasonable ( Comparatively Speaking in today's market ).

Meanwhile Intel has limited upside. On the Client Computing Side Around 7% of revenue will vanished due to Apple switching to their own Silicon. And for the first time ever they have real competition in Notebook market ( AMD was never really in the Notebook market segment in its entire history ). In DataCenter they will be facing threats from Zen 3 and ARM. And I am very skeptical of their GPU moves. The market is still expanding so there is the possibility for them to sustain their revenue, I just dont see how they could grow its current record revenue in the next few years.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23772245

Nvidia has been producing their own ARM cores since at least 2014:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Denver

The ARM core performance hasn't been spectacular vs the latest and greatest from Samsung and Apple but combined with CUDA and tensor cores it can provide pretty incredible results considering the cost, form factor, and power consumption. Carmel is also at least two years old at this point...

Their project Denver announcement from 2011 discusses plans for server and HPC applications:

https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2011/01/05/project-denver-proc...

Yes, its worth saying for context: The Nintendo Switch runs on an Nvidia ARM core.

They're capable of pretty great performance in the right contexts, and the industry definitely needs more consumer-accessible HPC-focused ARM competition what with Apple leading the charge on "everything to ARM". Microsoft has also shown interest, with the SPX, but we need processors more capable than what Qualcomm is producing; I'm hopeful Nvidia can help fill that gap in the next five years.

Very succinct summary - with the contrast (from an investor perspective) magnified by the fact that Nvidia has stable management that has delivered over a number of years, compared to Intel's untested CEO and recent history of significant mis-steps.

>> Nvidia has stable management

I'd expand this further to say Nvidia has an enthusiastic, highly-charismatic CEO who literally has groupies (e.g., when you see him at conferences.) For a big-time CEO, he is also surprisingly nice and approachable -- I've now interacted with him on three separate occasions. It makes me like him, his company, what he does.

I realize that is touchy-feely but I wonder how common this sentiment is.

I realise I did Nvidia a dis-service as Jen-Hsun and team are obviously much, much more than just 'stable'.

Never met him, but seems very impressive and approachable - how many CEOs would give a talk to students sitting on the steps of a university entrance? [1]

Just to add though that having groupies is not necessarily a positive for investors!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqiBzmuqPNY

He definitely seems approachable. Someone I knew from school interned at nvidia and supposedly he hosted a party at his house for the interns (possibly just PhD interns) and let people rev one of his fancy cars

Oracle also threw us a party as new hires at Mark Hurd's "house" (party villa) in Atherton. HR and all of the top dogs were there except for Larry and the Board of course. It was a nice gesture but he had a lot of security combing the house at all times and we weren't allowed to bring our phones even.

Definitely a well intentioned gesture but as always in SV corporate world, just becomes weirder by the minute :)

was an intern at nvidia. He's very approachable and all interns are invited to his huge ass california house. I saw came out of a meeting and just said hi to him. He's pretty much an engineer just like everyone except he's a CEO and he doesn't have that douchebag vibe like most tech CEOs are.

As someone trying to start a company of my own, I really enjoyed that talk he gave on the steps, where he talked about how nvidia was born and grew up. Highly motivating. In fact I curate such entrepreneur talks.

Any playlist do you like to share?

Yeah every year he throws a party for the interns. Not a weird sketchy one either, but HR is involved, drinks are limited and that whole thing.

He gives me creepy vibes. But every CEO does that, so I’m not sure it’s a bad thing. At least I actually liked him.

Those are his personalities, but much more important I think is that Jensen is actually a product CEO. A Product person would care about your product beyond it is just selling well. Not something could be said about Intel CEOs.

Dr Lisa Su is a product CEO as well. She had a much tougher time with AMD's debt and lack of resources, but still manage to pull things off. And small Fun Fact. Jensen and Dr Lisa Su are actually family relatives.

I think they are both interesting in being both product focused and having a deep understanding of the technology - which is a fairly unusual and a very powerful combination.

Agreed on the management. Regarding Intel’s CEO, Bob Swan is a finance guy with no history or background in semiconductors. It remains to be seen whether someone with no real background in technology or in the semiconductor industry can turn things around at Intel.

Apparently his current strategy is to just cut costs like craz-, I mean, like every CEO who was once a CFO. I know driver developers who work there and are stuck with old broken laptops of previous generations because there's no budget (they call it BTI) to upgrade. No dogfoodin for them. Even the previously free fruits are now just one per day per employee.

Source: I know people who work there.

Meanwhile the cost of monitoring the free fruit situation will cost more than the couple of crates of apple savings

perks are very very hard to take away. THe lower morale, and in many cases cause the best employees to leave, not because of the actual perk, but because of what that means - That the company doesn't value its employees.

I agree, I've seen many companies cut perks and yet not save any money, they just reduce morale.

> but because of what that means - That the company doesn't value its employees.

reducing perks is also a danger sign that a company is in a death spiral. If the company is to the point where it's worrying about $200 a week in fruit across N thousands employees then that can be indicative of other internal problems

It's also very indicative at this time, during pandemic about those companies chopping regular employees pay versus not doing anything to top line C suite.

Many companies reduced pay by 10%-20% or stopped 401k match or even pay raise when C suite still made profits from recent stock moves.

People get used to how a company is.

If the lunchroom is like the orphanage in Oliver Twist, and you have 12 inch VGA monitors, well, that's just the way it is.

At another company, if one day you notice that the coffee in the break room is no longer organic, even if it's of good quality, and the string cheese is only restocked twice a day instead of three times, that's a bad sign. Somebody is trying to save money. That may not mean the company is in trouble but it's a sign something isn't as good as it once was.

> not because of the actual perk, but because of what that means - That the company doesn't value its employees.

and/or that money is tight and things are likely to get worse

Anyone know how the AMD workplace is? Learning about work life at different companies is really interesting to me

I've always personally envisioned AMD's graphics driver team as a bunch of underdogs pulling off serious wizardry on a shoestring budget and still being criticized by the public for having any bugs at all.

> I am still waiting for Nvidia to make their play in CPU Market. May be a move in ARM Server CPU space.

What makes you think they are better prepared for this than, say, Qualcomm... or even Intel?

Despite Apple's decision to switch to ARM, I'm still not convinced it's the right architecture for the servers of the future. It more likely indicates Apple's convergence to a single platform, away from the classic desktop.

What makes you think it's not the right architecture for servers?

If anything AWS' Graviton2s are competitive on multithreaded workloads and it looks like the Neoverse cores are only going to improve there.

Personally I think servers are hard to get into because you rely on scoring big deals against Intel/AMD and the shipment volume is rather small compared to other markets.

However, being able to provide decent ML to cars, cell towers, buildings etc at a reasonable price/power budget has the potential for much larger volume albeit at a smaller profit margin. NVIDIA is largely uncontested in ML acceleration so they have a unique selling point in an embedded market that's waiting for big disruption.

It's no secret that NVIDIA is involved with RISC V. And don't forget Intel v Ampere (the company, not the NVIDIA chip). Intel is facing incredible competition. Once a crack appears in the server market and Arm rushes in, Intel will be in a very, very bad situation. Especially with 100,000+ employees compared to NVIDIA's 13,000.

EDIT: Downvotes? Really?

I'm personally not terribly bullish on RISC V currently. All of the advantages have to be weighed against "it's not x86_64". ARM processors at least have tons of smartphone people working out the bugs and random weirdness. With RISC V you're the one on the bleeding edge, and will be for a long time.

Plus if you're looking at the medium-long horizon you have to consider the possibility that the chips will stagnate or die out entirely and you'll be forced to abandon them anyway.

Everybody wants to wait until there have been some people working with the technology at scale and working out he bugs, finding problems, fixing the docs, populating StackExchange, etc... In order to get people to make the leap you need to offer them something significantly better than the current offerings so they'll be willing to do the extra work. If you are offering marginal power efficiency improvements that is not going to cut it.

A typical GPU has a bunch of small microcontrollers on it, usually Cortex-M’s. Those need to be licensed. I wonder if Nvidia’s interest in RISC-V is just to replace those microcontrollers?

Indeed, RISC-V has mainly been as replacement for Falcon cores in GPUs so far.

They evaluated vs Cortex A-53 through rather than Cortex-M.

https://riscv.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Tue1100_Nvidia_...

Their gain in risc-v may be more about making life hard for Intel (anti-competitive) and avoiding patents etc in gpu, than not actually wanting to go head to head on CPU revenue. Similar but weaker to why Google did Android (Apple phone monopoly might hurt selling ads).

If they produce competitive CPU on RISC-V that'd be very interesting. I'd like to see a competition between ARM and RISC-V chips, so that ARM is not the monopoly in that niche market (high-end non-x86 chips). I think it's very unlikely though, if not impossible. Seems more logical to produce ARM.

RISC-V chips have tended to run a bit cooler than ARM given comparable performance class, microarchitecture and fabrication device node. However it remains to be seen if this advantage will be preserved, especially as more RISC-V instruction extensions get standardized (vector instructions, packed SIMD, bit-level ops are all on schedule, plus a grab-bag extension for JIT hardware acceleration) and as ARM64 implementations improve.

Citation?

> EDIT: Downvotes? Really?

I was so close to actually upvoting you, and then I had to go and downvote... and by this point you were back in the black, so to speak.

It's baffling to me how smart people like yourself, knowing the HN rules or at least being able to read them, still complain about downvotes. I really don't get it.

Downvotes!? Really!?

> AMD was never really in the Notebook market segment in its history

AM386 SX was a fully static cpu with a much lower power consumption, way better for laptops that Intel offerings at the time.

Tracks with my experience; I remember having an amd 486 notebook, and it was about 50/50 back then.

Wow, Intel has dominated the market for something like 40 years now?

Thing is, the competition is even worse regarding the fruit to fix.

It would be interesting to put a few dozen ARM cores on a high end GPU card. Why not just run your complete application directly on the card?

Intel tried that with Intel Xeon Phi, basically.

That was just a lot of Intel cores. I'm talking about an NVIDIA GPU that happens to have some ARM cores along with the CUDA cores.

You're essentially talking about a Jetson:

https://elinux.org/Jetson_AGX_Xavier

Eight Nvidia ARMv8 cores, 512 Volta cores, 64 tensor cores, and 2 DLAs - all connected to 32 GB of shared RAM.

It was announced over two years ago and the price has fallen to $800. For another $200 you can add a USB-C to DP cable (for a second display) and 1TB of NVMe storage.

If I had a $1,000 compute budget it's what I'd get. You'd have a more than functional dual 4K daily driver for dev work, browsing, etc plus the ability to run ML workloads. Oh yeah, and it tops out at less than 50 watts from the wall with all but the heaviest tasks coming in at 25-50% of that.

I love the Jetson -- we have a bunch of them here -- but that's a SBC. What I want is an NVIDIA 2080Ti or 3080Ti card with some ARM cores that I can run apps that use CUDA+ARM directly on!

I love my Jetsons too!

One has to wonder if at some point Nvidia will produce a PCIe carrier board or something for souped up Jetson modules or some variant. I have no idea how the connectivity (PCIe device?) would work out but it's definitely within the realm of possibility.

The Xavier generation supports behaving as a PCIe device (PCIe device mode), so it's maybe not too outlandish. :-)

At that point how is the "GPU" card not just a small motherboard/SoM? I mean, I guess having it run off of a host system still helps with density, but it's 80% of a full computer already at that point.

I keep waiting for Intel's FPGA investments to bear fruit, but so far it seems like it ain't happening.

I am not surprised and pretty much expected. I would love to be wrong and corrected but there is absolutely nothing that suggest Intel's FPGA ( Altera ) are doing any better than before they were acquired, and no signs to suggest future growth either. If anything they are actually doing worst all while Xilinx is storming past them.

As a matter of fact I have yet to see a single Intel Acquisition in its history that has created synergy or additional value.

I am on Xilinx camp, but I am worried what happens with the Altera’s remains. People aren’t crazy about FPGAs paired with Xeon.

Well that entirely depended on Intel's so-called process advantages, didn't it?

> ... I just dont see how they could grow its current record revenue in the next few years.

They'll move into shadier tactics like subscriptions to unlock cores/overclocking, etc.

CUDA is nowhere near the de facto in the ML industry. Beyond some specific application domains like CV where DL makes sense, most ML still runs on commodity hardware, and I happen to believe this will be the case for a long time once the Gartner Cycle of Hype settles on the Deep Learning craze and everyone runs out of VC money.

Despite what cloud providers and NVIDIA want you to believe, no you most likely don't need a lot of compute power for your industry problem. Basic knowledge of statistics would help though.

OP was likely talking about training where NVIDIA has virtually no competition apart from Google's TPUs.

In inferencing a lot more models are deployed on GPUs than before and this trend is likely to continue. NVIDIA is alone there.

Ha I see - I've been training ML models with millions of data points and millions of features on CPUs for a decade now, I didn't know I needed a GPU - I guess I've been doing it all wrong all this time!

>I've been training ML models with millions of data points and millions of features on CPUs for a decade now

That is why it is taking a decade to train your models. If you upgraded to a GPU, you could train them much faster :)

> didn't know I needed a GPU - I guess I've been doing it all wrong all this time

No, not the whole time, just these last couple of years :)

I would be very surprised if a ML pipeline didn't benefit from some GPU acceleration. What kind of algorithms are you using?

I think most tech stocks are overpriced right now. The amount of speculation taking place in the stock market at the moment is just insane. MSFT gained 30% over 6 months (that's compared to pre COVID levels), what's changed that much? Microsoft is a mature company, it shouldn't swing this hard. Nvidia almost doubled compared to pre COVID levels. ???

Microsoft are killing it in enterprise. Our company is moving hundreds of servers to the cloud (Azure). Our company owns it's own datacenter, has a strategic partnership with another cloud provider (CEO supports the cloud provider publicly) but we're still moving to Azure. Since the start of the pandemic we have thousands of users moving from Skype for Business(on premise) to Microsoft Teams(subscription). Microsoft Teams has more users than Slack now. Once you're on the Microsoft train it's hard to get off. New Xbox coming out I believe at the end of the year. I think companies that don't have the necessary skills(my company) need to move to cloud our they will die, our core business isn't maintaining servers. Microsoft have really turned it around with developers, embraced open source, built great developer tools.

to be fair, teams has more users than slack because they effectively give away teams with o365, and then claim all the people who have o365 use teams. Lots of companies use o365 (so get counted for teams) then, use slack as there actual chat app.

With that said, our company recently switched from slack to teams, and its been a fairly annoying change. Teams is miles behind slack in terms of usability.

Since coronavirus Microsoft has the NHS (~1.7M employees) on teams.

I use both Teams and Slack and almost did a spit take at the idea of "switching" from Slack to Teams. I had noticed that Teams has more chat functionality than a meeting tool really needs, but I didn't imagine that it was intended to be usable as a company's primary chat system.

Yeah slack is definitely the superior product, I think it was a great strategy by Microsoft to give the free 1 year subscription. Gives them some time to catch up to slack.

> Microsoft have really turned it around with developers, embraced open source, built great developer tools.

I'm still taking these changes with a grain of salt. If devs are still getting the same treatment in say, 5 or 10 years, I'll believe that Microsoft has changed. But to me the whole thing smells of "Use our open-source programs that just so happen to work really well with our paid-for closed-source software! Why not just switch to Windows and grab our Office 365 subscription while you're at it?"

That might well be true, but right now it's great for many of us. If in a decade VSCode becomes a subscription-only thing, or it requires usage of sharepoint, or something similarly horrible, it'll still have been a wonderful editor to me at this moment in time.

But yeah, considering Microsoft's history it's probably good to stay vigilant.

I have used both Office365 (previous job) and Google apps (current job).

Office365 is lightyears ahead for pretty much everything, from a business perspective.

From a nerd persepective, outlook mail is a bit uncomfortable to use and Teams has usability problems (slack is still better in that regard).

However you get Teams basically for free with an office 365 subscription, and you would have to buy the office suite anyway, so...

The Office apps are better but everything else is significantly worse. All the systems are glommed together. The administration of everything is a nightmare. Try to setup things like OneDrive is a travesty. My girlfriend has O365 for her small business. She has the original account. She was trying to do something relatively simple with Teams the other day and it wouldn't let her. It said she wasn't an admin and she should contact hers. There is no one else, she IS the admin. So she signed up for a different service instead. I have nothing but trouble using the broad MS online ecosystem. But so many people are locked into and only know Windows and Office that switching cost is too much for most people.

And this is the problem which MS creates for itself by sticking everything together into one huge gluey lump for you to get stuck onto, quite intentionally, but lack of quality plus emergent problems get you. MS has never been reliable throughout, and never will be until it gives up on complexity, and it won't do that because it's addicted to complexity.

I imagine it's easier and cheaper for Moft to throw customer support at these types of problems than to solve them. Which, honestly, is probably better than offering better products with no support at all (Google, where even the products aren't necessarily better)

Yeah, let's talk about MS' customer support... it's soooo good.

A company with as many products as Microsoft can afford to be crap at so many things they do. Even a product they do well today, maybe corporate strategy changes tomorrow and condemns it to permanent neglect. It makes much more sense to use a solution from a company whose future is pinned to that one product.

> The administration of everything is a nightmare.

That's possible, I wouldn't know. I was writing about my experience as an user.

Teams main competitor is Zoom, not Slack. Take a look at the new features they just announced for it: https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/8/21317526/microsoft-teams-t...

It's all video call related.

But are there any ways I can convert my swiss knife 4€ per month vps (1vcore, 2g, 20g) to something azure (either a vps or a virtual distro) ? (genuine question)

I have been spending quite a bit of time trying to understand how the market is doing so well. There are quite a few variables, as in most complex systems, and many have been outlined Robinhood etc here.

However, I believe the single biggest factor to the market's continued stability was the announcement by the Federal Reserve to buy corporate bonds. This has NEVER been done before and was a HUGE deal.

The announcement came on March 23rd. 'Oddly' that also happens to be the very bottom of the March sell off panic.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/business/economy/coronavi...

Those purchases just started happening. As such, I expect the markets to continue as if there is no Covid Crisis as it is viewed as a short term issue that has been mitigated at a corporate cash flow point by this Federal Reserve buying. https://www.marketplace.org/2020/06/16/the-fed-starts-buying...

The market had a chance to correct itself; or worse, get into a depression (bear market). But that didn't happen. It suggests two things: 1- Either the market is not over-priced and these companies have strong revenues and fundamentals; or 2- The US dollar is discretely hyper-inflating and it's showing only on stocks and other similar assets at the moment.

Sure there is a chance that we are in a bubble (by the way, we have been saying that since 2010. That's over 10 years) but after Covid, I think that fundamentals have changed.

I think there's just nothing better to invest in right now, and wealthy people have a lot of capital. With things how they are in Hong Kong maybe there's even more capital flight out of China because they see the writing on the wall.

> I think there's just nothing better to invest in right now

I think this might be the biggest reason. With B&M falling like flies left and right, people are shifting their investments. I don't think it's limited to "wealthy people" either.

I'm sure the Fed's buying spree/inflation is a factor as well, however. Interesting times.

Agreed. I think this is still the case of: “Bears swimming in liquidity”

SP 500 Equal Weight Index is down -11.63% YTD. (every company in SP500 EWI has the same weight).

Most companies in SP500 are down. Stocks hurt because of COVID are losing value, those who are not affected or benefit gain.

High prices in tech sector reduces their expected future ROI. That's completely acceptable because other investments are worse.

and the universe of good investments is small while the universe of the money supply has expanded

so we will so oversized capital misallocation, until it is not considered a misallocation anymore

comparative metrics of the individual companies just because they happen to be publicly traded shares is not relevant or holistic enough

Funny how when redistribution of wealth is mentioned everybody gets all "oh noes, inflation! if poor people can eat then the food will cost too much." But this is kinda what we're seeing on the stock side... there's too much wealth aggregated in the hands of people who already have enough [food, shelter, education, etc] chasing a small world of actually-not-so-great-right-now investments.

The fundamental problem of capitalism is that it only solves the problems of people with money. Put the money in the hands of people with more problems, and those problems will get solved. (On the 'oh noes, inflation' side, many of these problems can be solved by services, which create their own supply over time as people take the new jobs created by new demand.) As it is, a massive amount of wealth is tied up doing nothing but looking dumb...

Sir, this is a Wendy's.

....but I'll entertain you, both of your first two sentences are about inflation. We aren't "kinda seeing this on the stock side" this actually is inflation. This is the expected outcome of inflation and what has been happening for 100 years in the US. With an unprecedented acceleration.

I think what you are missing from a "capitalism versus X" discussion is the nuanced discussion of macroeconomics.

Redistribution of wealth into poor people affording food has only a little to do with inflation, so I'm sorry thats the level of discussion you've had with people thus far. It has more to do with market signals as well as competitiveness of that market at all for private investors if they were to be taxed heavily in order to pay for it. They really can go somewhere else, and that is a great privilege which always has to be balanced with what policy makers attempt to do. Right now, there is a massive wealth distribution occurring in order for people to be able to stay fed, with additional payments in unemployment insurance, coming directly from the Federal Reserve creating new money. And there are many market signals missing, exacerbating misallocation of capital.

You have to realize that with the CARES Act, the Federal Reserve's charter has been modified by Congress. Things that were unfathomable and illegal for the Federal Reserve to do are now legal. The entire point of the Federal Reserve were so that Congress stayed out of managing the money supply as it would be a continual political distraction, and Congress always shied away from touching anything about the Federal Reserve's law until now.

So the entire discussion has flipped. Republicans and moderate Democrats will never call it socialism, they'll never call it universal basic income, and right now there is also no political will to tax heavily in order to curb inflation while paying for the same programs. But what is happening is massive inflation, from the state, into a lot of people's pockets, to keep the lights on for everyone. Many of those people are buying stocks, along with the wealthy and corporate recipients.

Post COVID the world economy is no longer growing, so stocks of companies that do grow are at a premium now.

I think prices today are to some extend inflated by government action. But it is hard to tell by how much, since also the global economy will grow again very soon. And if anyone benefits from more digitization and remote work it is MSFT.

Also for MSFT specifically, I think the company is in a very good spot right now with its cloud business, gaming and office, developer and productivity software

I suspect MSFT is reaping a huge gain from the combination of business tooling (office, applicaitons, infrastructure), cloud-hosted environments and high-touch customer management. With all those workers remote, companies have huge IT workloads to support them. Would you rather be calling your MS rep these days or trying to find a human at Google?

Let's not forget about the Xbox gamers working from home that are secretly playing games during boring meetings.

That makes a lot of sense.

Pretty much - Large and Mega cap is performing well because at the end of the day it’s small businesses that will struggle while the larger entities can ride it out. Add a few trillion in cash and the writings on the wall.

I also suspect the decision makers don’t really want asset prices to go to shit, so better for them to issue more debt and let the next generation deal with it.

> what's changed

Passive cash flows became more expensive. Money got pushed into Microsoft, not pulled into it.

Mind explaining what you mean by "passive cash flows" and why they became more expensive?

MS didn’t become more valuable in a vacuum. It’s just with the pandemic hurting so many businesses the value of a stable mature company that’s still making money went up.

The price/earnings ratio went up. You are paying more for each dollar of MS profit compared to last year (which was already a high P/E ratio).

It’s another form of inflation.

Passive cash is cash that is invested relatively risk free, such as in A status government bonds.

10Y treasury rate dropped by 1 percent point this year: https://ycharts.com/indicators/10_year_treasury_rate

Exactly

> MSFT gained 30% over 6 months (that's compared to pre COVID levels), what's changed that much?

1) assets are denominated in dollars

2) the amount of dollars in circulation has increased about 40% in 2020

3) Therefore, asset prices go up

That's all there is to it.

The public noticed the value of technologies MSFT offers. Not everyone who has money and invests understands what Cloud is or why MS Teams is something that might sell well.

Covid-19 gave all those people a very visual example of the value proposition.

apart from the pure financial stuff that others are discussing - COVID means that Microsoft is selling a lot of product right now. There are a LOT of PCs getting built right now, and what goes on them? Microsoft's OS and Microsoft's office suite. And I would not be surprised if a lot of places that may have been reticent to move into the subscription-based cloud model are suddenly seeing the light now that work has suddenly become decentralized and remote. Anyone who is selling collaboration or telework tools (Zoom, Citrix, etc) is benefiting hugely from this pandemic.

Dunno if you have tried to find PC parts lately but things like power supplies are extremely difficult to get your hands on right now. I have seen $100+ for a shit-tier random-brand gold power supply, take it or leave it, because right now there is just no supply. 30% of America is suddenly working from home and a significant number of those are building rigs for their new home office.

Monitors are another, the impact on the monitor market is palpable, basic productivity monitors (60 hz 24" 1080p and 27" 1440p) are up 50% or more in some caases from the start of the year.

I consider myself lucky that I am sitting on a great ultrawide gaming monitor and a lot of misc hardware, as things have been heating up this summer I pulled my J5005 NUC off one of the TVs and reformatted it yesterday so now I don't have to run my power-hungry gaming rig just to do citrix.

Or webcams! It was so hard to find a decent webcam in April. I am sure they are selling much better than normal to this day.

I don't understand why everyone cares so much about stock price, an almost arbitrary measure of the value of a company, based on sentiments and not facts. Isn't total equity the real indicator of the company's value in money?

Right. Intel stock is still somewhere around double what it was only 3 years ago, and I'm pretty sure that they're not in a better situation re EUV, 10nm, competition from AMD etc. than 3 years ago.

The Fed.

In the book The Intelligent Investor I got a feel for how long optimistic views can last (TL;DR 5+ years). And then 2000 - 2003 happened.

Compare the two:

https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=NVDA

https://finviz.com/quote.ashx?t=INTC

On all fundamental indicators - price to earnings, price to forward earnigs, price to book, dividend yield. NVIDIA is 4 to +10 times as expensive as Intel.

Tells you something about how the market sees Intel's future vs NVIDIA's.

I read that IBM gave its market share to Intel and Microsoft through its missteps to bring a personal computer to market.

The story of how Intel managed to screw up graphics, mobile, and now it’s desktop/server chips... that’s almost making IBM management look good at the moment.

Who is replacing Intel servers ? AMD ?

Also ARM chips for server use is rapidly starting to become a serious thing.

It's - of course - very small scale and early days at the moment, but the pricing is very positive and it's something people are starting to think about as a real viable option.

The servers will flip once ARM gets cheap enough to x86.

If I have a database and some Java or Ruby running on some Linux then why would I care whether it is on x86 or anything else?

However are those ARM CPUs going to be made by NVIDIA?

It seems to me that there are other fabless chip producers out there capable of doing this.

> If I have a database and some Java or Ruby running on some Linux then why would I care whether it is on x86 or anything else?

Databases, Java, and Ruby, are well-optimised for running on AMD64. Are they all as well-optimised for running on AArch64, for example? I'm not so sure. I still see basic intrinsics being implemented for Java on ARM. I think people may be in for a bit of a shock when they try ARM with some common software.

We saw pretty decent performance with AWS Gravitron. The pricing is a bit opaque as AWS might be taking a loss, but M6g.2xlarge steps all over M5.2xlarge on your basic Tomcat/Spring Boot app.

Remember there has been a tremendous amount of effort made to make VM's like the JVM and v8 performant on ARM for mobile. Turns out all those intrinsics scale just fine when presented with your typical "Business Application" workload.

I think Intel is especially in trouble with JVM workloads as it's very rare for libraries to call out to native code (unlike Python).

You really can just drop you jar on an ARM (m6g), AMD (m5a) or Intel (m5, m5n) expect the same results. After a bit of hesitation it will become just a standard part of cloud price optimization.

Cloud operators win - Chip vendors get commoditized.

(Modulo specialized workloads like HPC, ML and such - but to the topic, that's not to Intel's strength)

> Remember there has been a tremendous amount of effort made to make VM's like the JVM ... performant on ARM for mobile.

This doesn't reflect what I'm seeing at all - in fact I'm seeing basic ARM intrinsics still being added to the Graal compiler in the last few weeks!

https://github.com/oracle/graal/pull/2588

> You really can just drop you jar on an ARM (m6g), AMD (m5a) or Intel (m5, m5n) expect the same results.

Not without these kind of basic intrinsics you won't!

Mostly reporting what I’m seeing with our workload. Is it possible OpenJDK/Hotspot has more ARM coverage than Graal?

OpenJDK is more complete, but that is also pretty recent work. I think it's an indication of icebergs that Oracle's flagship new compiler is still having random drive-by commits by non-core-team members that add pretty fundamental intrinsics.

Plus having ARM widely deployed on the desktop via Apple may start to incentivise developers to fill in the remaining gaps where native code libraries are used?

It's not that they're going away, it's that they are turning into a more commodity market. You used to have 5000-10000 enterprises buying high-margin Xeons. Every dentist office had 5-6 Xeon chips sold at high margin.

Now, a significant, growing chunk of the market is in AWS, Azure, GCP, etc. Those vendors get favorable terms and make it harder for Intel to segment the market to maximize profits. When Intel was calling on me a couple of years ago, they were pushing storage hard (ruler, etc), but I don't see OEMs embracing Intel branding as storage, and Samsung seems to be winning deals that I'm involved in.

> Every dentist office had 5-6 Xeon chips sold at high margin.

What on earth for? My dentists office has a couple of old Opterons. What were yours using their Xeons for?

I go to a small practice. They have a 3D xray machine, whatever a Microsoft small business server is called, and a practice management system.

When it's time to refresh, it will be 100% cloud.

> Every dentist office had 5-6 Xeon chips sold at high margin.

That's a great observation.

For instance, I recently worked on a project to provide services to insurance agents via the cloud.

To me, it was interesting because it offered a lot of value for an insurance agency. Basically the last thing an insurance agent wants to worry about is some server in a closet that has a Blue Screen of Death.

AMD may not replace Intel, but it is certainly exerting a severe downward price pressure in the datacenter, Intel's most profitable market. The servers my company is deploying in its current refresh are all AMD EPYCs, after a 6–8 month qualification cycle.

As for client computing, ARM is taking over the increasingly irrelevant PC/Mac after having overwhelmingly won mobile, and IoT will also be ARM.

Furthermore, Trump's trade war against China will claim Intel as collateral damage. The Chinese will switch to RISC-V or the AMD-licensed but made in China x64 chips:

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15493/hygon-dhyana-reviewed-c...

Given that the sanctions also blocked Huawei's license of the ARM design. I think the Chinese will create their own processor family.

China has a processor from Sunway powering the #4 supercomputer as of June 2020, it was #1 when it launched in 2016.

https://www.top500.org/system/178764/

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunway_(processor)

The Power ISA is open source and well supported by a variety of software isn't it? That's what I'd go with if I were in their shoes.

Or fork ARM, ignoring that they're not paying for a license.

something like now in progress

https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/How-SoftBank-s-s...

Yes, the new EPYC cpus offer very good performance and value.

Surprisingly, POWER is now drawing even in TCO for small servers, if your shop has the software development chops to do it.

Are we anywhere near seeing Microsoft Windows running on ARM? Seems to me that Microsoft doesn't have the same strong incentive to shift away from x86 as Apple has.

They’re not going all-in, but https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/porting/apps-on...:

“Originally Windows 10 (as distinguished from Windows 10 Mobile) could run only on PCs that were powered by x86 and x64 processors. Now, Windows 10 desktop can run on machines that are powered by ARM64 processors with the Fall Creators Update or newer. The power-saving nature of the ARM CPU architecture allows these PCs to have all-day battery life and support for mobile data networks. These PCs will provide great application compatibility and allow you to run your existing x86 win32 applications unmodified.”

I think the market is betting more on AMD than Intel serving that market though.

I could have kicked myself for not buying AMD stock years ago, even joked about it with some friends at the time but couldn't afford to take the risk. The reason was (rightly or wrongly) Jim Keller returning to work on Zen.

He's worked on a few different and really exciting things since, but he's at Intel now. I suspect they'll sort it out and turn things around, but running their own fabs is their biggest problem now. They aren't competitive with TSMC and they desperately need to be.

Technically Jim Keller is still at Intel as a consultant I think but not for long ...

https://www.anandtech.com/show/15846/jim-keller-resigns-from...

> The reason was (rightly or wrongly) Jim Keller

So are you buying Intel stock now?

Nope. Still can’t afford to take that risk.

Also, the circumstances are much different. AMD was valued at the time as a company circling the drain - there was a lot of upside potential given the low starting point.

Intel is still valued very highly currently even after it’s problems in the last few years.

The thing is - I think they’d need to turn the company around entirely just to justify their current price, let alone any future returns.

It's been possible for a while but never really taken off. As you say, because Microsoft don't control or profit from the hardware (apart from their own Surfaces) they have no real incentive one way or the other.

They did try a more locked down version of Windows, Windows RT, on ARM. It was predictably a disappointment.

It's telling that even on hackernews nobody knows about the Surface Pro X.

Microsoft's grievous inability to name things doesn't help there. At least it's not the XBox One X.

I imagine they'd be stupid enough to follow that up with something like Xbox Series X to denote a completely new console generation!

It's only slightly more stupid than following up a smash hit console called a Wii with a completely new one called Wii U!

(I mean, seriously, I'm a proper Nintendo fan but somehow I missed an entire console generation because of stupid naming!)

I'm really curious why they named "Xbox Series X". It's hard to remembering whether it's latest or not for me (non English-native, Japanese).

Windows could probably run on ARM tomorrow (or at least, in 6 months) if Microsoft really wanted it to.

What it could probably not do is run-on-ARM with acceptable performance for every legacy app.

Windows' bread and butter has always been forever-compatibility (Win API language-of-the-year aside) for long lived business apps.

Apple has never, and doesn't seem to want to, competed on that front.

For consumers, I'm not sure. But I know as part of cutting costs, Azure decided to start running servers on ARM instead of x64: https://www.techrepublic.com/article/windows-server-on-arm-m...

It already does run on ARM64 but it is only available to OEMs, meaning that you can't buy it as a consumer. And it only runs on some specific SoCs, most of which are Qualcomm ARM chips.

Things are likely to change as more actual ARM64 laptops appear. Some Windows on ARM64 laptops are already available like the HP Envy X2, the Lenovo Yoga C630, and the Microsoft Surface Pro X.

Windows running on ARM is about as valuable as Linux running on ARM.

What makes Windows valuable is the 'legacy' applications.

in their defense, they both probably didn't have mistakes of others to learn from.

Although I don't think Intel is very dynamic or good company, I still think INTC is undervalued compared to NVDA, TSMC or AMD over long term (> 5 years).

The failure of Intel's 10nm process was a huge hit that keeps hurting them few years, but there is no reason to expect that their next 7nm process is a failure. They made wrong strategic choice when deciding if to use EUV or not.

The problem is that 10nm wasn't a one off oopsie. It was caused by power struggles in upper management from bad series of successions and high engineering turnover from changing culture, cost cutting and agressive of poaching campaigns from competitors like Apple, Google, and Nvidia.

Apple, Google, and Nvidia nave no process knowledge. They don't manufacture their own chips.

I think NVIDIA stock is seen more as an investment in AI tech generally, rather than NVIDIA specifically. The only other firms making really good AI-focused silicon are companies that don't sell them, only rent them.

Intel failed on mobile, failed on GPUs, struggled on 14nm, failed on 10nm. Intel has been very good at the old "If you sell an AMD CPU you better make a lot of money, because you sure as hell won't make any money out of Intel" but those days are gone. The reaosn their P/E is nowhere is because they're not going to be making any revenue at all in 2025 at this rate short of a government bailout.

One of the important things that NVIDIA has done in ML is make sure it is compatible with TF and Pytorch every new version they guarantee compatibility and also release their own docker containers. So you don't need to painfully install NVIDIA, CuDNN,NCCL and CUDA drivers. While AMD is releasing new hardware they still need to guarantee compatibility which NVIDIA is already years ahead. AMD barely release some initial support but not production ready

Deserved. Aside their OSS practices (or lack of), they have laser focus, put themselves in the dominant position via technology and know-how and drive direction of their industry by themselves. Rare to see such a dominant force in hardware anymore.

Intel needs a Satya Nadella. Every time you think CEOs are overpaid, think about what he did to Microsoft (bad CEOs should not be CEOs regardless of their compensation).

Over the last 10 years, Intel lost mobile (never seriously competed, probably NIH from the old guard not wanting to embrace ARM SoCs), gave up on modems (bad management probably, they were into wireless tech early), could not compete in the GPU space, lost their performance prime to AMD, lost fab edge to TSMC, lost laptop processors to Apple and maybe cloud to Graviton and co. Would have lost AI too but they bought Habana so the jury’s out on that one.

That’s gross mismanagement from a company with no excuses. They need a Satya with a fresh look on what the company is actually adept at. Regroup and attack.

To be fair, Intel enjoyed high highs and AMD low lows. It took them a while but now we actually have competition it turns out Intel are not so good after all. Funnily enough they moved beyond the Quad Core just as AMD started offering something decent.

My next processor won't be an Intel, especially with all the speculative execution crap that went on (and yes, I know it affected AMD too).

Intel's business practices are shitty, and quite frankly, they need to be torn down a few pegs and bleed a little, either they die out or they come back stronger.

Intel doesn't have the leverage to do a Satya.

Microsoft has done some amazing things, but it's build on on-school Microsoft.

I always hate these comparisons because they always compare market capitalization and not enterprise value. On the latter metric, which is independent of how a company is financed, Intel is still more valuable. Intel is still "worth more" than Nvidia.

Well done! The only company that successfully managed to ride both the blockchain and AI hype :)

I think that the parallels with the other half of the 'Wintel monopoly' are interesting.

Nadella had the courage to stop insisting that MS was 'Windows first' all the time and to recognise that MS had strengths that could be built on with a more balanced approach to the environment and ecosystems that MS operates in.

Intel still seems to be strongly 'x86 first' but it seems to me that this is no longer maximising value for shareholders. For example to what exent was the custom foundry failure due to the politics of x86 first and how valuable would a viable custom foundry business be today for Intel?

I think the key difference is that Microsoft’s differentiated asset is the trust and good relationships it has with Enterprises. Their advantage is their distribution, not their tech.

Intel on the other hand doesn't do it's own distribution and it chips have lost their Moore's Law advantage. If there is marginal performance change, technology will become a commodity.

All the tech stock valuation seem a little insane right now, but a company like amzn p/e has been a 100+ for a while.

As a matter of fact, AMZN's current PE Ratio (147) is equal to its ten year median value

AMD's market cap ~65B while being the runner up both in the CPU and GPU space, while a combined Nvidia and Intel is ~500B, sure emphasizes the value of being on top.

Something interesting to note is that Warren Buffet started out making his money in something called value investing [1].

The principle is that you use things like assets, employees, IP, sales, factory output, sales, etc. to calculate your expected share price and if you check the actual share price and find it to be greatly undervalued, you would buy up a somewhat significant part of the business. I assume this also allows you to have some kind of say in the future of the business and I assume that you would prefer it if the company were not that large yet.

It would be interesting to hear what a young Warren Buffet would have had to say (since the old one does actually tell us what he has to say).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_investing

somehow it saddens me that we don't call this kind of thing simply 'investing'.

And Tesla is currently worth more than these combined: BMW + GM + Ford + Mercedes + Hyundai + Nissan + Fiat Chrysler + Honda

You know, just a trillion dollars in sales give or take. I'm sure Tesla will get there sometime this century.

Intel has $25 billion in operating income the last four quarters (~73% increase in three years). nVidia has $3.4 billion in operating income the last four quarters. Yeah but nVidia is growing fast, right? Nope, they're growing modestly. How long will it take for nVidia to get to $25b in operating income? 15 years if everything goes perfectly?

It's certainly up to the reader to judge whether these spectacular valuations are due to the stock market bubble, or if... you know... it's different this time, it's the new economy, cloud!, or whatever bullshit is being spun this time around.

Intel is quite unconvincing on a lot of key aspects (10nm, 7nm, performance after spectre family mitigations, etc) but to me the biggest danger is their inability to commit and persist on pretty much any topic which isn't their mainstream CPU line.

They sold Xscale, they sold their modem division (admittedly it was terrible, but I refuse to believe it was unfixable, certainly Apple didn't).

This creates hesitation in prospective customers of anything which isn't their mainstream CPU business, reducing them to a one trick pony. And that pony is now having its lunch eaten from both below (ARM) and above (Epyc).

Their operating profit and their reserves mean little if prices go down - they are used to fat, lofty margins and I'm not sure they still know how to execute without them.

Think about what happens to the shale oil businesses once crude prices approach their extraction costs. You implode very quickly no matter how big you are.

Great summary.

And Intel's cost of business is incredibly high. Semiconductor fabs are some of the most expensive factories in the world.

Intel is in danger of becoming General Motors, a company that sat by idly while competitors made them obsolete.

The stock price only reflects the supply and demand of a company’s stock. A lot of people want to have nvidias and Tesla stock, so their price is higher.

The problem is all those people writing financial pornography about the stock market. That can give you the impression that there is more to the stock price than that.

The fundamental value of a stock is the net present value of future cashflows that stock entitles you to. Buyers and sellers are welcome to believe otherwise, but in the long run they will lose money.

Unless the stock pays a dividend (and a lot of stocks have never paid one), their cashflow never end up in your wallet as a shareholder. Thus the only value you will get is the amount someone else will pay for your stock.

Sure they need some cashflow (after all, nobody wants to buy a bankrupt company) but to believe the stock value is a straightforward formula based on cashflows isn’t how the market works. Otherwise Amazon would have plummeted in price long ago.

Buybacks. The other (and more efficient) method to return capital to shareholders is via buybacks, where the company literally hands you cash in exchange for your shares.

That is true though again, not every company does buybacks.

A company might not do a dividends or buybacks now, but if they are successful they are likely to do so eventually, and that expectancy is worth something just the same.

Nowadays the fundamental value of a stock is more what you can convince others to pay for it.

That's not fundamental, its superficial and the people playing that game are in for a correction.

> Buyers and sellers are welcome to believe otherwise, but in the long run they will lose money.

Not if they sell it to someone else for a higher price.

Someone will lose money, but you can't rely on Softbank throwing another billion dollars down a hole every time you've a tech disappointment to unload.

well to be fair that hole can be metaphorically filled by involving Greensill to help with some creative accounting!

Several of those manufactures that you listed are on the verge of bankruptcy (Ford, Nissan, FCA). Auto manufacturing is capital-intensive and extremely high risk and a few bad quarters is all it takes to completely wipe out shareholders. You may not realize this, but GM actually went bankrupt in 09 and shareholders lots everything.

Telsa is not going to go bankrupt in the near- or medium-term. There's just too damn much money backing them.

Tesla is also able to have almost positive cash flow on high margin high demand cars in the middle of a pandemic. The other automakers are leaking money like there is no tomorrow.

Ford, GM, FCA have a thin wedge of the market that is still profitable for them and that market is under attack, with little indication of them being able to make a huge splash in another market. Not to mention a broader shift in car market and transportation that requires massive investment.

If you don't grow, don't make much profit and are risky, meaning a couple of bad quarters almost kill you your stock is not gone be worth much.

Well, Intel income can also go down fast, and that's probably the main reason we see the stock price going down.

Really?

As far as i know intel has/had plenty of reserves and is still selling good.

The Demand in general is very high.

Doyou have any numbers?

In the year after the iPhone was announced, blackberry stock tripled to 140 dollars a share. They had record profits and revenue.

It’s currently $4.

You can be a dead man walking even while your financials are fine.

>In the year after the iPhone was announced...

The iPhone was a one-in-a-generation product that upended an industry. Yet I see 10 products being compared to it a week.

It may sound cynical to people here, but in the long-run, you'll do a lot better thinking "this is probably not the next iPhone" than having FOMO that every second tech company might be the next Apple.

I’m just using it as an example of an incumbent being disrupted. It takes a few years to show up in the bottom line.

The same could be said of nvidia. I don’t think their future is assured by any means.

Nothing is assured, but if you were going to bet, intel’s future seems a lot cloudier. Where do they get growth from?

Two fronts with big challenges: Losing Appple as a customer AMD already stealing market share on desktop, mobile, and server, with lots of improvements on the way in the short term. (smaller transistors, better memory controllers) While intel has really nothing in the pipeline.

That's why sometimes I wonder if the overlap of "tech" and "stock market" is bad.

One deals with concrete things, other deals with speculation.

These valuations are references of the stock market - it's almost a measure of popularity, than anything else. Right?

The overlap of tech and speculation is called "science fiction."

"Cloud!" made my day! I could totally see this in on a new-age advertising page on a new X as a service website lol

I hope they make a fast chip for the net Switch.

I'm actually a bit worried about the next switch's GPU (assuming Nintendo plans a switch pro/2 as next major upgrade).

The embedded GPU line of Nvidea switched from being focused on entertainment systems to be focused on "embedded" AI. E.g. cards running the calculations for self driving cars and robots.

This not only means they have different focus in their software stack but also that in the hardware they come with tensor units and similar.

Lastly they seem to be more expensive then the previous maxwell based ones (back when the switch was released). But this is hard to say as the prices I take for come from they AI boards.

But I don't think Nvidea is interested in making custom chips for Nintendo. (At most some variations of the Chips they do anyway).

And if the switch needs to switch the GPU this would be a problem for backward compatibility which I think is a major must-have if they bring out a switch 2 or similar.

Maybe we can blame Robinhood traders. But really, who knows? A lot of these valuations don't make much sense.

That's a lot of blows for Intel

I am looking for a new non-macbook and one of my primary criteria is that is should have Intel Integrated Graphics as the Linux drivers are open source and well integrated.

It feels like nvidia as a whole is leaning more towards special applications and proprietary solutions. They care more about gaming/hpc/machine-learning/self-driving and they are just not that interested in personal computers.

If I ever need the horsepower physically present on my desk I can still buy an external nvidia unit.

Why not go for an AMD GPU out of curiosity?

Mainly because the laptops I looked at (Dell XPS-es and Thinkpads) come with either intel or nvidia. It seems AMDs are more present in gaming laptops and I am looking for a daily driver. Or high-end macbooks but I am trying to get out of those.

That said, AMD on linux - while works - is still not "obvious" to me [0]. There are multiple graphics stacks with various level of proprietary-ness and you have to mix and match.

[0] https://www.amd.com/en/support/kb/release-notes/amdgpu-insta...

You can find ThinkPad E14 Gen2 or E495 (older but maybe stable for Linux)

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