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Comment by eulers_secret | Hacker News Reader

How would Intel go bankrupt when their net income is still $20 billion?

Sure they’re loosing some ground, but I see no indicators they’re at risk of a near-term bankruptcy...

If Sapphire Rapids and Meteor Lake fail they might be in danger. Increasingly the threat is not AMD but Arm, since cloud hyperscalers can bring CPU design in house and undercut x86 and Arm's fixed length instruction encoding is fundamentally better for very wide decoders.

Once they stutter it’s game over. You have to research and build fabs years before you start using them. What happens when they get stuck and fall behind TSMC for a few generations?

Intel can just use TSMC to build their chips: https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/08/bloomberg-intel-considering-o...

If second place wasn't fatal for TSMC, AMD, or ARM, perhaps it won't be for Intel either?

But TSMC and ARM have very different business models.

AMD divested their manufacturing capability in order to compete.

The question I think isn't whether Intel will be around - they will - but what will their business look like in 5-10 years time.

AMD spun off its fabs because they actually had good designs but couldn’t keep up in manufacturing. TSMC and ARM had different business models. Now, Intel never had the best designs but they had the best manufacturing. Now they are third place in both. Third place but spending as if it’s going to continue to dominate for the next decade. What’s going to happen when it writes off an entire fab?

I don't think bankruptcy is likely at all but they have more competition than for a long time (if ever) in their most profitable markets. I don't think backwards looking measures like historic earnings are that useful - if you look at the price / earnings ratio of 12 that tells you that the market is sceptical about Intel's prospects.

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