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Comment by marricks | Hacker News Reader

You may very well be right, but it's a bit much to say that's Intel's explicit strategy. In the past 12 years the main thing Intel has done is make poor long term choices: going big on mobile too late, SSDs taking off but not for Intel, whatever is gong on with 10nm.

Saying they're committed to fabricating in the US while they are, for the first time, relying on other companies to make chips for them over seas... right now their domestic fabrication may internally be viewed as a blunder.

Sure it could pan out for them but it's a crap shoot. Maybe those blunders were just all bad leadership which Intel has recovered from, only time will tell.

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I am a pretty hardcore AMD fan, but fair is fair:

> whatever is gong on with 10nm

The modern 'nanometer system' is nothing more than a bizarre versioning scheme (specifically its usually the 'major' portion of a semver), and you wouldn't be able to identify a physical thing to measure to compare different fabs.

Intel wouldn't have been competitive if they were still on their own 14nm process.

Like it or not, "10nm" is the official label for Intel's most pronounced and prolonged fuck-up since the Pentium 4 dead-end. The fact that node names have little to do with node geometry is irrelevant here (nobody's trying to compare competing process nodes on the basis of nominal size); what matters is that Intel didn't finish moving their CPUs past 14nm until last year. Their recent and long-term inability to ship a functional and profitable new process across all CPU product segments combined with their inability to adjust their CPU design roadmap to account for their fab problems is highly relevant to any discussion of their future prospects, even if the discussion makes use of Intel's technically inaccurate nomenclature.

Most of the failure you're stating there predates current leadership to be fair. It's difficult to see BK as anything other than a massive failure, betting the farm on alternative growth engines whilst failing on the core mission.

Reminds me of Facebook actually - if you tell the people who build your core product that they're lame, they're goign to leave, and your core business will fail.

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