Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ChuckMcM | Hacker News Reader

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I agree with 1-6 that they have always been really focused on their margins, they were never a company that wanted to go into debt for something that was 'unproven.'

They have had lots of things they stopped doing, the graphics chip I was involved in (82786) was one, the speech chips, the iAPX431, the modem chips, their digital watch was an early one.

I always saw it as an exceptionally low tolerance for risk. When I was their the 386 had just fabbed and I was one of the people watching when the very first chip was powered up and it actually worked (which amazed pretty much everyone). Sun Microsystems was a little startup in Mountain View using the 68000 and getting some traction I suggested to Intel that if they used the graphic chip I was working on and the 386 they could build an Intel branded "Workstation" and both replace the VAXStations they were using for CAD work internally and sell them as part of Intel's initiative to become a "systems company." I got a response to my memo[1] from Dave House who was later CEO but at the time just the head of Microprocessor Operation (MIPO) Marketing explaining to this lowly NCG (new college grad) that Workstations were not much of a market and Intel was only interested in pursuing the "big" opportunities. Six months later I joined Sun (just after they IPO'd sadly) and didn't look back. :-)

[1] Yes memo, as in typed up and printed out and put in a manilla envelope where on the last line of the front had it coming from Dave and being addressed to me. And yes, it started as a memo I had printed out and given to my manager because while Intel had "heard" of electronic mail they preferred the "durability" of actual mail and forcing people to use actual mail cut down on "frivolous" communications.

>I always saw it as an exceptionally low tolerance for risk.

Big laugh at the claim of intel having a exceptionally low tolerance to risk when they're the only semi company left still running their own fabs, decades after AMD sold off their own for being too risky of a venture to keep running by themselves. And every fab company out there will vouch for how risky that line of business is. Even more so to pour billions into a business like this while knowing Samsung/TSMC might beat you.

More correct would be that Intel has a low tolerance to risk for things that are way outside of their core competencies which have traditionally been designing X86 CPUs and fabbing them, and that's mostly it.

I commend them for not giving up on advancing their fab nodes despite the massive issues and setbacks(they could have spun it off like AMD did), and for building the ARC GPUs and keep improving them despite low sales.

I thought AMD had to spin off their fabs due to cost and cash flow issue because Intel was too busy playing dirty?

"Real men have fabs!" - AMD founder and CEO at the time, Jerry Sanders [1]

He said this some time in the 80's to early 90's as a defence for their expensive commitment to still be running their own fabs when most big semi companies like Motorola were selling off their fabs and going fabless because it was eating their resources and it was impossible to compete with the likes of TSMC on node shrinks and value.

So even without Intel screwing with them in anti-competitive ways, they could not have kept their fabs competitive much longer. The writing was already on the wall way back then but Jerry Sanders was just being stubborn.

[1] https://archive.is/igC4r

I mean... Maybe? But Intel proved their success of owning fabs throughout the 90s and 2000s, only 20-30 years after that statement were Intel even considered to be possibly dis-advantaged by owning it's fabs. But that was also a very different market.

So I don't think it's as direct a link as you seem to claim. Maybe it was the right decision even if AMD had the money to keep it going. But it will likely forever be one of those questions that has no solid answer either way.

Intel had the margin and volume to be the exception to the rule, meanwhile Qualcomm, Broadcom, and a ton of other fabless design firms were making good money unencumbered by the risk of investing in a fab division, and with the ability to switch to the best fab for each chip at a given time.

>> I thought AMD had to spin off their fabs due to cost and cash flow issue because Intel was too busy playing dirty?

IMHO Ruiz cut back on engineering and increased marketing. Then purchased ATI which I though was an odd or even dumb move (it was not). But that expensive purchase along with the failure of bulldozer almost killed the company. That's why they spun off Global Foundries - to stay alive.

>> when they're the only semi company left still running their own fabs

Yes and even within that they are risk averse, no need to look beyond 10nm and their reluctance to EUV.

So they are really risk averse and they just want their success to continue infinitely. In fact, contrary to Pat G claiming that Nvidia is lucky; it's really Intel which was lucky.

>> commend them for not giving up on advancing their fab nodes despite the massive issues and setbacks(they could have spun it off like AMD did), and for building the ARC GPUs

even if the turn around time in semi market is longer, the way they faltered on their Arc timelines and no encouraging signs of their new fab nodes is not commendable!

>even if the turn around time in semi market is longer, the way they faltered on their Arc timelines and no encouraging signs of their new fab nodes is not commendable!

Sure, Intel fucked up along the way, and it's easy to point fingers and laugh from the comfort of the armchair at Intel tripping over massively complex engineering challenges, but if designing and building successful GPUs and sub-7nm fabs was easy, everyone would be doing it.

It is unfortunate that you are equating pointing to the facts as finger pointing and laughing. It would be better if you substantiate instead with facts and data that imply/prove otherwise.

Further, neither do the facts nor my comment in any way implies building GPU's is easy. OTHO, when a company like Intel with their massive competitive advantage (when their fabs were the market leaders) thus leading to financial muscle fritter it away in what is supposedly their strength (fabs), don't you think that they in fact deserve to be laughed at?

In addition, what kind of risk are they alone taking when Biden is throwing billions upon billions at them and backstopping them.

The billions Biden threw their way isn’t really that much when their fabs cost billions to build. Don’t think the grants cover the full cost of their new fabs - it was 50 billion total right divided among all the corporations including TSMC, IIRC.

>It is unfortunate that you are equating pointing to the facts as finger pointing and laughing. It would be better if you substantiate instead with facts and data that imply/prove otherwise.

Is it that unfortunate? Because if you knew how difficult semi fabrication or GPU design is, you probably wouldn't say these failures are such big deals worth pointing out as negatives, but part and parcel of the process of solving such complex problems only 3 players worldwide have mastered.

Do you see Nvidia trying to fab chips? Do you see TSMC trying to design GPUs? Imagine Intel is doing both at the same time. Of course they will fail at points along the way, the important thing is they stay in the game to provide us with competition.

> Yes and even within [fab] they are risk averse, no need to look beyond 10nm and their reluctance to EUV.

Wasn't there an article on HN 2 days ago about Intel pushing 2 new technologies simultaneously in their next node? (ribbon gate and backside power?)

> Wasn't there an article on HN 2 days ago about Intel pushing 2 new technologies simultaneously in their next node? (ribbon gate and backside power?)

When I read "ribbon gate" just now, I assumed you were referring to some scandal.

Let's hope that's not prescient :)

> Yes and even within that they are risk averse, no need to look beyond 10nm and their reluctance to EUV.

Actually from what I heard, their failures with their Intel 7 was partly due to trying too many unproven technologies - i.e. they pulled a Zumwalt. With their current Intel 4 & 3 I heard they were more conservative.

>their failures with their Intel 7 was partly due to trying too many unproven technologies

Everything about bleeding edge semi fabbing is unproven technology.

Intel actually had trouble getting 14nm off the ground and it was late to ramp up, that should have been a signal that past progress might be coming to an end. I believe that when things got difficult managements response was to try to catch back up by going crazy on the 10nm jump and it went horribly.

What was more shocking is how long them seemed to be in denial before putting contingency plans in place.

> More correct would be that Intel has a low tolerance to risk for things that are way outside of their core competencies which have traditionally been designing X86 CPUs and fabbing them, and that's mostly it.

As a former Intel-er myself (during Craig Barrett, Paul Otellini times) I would disagree. Intel took bold and foolish bets bying DiaLogic, selling Xscale, betting on WiMAX mobile technology while fighting LTE backed by all telcos. I would characterize Intel's risk management as "passive-aggressive".

> They have had lots of things they stopped doing

I have wondered if leadership didn't understand the Gartner Hype Cycle, because a lot of projects seem to get killed after the investments but before significant success was even possible (the Trough of Disillusionment).

I worked at Intel for 10 years, mainly the Otellini years. To myself I called it Corporate Attention Deficit Disorder. I think it's a symptom of bad management, always moving on to the next shiny rock, no long term vision.

During my tenure I witnessed several failed initiatives. Itanium, Wimax, Digital Home, x86 phone (android), LTE modem. Imagine the billions wasted.

Its a weird company:

* They got their LTE modem into the iPhone 11 but just couldn't compete. * ARC GPUs would have been competitve if they had be launched a year or two sooner and its stagnancy is widley due to lack of funding since the market was dead during launch and we were in a massive market pullback where they were ultra hesitatnt to spend ANY money. (massive layoffs too) * Optane was a great product and had a good roadmap, but they were burning cash waiting for adoption and their customers had decoupled their memory and storage from the physical layer to mitigate limitations of NAND ssd so much that they didn't see the price as worth it, despite the obvious latency and endurance benefits that it had over even SLC NAND drives.

Sometimes they just miss the market for otherwise good products.

> They got their LTE modem into the iPhone 11 but just couldn't compete

it wasn't "just couldn't compete", those modems were horrible. the speed was lower than the Qualcomm that managed to be shipped in some of the iphones (from 8-11), and the connections were extremely flaky. I had a 9 with an intel modem, and it was abysmal compared to the previous iPhones I had owned.

that apple went back to Qualcomm, bought the intel division, and still is shipping Qualcomm modems says a lot -- it's still just not there.

Intel modems were measurable worse. One telecoms blog used a proper testset to measure 10dB worse sensitivity across the board.

And this was even before being slower even with strong signals.

So slower and noticably worse range. Modems are hard and take a long time to have small things ironed out here and there. Small things add up.

The Arc is very competitive at the price points it's available.

Don't forget Ultra Wide Band (another project that set fire to a pile of money used for hardware and software development), and the jettisoning of StrongARM.

I have a hard time believing that Intel will succeed at being a foundry this time around given how many failed prior attempts they have made. The foundry model is incompatible with the high margin duopoly CPU vendor model. What will prevent Intel from scheduling their own high margin products in fabs over foundry work from other companies? They will always have a business incentive to deprioritize their foundry customers when push comes to shove.

Reading some of the comments made by TSMC are enlightening. One of the reasons TSMC provided for their ability to succeed when Intel was flailing with their 10nm+++++ process is that TSMC runs experiments 24/7. This allows TSMC to run more experiments per day/week/month than Intel. I would really like to know when Intel starts running 3 shifts of process development engineers at a single fab to iterate faster, as that would be a true sign that meaningful change has occurred inside the beast.

Good luck finding enough engineers who want to work those shifts. That might work in Taiwan, or mainland China (where 996 work is normal), but not in the US.

I can’t entirely blame WiMax on Intel. I only saw it from the sidelines, but I had a laptop with integrated WiMax (complete with Intel chipset and an apparently functional antenna) in a market where Sprint had their much hyped SDR network, and they had WiMax working enough for their trade show folks to demonstrate it. But it was not one of their launch markets, so they… didn’t launch. They literally refused to take my money and sell me service.

I don’t care how well Intel executes and how well your launch market functions, if you’re selling a product that caters to business travelers and users, you had better actually be willing to sell the thing, across a large swath of the country, or it will fail regardless of how good it is.

Surely Itanium was a massive risk (that obviously didn't pay off)?

Anyone know why Intel / HP were so quick to productize Itanium?

Given the strong assumptions it was making about compile-time instruction scheduling, I'd have expected them to de-risk the project first. I.e., get a suitable compiler working, and get some benchmark results on a simulator.

It was the next big thing for the government, banks, oil and gas industry, while vendor locking them. It should had bring piles of piles of money.

There's a good anecdote about that in this fascinating interview with Bob Colwell (https://www.sigmicro.org/media/oralhistories/colwell.pdf):

"Anyway this chip architect guy is standing up in front of this group promising the moon and stars. And I finally put my hand up and said I just could not see how you're proposing to get to those kind of performance levels. And he said well we've got a simulation, and I thought Ah, ok. That shut me up for a little bit, but then something occurred to me and I interrupted him again. I said, wait I am sorry to derail this meeting. But how would you use a simulator if you don't have a compiler? He said, well that's true we don't have a compiler yet, so I hand assembled my simulations. I asked "How did you do thousands of line of code that way?" He said “No, I did 30 lines of code”. Flabbergasted, I said, "You're predicting the entire future of this architecture on 30 lines of hand generated code?" [chuckle], I said it just like that, I did not mean to be insulting but I was just thunderstruck. Andy Grove piped up and said "we are not here right now to reconsider the future of this effort, so let’s move on". I said "Okay, it's your money, if that's what you want." Suddenly this came up again later in another guise but again Andy shut me off, he said "we're not here to discuss it". Gordon Moore is sitting next to me and hasn’t said a word, he looks to all intents and purposes like he's asleep. He's got his eyes closed most of the time, you think okay, the guy's tired, he's old. But no, 20 minutes into this, he suddenly opens his eyes and he points to me and he asks, "did you get ever get an answer to your question?" and I said, "actually no, none that I can understand". Gordon looked around and says, "how are we planning to move ahead with this, if the answers don't make sense?" and this time Andy Grove said to him "We’re not here to discuss that, Gordon"."

In a way Itanium arguably did pay off, by killing off a lot of RISC competition.

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