Intel's Humbling

> They've moved up so many process nodes so quickly and have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab.

I'd buy this if they'd actually built a fab, but right now this seems too-little, too-late for a producer's economy.

The rest frankly doesn't matter much. Intel processors are only notable in small sections of the market.

And frankly—as counter-intuitive as this may seem to such an investor-bullish forum—the death knell was the government chip subsidy. I simply can't imagine american government and private enterprise collaborating to produce anything useful in 2024, especially when the federal government has shown such a deep disinterest in holding the private economy culpable to any kind of commitment. Why would intel bother?

I appreciate the deep cut. I definitely do not follow companies internally closely enough to see this coming.

> (samsung or tsmc) both within a 500 mile radius circle in the south china sea.

Within 500 mile radius of great power competitor, perhaps. The closest points on mainland Taiwan and Korea are 700 miles apart. Fabs about 1000 miles, by my loose reckoning.

>have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab

In the terms of end product - not really. Last 3-4 gens are indistinguishable to the end user. It's a combined effect of marketing failure and really underwhelming gains - when marketing screams "breakthrough gen", but what you get is +2%/ST perf for another *Lake, you can't sell it.

They might've built a foundation and that might be a deliberate tactics to get back into the race, we'll see. But i'm not convinced for now.

i honestly don’t see what you are seeing in terms of taiwans future sovereignty. Of course, China would like to do something about Taiwan, especially now with their economy kind of in the dumps and a collapsing real estate bubble. But when you look at the facts of it all, there’s absolut ZERO chance chine can muster up what it takes to hold their own in such a conflict. Their military isn’t up to snuff and they are one broken dam away from a huge mass casualty event.

>What happened over the 8 years prior was hedge funds and banks had saddled up on Intel stock which was paying healthy dividends due to cost cutting and "coasting"

Not clear about what the role of activist hedge funds is here but Intel's top shareholders are mutual funds like Vanguard which are part of many people's retirement investments. If an activist hedge fund got to run the show, it means that they could get these passive shareholders on their side or to abstain. It would have meant those funds along with pension funds, who should have been in a place to push back against short term thinking, didn't push back. These funds should really be run much more competently given their outsized influence, but the incentives are not there.

What I worry about with Intel is that they have gotten too much into politics; relying on CHIPS act and other subsidies, encouraging sanctions on Chinese competitors while relying on full access to the Chinese market for sales.

It is not a good long term strategy: The winds of politics may change, politicians may set more terms (labour and environment), foreign market access may become politicized too (US politicians will have to sell chips like they sell airplanes on foreign trips).

So Intel will end up like the old US car makers or Boeing - no longer driven by technological innovation but instead by its relationship to Washington.

> I think the market (and analysts like this) are all throwing the towel

1) Intel is up 100% from ten years ago when it was at $ 23. All that despite revenue being flat/negative, inflation and costs rising and margins collapsing.

2) Intel is up 60% in the last 12 months alone.

Doesn't look to me like they throwing the towel at all.

You should be bullish on intel, they got so much TSMC and Samsung trade secrets through the chips act that it would be a miracle to mess that up.

There is a good chance for Intel to recover, but that remains to be proven.

From their long pipeline of future CMOS manufacturing processes with which Intel hopes to close the performance gap between them and TSMC, for now there exists a single commercial product: Meteor Lake, which consists mostly of chips made by TSMC, with one single Intel 4 die, the CPU tile.

The Meteor Lake CPU seems to have finally reached the energy efficiency of the TSMC 5-nm process of almost 4 years ago, but it also has obvious difficulties in reaching high clock frequencies, exactly like Ice Lake in the past, so once more Intel has been forced to accompany Meteor Lake with Raptor Lake Refresh made in the old technology, to cover the high-performance segment.

Nevertheless, Meteor Lake demonstrates reaching the first step with Intel 4.

If they will succeed to launch on time and with good performance, later this year, their server products based on Intel 3, that will be a much stronger demonstration of their real progress than this Meteor Lake preview, which has also retained their old microarchitecture for the big cores, so it shows nothing new there.

Only by the end of 2024 it will become known whether Intel has really become competitive again, after seeing the Arrow Lake microarchitecture and the Intel 20A manufacturing process.

There are a few areas where they are under pressure:

- The wintel monopoly is losing its relevance now that ARM chips are creeping into the windows laptop market and now that Apple has proven that ARM is fantastic for low power & high performance solutions. Nobody cares about x86 that much any more. It's lost its shine as the "fastest" thing available.

- AI & GPU market is where the action is and Intel is a no-show for that so far. It's not about adding AI/GPU features to cheap laptop chips but about high end workstations and dedicated solutions for large scale compute. Intel's GPUs lack credibility for this so far. Apple's laptops seem popular with AI researchers lately and the goto high performance solutions seem to be provided by NVidia.

- Apple has been leading the way with ARM based, high performance integrated chips powering phones, laptops, and recently AR/VR. Neither AMD nor Intel have a good answer to that so far. Though AMD at least has a foothold in the door with e.g. Xbox and the Steam Deck depending on their integrated chips and them still having credible solutions for gaming. Nvidia also has lots of credibility in this space.

- Cloud computing is increasingly shifting to cheap ARM powered hardware. Mostly the transition is pretty seamless. Cost and energy usage are the main drivers here.

The biggest Intel's problem is that a lot of good people left over the previous years of shitty management. Pouring money into R&D certainly helps but with wrong people in key positions the efficiency of the investments will be low.

This blog

https://semiaccurate.com/

has told the story for more than a decade that Intel has been getting high on its own supply and that the media has been uncritical of the stories it tells.

In particular I think when it comes to the data center they’ve forgotten their roots. They took over the data center in the 1990s because they were producing desktop PCs in such numbers they could afford to get way ahead of the likes of Sun Microsystems, HP, and SGI. Itanium failed out of ignorance and hubris but if they were true evil geniuses they couldn’t have made a better master plan to wipe out most of the competition for the x86 architecture.

Today they take the desktop for granted and make the false claim that their data center business is more significant (not what the financial numbers show.). It’s highly self-destructive because when they pander to Amazon, Amazon takes the money they save and spends it on developing Graviton. There is some prestige in making big machines for the national labs but it is an intellectual black hole because the last thing they want to do is educate anyone else on how to simulate hydrogen bombs in VR.

So we get the puzzle that most of the performance boost customers could be getting comes from SIMD instructions and other “accelerators” but Intel doesn’t make a real effort to get this technology working for anyone other than the Facebook and the national labs and, in particular, they drag their feet in getting it available on enough chips that it is is worth it for mainstream developers to use this technology.

A while back, IBM had this thing where they might ship you a mainframe with 50 cores and license you to use 30 and if you had a load surge you could call you up and they could turn on another 10 cores at a high price.

I was fooled when I heard this the first time and thought it was smart business but after years of thinking about how to deliver value to customers I realized it’s nothing more than “vice signaling”. It makes them look rapacious and avaricious but really somebody is paying for those 20 cores and if it is not the customer it is the shareholders. It’s not impossible that IBM and/or the customer winds up ahead in the situation but the fact is they paid to make those 20 cores and if those cores are sitting there doing nothing they’re making no value for anyone. If everything was tuned up perfectly they might make a profit by locking them down, but it’s not a given at all that it is going to work out that way.

Similarly Intel has been hell-bent to fuse away features on their chips so often you get a desktop part that has a huge die area allocated to AVX features that you’re not allowed to use. Either the customer or the shareholders are paying to fabricate a lot of transistors the customer doesn’t get to use. It’s madness but except for Charlie Demerjian the whole computer press pretends it is normal.

Apple bailed out on Intel because Intel failed to stick to its roadmap to improve their chips (they’re number one why try harder?) and they are lucky to have customers that accept that a new version of MacOS can drop older chips which means MacOS benefits from features that were introduced more than ten years ago. Maybe Intel and Microsoft are locked in a deadly embrace but their saving grace is that every ARM vendor other than Apple has failed to move the needle on ARM performance since 2017, which itself has to be an interesting story that I haven’t seen told.

> This sudden shock of "we're going to invest everything in R&D and catch back up" was news that a lot of intel shareholders didn't want to hear. They dumped the stock and the price adjusted in kind.

Why the fuck are shareholders often so short-sighted?

Or do they just genuinely think the R&D investment won't pay off?

Correct me if I'm wrong on the timeline I think you are talking about, but Intel stock shed value like the rest of tech in 2021/22. IMO, your theory had a much smaller impact than you think in terms of the dump. They both dropped roughly the same amount from their frothy highs in 2021 to their 2022 lows, INTC and AMD at roughly 60ish%.

For the rebound you're theory is probably more true. It has been better for AMD obviously, but INTC has almost doubled in value since its $25 low, which is not slouching by any means.

I can agree on being bullish long term (I had short puts exercise back in the $20s). Like a lot of tech, INTC has more money than God and they'll get it right eventually.

ARM has been really competitive since, well, 2007, when the first iPhone hit the market, and when Android followed in 2008. That is, last 15 years or so. Not noticing a hugely growing segment that was bringing insane reams of cash to Apple, and Qualcomm, Samsung and others involved is not something I could call astute.

Pretty certainly, Intel is improving, and of course should not be written off. But they did get themselves into a hole to dig out from, and not just because the 5nm process was really hard to get working.

Intel’s problem was the cultural and structural issues in their organization, plus their decision to bet on strong OEM partner relationships to beat competition. This weakness would prevent them from being ready for any serious threat and is what they should’ve seen coming.

> Was ARM really competitive until recently? Nope. Intel crushed them.

Intel never "crushed" ARM. Intel completely failed to develop a mobile processor and ARM has a massive marketshare there.

ARM has always beaten the crap out of Intel at performance per watt, which turned out to be extremely important both in mobile and data center scale.

> Where was AMD?

Trying to breathe as Intel was pushing their head under water.

We saw AMD come back after their lawsuit against Intel got through and Intel had to stop paying everyone to not use AMD.

> Core 2 series blew them out of the water.

And Sandy Bridge all but assured AMD wouldn't be relevant for the better part of a decade.

It's easy to forget just how fast Sandy Bridge was when it came out; over 12 years later and it can still hold its own as far as raw performance is concerned.

Intel's flaw was trying to push DUV to 10nm (otherwise known as Intel 7).

Had Intel adopted the molten tin of EUV, the cycle of failure would have been curtailed.

Hats off to SMIC for the DUV 7nm which they produced so quickly. They likely saw quite a bit of failed effort.

And before we discount ARM, we should remember that Acorn produced a 32-bit CPU with a 25k transistor count. The 80386 was years later, with 275k transistors.

Intel should have bought Acorn, not Olivetti.

That's a lot of mistakes, not even counting Itanium.

The curse of having weak enemies is that you become complacent.

You're right: AMD wasn't competitive for an incredibly long time and ARM wasn't really meaningful for a long time. That's the perfect situation for some MBAs to come into. You start thinking that you're wasting money on R&D. Why create something 30% better this year when 10% better will cost a lot less and your competitors are so far behind that it doesn't matter?

It's not that Intel should have seen AMD coming or should have seen ARM coming. It's that Intel should have understood that just because you have weak enemies today doesn't mean that you have an unassailable castle. Intel should have been smart enough to understand that backing off of R&D would mean giving up the moat they'd created. Even if it looked like no one was coming for their crown at the moment, you need to understand that disinvestment doesn't get rewarded over the long-run.

Intel should have understood that trying to be cheap about R&D and extract as much money from customers wasn't a long-term strategy. It wasn't the strategy that built them into the dominant Intel we knew. It wouldn't keep them as that dominant Intel.

If you're process nodes are going wayyyy over schedule, it shouldn't take much intelligence to realize that TSMC is catching up FAST.

You should probably have some intel (haha) on ARM and AMD chips. They didn't care.

Why? It's monopoly business tactics, except they didn't realize they weren't Microsoft.

It's not like this was overnight. Intel should have watched AMD like a hawk after that slimeball Ruiz was deposed and a real CEO put in charge.

And the Mac chips have been out, what, two years now, and the Apple processors on the iPhones at least 10?

Come on. This is apocalyptic scale incompetence.

Well, yes.

Look at Japan generally and Toyota specifically. In Japan the best award you can get for having an outstanding company in terms of profit, topline, quality, free-cash, people, and all the good measures is the Deming Award. Deming was our guy (an American) but we Americans in management didn't take him seriously enough.

The Japanese to their credit did ... ran with it and made it into their own thing in a good way. The Japanese took 30% of the US auto market in our own backyard. Customers knew Hondas, Toyotas cost more but were worth every dollar. They resold better too. (Yes some noise about direct government investment in Japanese companies by the government was a factor too, but not the chief factor in the long run).

We Americans got it "explained to us." We thought we were handling it. Nah, it was BS. But we eventually got our act together. Our Deming award is the Malcolm Baldridge award.

Today, unfortunately the Japanese economy isn't rocking like it was the 80s and early 90s. And Toyota isn't the towering example of quality it once was. I think -- if my facts are correct --- they went too McDonalds and got caught up in lowering price in their materials, and supply chain with bad effects net overall.

So things ebb and flow.

The key thing: is management through action or inaction allowing stupid inbred company culture to make crappy products? Do they know their customers etc etc. Hell, mistakes even screw-ups are not life ending for companies the size of Intel. But recurring stupidity is. A lot of the times the good guys allow themselves to rot from the inside out. So when is enough enough already?

> Where was AMD?

Crushed by Intel's illegal anticompetitive antics?

The problem is this... The money cow is datacenters, and especially top of the line products where there is no competition.

Then fastest single core and multi core x86 cpus that money can buy will go to databases and similar vertically scaled systems.

That's where you can put up the most extreme margins. It's "winner takes all the margins". Beeing somewhat competitive, but mostly a bit worse is the worst business position. Also...

I put money on AMD when they were taking over the crown.

Thank you for this wakeup call, I'll watch closely if Intel can deliver on this and take it back. I'll habe to adjust accordingly.

> Nope. Intel crushed them.

The problem is that Intel has had a defensive strategy for a long time. Yes, they crushed many attempts to breach the x86 moat but failed completely and then gave up attempts to reach beyond that moat. Mobile, foundry, GPUs etc have all seen half-hearted or doomed attempts (plus some bizarre attempts to diversify - McAfee!).

I think that, as Ben essentially says, they put too much faith in never-ending process leadership and the ongoing supremacy of x86. And when that came to an end the moat was dry.

> Was ARM really competitive until recently?

The writing was on the wall 6 years ago; Intel was not doing well in mobile and it was only a matter of time until that tech improved. Same as Intel unseating the datacenter chips before it. Ryzen I will give you is a surprise, but in a healthy competive market, "the competition outengineered us this time" _should_ be a potential outcome.

IMO the interesting question is basically whether Intel could have done anything differently. Clay Christianson's sustaining vs disrupting innovation model is well known in industry, and ARM slowly moving up the value chain is obvious in that framework. Stratechery says they should have opened up their fabs to competitors, but how does that work?

They should have known it was coming because of how many people they were losing to AMD, but there is a blindness in big corps when management decide they are the domain experts and the workers are replaceable.

> Was AMD really competitive before Ryzen?

No, but ARM should've rung many bells.

Intel poured tons of billions in mobile.

Didn't understood the future from smartphones to servers was about power efficiency and scale.

Eventually their lack of power efficiency made them lose ground in all their core business. I hope they will get this back and not just by competing on manufacturing but architecture too.

Intel's recent CPUs are not as good as Ryzen? That hasn't been correct for a few years now.

Only the Paranoid Survive

AMD had Jim Keller join them, that should have been a wake up call for Intel.

5nm is good yield at the moment. It's even fully automotive qualified, which is a testament to its yield. But performance advantage vs cost doesn't justify to move from 7nm for a lot of designs. So tech adoption is getting stickier. For hogh performance designs like Apple CPUs going to the cutting edge is a given. So since 3nm is available 5nm lost its appeal. This is a new territory for TSMC but I think they handled it well. Just last year they were gearing up a lot of 5nm capacity in anticipation of people moving from 12 and 7nm to 5nm. It quickly became clear that this isn't happening. So they moved some of this to 3nm and some is going back to 7nm and 6nm (shrunk 7nm) I think. They are also cautious about buying the newest equipment from ASML unlike Intel and Samsung. This seems to play well for TSMC.

I think TSMC learned from Intel's downfall more than Intel. I don't see any industry traction from IFS. They can research any new technology they want. Without wafer orders it's a recipe for a quick cash burn..

I think it's time to stop talking about node sizes. This reads as meaningless to me, not because I don't know what nanometers are, but because the nodes are all defined by a set of technological changes that have little to do with the measurements, and they are all very incremental and interchangeable at this point, so each node doesn't require an entirely new fab. Actually this has always been mostly true, but the capital investment of new equipment used to be less than the risk of variance from process modification. I don't think this is the case anymore. I expect to see gradually-evolving processes that are sold to customers as performance targets rather than fixed fabrication methods. Even the designs may need some kind of meta-representation that gets 'compiled' to a process, which may have traveller variances like metallization layers.

Of course we don't need to know everything, but in terms of news, maybe we could reference key technologies in use that have the largest effect on performance targets and downstream process modification.

It would have had the same fate as the NVIDIA ARM deal.

He was right but for the wrong reasons.

Had Intel figured out hyperthreading security and avoided all the various exploits that later showed up …

> The future of chips is security on the chip. I was like no, no its not!

Putting aside whether the statement is considered true or not, buying McAfee under the guise of the kind of security meant when talking about silicon is... weird, to say the least.

MBAs eating the world one acquisition at a time.

There's definitely a lot that can be critiqued about that period.

Famously they divested their ARM-based mobile processor division just before smartphones took off.

The new CEO, as the article mentions, seems to have a lot more of a clue. We just hope he hasn't arrived too late.

I remember when they did random stuff like the whole IoT push (frankly, their offerings made no sense to humble me .. Microsoft had a better IoT than Intel). They did drone crap .. gave a kick ass keynote at CES I recall .. also .. made little sense. Finally, the whole FPGA thing .. makes little sense. So much value being destroyed :(

Intel pivoting to GPUs was a smart move but they just lacked the tribal knowledge needed to successfully ship a competitive GPU offering. We got Arc instead.

Intel should have bought Nvidia.

And acqu-hired Jensen as CEO.

McAfee was Renee James idea, she was two in a box (Intel speak for sharing a management spot) with Brian Krzanich.

Semiconductor manufacturing is brutal. I'm glad I no long work for 24/7 fabs & foundries.

I have similar stories where adding a standard wafer-rinse step took a year of testing, documenting, pitching to customers, etc.

Almost as if "doing the right thing" requires an underlying moral framework.

That's not under the Intel corporate logo. It's a personal account. His comments aren't my cup of tea but they certainly aren't generally offensive.

I felt that way about their Optane persistent RAM memory (https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/05/intel-finally-announ...).

>I wanted a discrete GPU when they announced Xe but it has become Xe ARC alchemist, battlemage, celestial, and druid.

They've made this situation fairly clear, in my eyes.

Alchemist is the product line for their first attempt at true dedicated GPUs like those Nvidia and AMD produce. It's based on Intel Xe GPU architecture.

It's done decently well, and they've been very diligent about driver updates.

Battlemage is the next architecture that will replace it when it's ready, which I believe was targeted for this year. Similar to how the Nvidia 4k series replaced the 3k before it. Celestial comes a couple years later, then druid a couple years after that, etc. They don't exist simultaneously, they're just the names they use for generations of their GPUs.

tbh that applies to all fortune 500 at this point

What does this even mean? (not sarcastic)

They ran it for max profit in an era when strategic investments needed to be made.

It's remarkably common and heavily incentivized.

No, they were on the boat, they just mis-managed it. They used to make Arm chips, but sold it off just before the first iPhone was released as they saw no future in mobile CPUs. Same with network processors for routers around the same time.

They have been trying half-heartedly with GPUs on and off since the late 1990's i740 series.

The root cause is probably the management mantra "focus on core competencies". They had an effective monopoly on fast CPUs from 2007 until 2018. This monopoly meant very little improvement in CPU speed.

Is it just the fate of large successful companies? The parallels with Boeing always come to mind. We’ve seen this play out so many times through history, it’s why investing in the top companies of your era is a terrible idea.

https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune500_archive/f...

I wonder how many of our companies will survive at the top for even 20 more years?

https://companiesmarketcap.com/

Berkshire is the only one I feel sure about because they hold lots of different companies.

And the manufacturing failed to save them:

[...] when Intel’s manufacturing prowess hit a wall Intel’s designs were exposed. Gelsinger told me: 'So all of a sudden, as Warren Buffet says, “You don’t know who’s swimming naked until the tide goes out.” [...]'

You're missing the big one: they missed the boat on 64-bits. It was only because they had a licensing agreement in place with AMD that they were able to wholesale adopt AMD's extensions to deliver 64-bit x86 processors.

Xeon is not something people normally run on desktops.

Datacenters were and still are full of monstrous Xeons, and for a good reason.

They still dominate PC’s and the server market.

This is so common that it happens all the time with successful companies. They don't have to make good decisions. They have more than enough cash to keep making bad decision after bad decision, whereas a smaller company would collapse.

Apple and Microsoft have both managed to avoid this, and been the exception.

TSMC manufactures Apple Silicon. It’s a good example of the foundry model that the article is talking about.

Apple had been sandbagging the Intel chips for several generations of macbook with anemic cooling solutions, poor thermal throttling curves, and fans that wait until the last moment to turn on. To the extent that the fastest CPUs available in Macbook Pros did not outperform lower models, because both became thermally saturated. When properly cooled, the Intel silicon tends to perform a lot better.

Additionally, both Intel and AMD manufacturer CPUs for HEDT and servers which are far beyond anything Apple is fabricating at the moment. Apple has no response to Epyc, Threadripper, or higher end Xeon. Similarly, Apple has no equivalent to Intel, AMD, and Nvidia discrete GPUs.

Apple made a quality cell phone chip, and managed to exploit chiplets and chip-to-chip interconnects to double and quadruple it into a decent APU. But it's still an APU, just one segment addressed by current x86 designs.

There are many different reasons. Firstly, Apple built experience over a decade designing and building the chips, taking over more and more of the design and IP. Then making these chips at a Intel competitor TSMC, who has a different business model to Intel. Apple were also willing to compromise. The first years had weird experiences for customers with Rosetta, broken apps and Macs that could only drive a single external monitor and connect to few devices. Yet we clearly saw the power efficiency from the better foundry tech at TSMC, coupled with decade of saving watts for mobile phone batteries.

I don't think Macs really amounted to much $ in sales for Intel, compared to e.g. Dell etc.

The software stack co-evolves with the hardware, if the hardware can't do something fast then the software guys can't necessarily even try it out.

People have been trying to break NVIDIA's moat by creating non-GPU accelerators. The core maths operations aren't that varied so it's an obvious thing to try. Nothing worked, not even NVIDIA's own attempts. AI researchers have a software stack oriented around devices with separate memory and it's abstracted, so unifying CPU and GPU ram doesn't seem to make a big difference for them.

Don't be fooled by the name GPU. It's purely historical. "GPUs" used for AI don't have any video output capability. I think you can't even render with them. They are just specialised computers come with their own OS ("driver"), compilers, APIs and dev stack, which happen to need a CPU to bring them online and which communicate via PCIe instead of ethernet.

Fast memory is very expensive.

Which is why you only use it when you really need it - on a GPU/AI accelerator.

It all depends on timing. TSMC is also working on backside power delivery.

Intel's roadmap looks great. However, I'm skeptical of whether they're actually meeting that roadmap. Meteor Lake was launched last month using Intel 4, but it looks like Intel 4 has lower transistor density than TSMC's 5nm. Intel 3 is listed on their roadmap as second-half 2023, but we've yet to see any Intel 3 parts.

Realistically, there won't be too much of an advantage for Intel. It's pretty clear that even when Intel ships things, they aren't shipping these new nodes in volume. Intel 4 is only being used for some laptop processors and they're even using TSMC's 5nm and 6nm processes for the graphics and IO on those chips. They canceled the desktop version of Meteor Lake so desktops are staying on Intel 7 for now. Intel's latest server processors launched last month are also Intel 7.

If Intel were able to get a year or two ahead of TSMC, then I could see a nice advantage. However, it looks like Intel's a year behind its roadmap and even being a year behind they're only shipping laptop parts (and not even able to fab the whole chip themselves).

But past success/failure doesn't predict the future. Maybe Intel will be shipping 20A with backside power in 2024 and it'll be 2025 before TSMC gives Apple a 2nm chip with backside power.

But given that we haven't seen them shipping Intel 3 and they haven't taken Intel 3 off their roadmap, I'm going to be a bit skeptical. Intel is doing way better than they had been doing. However, I've yet to see something convincing that they're doing better than TSMC. That's not to say they aren't going to do better than TSMC, but at this point Intel is saying "we're going to jump from slightly worse than 5nm (Intel 4) to 2nm in a year or less!" Maybe Intel is doing that well, but it's a tall ask. TSMC launched 5nm in 2020 and 3 years later got to 3nm. It doesn't take as long to catch up because technology becomes easier over time, but Intel is kinda claiming it can compress 5-6 years worth of work into a single year. Again, maybe Intel has been pouring its resources into 20A and 18A and maybe some of it is more on ASML and maybe Intel has been neglecting Intel 4 and Intel 3 because it knows it's worth putting its energy toward something actually better. But it also seems reasonable to have a certain amount of doubt about Intel's claims.

I'd love for Intel to crush its roadmap. Better processors and better competition benefit us all. But I'm still wondering how well that will go. TSMC seems to be having a bit of trouble with their 3nm process. 2024's flagship Android processors will remain on 4nm and it looks like the 2024 Zen 5 processors will be 4nm as well (with 3nm parts coming in 2025). So it looks like 3nm will basically just be Apple until 2025 which kinda indicates that TSMC isn't doing wonderfully with its 3nm process. Android processors moved to 5nm around 6 months after Apple did, but it looks like they'll move to 3nm around 18 months after Apple. But just because TSMC isn't doing great at 3nm doesn't mean Intel will face similar struggles. It just seems likely that if TSMC (a company that has been crushing it over the past decade) is facing higher struggles at 3nm, it's a bit of wishful thinking to believe Intel won't face similar struggles at 3nm and below.

Good analogy.

Funnily enough, this is EXACTLY what has happened to the video game and movie/series industry.

They jump onto the latest trend, e.g. ESG to get in good with the banks and funds without thinking about what long term damage it is doing to their brands and products.

While it's sad now, I'm looking forward to long-term thinking being emphasized in business school again.

They all look like that, aren't they? It's like cancer, late stage. It's everywhere. I'm trying to be optimistic here, but I don't see much light at the end of the tunnel. Best case a second depression wipes away everyone's wealth and we start from clean slate.

And furthermore they lost most of their best engineers and scientists during the years that the company was run by the useless MBAs. Now each new technology process is a huge struggle. Intel has secured some of the first new gen EUV machines from ASML, but if they'll have the talent to quickly start using them on scale is not yet clear.

This is oversimplified and actually underplays how serious the issue is.

These companies didn’t fail because of myopic financial engineers. The ones focused on quarter to quarter tend to bomb the company relatively quickly and do get flushed out.

These companies failed because of long term financial visionaries. These are the worst because they are thinking about how the company can capture markets at all costs, diversify into all adjacent markets, etc. They are a hard cancer to purge because on the surface they don’t sacrifice stuff for the current quarter. They sacrifice laser focus for broad but shallow approaches to all kinds of things.

“Sure, we’ll build a fab here. And we’ll also do enterprise NICs… And also storage… and also virtualization… and also AI… and also acquire some startups in these fields that might have something interesting…”

The company becomes big listless monster coasting on way too many bets spread out all over the place. There is no core engineering mission or clear boundary between what is the business and what isn’t.

Intel is far from “myopic”. If it was something as obvious as a next quarter driven CEO, the board would have made a change immediately.

I think you’re vastly overestimating how much Wall Street cares about technical issues like this. Spectre/meltdown barely registers on the radar of issues that Intel has. People are still mostly buying Intel CPUs in laptops, desktops, and servers, and the N100 seems to be gaining ground in the Raspberry Pi space. Maybe it gave an opening for AMD in some markets, but Intel really hasn’t seen some huge tarnished reputation because of it.

The far greater threats are that they missed the phone market, and are missing the GPU/AI market. Those are entirely new markets where growth would happen, instead of the mostly fixed size of the current CPU market where the same players are just trading small percentage points.

I take that to mean you haven't tried any recent (zen3/4 U series) AMD laptops then, or for that matter the M1/2/3's. I've heard this from a number of people who are comparing the x13s or new mac's with their 14nm intel that has a discrete nvidia gpu (which is eating another 10W+) from 2017/8 or so.

I have a pile of laptops including the x13s, and that part burns a good ~30W for a couple minutes, while running ~30% (or worse) slower, then thermally throttles and drops another ~30% in performance.

For light browsing it manages to stay under 5W and gets 10h from its 50Wh battery. This is also doable on just about any AMD or Mac laptop. The AMD machine I'm typing this on tells me I have more than 12 hours remaining and i'm sitting at 81% battery (67Wh). And this machine is a good 3x faster compiling code, or running simple benchmarks like speedometer when its plugged in or allowed to burn 35W. Except it also has a fan that turns on when its under heavy load to keep it from thermally throttling.

Yes the x13s is cute, it is a thin/light laptop and is probably the first windows on arm machine that isn't completely unusable. But, its going to take another leap or two to catch-up with current top of the line machines.

Everyone loves geekbench so, here is an obviously unthrottled x13s vs a similarly rated 28W AMD 7840U.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v5/cpu/21596449 https://browser.geekbench.com/processors/amd-ryzen-7-7840u

That Amd is 2x the single threaded perf, and 50% faster multithreaded, and anything graphics related is going to look even worse.

Why

TFA is about Intel's humbling not Intel's humility. If Intel was already humble, there would be no need for a humbling