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Comment by tgtweak | Hacker News Reader

I'm kind of bullish on Intel right now. They've moved up so many process nodes so quickly and have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab. Let's ignore the elephant in the room which is taiwan and it's sovereignty, and only focus on the core r&d.

Intel flopped so hard on process nodes for 4 years up until Gelsinger took the reigns... it was honestly unprecedented levels of R&D failure. 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". 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.

Intel's 18A is roughly 6 months ahead of schedule, set to begin manufacturing in the latter half of 2024. Most accounts put this ahead of TSMC's equivalent N2 node...

Fab investments have a 3 year lag on delivering value. We're only starting to see the effect of putting serious capital and focus on this, as of this year. I also think we'll see more companies getting smart about having all of their fabrication eggs in one of two baskets (samsung or tsmc) both within a 500 mile radius circle in the south china sea.

Intel has had 4 years of technical debt on it's fabrication side, negative stock pressure from the vacuum created by AMD and Nvidia, and is still managing to be profitable.

I think the market (and analysts like this) are all throwing the towel in on the one company that has quite a lot to gain at this point after losing a disproportionate amount of share value and market.

I just hope they keep Pat at the helm for another 2 years to fully deliver on his strategy or Intel will continue where it was headed 4 years ago.

View on HN

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.

> TSMC 5-nm process of almost 4 years ago

N5 is interesting because it's the first process fully designed around EUV and because it was pretty much exclusive to Apple for almost two years. It launched in Apple products in late 2020, then crickets until about late 2022 (Zen 4, RTX 4000, Radeon 7000). Launches of the other vendors were still on N7 or older processes in 2020 - RTX 3000 for example used some 10nm Samsung process in late 2020. All of those were DUV (including Intel 7 / 10ESF). That's the step change we are looking at.

Exactly. N5 is sort of an outlier, it's a process where a bunch of technology bets and manufacturing investment all came together to produce a big leap in competitive positioning. It's the same kind of thing we saw with Intel 22nm[1], where Ivy Bridge was just wiping the floor with the rest of the industry.

Improvements since have been modest, to the extent that N3 is only barely any better (c.f. the Apple M3 is... still a really great CPU, but not actually that much of an upgrade over the M2).

There's a hole for Intel to aim at now. We'll see.

[1] Also 32nm and 45nm, really. It's easy to forget now, but Intel strung together a just shocking number of dominant processes in the 00's.

The reason N5 came together for TSMC is because they run more experiments per unit time than Intel does. They're doing this 24 hours a day across multiple shifts, which makes it possible for them to improve a given process faster. It remains to be seen if Intel can actually pull ahead or not without a major culture change, or if "this time" they can succeed at becoming a trusted foundry partner that can drive enough volume to support the ongoing investment needed in leading edge fabs.

> The Meteor Lake CPU [...] has obvious difficulties in reaching high clock frequencies,

Not sure where that's coming from? The released parts are mobile chips, and the fastest is a 45W TDP unit that boosts at 5.1GHz. AMD's fastest part in that power range (8945HS) reaches 5.2GHz. Apple seems to do just fine at 4GHz with the M3.

I'm guessing you're looking at some numbers for socketed chips with liquid cooling?

The 5.1 GHz Intel Core Ultra 9 processor 185H is the replacement for the 5.4 GHz Intel Core i9-13900H Processor of previous year. Both are 45-W CPUs with big integrated GPUs and almost identical features in the SoC.

No liquid cooling needed for either of them, just standard 14" or 15" laptops without special cooling, or NUC-like small cases, because they do not need discrete GPUs.

Both CPUs have the same microarchitecture of the big cores.

If Intel had been able to match the clock frequencies of their previous generation, they would have done that, because it is embarrassing that Meteor Lake wins only the multi-threaded benchmarks, due to the improved energy efficiency, but loses in the single-threaded benchmarks, due to lower turbo clock frequency, when compared to the last year's products.

Moreover, Intel could easily have launched a Raptor Lake Refresh variant of i9-13900H, with a clock frequency increased to 5.6 GHz. They have not done this only to avoid an internal competition for Meteor Lake, so they have launched only HX models of Raptor Lake Refresh, which do not compete directly with Meteor Lake (because they need a discrete GPU).

During the last decade, the products made at TSMC with successive generations of their processes had a continuous increase of their clock frequencies.

On the other hand Intel had a drop in clock frequency at all switches in the manufacturing processes, at 14-nm with the first Broadwell models, then at 10-nm with Cannon Lake and Ice Lake (and even Tiger Lake could not reach clock frequencies high enough for desktops), and now with Meteor Lake in the new Intel 4 process.

With the 14-nm and 10-nm (now rebranded as Intel 7), Intel has succeeded to greatly increase the maximum clock frequencies after many years of tuning and tweaking. Now, with Meteor Lake, this will not happen, because they will pass immediately to different better manufacturing processes.

According to rumors, the desktop variant of Arrow Lake, i.e. Arrow Lake S, will be manufactured at TSMC in order to ensure high-enough clock frequencies, and not with the Intel 20A, which will be used only for the laptop products.

Intel 18A is supposed to be the process that Intel will be able to use for several years, like their previous processes. It remains to be seen how much time will pass until Intel will become able to reach again 6.0 GHz in the Intel 18A process.

That's getting a little convoluted. I still don't see how this substantiates that Intel 4 "has obvious difficulties in reaching high clock frequencies".

Intel is shipping competitive clock frequencies on Intel 4 vs. everyone in the industry except the most recent generation of their own RPL parts, which have the advantage of being being up-bins of an evolved and mature process.

That sounds pretty normal to me? New processes launch with conservative binning and as yields improve you can start selling the outliers in volume. And... it seems like you agree, by pointing out that this happened with Intel 7 and 14nm too.

Basically: this sounds like you're trying to spin routine manufacturing practices as a technical problem. Intel bins differently than AMD (and especially Apple, who barely distinguish parts at all), and they always have.

I have also pointed that while for Intel this repeats their previous two process launches, which is not a good sign, TSMC has never had such problems recently.

While one reason why TSMC did not have such problems is that they have made more incremental changes from one process variant to another, avoiding any big risks, the other reason is that Intel has repeatedly acted as if they had been unable to estimate from simulations the performance characteristics of their future processes and they have always been caught by surprise by inferior experimental results compared to predictions, so they always had to switch the product lines from plan A to plan B during the last decade, unlike the previous decade when all appeared to always go as planned.

A normal product replacement strategy is for the new product to match most of the characteristics of the old product that is replaced, but improve on a few of them.

Much too frequently in recent years many Intel new products have improved some characteristics only with the price of making worse other characteristics. For example raising the clock frequency with the price of also increased power consumption, increasing the number of cores but removing AVX-512, or, like in Meteor Lake, raising the all-cores-active clock-frequency with the price of lowering the few-cores-active clock frequency.

While during the last decade Intel has frequently progressed in the best case by making two steps forward and one step backward, all competitors have marched steadily forwards.

> I have also pointed that while for Intel this repeats their previous two process launches, which is not a good sign, TSMC has never had such problems recently.

I'll be blunt: you're interpreting a "problem" where none exists. I went back and checked: when Ivy Bridge parts launched the 22nm process (UNDENIABLY the best process in the world at that moment, and by quite a bit) the highest-clocked part from Intel was actually a 4.0 GHz Sandy Bridge SKU, and would be for a full 18 months until the 4960X matched it.

This is just the way Intel ships CPUs. They bin like crazy and ship dozens and dozens of variants. The parts at the highest end need to wait for yields to improve to the point where there's enough volume to sell. That's not a "problem", it's just a manufacturing decision.

You can't compare optimized clock frequencies on 2 year mature process with first run on a new process... AMD and Nvidia both improve stable frequencies with process improvements at TSMC even on the same nodes over time (RTX 4060 TI, tsmc N4, 2.31ghz base, 2.54ghz boost vs RTX4060 - TSMC N4, 1.83ghz base, 2.46ghz boost).

Most chipmakers saw gains moving from n5 to n5p at tsmc, which wasn't even a process jump simply maturity and optimization on the existing node.

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.

"This investment, at a time when … wages war against utter wickedness, a war in which good must defeat evil, is an investment in the right and righteous values that spell progress for humanity"

That is not a partner for creating logical systems. Very clear their current decisions are political.

That bananas quote is from an Israeli minister.

Imagine what it would do if Intel became strongly associated with one side in the Israel-Palestine conflict. It could really hurt their business.

Usually business leaders are smart enough to stay out of politics.

They are taking sides. That is easily seen during an interview with the CEO, who almost cried talking about the events of October 7th. Intel will give 5000$ war grant to the Israeli employees. One of Intel's largest fabs is a 20-minute drive from where the massacres occurred.

Do you know if AMD has any presence in Israel? Intel has already sold me multiple garbage dump products in the past and so if I can minimize my Israel related purchases i'd prefer to do that.

The Mac is annoying since I think some pieces of their silicon designs come from Israel (storage controller). Can someone correct me if I am wrong on that?

What company doing VLSI, with more than say 500 employees, doesn't have some kind of presence in Israel? That's got to be a short list.

AMD is big in Israel as well. Most of the tech stuff is developed in Israel, side effects of future-oriented democracy I imagine. Boycotting things is useless virtue signalling of the woke disease. I would suggest going to pro-Palestinian protests and try to explain to them that raping, kidnapping and mutilating children is not going to bring peace and a country to Palestinians.

It's fine to be future oriented, to share development, the problem is any religious destiny/racist element.

I'm not sure what you mean by "woke disease," but consumerism involves evaluation.

Oct 7 was horrible, but it didn't come out of nowhere. Sabra and Shatila, for example (Waltz with Bashir being a very good Israeli film on the topic), and the many thousands of people killed mutilated or displaced in their usual unhelpfully disproportionate response..

How is AMD big in Israel?

> Boycotting things is useless virtue signalling of the woke disease.

I didn't realize HN served multiple alternate realities. Over here where I'm looking from, by far the largest boycotts of the last 8 years have been from conservatives who were upset by events like trans people being featured in ads and the existence of gay people in movies/tv shows.

Apparently they have become strongly associated since that quote is part of the release for their new plant. It is sickening to me this kind of hard-right religious zealotry is part of decisions of tech companies. I am avoiding Intel as much as possible now, I hope others will consider this too.

That quote didn't come out of Intel's mouth.

It is directly associated with the deal they are making. Would you let that quote be used with a deal your company is making? Intel knows full well how this is being spun.

Basically all the big semiconductor companies do R&D in Israel

Yes, but it's all relative. A giant new development is different than a branch office. Though in all cases there is no doubt overlap with their military industrial complex. But I don't think we will normally see such religious extremism tied to projects, and that should be called out, loudly and clearly, as not ok.

Intel has used political incentives often though its history to great effect. I think its a much smaller issue than you think. Its part of their standard game-plan for over 30 years. The issue with boeing is becoming acontract company that into contracts out all their work which is self defeating and leads to brain drain. EX: the door lacking bolts because Boeing doesnt even build its own fuselages anymore and have let their standards fall, wholly depending on contractors with little oversight.

Boeing was culturally taken over by McDonnell Douglas leadership.

What's fascinating albeit somewhat depressing is that it seems something similar happened when McDonnell merged with/took over Douglas as well: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-legal-and-moral-questi...

Have you read chip war?

It will challenge your concerns

Yeah. Too much the cold war angle. I think he overstates the role of government/military and underestimates how much the consumer market has driven the process innovations that has made computing cheap and ubiquitous,

If you think the concern over China and Taiwan is understated I think you'd do well to look at how both the US and China are putting insane amounts of resources behind this.

>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.

Depends who your user is. From a desktop side you're probably not going to notice because desktop CPU requirements have been stagnant for years, desktop is all about GPU. On the server side Sapphire Rapids and Emerald Rapids is Intel getting back in the game and the game is power and market share.

See there's only 2 or 3 more obvious generations of obvious die shrinks available. Beyond those generations we'll have to innovate some other way, so whoever grabs the fab market for these modes now gets a longer period to enjoy the fruits of their innovation.

Meanwhile server CPU TDPs are hitting the 400W+ mark and DC owners are looking dubiously at big copper busbars, die shrinks tend to reduce the Watts per Calculation so they're appealing. In the current power market, more efficient computing translates into actual savings on your power bill. There's still demand for better processors, even if we are sweating those assets for 5-7 years now.

What you quoted refers to Intel's efforts to act as a fab for external customers.

Intel is still behind TSMC at this point in terms of raw process efficiency, but that rate of change is moving quickly and I posit that the products released later this year will have a process efficiency advantage over AMD's offerings for the first time since AMD abandoned global foundry.

raptor lake is the same as coffee lake/comet lake? nah

> 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?

Licking County (next-gen, post-18A) has already broken ground and is in assembly, Magdeburg and Ireland (18A) also well underway and in production. Arizona's 20A facility (Fab 52 and Fab 62) have been done for half a year and are already in tape out. Not sure what is up for debate here, you can't really hide a $5BN infrastructure project from the public.

I think it's safe to say that 80BN+ in subsidies are already well in the process of being deployed. Intel, along with Samsung and TSMC, are heavily subsidized and have been so for a very long time. Any government with modest intelligence understands the gravity of having microchip manufacturing secured.

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.

> Apple has proven that ARM is fantastic for low power & high performance solutions

Apple has proven that Apple Silicon on TSMC's best process is great. There are no other ARM vendors competing well in that space yet. SOCs that need to compete with Intel and AMD on the same nodes are still stuck at the low margin end of the market.

Ampere?

They will be manufacturing those ARM cpus

Has that been announced? Or is it more a matter of Intel producing some unannounced product on an unannounced timeline with a feature set that has yet to be announced on an architecture that may or may not involve arm? Intel walking away from x86 would be a big step for them. First they don't own arm and second all their high end stuff is x86.

They will be manufacturing them for their customers.

Also arm isa is just isa

You seem to focus on it too much when it isnt THAT relevant.

Isa doesnt imply perf/energy characteristics

They announced this last year: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-...

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.

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.

Gelsinger put a $4BN compensation package in effect for securing and retaining talent within his first 6 months of taking the role, one of the first things noted was brain drain to competitors.

>Intel Poaches Head Apple Silicon Architect Who Led Transition To Arm And M1 Chips. Intel has reacquired the services of Jeff Wilcox, who spearheaded the transition to Arm and M1 chips for Apple. Wilcox will oversee architecture for all Intel system-on-a-chip (SoC) designs

note re-acquired.

Raja Koduri also came back to Intel (from AMD Radeon) and only recently left to dabble in VFX, as opposed to working for a competitor to Intel.

Anton Kaplanyan (father of RTX at nvidia) is at Intel now.

I think people are not checking linkedin when they make the claim that Intel's talent has been drained and there is nobody left at home. Where there is remuneration and opportunity you will find talent. I think it's safe to say no industry experts have written down Intel.

edit: first foundry customer online in New Mexico fab: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/newsroom/news/intel-...

> 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?

They bought the stock on the principle that it was going to pay a consistent 5% dividend every year and weren't looking for moonshots at the cost of that consistent revenue.

Yeah, just look into any investment thread on HN to see how shareholders thinks, nobody recommend investing in unconventional things. Shareholders are your everyday guy who decides where to put his pension, and that guy picks the safe bet with good returns.

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.

> every ARM vendor other than Apple has failed to move the needle on ARM performance since 2017

You must mean, performance relative to Intel, not absolute performance. Clearly Qualcomm has improved Snapdragon over time as have a number of other Android SOC vendors.

But I wonder if it's even true, have ARM vendors other than Apple failed to move the needle on performance (let's call performance single thread geekbench) relative to Intel? If someone is up for tracking down all the numbers I'd read that blog post. :)

> and they are lucky to have customers that accept that a new version of MacOS can drop older chips

Indeed, Apple has shown not just once but multiple times that they'll happily blow up their entire development ecosystem, whether it's software (Mac Finder vs. MacOS X) or hardware (68k, PPC, Intel, and now ARM). I think Intel didn't expect Apple to switch architectures so quickly and thoroughly and got caught flat-footed.

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.

How did that work?

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.

> there’s absolut ZERO chance chine can muster up what it takes to hold their own in such a conflict.

However China is now a full fledged dictatorship. I'm not sure you can count on them being a rational actor on the world stage.

They can do a lot of damage, but would also get absolutely devastated in return. They are food, energy insecure and entirely dependent on exports after all.

True, but the elite class that’s currently profiting from and in control of said country would devastate themselves if they dare. Skepticism about the wests self-inflicted dependency on China is at an all time high. Terms like "on-" or "friend-shoring" are already coming up now.

You’re not wrong, maybe all the scaremongering in the west about China overtaking us got them delusional enough in a Japanese nationalist type way for them to behave this irrational, but i highly doubt it. But that can also change pretty quick if they feel like their back is against the wall, you’re not wrong in that regard

How much is that elite independent of Xi? A relatively independent elite is probably a more stable system. But a completely subservient elite to the fearless leader is however much more dangerous.

I don’t think Xi is as independent as you believe, but that’s a matter of personal opinion.

I just don’t think it’s very likely for just about any leader putting themselves into the position you are describing. This is a reoccurring narrative in western media, and I’m not here to defend dictators, but i feel like reality is less black and white than that.

Many of the "crazed leaders" we are told are acting irrational, often do not. It’s just a very, very different perspective, often bad ones, but regardless.

Let me try to explain what I mean: during the Iraq war, Saddam Hussein was painted as this sort of crazed leader, irrationally deciding to invade Kuwait. But that’s not the entire truth. Hussein may have been an evil man, but the way the borders of Iraq were re-drawn, Iraq was completely cut off from any sources of fresh water. As expected, their neighbors cut off their already wonky water supplies and famine followed. One can still think it’s not justified to invade Kuwait over this, but there’s a clear gain to be had from this "irrational" act. Again, not a statement of personal opinion, just that there IS something to be had. I’m not trying to say that i am certain that Hussein had the prosperity of his people at heart, but i do think that it isn’t entirely irrational to acknowledge that every country in human history is 3 missed meals away from revolution. That’s not good, even if you are their benevolent god and dictator for lifetime(tm).

Russia "irrationally" invading the Ukraine may seem that way to us, but let’s see. Russias economy is just about entirely dependent on their petrochem industry. Without, their are broke. The reason why they still can compete in this market is their asset of soviet infrastructure and industry. A good majority of USSR pipelines run through the Ukraine. I’m not saying it’s okay for them to invade, but i can see what they seek to gain and why exactly they fear NATO expansion all that much.

I personally don’t see a similar gain to be had from China invading Taiwan, at least right now. They have lots to lose and little to gain. Taiwans semiconductor industry is useless without western IP, lithography equipment and customers. There are even emergency plans to destroy taiwans fabs in case of invasion. And that’s beside the damage done to mainland China itself.

But as i stated, this may very well change when they get more desperate. Hussein fully knew the consequences of screwing with the wests oil supply, but the desperation was too acute.

I just don’t buy irrationality, there’s always something to be had or something to lose. It may be entirely different from our view, but there’s gotta be something.

Russia doesn't frear NATO - see their reaction on Finland joining it. Also the pipelines were not the reason for invasion. They were the opposite - a deterrence. As soon as Russia built pipelines that were circumventing Ukraine, they decided to invade, thinking that the gas transmition would't be in danger now.

Also Saddam was told by the US ambassador that the US has no opinion on Arab-Arab conflicts...

yup. there are more examples than i can muster up to write. One more gut-wrenching than the former. The US calling anyone irrational is pretty rich anyways. After all, invoking the use Brainwashing in war after war, instead of accepting the existence of differing beliefs isn’t the pinnacle of rationality either. Neither is kidnapping your own people in an attempt to build your own brand of LSD-based brainwashing. Neither is infiltrating civil rights movements, going so far as attempting to bully MLK into suicide. Neither is spending your people’s tax money on 638 foiled assassinations of Castro. Neither is committing false-flag genocides in Vietnam, or PSYOPing civilians into believing they are haunted by the souls of their relatives.

none of those claims are anything but proven, historical facts by the way.

Wanna lose your appetite? The leadership in charge of the described operations in Vietnam gleefully talked about their management genius. They implemented kīll quotas.

this list also is everything but exhaustive.

> the way the borders of Iraq were re-drawn, Iraq was completely cut off from any sources of fresh water.

In the geography which with I am familiar, Iraq has two incredibly famous rivers and the Persian Gulf is actually salt water.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/local-global-tensions-course-t...

Turkey, Iran and Syria can and have caused horrible water shortages in Iraq.

Problem is, "rational" is not objective. "Rational" is more like "consistent with one's goals (subjective) under one's perception of reality (subjective)".

When you're saying "Putin invaded Ukraine irrationally" you're implicitly projecting your own value system and worldview onto him.

Let's take goals. What do you think Putin's goals are? I don't think it's too fanciful to imagine that welfare of ordinary Russians is less important to him than going down in history as someone who reunited the lost Russian Empire, or even just keeping in power and adored. It's just a fact that the occupation of Crimea was extremely popular and raised his ratings, so why not try the same thing again?

What about the worldview? It is well established that Putin didn't think much of Ukraine's ability to defend, having been fed overly positive reports by his servile underlings. Hell, even Pentagon thought Ukraine will fold, shipping weapons that would work well for guerrilla warfare (Javelins) and dragging their feet on stuff regular armies need (howitzers and shells). Russians did think it'll be a walk in the park, they even had a truck of crowd control gear in that column attacking Kyiv, thinking they'll need police shields.

So when you put yourself into Putin's shoes, attacking Ukraine Just Makes Sense: a cheap&easy way to boost ratings and raise his profile in history books, what not to like? It is completely rational — for his goals and his perceived reality.

Sadly, people often fall into the trap of overextending their own worldview/goals onto others, finding a mismatch, and trying to explain that mismatch away with semi-conspiratorial thinking (Nato expansion! Pipelines! Russian speakers!) instead of reevaluating the premise.

I don't accept the subjectivity w.r.t. "perceived reality". Russia's military unreadiness was one of the big reasons I consider the invasion irrational, and I put the blame squarely on Putin because he could have gotten accurate reports if he wasn't such a bad leader. You are responsible for your perceived reality, and part of rationality is acting in a way that it matches real reality.

(But yeah, clearly his actual goal was to increase his personal prestige. Is that not common knowledge yet?)

I'm skeptical of you claims about Hussein but I will admit less familiarity with it. Your claim about Russia's motives are bunk

> Russia "irrationally" invading the Ukraine may seem that way to us, but let’s see.

Invading one of their largest neighbors and ruining their relationship with a nation they had significant cultural exchange and trade with (including many of their weapons factories) is irrational.

But Russia's leaders didn't want a positive neighborly relationship they wanted to conquer Ukraine and restore the empire. Putin has given speeches on this comparing himself to the old conquering czars.

> Russias economy is just about entirely dependent on their petrochem industry. Without, their are broke.

True enough

> The reason why they still can compete in this market is their asset of soviet infrastructure and industry.

Much of the equipment is western and installed in the post Soviet period.

> A good majority of USSR pipelines run through the Ukraine.

Then they probably shouldn't have invaded in 2014? Almost seems like they made a bad irrational choice. They had other pipelines that bypassed Ukraine like NS1 and NS2 which didn't enter service due to the war

> I’m not saying it’s okay for them to invade, but i can see what they seek to gain

Please explain what they tried to gain. Ukraine wouldn't have objected to exports of gas through Ukraine if not for the Russian invasion and they already had pipelines that bypassed Ukraine.

> and why exactly they fear NATO expansion all that much.

They don't fear NATO expansion, they disliked it because it prevented them from conquering or bullying countries with threats of invasion. They've taken troops of the NATO border with Finland (and didn't even invade Finland when Finland joined NATO). Russia acknowledged the right of eastern European nations to join NATO and promised to respect Ukraine's sovereignty and borders.

> I personally don’t see a similar gain to be had from China invading Taiwan, at least right now. They have lots to lose and little to gain. Taiwans semiconductor industry is useless without western IP, lithography equipment and customers. There are even emergency plans to destroy taiwans fabs in case of invasion. And that’s beside the damage done to mainland China itself.

The fabs are a red herring, they're largely irrelevant. If China invades (which I hope doesn't happen) it will not be because of any economic gains. There are no possible economic gains that would justify the costs of a war. If they invade it will be for the same reason that Russia did, because of extreme nationalism/revanchism and trying to use that extreme nationalism to maintain popularity among the population.

I think "economy in the dumps" is a bit too harsh.

China is facing a deflating real estate bubble, but they still managed to grow the last year (official sources are disputed but independent estimates are still positive).

I would refer you to these to take the counterpoint to your position [1][2] [3].

China is in a world of hurt, but the government is trying desperately to hide how bad it actually is. If this continues for a few more months, it will be an existential situation for their economy.

[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-31/china-hom...

[2] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-31/china-sto...

[3] - https://www.piie.com/blogs/realtime-economics/foreign-direct...

it’s where the growth is coming from. Chinas growth (or even just sustenance) isn’t coming from a healthy job market and consumer spending. It’s mostly fueled by SOEs and prefectures going into debt to keep on investing, many local administration have found out they can trick debt limits by forming state-owned special purpose vehicles that aren’t bound to their debt limits. That’s not good at all. there’s a reason we are seeing tons of novel Chinese car brands being pushed here in Europe, they massively overproduced and cannot sell them in their own market anymore. It’s really not looking great atm.

edit: one also should keep in mind that the Chinese real estate market is entirely different in its importance to its populations wealth. "Buying" real estate is pretty much the only sanctioned market to invest your earnings. They still pretend to be communist after all.

> they are one broken dam away from a huge mass casualty event.

Are there any dam-having countries for which this isn't the case?

none or VERY few are even remotely close to the impact a potential breach of the three gorges dam would have. [1] Seriously, it’s worth reading up on, it’s genuinely hard to overstate.

[1]: https://www.ispsw.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/718_Lin.pdf

"In this case, the Three Gorges Dam may become a military target. But if this happens, it would be devastating to China as 400 million people live downstream, as well as the majority of the PLA's reserve forces that are located midstream and downstream of the Yangtze River."

"This article first appeared in The Times of Israel on September 11, 2020."

Also what does "400 million people live downstream" even mean? There's ten million people living downstream of this dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Dam_(Troy), and ten million more living downstream of the various Mississippi dams and so on.

It's grossly overstated because TW doesn't have the type or numbers of ordnance to structurally damage gravity dam the size of three gorges. And realistically they won't because the amount of conventional munitions needed is staggering, more than TW can muster in retaliatory strike, unless it's a coordinated preemptive strike, which TW won't since it's suicide by war crime.

The entire three gorges meme originated from FaLunGong/Epoche times propaganda, including in linked article (to interview with Simone Gao) and all the dumb google map photos of deformed damn due to lens distortion. PRC planners there aren't concerned about dam breech, but general infra terrorism.

The onne infra PRC planners are concerned about are coastal nuclear plants under construction, which is much better ordnance trade for TW anyway, and just as much of a war crime.

i seem to have been throughly wrong about the three gorges dam. But i think you also have misunderstood the scenario i was imagining. I was actually entirely unaware of there being a meme about the thing collapsing on its own. I was strictly referring to its viability as a strategic target for infrastructure terrorism if that’s the term to use here. I was imagining a scenario where the US is going to town in support of TW, as has been theorized by just about every media pundit in existence right now. I may be wrong about the state’s willingness to commit war crimes, but i just watched IDF, dressed up as civilians, sneaking into a hospital to shoot unarmed patients, alleged to be Hamas members. Or the lack of care over Gaza being white phosphorous'd.

But, as it seems, i vastly underestimated the effort needed to cause my theorized catastrophe. I’m entirely open to admit being wrong about that, always good to learn.

Also, correct me if I’m wrong, but afaik, the viability of nuclear plants as strategic targets has been vastly overblown. I’ll go read up on it, but i don’t think it’s that big of a risk.

IMO US hitting three Gorges (ptentially killing 10s of millions) is basically instantly escalating to proportional countervalue (i.e. targetting civilian, not counterforce, targetting military) nuclear retaliation, regardless of PRC no first use. This isn't perfidy spectrum of warcrime.

I think you're talking about US, willing to escalate to mainland attack, specifically strategic targets that support war economy. Nuclear plants being sensation overblown since it's basically jsut another piece of hard power infra. Which BTW very few US strategic planners have actually indicated willingness to do, but also inevitably must since PRC can prosecute TW (and SKR/JP) war completely from mainland.

To which IMO, most also vastly underestimate the effort needed. Reality right now is, the amount of fire power US can surge in region (naval strikes, aviation regional runway access, CONUS long range bombers), is very limited relative to number of PRC strategic targets, and in contested space theatre. To be blunt, PRC mainland is significantly larger (more targets) and capable (less ability to hit targets) than any previous US adversaries. By 1-2 order of magnitude. Most don't grasp this.

For reference the US+co air campaign in Gulf War, where US+co surged 6 carriers and had extremely geographically favourable regional basing to supplement land aviation, conducted ~100,000 sorties in 40 days, on Iraq, a country 20x smaller (realistically 10x since PRC targets are mostly east half of country), with 80x less people (even less aggregate productive/manufacturing ability). And that campian was essentially UNCONTESTED, since IIRC the french who designed Iraqi anti-air network sold out entire system to west. And it was efficient since regional base (CENTAF Saudi) was close enough that US fighters can sortie with minimal refueling.

None of that is true in PRC campaign, distances involved and limited basing US has access to (at least relative to PRC access to their entire military infra), means US unlikely to forward deploy as much aviation, and sorties need midair tanking (possibly multiple times) to deliver weapons, assuming those fighters aren't shot down/destroyed on the ground in the first place. Same with navy - US can throw in all but the effects won't scale proprotionally since US can't actually sustain/replenish surge for more than a few weeks, assuming support assets don't get destroyed themselves when they restock in port. So to summarize PRC is 10x-20x bigger than Iraq, 80x+ more targets, in contested region where PRC has home team advantage and where US has visiting team disadvantage (with regional partners factored in), in manner that US might not even be able to sustain forward posture for more than a few weeks (vs 5 weeks of initial Gulf War campaign). If you just naively scale Iraq air campaign to PRC, it would take US 5+ years to degrade PRC same way it did Iraq.

That's the scale of problem. Granted it's very hand wavy and napkin mathy but it illustrates how gargantuan PRC actually is and how big the challenges has become relative to US military capability that is calibrated to stomp small/medium sized countries. IMO why planners last 10 years have focused on SLOC/energy blockade, because land war in Asian is stupid. But even blockade talk is going to quiet down (and IMO US supporting TW militarily) in a few years when PRC roles out CONUS conventional strike with ICBMs to mutual conventional homeland vunerability. But that's another matter entirely, the TLDR is US game theory on TW going to be very different when they realize 200-300 oil refineries and lng plants and a few F35 assembly plants can significantly degrade CONUS and NATO. The other part of hitting a 100s of smaller targets vs 1 large target that triggers nuclear retaliation is there's more rungs/opportunity to deescalate, which is probably top priority in actual US/PRC war.

> 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.

Intel was literally at $25 in February last year, that's the 10-years-ago stock price.

Intel's P/E was about 50 at that time, AMD was over 1000. That's "throwing in the towel" in as pointed of a way that the market can possibly do.

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.

A 500 mile radius circle has a diameter of 1000 miles, so you're both correct.

Ha, silly of me, quite right. Not exactly what comes to mind when drawing circles to include a city 2/3 south down Taiwan, and 2/3 north up RoK, but fair point.

>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.

there's probably no need to imagine this conspiracy-like machinations of shareholders. Intel fucked up bad and process development is certified crazytrain to la la land.

(dropping molten tin 1000 times a second and then shooting it with a laser just to get a lamp that can bless you with the hard light you need for your fancy fine few nanometers thin shadows? sure, why not, but don't forget to shoot the plasma ball with a weaker pulse to nudge it into the shape of a lens, cheerio.

and you know that all other parts are similarly scifi sounding.

and their middle management got greedy and they were bleeding talent for a decade.)

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