Intel used to dominate the U.S. chip industry, now struggling to stay relevant | Hacker News Reader

Intel used to dominate the U.S. chip industry, now struggling to stay relevant

cnbc.com

43 pointspasttense0112 comments

"struggling to stay relevant" is an exaggerated editorialized title.

Sure, they're not "Numero Uno" anymore, but they're very far away from being irelevant.

If they can get a solid third place in the GPU space behind Nvidia and AMD, and a second place in the AI space behind Nvidia, and stay in third place in semiconductor manufacturing behind TSMC and Samsung, that's still a huge accomplishment considering how high the barriers to entry in these spaces are, especially for a single company.

Third place for discrete GPUs is unlikely to be profitable. Third place in semiconductor manufacturing means having to outsource production of a significant part of the product line to stay competitive. Over timescales of several years, these markets are too close to winner-take-all for third place to be a sustainable position. Just look at how much Intel had to fuck up in order to give others the opportunity to move into first or second place in markets that had been entirely Intel's to lose.

Intel's getting destroyed on all fronts, let's not kid ourselves here. Plus foreign governments don't want the NSA-mandated hardware backdoors now that everybody knows they exist. Intel's OK I guess if you work for the government and need a computer with such a "feature" so the glowboys can keep tabs on you.

Intel mostly dominated thank to the monopoly practices.

AMD was better in 2002-2004 on Opteron times ... but Intel just paid 'manufacturers' to use Intel instead in their offering.

Current AMD ZEN/Ryzen is just too strong to make that happen again.

I would say 'fuck intel' but I also like the fact that Intel was the first one to offer open source GPU drivers ...

Intel still has 80% share in PCs and 70% share in server CPUs. The stock is struggling because their costs are high and competition with AMD has squeezed margins.

So was IBM on computers; then, new interesting computers happened, such as the ones from DEC with ITS and WAITS, the whole AI and network/multimedia with them instead of the crappy batch job based computing with punchcards... I can't wait for a libre, RISCV alternative to Intel/AMD shaking up the grounds of the propietary computing.

And then the Cloud happened, the modern version of timesharing.

RISC-V OEM extensions will ensure that never takes off like people expect.

They look for GNU/Linux, and Android/ChromeOS is what they will get.

>RISC-V OEM extensions will ensure that never takes off like people expect.

Just like ARM has failed in the market for this exact reason too. Intel ships thousands of CPUs for every ARM shipped, right?

In the FOSS market, definitely, how are those reverse engineering efforts outside Raspeberry PIs?

Intel's dropping x86, and moving all to amd64 with UEFI, that's just as bad.

Intel is struggling because they are trying to compete with TSMC. It requires a lot of capital to build the fabs.

Intel is trying to compete with TSMC, and AMD and Apple and to some extent NVIDIA and Samsung. Their problem isn't the capital required for building fabs and designing chips. Their problem is that spending that capital hasn't been producing compelling or timely results.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com