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Comment by osnium123 | Hacker News Reader

Intel losing design talent to startups.

It's the cycle of life. Intel was founded by people leaving Fairchild, and that in turn was founded by the Traitorous Eight from Shockley.

The ecosystem is healing.

Meh all that happened in an environment with a complete lack of competition. Now it just seems like East Asia will eat everyone’s lunch while the ecosystem is healing.

> Meh all that happened in an environment with a complete lack of competition.

It was an insanely competitive environment. Shockley had the leg up due to being the literal inventor of the thing he was intending to manufacture and from getting an early investor to start his laboratory.

> Now it just seems like East Asia will eat everyone’s lunch while the ecosystem is healing.

They've got good labor prices but almost no legitimate IP.

> They've got good labor prices but almost no legitimate IP.

They don't care about your IP. If it can be manufactured and sold, they will do it. And that's how it should be.

They are making up ground in terms of IP even if it is things like Loongsuns LAA64 which is basically just MIPS and RISC V slammed together. China is hungry and their goverment is throwing a lot of investment behind that hunger.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loongson

Intel can just buy back their startup in three years if it worked and they need it. Probably cheaper than trying to develop whatever in-house and with better chance of success.

If the startup is successful it won’t be cheap to buy

Unless the company stumbles upon some revolutionary novel computation approach (eg 10x more efficient) it seems a long road for a chip designer to become a financial success.

Even if it could buy a RISC chip today that was magically 20% better than Intel, who is going to buy it for serious commercial installations? It has taken years since Zen1 before AMD started to gain real presence in servers and laptops.

RISCV chips that are way slower than Intel that are already being used in serious (?) commercial installations [that was a lot of words].

The ISA doesn't matter that much for performance at the high end. The most important difference between ISAs is security.

ARMv9 is the best here (several well designed security extensions) and x86 might be the worst (part because of variable length instructions and part because Intel can't ship SGX.) I don't know about RISCV in particular.

How long did it take Apple to make their ARM-based CPUs that totally outperform Intel CPUs in laptops? This group could very well do the same. The main problem, of course, is x86 compatibility, since most laptop users run Windows and not Linux and Windows only works on x86. They might be targeting a different market where x86 compatibility isn't important but power efficiency (or maybe some other metric that x86 sucks at) is: non-Windows mobile devices of some kind, for instance.

I do really wonder what their business strategy is here.

It took Apple ten years. Apple A4 was released in 2010, M1 in 2020.

Apple bought P.A. Semi in 2008 and put them to work on ARM cores right away. On the other hand, there were noises about the A-series being faster than x86 already at the time of Apple A13 in 2019.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi

The goal of the A/M series chips isn't to be faster than x86, it's to have a better power/performance tradeoff. Going as fast as possible gets you "gamer laptops", which weren't good products.

Of course they are fast, which is part a nice coincidence, and part Intel falling badly behind TSMC.

From what I've read, the Apple M chips aren't faster than the very fastest Intel offerings. But it doesn't matter: what matters is how long your laptop will run on battery doing typical laptop work, and the M chips really put the x86 chips to shame here unfortunately. So agreed, what they're great at is power/performance tradeoff.

Hardware companies grow exponentially slower than SW companies. Given Intel spent (wasted?) over $10B each on Altera and Mobileye, I'm sure they'll be able to afford whatever this will be valued at.

Of course, the real question is whether it'll be Intel that buys them or one of Intel's competitors.

nVidia?

>Hardware companies grow exponentially slower than SW companies

Meh. That's only because that market is irrational and many SW companies are massively overhyped and overvalued. You can't possibly tell me with a straight face that WhatsApp is worth the 19 billion Facebook spent on it especially given WhatsApp is not making any money.

WhatsApp was a very smart buy for $19B considering its ubiquity around the world. There are countries where business basically does not happen unless you are using WhatsApp.

Also, Meta surely gleans tons of data from WhatsApp that they can use to better sell advertisements, even on other Meta properties.

But there are no ads in WhatsApp, how do they make money from those using it?

https://business.whatsapp.com/resources/resource-library/wha...

https://scontent-iad3-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.8562-6/454446299_...

Given Meta’s net income trajectory and the very, very widespread usage of WhatsApp, it should be safe to assume that WhatsApp is a valuable asset. If not explicitly making money, at the least it is not in a competitor’s hands, which itself is surely worth billions of dollars to Meta.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/META/meta-platform...

Your example is not doing you any favors to be honest.

The customer base capture along with acquiring the best social graph available (people usually only message through cellphones to other people who they are truly connected, unlike the social media) was well worth 19B.

But there are no ads in WhatsApp, how do they make money from those using it?

What use spending big on buying a large userbase if you don't monetize it?

Companies are valued on potential earnings.

I see a lot of trivial possibilities to monetize 2B+ users. You can either act on those possibilities now, or rely on the valuation to sell the company on. Sooner or later, someone will monetize, and that's what's important.

There are ads in WhatsApp. I routinely get pushed to join what are essentially corporate ad-delivery channels.

Right now in my "updates" tab i am proposed stuff like Real Madrid C.F (a while ago it was another team), WhatsApp itself, Juventus and Arsenal.

They're dumb as well, because I have no interest in football.

That's spam advertising, they're most definitely getting money out of that.

In fact, Intel already tried and failed to buy SiFive for $2B. https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-failed-to-buy-sifive

They'll be laughed out of the room.

As happened when they tried this with SiFive.

It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. If these succeed, it'll indicate constraint and be a testament to how bureaucratic and broken Intel really is inside.

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