Intel spends more on R&D than Nvidia and AMD combined | Hacker News Reader

Intel spends more on R&D than Nvidia and AMD combined

tomshardware.com

17 pointsdoener18 comments

Title poses a question, then the last paragraph explains why it was not relevant and the article was just created for the title.

AMD and Nvidia are fabless.

>But more importantly, Intel spends billions on new semiconductor production process technologies. Every new manufacturing process typically requires billions in upfront research and development investments. Intel also develops packaging technologies, which require a lot of R&D money.

Well yeah, this is exactly what I was going to point out before I even had to open the link. Intel isn't fabless like the other two.

Design R&D is mostly spending on staff & software.

Fabs have billions of dollars of hard infrastructure to build.

TSMC spent about $6b in R&D last year, so they could swap out either AMD or Nvidia in the headline with TSMC and the title would still work and be a little more apples to apples.

Yea but TSMC produces good stuff.

In part, thanks to ASML.

I don't think TSMC use their own lasers anymore (not since 2016), so even then I'm not sure.

This is why they provided a normalized comparison versus market cap. They should have probably done it with revenue, but this does provide a means of analysis of the relative efficacy of value creation via R&D dollars.

Intel's current drive to catch up with Nvidia and AMD GPUs probably isn't cheap either.

It's not that it's expensive, it's that they've gone about it in such an incompetent way that they're losing money on it hand over fist.

Apple are fabless...

A lot of people blame the waste at Intel on the MBAs, but I have to say, the PhDs might be equally to blame. I know quite a few people at Intel who do cool R&D work that will clearly never make it to a real commercial product (except maybe a DoD toy), but are quite content to have Intel pay for it for literal decades.

If you knew what would be able to be commercialized it wouldn't be called research.

> clearly never make it to a real commercial product (except maybe a DoD toy), but are quite content to have Intel pay for it for literal decades.

OP posted that context?

Surely there is, especially within the constraints of a commercial company, a reasonable a) direction and b) limit to research.

Research for the sake of it is called academia.

I think this is right, it's a gamble. Discoveries and advancements are made by people tinkering with things without the mind to commercialise it.

Nominally, corporate R&D should in fact have a good chance of making it into a real product if the technology works. It should not be a certainty that the technology will work.

Intel's R&D produces a lot of technology that works but never makes it into a product.

AMD + TSMC = ~12B vs Intel at 16B

For anyone that wants a closer comparison.

Cranking up R&D especially during a time to perfect the trade sounds backward. Intel probably has 6 more years then to release anything into full production.

It’s not only the spend … often too much easy money from the government or military would do the opposite …

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