Intel's Death and Potential Revival
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
https://semianalysis.com/2024/12/09/intel-on-the-brink-of-de...
The problem is there are two distinct objectives:
1. Maximise shareholder value
2. Maintain and extend Intel's (close to) leading-edge fab capability.
These are not necessarily consistent!
The Intel Board (bad as it is) is trying to deliver 1. and probably now doesn't care about 2. That's not what the US needs, so some sort of government intervention is inevitable if 2. is to be achieved.
And I'm not convinced that PG's IDM 2.0 strategy would have delivered either.
Thanks, good reading. Sharp retrospective and analysis, hopeful blueprint for the future:
"""
Intel Foundry won’t be laden with Intel’s lagging product team, Mobileye, or Altera. Intel Foundry will have one clear function, and it’s vital to national security and the future of America and the West.
Who should lead the charge here? Maybe a “Chip Czar” charged with restoring American logic prowess. We know someone with a great CV who has just become freed up for new opportunities…
"""
So How are all of you enjoying this new Guided Age of Technology Trusts and that new age that started in earnest beginning with the 1980 election and is really coming into its own with the election of 2024! Say hello to the Robber Barron Cabinet come Jan 20th 2024, and maybe 2029 will be a year not to dissimilar from the one that occurred one century before!
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/bypn9cdrc
How Intel's $108 billion buyback gambit backfired—a cautionary tale for tech giants Intel’s focus on stock price over innovation left it playing catch-up in the AI race—and tech leaders should take note.
Buybacks artificially pumped the share price, which means any correction is/has been very brutal, more "bubble" like.
Correct, but if a decade ago was the right time to do it, then 2020 was the second best, and now is the third best.
>Gelsinger’s plan was to become a foundry, with Intel as its first-best customer.
The only real alternative to this is to split Intel into two companies - a Foundry and a Products company - and effectively achieve the same thing via contracts rather than ownership.
I have a feeling that in 18-24 months we're going to be reading articles about how the best time to split the company was 2 years ago and now it's too late.
For most passive investors, an individual stock’s weight is a technical detail that’s handled by automatic portfolio adjustments. The total market cap of semi sector stocks is way up despite Intel, so anybody who didn’t try to actively pick winners has done well.
Apple and Nvidia should be leading the charge here. They're the ones that are both vulnerable to a TSMC squeeze and have the resources to make a difference.
It appears that Nvidia is looking to manufacture the low end of their upcoming GPU's on Samsung, so they're doing at least something. But Apple appears to be doubling down on TSMC via exclusive contracts.
Kind of. 8080 and 8085 share also the same ISA. Other families that did that were the 6502 (the 6510, the 6504), Z-80 (Hitachi's HD64180, which became the Z-180, Z-280, R800), and Texas' TMS9900, which was part of a whole family that spanned from the ill-fated TI-99/4 to the TI-990 minicomputers.
Still, I wish the ia432 succeeded, or the TMS9900 was picked for the IBM PC. Would be a much nicer world.
What if they're wrong, and there's a much, much simpler architecture that could be found, that could scale almost infinitely, and make better use of Dennard scaling?
The only thing I see are these institutional investors are very upset Intel is not like Nvidia. So they are complaining and these investors will eventually destroy Intel because their stock is not rising 500% per year.
So all this pressure on Intel since Nvidia became a thing is distracting Intel from focusing on their business. Causing more harm than good.
Intel foundry has fallen behind TSMC to the point the latest Intel laptop chip (Lunar Lake) was manufactured using TSMC. Recent attempts to attract external client s to fab using Intel Foundry have not met expectations.
Given all this, I think quite a lot of hand-wringing is warranted.