Intel's Fall from Grace
cacm.acm.org
cacm.acm.org
And where to find enough companies reflecting Intel’s situation, without confounding factors, for a survey?
“Correlations” are not the best inputs for business decisions.
But I don’t doubt there would have been lots of consultants ready to manufacture such a survey if Intel had signaled demand…
It feels like every delay is pretty bad for their image and the public opinion, though of course I can't quantify it. It would probably be a bit different if they were shipping products: Core Ultra was a bit of a sidegrade in some respects but with better pricing it would actually be a good option. Even their Intel Arc cards had a rough launch but despite that most of the issues have been largely addressed and things are looking up, especially for the pricing that they can pull off and the market segment that they're targetting (like AMD also pulling out from the high end, because they can't compete with Nvidia).
My current CPU is a Ryzen 5 4500, which uses a "7nm" process and which PassMark tells me is smack dab in the middle of everything that's available out there. Something like the Core Ultra 245K would be a very significant improvement, even a lower TDP part would be good, as long as it's priced correctly. Yet, Intel is trying for a moonshot with 18A instead of getting something "good enough" out there and competing on price, while doing that was more or less what let AMD survive for years (e.g. before Ryzen), doing which would probably put them in a more stable position and would let them iterate.
That CMOS fabrication process was intended for a single Intel product, the laptop CPUs Arrow Lake H, which will now be made by TSMC.
The costs for bringing that process good enough for mass production would have never been recovered.
It is much better to channel all resources to improving the fabrication yields of the superior 18A fabrication process, which is intended to be used for many important Intel products, including server CPUs, and also for any external customers they will be able to lure.
While Intel has used a slogan like "5 nodes in 4 years", two of those were actually half nodes, i.e. "Intel 3" is an improved variant of "Intel 4" and "Intel 18A" is an improved variant of "Intel 20A".
It would have been much better for Intel if they would have also skipped "Intel 4", but they were in a hurry to launch Meteor Lake before the end of 2023 and "Intel 3" would not have been ready for mass production by that time, and they were still not convinced that they must completely outsource the fabrication of their CPU chips until they have a competitive fabrication process.
With some difficulties, Intel has succeeded until now to meet all their milestones toward their stated goal of having a competitive fabrication process, i.e. 18A, and competitive CPUs, by the end of 2025.
The main thing that can be criticized about their roadmap is that it had included too many intermediate steps, with not yet competitive fabrication processes and CPUs, which have required nonetheless a lot of development efforts, slowing the progress towards the real goal. Nevertheless, it is likely that most of the intermediate steps have been unavoidable, because without new products for a couple of years their sales would have been even lower and their losses greater.
Only if Pat Gelsinger would have remained CEO until that time (one year from now) it would have been possible to assess whether he has been a bad CEO or a good CEO.
Companies and governments alike have tried to enter the industry and failed over and over. And even staying in it was a struggle for Intel once the pressure was on.
I'm not sure if or how that will ever change. Unless someone comes up with a complete revolution for chip manufacturing that makes the process far easier and simpler than anything we have today, while keeping close to the same performance - I don't think it will. Or if we move to some completely new technology with no similarities at all to silicon - so that new blood can make significant progress.
If they stay the course they'll be in an amazing position. Especially if China makes a move on Taiwan...
I had a glimmer of hope when Keller joined, but he noped out not long after, concluding that leadership were idiots and telling the board as much, then resigning shortly later.
Whether he was right or not is for the reader to speculate, but he's not exactly known as an unstable hothead, nor unintelligent, so one can at least speculate some real problems existed.
It's hard to completely shake up and revamp an organization so large and entrenched, but it's exactly what they need.
> if they can deliver 18a in 2025
What on earth makes you believe this is a possibility given their last 10 years?
For Intel's sake, I hope I eat crow. But fool me once, shame on you...
You mean the 10 years prior to Pat? Since his arrival he plan of 5 node in 4 years has been executing well so far. The last node in that plan is 18A.
As you said, 18A is the last node of that plan, so by now if they were executing well on those nodes they should be fabbing all their products on the Intel 3 and 20A processes but they’re not. In fact they don’t even have a 20A process to use because they cancelled it, so clearly that wasn’t executed well.
I thought the board wanted to split the company in two, while Pat wanted to invest in the fabs. Now that he's gone, doesn't that mean the board will find someone who agrees with them about spinning off the fab business?
I dont think that is even possible. Given the money they received from CHIP Act. They could spin off x86 business, but may be not the Fab. My guess is that The board actually want Intel to be itself back in the good old days, leading edge node and selling CPU at a premium. Hence they want to scale down their scale of investment on Fabs and possibly focusing capacity for itself only.
Obviously the board doesn't know much about the current Semi market.
Those days are gone and never coming back. How do they get people this clueless on the board anyway?
Don't assume any great intelligence on the part of these board members. If all these company-running people were so brilliant, Intel wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.
https://x.com/PGelsinger/status/1865783256551133472?t=So3tqq...
Former CEO seems to think that the problems are spiritual
I doubt it’s a parody.
I don't think the former CEO thinks that is a spiritual problem, I think he just feels like there is nothing else that he could do.