Broadcom, TSMC eye possible Intel deals to split storied chipmaker
reuters.com
reuters.com
Sometimes you just gotta stick to the core competencies and stick to them well.
Part of me thinks this is what Radio Shack could've made work. They almost made it to the point in time where hobbyist electronics / maker culture was popular again, but by that time they were just the place people used to buy cell phones from.
Notably, the whole sector seems to have collapsed in favor of online shops like Sparkfun and Adafruit. Most small cities used to have a shop where you could go pick through trays of random electronic components. Now, I don't even know where you'd go to do that in major cosmopolitan centers that certainly have the populations to support it. It's just too easy to make a shopping list of components at your desk and hit buy.
Unfortunately, I suspect there are also lots of projects that are on hold while that one component you just realized you needed makes its way through the mail.
The goal is to get people in the store and building together. Of course no one is going to drive to the store and spend $30 on an aux cable when Amazon will ship it to you tomorrow. But they might just spend $20 on a pack of resistors and a USB breakout board while they're already at the shop using the oscilloscope to probe out a signal on their in flight project and ordering from amazon means stopping progress for the day.
I'd probably also aim to have on-prem competitions, think ant-weight battle bots stuff, micro-mouse or even pinewood derby stuff.
Heck you could probably even lure in some additional markup sales on components by having a "grab-bag" bench, in which you can't bring your own stuff, but you only pay for what you take out. Want to build a battle bot but don't know in advance what pieces you will or won't need? Build it on the grab-bag bench and we'll total up your costs after the fact. Sure you probably could get everything cheaper if you ordered it all online, but how convenient to just have a massive wall of parts already and only get the things you need and not need to store the rest of the 500 resistor pack you had to order to get the 20 you needed.
It might not have worked, the whole thing still might have ended in liquidation, but it feels like it would have had a better chance than batteries and cell phones.
Micro Center. They are what Radio Shack might have become if they'd been well-funded and stayed in business.
Unfortunately there are not very many of them.
Their goal isn't necessarily to run a business that's profitable long term, it may be to segment it out and squeeze various segments to wring the last bits of juice out of them until leaving a dried husk while providing middling quality to the most lucrative segments to string them along.
You don't want to be in the segment destined to be juiced.
> You need AVX only? It's only bundled with all AVX flavors and vector operations add-on pack, just for $500/socket/year* (*:for processors up to 10 cores. For higher core counts and SMT enabled options please reach out to your nearest Broadcom sales representative).
ref: Intel on Demand (https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/docs/ondema...)
VMWare had/has a strong moat which can be exploited by jacking up prices. Intel doesn't have that.
When they missed out on mobile it appeared to be a big blunder, especially when one considers the long term impact of electricity usage in datacenters. When Apple released the M1 chips that could run x86 faster than native, it was clear what was going to happen to Intel. Intel is now done -- dead, finished. This is a legacy business where the owners can try to get more money than they paid for it, but if they have to put up new capital (that isn't free government money), they will not be getting their money back.
> Yeary has been telling individuals close to him that he is most focused on maximizing value for Intel shareholders, the report added.
RIP Intel.
But with a company like Intel, one does really need long term vision to maximize value in the long run. We don't know if he's looking for quick fixes (short term) or long term fixes.
He's been on the board that hired the last 3 CEOs, so I have little faith in their getting things right.
Intel + Broadcom + IBM + HP + Oracle + Apple + Google
They'd from Chips to Cloud.
5 year annual return is 56% for Broadcom and 33% for TSMC
10 year annual return is 40% to 27%
15 year annual return is 41% to 26%
Oregon exports more than $30 billion worth of electronics annually, most of which are semiconductors manufactured in Intel’s Hillsboro factories.
----------
The company employs more people than any other business in the state. ----------
The state’s chip industry pays an average yearly wage of more than $150,000, according to government data, well over double the state average. Hefty pay from Intel is an especially big deal in Oregon, which relies on personal income taxes for the bulk of state revenue.
---------- ...Intel might consider selling its business off in pieces.
That could be calamitous in Oregon, turning Intel’s huge local campuses into satellite operations of other companies that don’t need the full range of corporate and technological functions that have been the foundation of Intel’s Hillsboro sites for decades.
“The people who work at Intel have to be really panicked,” Hutcheson said.
Intel’s research factories in Hillsboro support high-volume production sites in Arizona, Ireland, Israel and -- soon -- in Ohio. If that manufacturing network were someday to break up, it’s not clear what role would be left for the company’s top engineers and scientists in Oregon.
It would really be a sad day and the begin of truly dark era for the entire computing industry, though.
As an alternative... Amazon would probably be another interesting buyer. Amazon is another company dead serious about having their own silicon. And owning the main supplier of x86 chips as well in-house capabilities to manufacture their own Graviton chips would give them an incredible edge over other cloud computing providers.
Things Broadcom would do: sell you a chip, nerf if after a year and charge you a subscription to unnerf.
Look at what they did to VMWare. If you were a VMWare customer you were and are in deep shit right now. The fact this conversation between Intel and the Grim Reaper is taking place means everybody, from consumers to OEMs to clouds need to divest away from Intel today.
Sell what you have while you still can get some cash for it and remove it from consideration for any future plans.
Intels plants are far from start of the art. Given their inability to compete and catch up with TSMC
[1] https://groq.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/GroqChip%E2%84%A...
[1]https://www.pcmag.com/news/trump-intel-was-great-until-taiwa...
This data is a couple years out of date now but it still shows how relevant older nodes are: https://stockdividendscreener.com/technology/semiconductor/t...
I think the reason is obvious...it has no choice
TSMC is not going to be motivated to build up a competitor who weakens the economic wall around Taiwan.
What I could see happening based on recent events is that Trump tells Taiwan they have a couple years of US security left. TSMC is then forced to consider putting more effort into mfg in the US(and other countries). What that would mean for the rest of the elec mfg supply chain is unknown. Taiwan is quite critical beyond just chip mfg.