Hacker News Reader

Comment by qzw | Hacker News Reader

Remember when Microsoft invested in Apple when Apple was down in the dumps? This is giving similar vibes. That deal was arguably what saved Apple near its nadir. I’m not a fan of Intel’s past monopolistic practices, but for the sake of sustaining competition in the CPU/GPU market, I hope this deal works out for them even half as well as the MS deal did for Apple.

View on HN

>Remember when Microsoft invested in Apple when Apple was down in the dumps? This is giving similar vibes.

Doesn't feel the same because the 1997 investment was arranged by Apple co-founder Steve Jobs. He had a long personal relationship with Bill Gates so could just call him to drop the outstanding lawsuits and get a commitment for future Office versions on the Mac. Basically, Steve Jobs at relatively young age of 42 was back at Apple in "founder mode" and made bold moves that the prior CEO Gil Amelio couldn't do.

Intel doesn't have the same type of leadership. Their new CEO is a career finance/investor instead of a "new products new innovation" type of leader. This $5 billion investment feels more like the result of back-channel discussions with the US government where they "politely" ask NVIDIA to help out Intel in exchange for less restrictions selling chips to China.

> This $5 billion investment feels more like the result of back-channel discussions with the US government where they "politely" ask NVIDIA to help out Intel in exchange for less restrictions selling chips to China.

Stinks of Mussolini-style Corporatism to me.

You try to pin this (hypothetical) as fascism.

Let's assume Trump admin pressured Nvidia to invest in intel.

Chips act (voted by Democrats / Biden) gave Intel up to $7.8 billion of YOUR money (taxes) in form of direct grants.

Was it more of "Mussolini-style corporatism" to you or not?

The parent comment is speculation. But yes, speculatively, a legislative act of investment would be less authoritarian than the whims of an executive that puts tariffs on your product constantly unless you do what he says.

Is the method by which it’s communicated what gives you negative feelings? Because this is an approach to handling the labor dumping that’s been allowed in nearly every industry since the 1980s, and it’s been used numerous times in the US and abroad. They typically only offer temporary relief, while domestic industries should be adjusting and better trade deals get negotiated. The last I checked, that’s been happening to some degree… but it also probably needs to be supported by the ability for companies to borrow money, which the Fed (until recently) seemed hell bent on preventing, while we continued to watch the job market burn to the ground. So cash flush businesses investing in each other to keep competition alive seems like a positive here. Maybe that’s just me?

My comment was only referring to the manner of implementation, not the positive or negative view of the investment.

It isn't the "method of communication". It's legislation vs. coercion (in the speculative scenario from the parent comment).

Most regulation is effectively coercion. The difference is regulation isn’t easily rolled back, whereas the current approach to modifying behavior is (as we’ve seen, numerous times in the last few months even). One is more tolerant of failure than the other.

There is an extreme where policy cannot be modified, and there is an extreme where the whims of one person, and the precedent of having the US government defined as the whims and whiplashes of one person, is immensely harmful to our national credibility. It fucks with investment, immigration and education.

There's big difference between government allocating tax payer dollars by passing a bill than a president using their influence to force dealings between corporate entities that benefit the ruling party.

Yeah, the thing about the economy is it's too big for one mind to grasp, you need statistics to make sense of it in aggregate.

If you fiddle and concentrate only on the top performers, the bottom falls out. Most of the US economy is still in small companies.

That's how post-WW2 France was actually rebuilt. You could also see big hints of that in the US WW2 economic effort, which couldn't have been done without the Government taking a direct hold of things and instituting central-ish planning.

You're speaking of what is referred to as neo-corporatism [0] and it's a tripartite, democratic process, not the fascist sort where everything is within and for the benefit of the state [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism#Neo-corporatism

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporatism#Fascist_corporatis...

> democratic process,

There was not that much democracy in the French post-WW2 technocratic establishment, but I agree that they were not technically fascist (nor otherwise).

This style of classical fascism or economic fascism, or whatever the term is differentiate it from the modern unrelated usage of fascism, being used in the US is a bit unnerving, and it's crazy that it's usually from the Republican party, who claims to espouse free markets.

It also happened under G. W. Bush with banks and auto manufacturers, but the worst offense was under Nixon with his nationalization of passenger rail.

At least with the bank and car manufacturer bailouts the government eventually sold off their stocks, and with the Intel investment the government has non-voting shares, but the government completely controls the National Railroad Passenger Corporation, (the NRPC aka Amtrak) with the board members being appointed by the president of the United States.

We lost 20 independent railroads overnight, and created a conglomerate that can barely function.

Except ofc. China has banned Nvidia.

https://www.ft.com/content/12adf92d-3e34-428a-8d61-c91695119...

Microsoft also invested $100M in Borland at the same time.

Investing in Apple and Borland were an counter-anti-trust legal move, keeping the competitors alive, but on life support. This way they could say to the government "yes there is competition".

Google does the same these days by keeping Firefox alive.

I don't think that's an apt comparison, given that Microsoft and Apple were more direct competitors than Intel and Nvidia; the latter have a more symbiotic relationship. I think the rationale is closer to the competitor of my competitor is my friend -- they face two threats by AMD growing larger in the CPU market:

- a bigger R&D budget for their main competitor in the GPU market

- since Nvidia doesn't have their own CPUs, they risk becoming more dependent on their main competitor for total system performance.

Here's Nvidia's CPUs, which are increasingly a required part of their data center offerings:

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/grace-cpu/

Required in that Nvidia would like to sell them to you. But customers seem to be hesitant and prefer x86-based DGX and similar systems. At least from what I've heard and seen.

> since Nvidia doesn't have their own CPUs, they risk becoming more dependent on their main competitor for total system performance.

This is why they built the Grace CPU - noting that they're using Arm's Neoverse V2 cores rather than their own design.

Nah I have feeling this is part of the result of the arm twisting to be allowed to sell to China.

This is a big ask for a shrinking market- with the pressure that the Chinese government is putting on their domestic companies to not buy H20's, I'm not sure how big this is going to be going forward. 5 billion (plus whatever it costs to build these products) is a lot for a market that is probably going to be closed soon.

It's even more ironic when you remember in 2005 the tables were turned, and Intel was trying to buy Nvidia.

Does intel have someone who will return and change the course of the company or return to its original mission or something of that sort?

Oh, I bet Elon has been handed some ideas.

> Remember when Microsoft invested in Apple when Apple was down in the dumps?

Had Apple failed, Microsoft would probably have been found to have a clear monopolistic position. And microsoft was already in hot waters due to InternetExplorer IIRC.

Yep. MSFT needed Apple because of Anti-trust issues.

Apples demise wouldve nailed the case.

All they need now is a CEO like Steve Jobs…

Jensen moves to intel …

where / who is intel's steve-jobs ?

Competition?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com