It's not actually good for the shareholders unless you have a divisor which is effort. Intel is a semiconductor company, investors that want to invest in treasuries or Exxon or whatever is considered extreme low-beta (ha, maybe not Exxon anymore, maybe Visa) have every opportunity to do so.

The most expensive, highest-margin, technically advanced and risky business in the world is for investors who want that in their portfolio. If they wanted to milk a dying industry on the way down they would go buy Disney stock.

It is very clearly in the interests of long-term investors in Intel to maintain a commanding position in fabrication: it's been the secret sauce of the company since the very beginning, it's never been more in demand.

This idea that companies are obligated to do what will deliver some little bump in the stock price in 90-180 days is everything from not how the rules work to just a lazy meme for people who don't want to earn their princely salaries.

Don't make excuses for weakness at the top.

> They've been doing the exact right thing for the shareholders

Inflation-adjusted INTC [1] is the same as it was in 1997, including dividends! Shareholders have no real return from INTC for almost 3 decades.

[1] https://totalrealreturns.com/s/INTC

They've been doing the exact right thing for the shareholders: squeezing the living shit out of an asset (x86/64) for decades while cutting anything interesting or competitive to the bone to give shareholders more money.

I would quibble with the exact right thing phrases but otherwise agree. Intel indeed followed a formula which is intended to and often does produce massive return for some time frame. The formula is indeed "gutting the company" - squeeze every part of an enterprise and return the results as profits. Whether destroying the companies long term prospects is worth these short term profits is a complex calculation.

A managers' duty is to promote long term value and stability, actually, but return enough short term profits and you trump that long investment income.

>"They've been doing the exact right thing for the shareholders"

Clearly not as they've ended up suspending dividend payments altogether.

The fiduciary duty is whatever the shareholders make of it, there is no need for it to be just monetary. If they were planning for long term instead of short term profits they would be making sure the company is still the world leader in 25 years. But since big investors are either pension funds or hedge funds (aka greedy bastards) you get earnings above all else.

That’s a bullshit meme. One glance at the stock history shows that they haven’t been doing anything for shareholders for over a decade.

The decline in what we expect of our leaders has been going on my entire life and the contrast between 20 years ago and the present is stark.

In 1998 Meriwether and the rest of LTCM nearly crashed the economy, needed the Fed to get involved, and they were personally ruined, guy never opened a ten thousand dollar bottle of wine again and probably never had anything again. Shortly thereafter, Jeff Skilling took out offices in 9 cities and pension plans all over the country with shady accounting. 24 years in prison (reduced later to 14). Ebbers/Worldcom 2002: died in prison.

By 2008? Zero prosecutions. Bonuses the next year.

Around the same time Clinton got caught lying about chasing (consenting and of age) skirt in the Office: nearly ended his presidency, definitely ended his policy agenda, real consequences and he caught a shooting star to avoid far worse. The public was not going to accept it, Congress was not going to let it slide on either side of the aisle. Today? Something like that barely makes the press. You have to be accused of sex trafficking to even get an investigation started and everyone will probably walk.

The idea that this became uniquely bad in January, or even 2016 is demonstrably untrue. At some time in the last 30 years we started accepting leadership who are dishonest, nakedly self-interested, lie without consequences, enrich themselves via extraction rather than value creation, collude with no oversight, and sell out the public.

This is a completely bipartisan consensus on these norms. Speaking for myself, I think Trump represents a new low, but not by much, he's just the next increment in what history will probably call the Altman Era if his ascent to arbitrary power on zero substance continues on it's current trajectory.

I'm sorry, but to blame Intel's inadequacies on political climate is comedic.

Trump causes uncertainties in some areas but I would not say that fab investment or factories is one of those areas. The democratic president after Trump has pretty much kept the exact same course as Trump, even going so far as continuing to build the border wall that Trump started, continuing the tariff behavior as you noticed too and certainly they will continue to want chips factories at home in the US. That much is already clear when you look at what the democrats say and do. I would struggle to find anything other than deportation or tax schemes that the next president will change. And even there.. it's not like the democrats changed the so called Trump tax cuts "for the rich" when they were in power. One main area that comes to mind that democrats will attempt to change are social issues like policies around sports for trans people or bathrooms or POC/LGBT specific funding. As much as they (quite hilariously) keep telling everyone else to stop caring about this supposedly fringe issue, that's really the first thing they will probably try to reimplement. I still remember how Biden, in his ~1st week in office, immediately implemented farmer funding specifically for POCs. It's so absurd but this seems to be what they care about most, essentially on its face racial policies.

Only if that activist investor acts with decisiveness, vision, long-term goal orientation, and demonstrates consistently high-integrity behavior.

What has much more commonly produced good outcomes in such situations is robust public-private partnerships like the ones that produced the semiconductor industry in the first place. Run the list of innovations in strategically key technology and what will you find at one remove in every instance? The DoD, NASA, the Labs and ATT more broadly, the university system.

It's always a public/private partnership during periods of explosive value creation when the stakes are high, and it's always a private sector capture orgy during periods of extractive stagnation like the present.

Intel needs a full-time board that gives a shit about whether the company succeeds. You could populate that board with nearly any combination of capable founder types and you'd get far better results.

The current board is a pack of cargo-culting epitaph writers.

Imho activist investors are usually about cutting investment in the future, maximizing the current accessible profits, collecting a wad of cash, then letting the company die while moving off to be active on another board.

From what I could gather while I was inside (2010-ish, but not directly involved with chip product lines) there was just incredible hubris company wide. "Intel Architecture is the best because we made it and we're the best" essentially.

They were wasting a ton of time and effort eagerly trying to convince Apple to put IA into phones despite obvious failures to deliver power-effective chips (Atom being the result of these efforts from what I understand). They were spending a lot of time and money trying to start up like a junk ware app-store thing for PCs that they could use OEM relationships to peddle, as if the PC ecosystem belonged to them the way that Android did to Google or Apple's ecosystem to Apple, not realizing that if anyone has that power it's Microsoft (but they also don't).

It was pretty shocking coming from a hacker/cyberpunk culture where everybody had been dunking on Intel designs for over a decade. (I personally had been waiting for an ARM laptop since around 2000.) A lot of leadership I got to interact with were business/people-people types that truly seemed to believe that the best product boiled down entirely to social perception of status and has zero basis in reality. Basically the company seemed to be high on the Intel Architecture's accidental monopoly over personal computing thanks to PC-WinTel becoming so dominant (and Apple's later capitulation) and seemed to believe that it was all because of their "genius" Intel Inside marketing campaigns (which were pure social status signaling, but with an effect of avoiding price competition with lower-cost IA rivals AMD,Citrix,VIA and holding power over OEMs rather than being responsible for the market situation around IA in the first place).

Maybe something in the Hillsboro/Beaverton area's water? Both they and Nike seem to entirely consist of a diet of their own farts.

This isn't very surprising. Intel has already been making their GPUs at TSMC for quite a while now (I believe using N4). Porting and validating that GPU to Intel fabs would be expensive and take a lot of time.

There is talk about the next version of Arc using 18a. If it does, I'd expect Intel to move that generation's compute tiles to 18a as well.

Has it been confirmed that the compute section is exclusively TSMC? My limited searching turned up nothing definitive and wasn't clear about if there would be a mix of 18A and TSMC N2 in all processors or if this was a contingency plan for increased volume or if this was a fallback in case 18A falls through.

They just farmed out the compute section of Nova Lake to TSMC which is a sad statement

Apple farms out its displays to Samsung, a competitor. It's just how business is done.

Didn't they commit to that quite some time ago?

Do they have foundry customers? Serious question; I remember Gelsinger's IFS announcement and that they had some launch partners, but haven't seen much since.

I used to say "Never bet against Intel", it was because everytime they seemed to be behind they would pull something out and regain the loss in short order.

But so far nothing of the sort has happened for a long time. If feels like ever since Ryzen landed, they have been desperate to catch up but keep tripping on themselves. Losing Apple, while inevitable, has made them look even more irrelevant. They still do decent stuff for the most part but there isnt anything really exciting.

I do like what they are doing with Arc GPUs but it is clear those are loss leaders and it isnt really gaining that much traction.

Alas, this is a story where we will have a better understanding in five years from now.

The rumor is that Intel might not offer 18a to external customers rather than getting rid of 18a itself. A lot of this seems to be due to their design libraries still being quite proprietary and not much to do with the viability of the process itself.

It's not about how soon 14a and 10a come out, but rather about how good they are when they arrive. 14a will be competing against TSMC A16 in late 2026 and 10a will be competing with TSMC A14 in late 2027. The measure of Intel's success will be whether they are gaining or losing vs TSMC.

On the customer front, I think customers are probably necessary to offset the ever-increasing R&D costs and an extra year or two to work on making their libraries more standardized may be best for everyone.

They're not scrapping 18A. Panther Lake is slated to be manufactured on 18A. The rumors are about Intel giving up on finding Foundry customers for 18A, and instead targeting 14A for Foundry.

Price/performance, not node is what matters.

How long ago did nm numbers stop being descriptions of size of chip and start being purely marketing names? About a decade?

Yeah. That is what happen when I post it just before I felt asleep. Too late now can't edit it.

The last time I built a PC was around a decade ago but I always bought AMD simply because they were cheaper for equivalent performance in the middle. Getting an adequate CPU for hundreds of dollars cheaper than the higher-end Intel chips meant that I could afford the second-highest-end GPU that NVidia had at the time. This made a lot more sense for gaming workloads as $300 towards the GPU had a much bigger effect on frame rate than $300 towards the CPU.

These days iGPUs run pretty much any game I care to play so it doesn't matter.

Athlon 64 competed with first-gen Core, but Core 2 thru Sandy Bridge is what left AMD in the dust for 10 years.

In the past we had only x86 and they were produced by AMD and Intel, no other serious competitor left. Of course in that market it will swing back and forth between these two. The stronger competitor will not go for the kill due to government intervention.

Now we are in a different situation. There are several big competitors using ARM instead of x86. The software world is actually transitioning away from x86 in masses. Apple does their own CPUs better than Intel. AMD outsourced production already. Everybody is pumping money into TSMC who are are already ahead of Intel and they are moving faster.

Either Intel gets a really really lucky run with their new technology or they need to split off the foundry business. The government may put it on life support until TSMC themselves may run into serious problems.

The better way into the future may be to split up TSMC in multiple redundant and competing companies.

AMD had been gradually working their way up for a long time - the K6-III was an excellent CPU for the time.

They made the amd64 architecture. Let’s not forget that.

That’s a big if.

“If Intel can just get this next node they’ll be sitting pretty” is what people have been saying for over a decade isn’t it?

Just getting the nodes working and producing enough chips has been a huge issue for them, let alone having good chip designs on top of that.

“No one got fired for choosing Intel” has stopped applying. They’re even losing server marketshare, which was their rock.

I used to be a die-hard Intel customer, and recommended to everyone that asked me what to but, to buy Intel. That has changed. Now it's price/performance that matters more than brand. Intel also had a few missteps that made the brand lose a bit of its luster.

My most recent computer is AMD Ryzen based, but we just bought an Intel-based Dell for my partner because the price/performance was better than comparable AMD machines at the time, possibly due to a sale. But the Intel chip is a lot faster than my laptop, so now I'm a little bit jealous of the Intel machine.

AMD lost their foundry business on the way. To keep the foundry competitive you need a lot cash rolling in or you're out. Either they become competitive soon, somebody keeps pumping billions in for many years, or they're out and lose their foundry.

Intel as a brand may survive in some shape or form but it's not looking good for the foundry.

> A big part of AMD's turnaround was going fabless.

Part of it, sure, but they were still fabless and in the ditch before Zen. Unless you're referring to going with TSMC instead of GloFo as going fabless.

What I don't get is: When AMD fabless is profitable and GlobalFoundries is profitable, why where AMD with the fab not?

Switching to TSMC broke their negative feedback loop, though. In the past AMD could be relied on to somehow not have the money to invest in their fabs at some point, resulting in another Intel era.

Nowadays, there will be another process node from TSMC. If AMD doesn’t pay for the R&D, TSMC’s other customers (like Apple and… actually, Intel) will instead.

Yup, though it's been never such a good run for them by far. Granted things were moving much faster back then overall, but amd has been dominating for 7 years now.

The problem for Intel is all the growth since mid 2000s is non PC.

I think it also shows that fabs who only have one customer (ie, Intel) aren't as competitive because they can't provide as much scale and are more sensitive to that customer's success.

Intel's fab would be doing much better if it spun it out a while ago and was making Intel, Nvidia, and Apple chips right now.

> IDK if they are working on new fabs at this point

Yes, they are.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/semiconductors/in...

Definitely struggling, but still in the game.

How does this scale? TSMC can't literally be the only fab in the world...

>> Intel might still run fabs, but they'll be mostly contracting them out to people who want cheap ASICs and 10 year old fab tech.

Intel fabs have never had to be as cost effective as others. They were selling top end chips for top dollar for decades. I bet there are 10 other companies that can make 45nm chips cheaper than Intel can on their old equipment. I could be wrong.

>There are dozens if not hundreds of fabless semiconductor companies.

How many of them develop high performance x64-64 cores?

>Owning fabs is the only thing that makes Intel special IMO.

Maybe if you ignore they're the only player with remotely competitive discrete GPU IP for graphics and AI, after the Nvidia and AMD duopoly.

yeah that might happen

I mean for gaming there is already the Ryzan Max+395 which already is beyond the level of low end graphics (at least if placed in a desktop where it's not heat/power throttled). But it's a bit of a unicorn (especially if you look for a system where it can run full throttle).

but I'm not sure about the beat nVidea part, nVidea has some experience with putting ARM CPUs on their graphic cards and as far as I remember on for their server center solutions there is one which pairs up graphic cards (and their RAM) over PCIe and mostly cuts out the CPU

2027-28 is the high danger range. (Davidson Window https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2021/07/03/closing... )

Honestly, I like it. It gives Taiwan revenue to be able to defend itself from an aggressor.

Because Windows has a pants on head design choice where processes that aren’t the active window get shunted onto the e cores regardless of whether they are doing lots of work or not. I halfway suspect that this is intended as a market segmentation trick by MS

That became abundantly clear when Jim Keller walked in and out so quickly.

Hahaha that would nail the coffin shut!

There were lawsuits against Intel for IP theft in the news 25+ years ago. It is hard to find articles on them these days as web searches are biased toward recent events, but I was able to find this:

https://www.nytimes.com/1997/05/14/business/suit-by-digital-...

There were much more discussion of Intel stealing things in the 90s than today.

Nvidia is literally the most valuable company on the planet. That doesn't mean $100B market cap is anything to sneeze at.

AIPAC was founded in 1954.

I mean, if I thought I had a plan to be the guy who saves Intel from it's own mistakes, I'd be optimistic too.

Also, I looked into the claim when he had said it, apparently he was being intentionally misleading about it, and the press tried to ask what he meant: he was speaking tensor performance on future enterprise Arc card products at datacenter scale, ie, AI bait.

In early 2021, Nvidia's compute flagship was the A100, 19.5 FP32 MAD TFLOPs, but the misleading number they quote in marketing is the tensor performance of 312 TFLOPs of FP16 accumulates. That would be about 3.2 million of these at tensor perf.

Skipping H series, in late Nov of last year, their new flagship is the B200. 124 FP32 MAD TFLOPs, 2250 tensor FP16 accumulate TFLOPs. That is now 445k cards to reach zettascale if using tensor cores. You won't be fitting ~1400 GPU-laden machines in a single datacenter, but the number is becoming more manageable.

They improved, in 3.5 years, 7.2x.

Lets say Nvidia does this again. 3.5 years, again, would put you in early 2028, and they manage another 7.2x win: that could be 62k cards across 7.7k. That absolutely is doable in a single datacenter.

The problem is, and this is where the prediction actually falls apart, not that its impossible: We don't know what future Arc cards look like, nor enterprise ones. Battlemage is an improvement over Alchemist, so the tech *is moving forwards at, but either Celestial or Druid was supposed to introduce the enterprise compute card variants, but that seems to be dead, and no indication either of those lines will even see the light of day now. The new CEO seems to be hard set on making Xe for iGPU only.

I can't find any hard numbers on Intel's tensor units, but apparently they're actually competitive. I can find the normal FP32 MAD numbers, and it ends up that Intel is 13.5w per TFLOP and Nvidia is 8 and both companies have equal efficiency in transistor usage. Assuming Intel made a B200 competitor, and assuming the higher power usage is due to voltage (Intel B series voltage is similar to Series 40's voltages, which is a lot higher than equivalent enterprise/pro series cards), Intel could be making a card that's somewhere in the ballpark as 2/3 as good for the same power usage.

So, in the end, yes, I don't agree with his claims of future Zettascale at Intel by 2027. I don't think he was wrong for the industry as a whole, however. If he would have said, say, 2030, I don't think we would be discussing this, that certainly would have been doable if he was at the helm and they kept doubling down on Arc every gen and everything went according to plan.

What is the alternative, except dependence on foreign countries for key economic inputs?

Betting some on Intel is very wise when the alternatives are, as I see it: 1) investing in TSMC building fabs and creating more of an employee knowledge base and skill base on shore, 2) hoping a US-based startup gets enough traction to grow.

Agreed on leadership. But selecting leadership teams, especially technically-grounded leadership teams is extremely difficult. Which is why companies revert to non-technical leadership so often.

Throwing good money after bad sounds like something governments are prone to do. Dysfunctions tend to grow as those who benefited from corruption have more money now to spend on more corruption.

Since Intel has been mismanaged for so long I don’t know how many good lower level employees they managed to retain, I doubt much would be left if they properly cleaned house.

The inability to make SOTA silicon chips domestically would be catastrophic in a event of a war in the east.

TSMC is making fabs in the US, but they are not SOTA fabs. Those are kept in Taiwan.

They actually haven’t meet the requirements to get CHIPS funding, and they kinda got screwed with a military deal reducing the amount CHIPS allocated for them if they do.

That being said the government will likely not allow them to fail completely out of the foundry business for geopolitical reasons

>Why is the government bailing them out then?

There wasn't any bailout on them, what do you mean?

Because there's a strategic benefit and the cost is practically negligible compared to the cost of this section of the economy going away.

That is the political calculation, not "throw good money after bad" kind of economics 101.

I'm surprised the US just doesn't fund a new fab company or consortium, like Japan did with Rapidus.

But I guess "too much socialism"

There's a nice interview with Mike Clark where he talks about this a bit. His take basically matches this. He says that, in his view, any efficiency benefits of ARM are just that's been the market for ARM. In his view, if x86 had a market motive for ARM levels of efficiency, they'd be able to deliver it. But, historically, the x86 market wants performance more than efficiency, so that's what it gets.

https://www.computerenhance.com/p/an-interview-with-zen-chie...

I don't think so. For example, if an ISA requires a strict memory ordering, this makes the architecture more complicated than an ISA with relaxed memory ordering, although the latter is a pain to write code for.

And yet Itanium flopped.

> It's at the microcode that the ISA lives and that's changeable.

No, it's not. In modern high-speed CPUs, many instructions are decoded directly, without going through the microcode engine. In fact, on several modern Intel CPUs, only one of the instruction decoders can run microcode ("complex") instructions, while all the other decoders can only run non-microcode ("simple") instructions.

It would be more precise to say that it's at the "front-end" part of the core (where the decoders are) that the ISA lives, but even that's not quite true; many ISAs have peculiarities which affect beyond that, like flags on x86.