Slashdot Asks: What Happened To Intel?
- Reference: 0175589077
- News link: https://ask.slashdot.org/story/24/12/04/0016257/slashdot-asks-what-happened-to-intel
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Analysts suggest the board may be considering splitting off Intel's foundry business, though such [2]a move could face scrutiny from the U.S. Commerce Department due to $8 billion in CHIPS Act funding. The Verge [3]adds :
> But Moorhead and Creative Strategies analyst Ben Bajarin both believe Gelsinger's departure was so sudden, it can't simply have been the straw that broke the camel's back. "There must have been a decision the board made that he was not going to stick around for," Moorhead tells me.
>
> His hunch: Intel's board may want to split off its foundry business entirely, above and beyond the spinoff that Gelsinger already announced, turning Intel into a company that simply designs chips like its direct rivals.
[1] https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/12/02/1427231/intel-ceo-gelsinger-exits-as-chip-pioneers-turnaround-falters
[2] https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/11/29/0529245/intel-required-to-keep-control-of-foundries-under-79-billion-chips-act-deal
[3] https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/3/24311594/intel-under-pat-gelsinger
When They Were 2nd, Karma Bit Their A$$es (Score:5, Insightful)
During the Bulldozer period, HPDT/Workstation/Gamers had to buy whatever marginally improved chip intel swept from the edge of the desk--for gouged prices. When AMD got their game back, and then Intel was 2nd, no one shed a tear.
Re:When They Were 2nd, Karma Bit Their A$$es (Score:5, Informative)
AMD destroyed intel multiple times over the past 20 years, starting with 64 bit processing. Intel has held dominance only because of its desktop deals.
Intels grip on them, probably with sweetheart deals to increase desktop profit of large prebuilts, had been propping them up in that market. Which maybe lead to their shitty 13/14 gen CPUs being shitty failure rate chips and them trying to hide it for up to 2 years.
This on top of the CEO that talked about how sweet their deal was with a chip manufacturer, causing the chip manufacturer to basically stop the deal and charge full price to Intel.
I would say that gluttony and hubris caused Intels fall in this area, as they basically didnt pay attention to it, didnt care, and thought they had enough dominance to openly gloat and thumb their noses.
Or in other words, INtel told desktop users "let them eat cake"
Re:When They Were 2nd, Karma Bit Their A$$es (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems at best incomplete to say that Intel 'held dominance only because of its desktop deals' given the breakdown in income (and often even more dramatically in margins) between their desktop and their datacenter lines; as well as the fact that they went from making substantial amounts of money to posting losses despite seeing the smallest marketshare reductions in desktop and mobile(both presumably because they do play a lot of hardball with the PC OEMs to encourage them to exclusivity or relegating AMD to the trash tier product lines; but also because the performance and efficiency differences are less dramatic in smaller, lower end parts: AMD's desktop and mobile parts have become vastly more credible with Zen and subsequent iterations; but Intel can knock out single die monolith parts pretty cheaply which makes them much more viable until you get to performance levels where the multi-chip ryzen parts are able to offset their packaging costs better than Intel is able to pump more power into 13 and 14900k dies.
The shift in desktop(from slightly over 10% AMD in first half of 2017 to slightly over 20% in second half of 2024) and mobile(from 10% to 20% between 2018 and 2024) is certainly noticeable; but it's server CPUs where the shift is most dramatic(~1%in 2017-2018; 24% in 2024) and where the shift in margins is downright brutal: Q2 2024 results for Intel were $3 billion for 76% of datacenter CPUs; AMD saw $2.8 billion on 24%.
That's an absolute bloodbath on the datacenter side(probably made worse by the number of AI hypebeasts who are spending less on CPUs in order to hit GPUs and 'AI' networking requirements harder): AMD went from basically not existing to making almost half the money between the 7001s and the 9005s.
Re: (Score:1)
A non sequitur (English: /nn skwtr/ non SEK-wit-r, Classical Latin: [non sktr]; "[it] does not follow") is a conversational literary device, often used for comedic purposes. It is something said that, because of its apparent lack of meaning relative to what preceded it,[1] seems absurd to the point of being humorous or confusing.
Re:Did he use the word "woman"? (Score:5, Insightful)
That has zero to do with problems that stem back to when chipzilla saw Andy Grove retire. They fought every competitor like dogs to retain their throne. Innovation was about acquisitions, not innovation. They stagnated, bought endless number of seeming cash cows only to watch them die. They bought great software, only to kill it. They bought lots of stuff, but at the center, the chip innovations made didn't work. Mitre/Sceptre ate their lunch, as cache prediction and instruction pre-fetch designs were suddenly found to be deeply flawed.
They couldn't build low power chips. They missed the ARM revolution and every phone has ARM in it because they missed that boat. Every serious GPU is built by NVIDIA because they didn't pay attention to building GPU software ecosystems and GPU libs.
At every conceivable turn, Intel scratched its balls instead of being at the forefront of various revolutions-- and it was theirs to lose, and they did. They sacked any number of CEOs like bad football coaches. Their core revenues ran out of fuel, the cash cows starved, dead, or murdered on acquisition.
They blew it for two decades, but the core patents and antique fabs kept going and going. Gelsinger was the wrong guy to hire. He should've slashed, burned, regrouped vastly, and try to re-invigorate what was once a pioneering spirit of very capable engineers and thinkers. Didn't happen. Hope someone has butter and jam, because they are toast.
Re: (Score:3)
Your comment hilights how quickly Intel moved away from Andy Grove's [1]leadership style: [wikipedia.org]
> "Grove popularized the concept of the "strategic inflection point," a crucial time that demands a major change in strategy due to shifts in the business environment. A company's growth depends on recognizing and effectively navigating these points."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Strategic_inflection_points
Re:Did he use the word "woman"? (Score:4, Informative)
They also spent $100 billion in stock buybacks. [1]https://www.calcalistech.com/c... [calcalistech.com]
[1] https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/bypn9cdrc
Why would anyone buy Intel right now? (Score:2)
Why would anyone buy an Intel CPU over an AMD CPU when team red is so much better?
Re: (Score:2)
There have been reports of OEMs unhappy with supply, particularly for laptop parts(not really an enormous surprise when AMD has to choose how to divide their chunk of TSMC's attention between client margins and datacenter margins, along with the presumably longer term contracts for the semi-custom APUs in everyone except Nintendo's current-gen consoles.
That, along with low to midrange desktops, is also where Intel's offerings are at their most credible. The persistent attempts by some vendors to depict a
Re: (Score:2)
Laptop OEMs are still enjoying deep discounts on 10nm parts from Intel. AMD is charging.a lot for new products like Strix Point (not so much for previous gen Hawk Point).
Take supply complaints from OEMs with a grain of salt.
Server-Wise, AMD is Cheaper (Score:3)
While server motherboards can cost $1000, alone, and while they aren't giving away server CPUs, memory is huge expense. AMD has usually let you upgrade the CPU once, saving motherboard and RAM costs, while Intel is basically a one-shot deal. This also affects the choice of parts too.
If you think that RAM isn't a big deal, then please make arrangements to send me a MB/RAM/CPU combo, to my sig. I need, absolutely need 256GB of RAM, want 512GB or better for doing OpenFoam Computation Fluid Dynamics tests on a home-spun car body. If I had 1-2 TB of RAM, that would get the unbiased mesh down about 1mm, which is at the point of diminishing returns.
Re:Server-Wise, AMD is Cheaper (Score:4, Informative)
Que? Both Intel and AMD have been on a "multiple generations of CPUs per motherboard socket" routine for a long time now.
Intel:
- Sandy Bridge then Ivy Bridge [LGA2011]
- Haswell then Broadwell [LGA2011-3]
- Sky Lake then Cascade Lake [LGA3647]
- Cooper Lake then Ice Lake [LDA4189]
- Sapphire Rapids then Emerald Rapids [LGA4677]
AMD:
- Opteron/Bulldozer [G34 - ZIF1944]
- Zen, Rome, Milan [SP3 - ZIF4094]
- Genoa, Bergamo, Turin [SP5 - ZIF6096]
If you're talking about support for O(1TB) of memory, I assume you're referring to server parts because until pretty recently even most server motherboards didn't implement enough physical memory address lines to support 1TB.
Re: (Score:2)
Nobody really bought Cooper Lake though.
Re: (Score:2)
My work has a shared development server from about 2020, with dual xeon cpu's and 1TB of RAM
It's just an average multi-socket HP server I think.
Same thing as Google (Score:5, Interesting)
They had some competent people in charge, a good product. But the leeches started coming in to management, more interested in grabbing what they could than improving the company (or making the world a better place). These people had more skills in backstabbing their coworkers than in running a competent business.
Once the competent people retired, the leeches took over the place and didn't know how to keep it running. They fired a bunch of their smart technical people, cutting the wheels out from under their bus.
Really, the amazing thing is that Intel managed to keep going for two decades after that happened. They had some strong inertia.
Re: Same thing as Google (Score:3)
Funny how that keeps happening
Re: (Score:2)
Happened when McDonnell Douglas execs took over Boeing.
It's mind boggling how someone thought it was a good idea to not fire the management of the failing McDonnell, and keep the Boeing execs.
Re: (Score:2)
> fould to deal with national policy (which isn't really meaningfull)
Boy, you got that right.
Re: (Score:2)
> Simply chip manufacturing is not profitable
Tell that to TSMC
Simple (Score:3)
Competition happened.
Intel's had plenty of blunders over the years. Remember when [1]2+2 didn't have to equal 4 [wikipedia.org]? Good times, good times.
But through all their mistakes, there was never anyone who was really poised any threat to overtake them. AMD was the only real competition in the early aughts, but even they discovered how hard it was to really dethrone Intel. Like, impossibly hard.
But no dynasty lives forever, and eventually their winning streak came to an end. They spent way too long trying to figure out how to shrink their fab below 10nm, and others caught up then surpassed them. Now it's rebuilding time...if they can afford to do so.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug
Three and half years and no turnaround (Score:3)
Still losing money. Still losing in servers to AMD and ARM. Missing the AI boat completely despite spending billions on 2 separate AI startups. And now AMD and Qualcomm are really pushing to muscle in on Windows laptops, the last place Intel really makes money without a lot of competition. Whether silicon fabs work or not the man failed elsewhere given almost 4 years of tenure.
Intel actually isn't doomed... (Score:3)
They are being compared to Nvidia and the massive AI bubble they are riding. They are in the middle of some bad PR and bad execution for sure, but it's really a lot of short pressure from investors that want "all the money now" versus long term growth and investment in fabs and more reasonable investments in AI acceleration. Frankly, when the AI bubble pops, NVidia will be way more exposed to downward market pressure than Intel and AMD.
They have a very good story on the newest Xeons and has a really good roadmap overall. And AMD is putting good pressure on them to get on top of things.
Intel would do well to spin the foundry side back in and shore it up and frankly, they should get more government support to do so. Having TSMC be the only source of high end fabrication is not a good thing. Yea, it's protectionist, but in this case, I think that's a good thing.
Too many stock buybacks (Score:4, Insightful)
They couldn't keep up with AMD because they were starved for capital after years and years of taking money and using it for stock buybacks in order to artificially boost share price and line the big shareholders and CEO pockets.
It also meant they couldn't take any useful risks like outbidding AMD for the PS4 contract. To be fair consoles tend to be low profit margin because as the console life cycle continues there's pressure to make cheaper CPUs and GPUs but still that didn't happen this time around with console prices staying pretty high allowing AMD to consistently make money off the hardware.
They also dragged their feet getting into the GPU market so they're too far behind to really take advantage of the Bitcoin and AI bubbles. Again they didn't have a lot of money lying around to take risks with because so much money was tied up in stock buybacks.
There's a good reason stock buybacks used to be illegal and why they should be now. But our economy is going to be such a mess for the next 4 years it hardly matters
Intel never managed to make a decent GPU (Score:3)
That has been the core problem for the past 25 years or so.
Intel was always pushing second class GPUs with a lot of buzzwords.
But when it came down to performance, they never managed to build something that came close to nVidia or AMD.
Chaos (Score:1)
Anyone else notice that ever since Chris died, the world has been going downhill?
American Business practices (Score:3)
next,
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
> Well I haven't followed Intel downfall much so I had to idea to do a quick search to find this:
> [1]https://www.intel.com/content/... [intel.com]
> As usual, go woke go broke. That's what happened to Intel!
> Canada is very close to bankruptcy with woke Trudeau as another example but USA had a chance to fix this earlier and they logically did.
Talk about a classist comment
actually, the lack of ethics is what lead to this, not social conscience and social responsibility
all you greedy political fundamentalists are the problem, trying to make ethics a dirty word
[1] https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/diversity/diversity-at-intel.html
Re: (Score:2)
Counter points:
[1]https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/a... [nvidia.com]
[2]https://www.tsmc.com/static/en... [tsmc.com]
[3]https://www.amd.com/en/corpora... [amd.com]
[4]https://www.asml.com/en/compan... [asml.com]
need I continue?
[1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/about-nvidia/careers/diversity-and-inclusion/
[2] https://www.tsmc.com/static/english/careers/inclusive_workplace.htm
[3] https://www.amd.com/en/corporate/corporate-responsibility/diversity-belonging-inclusion.html
[4] https://www.asml.com/en/company/sustainability/people/diversity-and-inclusion
Re: (Score:2)
classism breeds corruption which produces incompetency
Lifecycle of Human Institutions (Score:3)
I think it is more the general life cycle of any human institution like a company. Once you get so large and far ahead of the competition you either get complacent and/or too big to change and adapt allowing the competition to catch up and overtake or you get drunk on success and start doing crazy stuff.