Losing 16 billion dollars totally has nothing to do with this at all. Its time for Pat to pursue some creative hobbies at home, enjoy his retirement, and be with his family. There are no American troops in Baghdad, everything is fine, Intel is fine, and will soon be back to doing great things. Just ask Userbenchmark, Intel products are the best in class and highly sought after. nVidia has no real advantage in the AI race, and Intel is just dominating.
That 16 billion is just a brief hiccup, company is totally about to do great.
Maybe now they can forget all the expensive chipmaking and get back to their core business of stock buybacks.
That’s probably the real reason. He was going to invest all that money instead of doing more stock buybacks. What an idiot!
With the CHIPS Act funding they can’t do stock buybacks.
It just frees up other money for buybacks that they would have had to waste on R&D.
the fact that you have to explain to people that money is fungible…
Well, at least one stupid fucker disagrees with that idea…
This simultaneously made me laugh and sad. Sad because I have heavy investments in Intel.
Well their stock price just jumped up after this announcement.
To less than what it was a month ago.
And more than what it will be next month.
This is the real lesson here and US taxpayer has to now pay for Intel CapEx.
These parasites are able to make “business” decisions that impact all of us with zero accountability.
Clown capitalism and no lessons learned.
Disgusting parasites are enabled here IMHO
While we’re at it, let’s go back to 10nm chips too. That’s Intel’s bread and butter. Phones get bigger every year. Why not transistors too?
userbenchmark should not be trusted.
My comment was dripping with sarcasm, I refer to them as “Loserbenchmark” most anytime they come up. Complete toolbag shill assholes over there, lol.
Are they still posting salt over AMD cpus spanking Intel haha
That shit started in 2017 and it got progressively more pathetic.
AMD wasting money on marketing… sure buddy, cope
Damn. I actually thought he might turn things around back when he was brought in. Their engineers have let them down, how did they fall so far behind after being so far ahead just 15 years ago?
They released the same 4 core CPUs for like 6 years in a row
Why innovate when line go up?
Profits go up if you don’t invest in your company but instead pay your shareholders. But at some point you atrophied your R&D so much you have fallen behind and then the question becomes, do you bleed it dry and sell it for parts, or revitalize by investing. And if revitalizing is still viable.
It’s almost like maximizing profits over everything isn’t a great idea.
If you are a shareholder that gets the payout and make a profit… it sure is. For everyone else… Who are we kidding. Fuck everyone else.
Yup, I was being sarcastic, but I appreciate the response
revitalize by investing
they are not investing… they need to raise capital to do that. currently they are praying US and german taxpayer will fund their CapEx.
Looks like US took note and this clown got sacked, which is good but enough.
Between boeing and intel… you corpo practices are being exposed for the pathetic extraction racket it is. at least boeing went out and raised 20b via share offering and gutted their shareholders.
Intel stock prolly too gutted to do that now tho lol
pathetic.
It was 8 years ago. AMD was on the verge of bankruptcy and Intel had been propping them up for years so they wouldn’t have to deal with the government going after them for having a total monopoly. If Zen had been a failure AMD wouldn’t have survived. I figured Intel had advanced stuff in the pipeline that they were just sitting on waiting for AMD to force their hand (because they were dicks like that). I was wrong.
Hey man, they just renamed their newest chips to have a completely different confusing naming scheme! What more innovation do you want?
I think we all thought that tbh. Intel let their hubris get them and this is the result.
They don’t have innovation anymore, I don’t know what they’re doing and I don’t think they do either.
I wish AMD would catch up in the GPU side of things so it wasn’t such a monopoly with NVIDIA but I guess we’ll see, I mean they did knock Intel down eventually so who knows maybe it’s possible.
That would have gone truly horrible if AMD did go bankrupt, that would have been a really dark timeline for all of us.
Honestly, I hope AMD-s shift to focus on lower end cards is successful. It should be considering the xx60 series (and performance equivalent) cards make up like 50% of the entire consumer GPU hardware? At least I think it was around 50 the last time I tried to sum up all the percentages of the Steam hardware survey. There’s definitely a huge market they can tap if they can bang-per-buck outprice Nvidia (and I guess also Intel). Maybe even bring down the ridiculous pricing of modern GPU-s.
Even if their cards offer better value than Nvidia at the low end, AMD still have an uphill battle to get people to switch. The brand recognition they have is insane, and for some reason people value dlss and frame gen very highly (wether it works well for their card and game or not).
Steam hardware survey is questionable. There’s a lot of computer cafes in east Asia where people login to their Steam accounts and happen to hit the survey. Those machines are often running very low end cards like the Nvidia 1050. This is common enough that the results are heavily skewed.
You can check yourself. I’m pretty sure the “cafe cards” amount to around 3-8% of the lowest end cards depending on whether we consider 1650 and 1060 as cafe cards. Obviously also excluding integrated cards because those I didn’t consider in the first place. On the other hand the current gen and last gen low end cards (xx50 and xx60) make up 25-28% of the market.
Also I don’t understand why you’d want to exclude cafe’s from the potential market? It’s not like internet cafes don’t upgrade their hardware. When they do upgrade they’re definitely going with the low end cards.
The issue is that they’re being counted extra times because of multiple people logging into the same machine.
How much RAM do you imagine internet cafe machines use? 8gb? 16gb? 32gb?
They’ve been smart in continuing to invest in datacenter cards and investing in open compute tooling to support them. Nvidia is at the top of the world and has a long way to fall, so if they start restricting supply of datacenter GPUs or simply charging too much that leaves plenty of market for Intel and AMD both to feast on and build up healthy product stacks to eventually surpass Nvidia.
On the flipside Nvidia is smart to be diversifying right now. Their forays into GPU servers with custom ARM CPUs might become fruitful in the long term, plus their networking investments really allow them to build a unique and compelling datacenter package
It’s a story that’s been repeating for decades now. Company creates a new market with new useful tech, run by engineers passionate about the tech, experiences exceptional growth, becomes large corporation, much larger than any competition. Uses relative wealth to keep competition from catching up. Eventually saturates market to the point where market growth doesn’t finance the growing R&D expenses (which were tuned assuming previous rate of growth would just continue). At some point, profit increases start coming from business/marketing side of things more than engineering side, resulting in MBAs and marketers getting more promotions and eventually control of the company. Then tech stagnates because they don’t think investing in R&D is as worthwhile. Also aren’t able to prioritize what R&D is still happening effectively because they don’t really understand the tech as well as engineers. But they tread water and even increase profits because they dominate the market.
Until competition that is engineering focused (often also made up of former engineers from the dominant company) catches up or creates a new market that makes theirs start going obsolete. Suddenly trouble, then they either pivot to quietly supporting businesses that continue using their products, or gets in trouble with the law because of increasingly anticompetitive practices.
Xerox could have owned the PC market but thought they could continue being a household name sticking with copiers. IBM outsourced everything and people eventually realized they didn’t need IBM.
FoxconnFairchild had two groups of engineers leave and create Intel and AMD when they were dissatisfied with how management was running the company. And now Intel coasted while AMD floundered and was completely unprepared for TSMC and AMD to make large technical leaps and surpass them.Foxconn had two groups of engineers leave and create Intel and AMD when they were dissatisfied with how management was running the company.
You’re thinking of Fairchild, not Foxconn.
William Shockley led the team that invented the transistor while at Bell Labs, and then went on to move back to his home state of California to found his own company developing silicon transistors, ultimately resulting in the geographical area becoming known as Silicon Valley. Although a brilliant scientist and engineer, he was an abrasive manager, so 8 of his key researchers left the company to form Fairchild Semiconductor, a division of a camera and imaging company with close ties to military contracting.
The researchers at Fairchild developed the silicon integrated circuit (Texas Instruments developed the first integrated circuit with germanium, but it turns out that semiconductor material wasn’t good for scaling and hit a dead end early on), and grew the company into a powerhouse. Infighting between engineers and management (especially east coast based management dictating what the west coast lab was doing) and Fairchild’s policy of not sharing equity with employees, led Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce (who had been 2 of the 8 who left Shockley for Fairchild) to go and found Intel, poaching a talented young engineer named Andy Grove.
Intel originally focused on memory, but Grove recognized that the future value would be in processors, so they bet the company on that transition to logic chips, just in time for the computer memory market to get commoditized and for Japanese competition to crush the profit margins in that sector. By the 90’s, Intel became known as the dominant company in CPUs. Intel survived more than one generation on top because they knew when to pivot.
Ah right, thanks for the correction!
We’re raking in money, why spend on R&D?
Man I hope Battlemage is an actually profitable launch, or at least not a massive loss. Otherwise who knows if the next CEO will axe their GPU line. People liked to fearmonger them killing Arc before, with with a new change in management I can actually see that happening.
I hope Intel gets their act together soon. We can’t have a monopoly on chips on the CPU or GPU space.
It’s baffling how fast they fell, since they had a monopoly for ~20 years.
They had untouchable market dominance from the mid 80’s through the mid 2010’s, so probably closer to 30 years.
AMD and Apple caught up on consumer PC processors, as the consumer PC market as a whole kinda started to fall behind tablets and phones as the preferred method of computing. Even in the data center, the importance of the CPU has lost ground to GPU and AI chips in the past 5 years, too. We’ll see how Intel protects its current position in the data center.
The competition for CPUs can be AMD vs ARM vs RISC-V. It doesn’t have to be between two x86 giants.
That’s better, not necessarily for instruction set reasons, but because ARM and RISC-V are more open to multiple companies stepping in to produce chips.
I’m personally excited about the actual engineering challenges that come next and think that all 3 big foundries have roughly equal probability of coming out on top in the next stage, as the transistors become more complex three dimensional structures, and as the companies try to deliver power from the back side of the wafer rather than the crowded front side.
Samsung and Intel have always struggled with manufacturing finFETs with the yields/performance of TSMC. Intel’s struggles to move on from 14nm led to some fun memes, but also reflected the fact that they hit a plateau they couldn’t get around. Samsung and Intel have been eager to get off of the finFET paradigm and tried to jump early to Gate All Around FETs (GAAFETs, which Samsung calls MBCFET and Intel calls RibbonFET), while TSMC sticks around on finFET for another generation.
Samsung switched to GAAFET for its 3nm node, which began production in 2022, but the reports are that it took a while to get yields up to an acceptable level. Intel introduced GAAFET in its 20A node, but basically abandoned it before commercial production and put all of its resources into 18A, which they last reported should be ready for mass production in the first half of 2025 and will be ready for external customers to start taping out their own designs.
Meanwhile, TSMC’s 3nm node is still all finFET. Basically the end of the line for this technology that catapulted TSMC way ahead of its peers. Its 2nm node will be the first TSMC node to use GAAFET, and they have quietly abandoned plans to introduce backside power in the generation after that, for their N2P. Their 1.6 nm node is going to have backside power, though. They’ll be the last to marker with these two technologies, but maybe they’re going to release a more polished process that still produces better results.
So you have the three competitors, with Samsung being the first to market, Intel likely being second, and TSMC being third, but with no guarantees that they’ll all solve the next generation challenges in the same amount of lead time. It’s a new season, and although past success does show some advantages and disadvantages that may still be there, none of it is a guarantee that the leader right now will remain a leader into the next few generations.
Especially one just a small naval visit from China.
Damn, this guy is utterly fantastic at ruining huge tech firms.
Eh, he was handed a company in a bad strategic place and he did not fix it.
Lisa Su was in a similar position when she took over AMD, but she managed it. While I don’t want to put too much emphasis on the CEO alone, AMD’s turnaround is quite remarkable. They very easily could have collapsed at one point.
He was handed a company in a horrible strategic place and he did the right things to fix it. Reinvest in process technology mainly. Those investments do not bear fruit overnight. They take years. Whoever replaces him could basically be a stuffed suit and will probably have some success if only from his investments starting to pay off. It’s too bad he didn’t get a few more quarters to see it happen.
Nah, they’re stuck. The most recent 2xx series Intel chips are actually on a better TSMC fab than what AMD’s 9000 series chips are using, but you wouldn’t know it from almost any benchmark available. Their architecture is just bad, and a fab improvement can’t even save it.
All they need to do is hold out and survive until China invades Taiwan and the chip foundry game will change overnight. I bet they’ll even get free access to TSMC patents just to try to get the west back into the chip lead. They won’t be allowed to fail at that point.
Though I don’t see the consumer semiconductor industry thriving after that.
China will never invade Taiwan. Taiwan has a backchannel protection deal with the US and China knows it.
China’s too smart to ‘invade’ Taiwan. There will be no tanks and helicopters invading. China / CCP may be assholes but they are also fucking smart.
Look at Hong Kong. There were no tanks or helicopters. Just steadily increasing political control. More or less the entirety of HK protested for weeks/months. It did fuck all.
That will be what happens with Taiwan. It won’t be an invasion. It will be a gradual slide.
Right now, USA officially supports the ‘One China’ policy to appease China even though we want Taiwan to be independent. It’s let us keep huge trade with China (which the Chinese also want/need) while we depend (and NEED) Taiwan for a lot of tech manufacturing especially computer chips.
Thing is, China has no desire to be dependent on us. They want us dependent on them for manufacturing, but don’t want to need that business. That’s why China is doing aggressive R&D on pretty much every high tech area they depend on the West for, trying to ensure that everything China needs can be made in China from Chinese tech. To do that they need to be able to design and manufacture the latest computer chips, which they currently can’t. But they’re pouring billions into figuring it out.
If China takes over Taiwan, either openly or covertly, they get TSMC. And that gives them all the chipmaking tech they need.
Don’t expect tanks. Expect state sponsored industrial espionage at TSMC and their own suppliers. Then expect Chinese chipmakers to flood the market with top-line or near-top-line hardware at low prices, which US won’t embargo and thus we’ll get even more dependent on China.
Lol the biggest reason you’re wrong to make that comparison is that Hong Kong was never its won country. Hong Kong was a British colony and then a Chinese special administrative region (SAR) given a degree of administrative autonomy by the Chinese government voluntarily as part of a treaty with the British. The treaty expired and then China decided to change the rules for Hong Kong.
Taiwan meanwhile was the territory that the Republic of China (RoC aka Nationalist China) held on to when it lost the Chinese Civil War against the People’s Republic of China (PRC aka Communist China) who now control the mainland. The PRC never controlled Taiwan and the RoC government which rules there does not answer to the PRC nor has it ever. The PRC and its Communist Party can claim that Taiwan is a rogue province all they want but that’s a lie. Taiwan is not theirs it was and still is under the government of the ROC even if the ROC has lost the rest of its territory to the PRC since the Civil War and World War 2.
Hong Kong’s city government allowed China to take more direct control because it always answered to China since the British gave it to China. Meanwhile the ROC government in Taiwan has never answered to the PRC and it never will. Opposing the PRC is literally one of the main goals of that government and country and I don’t think there are any major politicians there who want to join the PRC willingly nor would amy such politician be popular there.
Long story short the ROC (Taiwan) and Hong Kong are not even remotely comparable and the former won’t just accept any attempted takeover by the communists.
That depends on Trump giving a shit about protecting anyone. I wouldn’t be surprised at any outcome.
Trump hates China so he would do it just to show that he’s opposing it.
I agree and my comment had obviously no nuance. I’m still dealing with VMware fallout in my professional life which is on Broadcom but still, this dude had control of another huge sinking ship previously…
Yea, he was CEO of VMware from 2012 to early 2021. All the issues VMware has now came from broadcom buying them which happened well after he left.
VMware had some pretty cool stuff in the pipeline related to DPUs that would’ve been killer in hypervisor networking but I’m pretty sure that’s out the window post-acquisition.
Honestly with how good kvm and qemu have been getting and the number of competitors building hypervisor off of open source virtualization technologies it was probably a ticking time bomb before it fell to cheaper, freer competition. This way we have a bad guy to blame and not just pure corporate hubris
A I!
