Wow! Some weed smoking a happening! The fabrication facilities heavily rely on the x86 juggernaut to keep it viable. If Intel was to split itself and then contract out all its x86 business to the lowest bidder then IFS would fall away like GF has.
That is a weird statement. GloFo was 4th to a 14nm-class node, and was on track to be 4th to a 14nm-class node for at least half a decade. Two seconds on Wikipedia shows GloFo "second sourced" their 22nm and 14nm, one of which came from STMicro (and went to Samsung first) and the other of which came from Samsung.
Intel is either 2nd or 3rd, with a pretty compelling 4nm launch demonstrating comparable density from their "4nm" performance libraries to Samsung's average across all of their 3nm libraries.
Those aren't remotely the same thing. If Samsung lays another egg, we could legitimately see Nvidia build its consumer product on Intel 1.8nm.
Intel's 4 isn't fake, but it is incomplete. We'll see what their 3nm does to finish the node. Intel 7 was a very good DUV node but obviously TSMC's EUV 7nm and refined 6nm outclassed it. Samsung's 8nm was easily as bad though, and while they have less wins total compared to 8nm (in part because TSMC scaled up 5nm quite well), they still have customers.
Intel's IO tiles and SoC tiles were TSMC 6 because TSMC 6 is strictly superior to Intel 7 in lower-power scenarios. Intel 4 literally doesn't have low power libraries, so that was off the table too.
Intel's GPU was supposedly originally going to be TSMC 3nm, which Intel fully admits it doesn't have an answer to right now. The tile instead got backported to 5nm (at least that's what I read) and was part of why Meteor Lake slipped. Porting from TSMC to Intel is not trivial at this time, and Intel 4 is low enough volume right now that there's no way that work was getting done.
All of this to say -- Intel pragmatically went with the market leader for substantial parts of their newest CPU. None of that changes that they're still not in 4th place, and they're arguably tied for 2nd given how poor Samsung's recent track record has been. Samsung's early GAA attempts on 3nm might end up being their Intel 10nm patterning.
Nothing in Intel 4 is all that ambitious, and the same can mostly be said for Intel 3. Intel 1.8, again we'll see, but "neck and neck for 2nd place" is a reasonable place to be. You can make a lot of money in 2nd place. 4th place starts to get into commodity territory.
You are delusional. Intel may well be first to gate all around nodes mass production. TSMC has been in the lead for just a few years compared to the sweep of 50+ years Intel has been around...
Intel fell behind AMD in the P4 era, then it was better than AMD, then it was worse. I think people who say things like this haven't been around long enough to even remember. I suspect you weren't even alive in the 90s or at most were a small child.
legend has it (I recall reading the quote, but can't find it right now) that the Intel CEO at the time had this to say: I'd rather have the 8086 in every Ford than every PC.
which makes sense, if one believed the ~2,500 sales expectations of IBM (and no clone yet considered).
and it wasn't the PC that made itself: it was 1-2-3 which was written to MS/DOS assembler alone. Mitch made both Uncle Bill and Mr. Blue rich
This rhetoric of "the pc made intel" and not the other way around is just a bunch of BS by people who don't know what they are talking about and weren't around in the 80s to see it happen. IBM was looking for a supplier, and Intel made a HUGE bet (they essentially bet the whole company) that they could pivot from memory to CPUs and be successful that way. The x86 instruction set was designed to reduce memory usage and provide programmers with maximum flexibility. Back on those days, memory was extremely limited and VERY expensive. They bet the company that they could make the chip on time, in high volumes, and cheap enough for mass market PCs. Then they delivered on their promise. The low cost and strong supply of CPUs from Intel opened the door for many different companies to make PCs which drove the price down and caused massive growth in the industry.
"In fact the PC didn't require even the x86 architecture to do that"
the Moto 68xxx chips made more sense, technically, but Intel gave (well, begged for) IBM a better deal. again, it would have made no difference. the quality of the chip wasn't what made the 8086/8 lusted for, it was 1-2-3 and Mitch would have written it in whatever assembler was available. little remembered fact - for the first few years (may be 2) IBM would sell the PC with whatever OS the user wanted (well, among 3) - UCSD p-System, CP/M 86, or PC/DOS. Uncle Bill owes Mitch a large debt, since Mitch wasn't going to write 3 versions of 1-2-3 and chose PC DOS for reasons I don't recall.
"PC was steam-rolling its way with or without Intel"
without 1-2-3, IBM would have been right - 2,500 units/year would have been about right; a Tonka steamroller, at best. the PC was envisioned as a miniature (very, very) mainframe - the user would write bespoke code to do bespoke tasks, just smaller. the notion that the PC would end up being an appliance where the 'user' ran some packaged code (bunches of them, it turned out) was never considered. what's odd, of course, is that there already was a spreadsheet package in fairly wide use, but on 8 bit machines: VisiCalc. it was so common that Mitch copied most of it to make 1-2-3. lawsuits ensued.
"With the significant capital required to scale up the chip fab side of the business, it's a decision that, even today, Intel executives still get asked about."
Putting that at arms length doesn't change the problems. Plus they'd have to go head to head with others for the same customers.
Bingo. We already saw this in action with GloFo: "Oh no, fitting out for new processes is getting expensive!" "Let's sell off our fab arm, then we don't need to pay for new processes ourselves!" "Whoopee, now we don't have to invest in fab upgrades but we get the upgrades for free" "What, the lack of investment in fab upgrades means there AREN'T any fab upgrades? We're stuck on 14nm until we can port our architecture to a new process, company, AND design toolchain?"
Their most important architectures for profitability (Atom, whatever their NPU name is, and Arc) are already ported and I'm sure that they have assessed the viability of moving Core over as well. They are not living off a shoestring budget and hoping their last shot at a viable consumer product lands before they hit literally 0 ODM wins. They are absolutely not in AMD's position.
To support the capital expenditure, Intel needs scale. Once upon a time, the PC business was the biggest user of logic chips and x86 dominated the PC, so Intel operated at the largest scale.
Today, the smartphone business is the largest scale user of logic chips, and x86 is nonexistent in smartphones. Taking smartphone SOC business away from TSMC isn’t impossible, but it would be very hard and would require intel to make risky business decisions.
But training AI models is now a rapidly growing business and much closer to Intel’s comfort zone than smartphones. There are many companies designing chips for AI, so it’s a competitive space. But it still might be easier for intel to attain sufficient scale through a combo of x86 and AI than by taking smartphone customers away from TSMC.
So I guess my point is — Intel needs greater scale to support the capex. AI might be the best way to get there.
It doesn't matter. Intel can fab AI chips and ARM CPUs. The x86 part of the combo is Intel fabbing their own stuff, and theoretically some of AMD's according to their public statements but that's not likely.
I haven't kept up with the foundry news for quite a while. Has there been any information on what actually happened that caused them to suffer so much with their process nodes? Going from being ahead of everyone by quite a distance, to being a good chunk behind.
If I remember correctly, there were some posts here and there that they went the wrong direction with 10 nm and hence had to basically start from almost scratch, which in turn caused a delay with future nodes, although they didn't say what exactly went wrong (at least in the ones I read). They could've been just guesses though and not based on anything concrete.
Intel admitted they tried to do too many new features in 10nm at once. They definitely didn't start from scratch, but their ambitious targets for 10nm were highly competitive with TSMC 7 despite not using EUV with the node. Intel relaxed a bunch of the node's measurements and landed a lot closer to Samsung's 8nm (but without the heat problems), which was also a DUV node.
At this point, any mistakes Intel commits are from unfamiliarity with EUV.
I seem to recall that intel made several other mistakes. They laid off experienced engineers to briefly inflate quarterly profits; they didn’t compete as aggressively as they could have in the smartphone SOC market; and they skimped on capex. All of that to inflate short term profits and executive bonuses.
If they could have had another Andy Grove as CEO, I bet they’d be in much better shape today. Gelsinger wants to be Grove-like, but it’s definitely an uphill clim.
Failing to spin off the fabs is going to go down as one of the stupidest business decisions of all time. If Intel had spun off in 2021, the fabs would’ve been worth $500B+ on the market - more than the combined company is now. It also would’ve solved Intel’s anti-trust problems.
Instead, Intel runs a business that most customers are not stupid enough to buy from, because of Intel’s abusive history. TSMC and Samsung are better partners across the board, why on god’s green earth you would open your design portfolio and order book to Intel, one of the most savage companies in the industry, is beyond reason.
Gelsinger needs to be fired, and replaced with someone who has a better understanding of the strategic and financial landscape of the *future* of the industry. He’s 30 years out of date.
I doubt IFS is going to get any significant volume of customers until it spins off.
The potential for IP / Intellectual theft is too high, especially given Intel's dirty / savage history.
So, until IFS commits to the same seperation of "Church/State" or "Manufacturing/ASIC Design" as TSMC did so long ago, it's going to have a hard time finding customers.
The problem with focusing on scale, is that it's often assumed to be a one-sided win: the more the better. But it ain't so. Fact is that capitalists, for the last couple of hundred years, have made the money from replacing humans with machines. Once the BoM has only vanishingly small amount of labour in it, generating profit from labour substitution gets dicey. Withall, the only way to get close to profit is to run said capital 24/7/365, and spit out maximum output. In order to do that, there need be sufficient demand for your widgets. Which isn't clear right these days. As the Great Depression, Great Recession, and garden variety recessions prove - it's the Demand, Stupid.
As some wag, somewhere, pointed out a while back: many, if not most, of the embedded chips will forever live on XXnm nodes and not the Node of The Month .Xnm; where it would be too small to see with the naked eye, and a bitch to mount. I sometimes think that the Desktop World has, really, gotten there too; niches like games and AI and whatever notwithstanding.
This. Recent history has shown it is easier to get a start-up going with industry leading chip design. The foundry business has a huge moat around and US government money to keep it going.
Regardless of what side of the isle or agreement you are on, it's important Intel have a competitive, independents manufacturing end in the United States for if anything but national security. 90% of the worlds advanced manufacturing happens in a country that is on the verge of being invaded by a nuclear-capable neighbor, with the outcome of Ukraine as a litmus test.
Maybe they’ll spin off their chip design business instead. It’s kind of a technicality as to what is spun off vs retained. Whatever entity loses the name “Intel” and Gelsinger as CEO has been spun off. So maybe Intel becomes a foundry led by pat Gelsinger while “80x86 Design” becomes a new chip design firm.
> Maybe they’ll spin off their chip design business instead. It’s kind of a technicality
You might be right about that. It sure would be shady for him to speak on such a technicality.
> Whatever entity loses the name “Intel”
Oh, the design firm must keep the name "Intel". That's where 98% of the brand's value lies.
As for the foundry business, I mean it's almost better if it drops any affiliation with Intel, since they want customers who are traditionally competitors of Intel's and constantly reminding them that they're doing business with a part of Intel won't help there.
> Intel mostly doesn’t sell direct to consumes so I’m not sure what brand value means for them.
Don't tell me you've never heard the phrase "Intel Inside" or seen the stickers!
> I wouldn’t underestimate the value of the manufacturing tech.
I'm not. I'm literally talking about the value of the name, itself. Consumers know the name Intel, and it's likely to weigh on their purchasing decisions.
In contrast, I'm sure fab customers don't care what a fab calls itself, so long as all of the details make sense.
The era of “intel inside” meaning anything to consumers is long gone. And I’m not sure it ever meant all that much on its own. Every time AMD has managed to make a competitive processor, they’ve been successful selling it despite “Intel inside” stickers. The nerds quickly figure out what the best product is, tell their friends, families, and bosses, and the better chip wins in the marketplace.
Intel’s past success was built on superior manufacturing, enabled by superior investment, enabled by economies of scale, enabled by huge demand, enabled by the PC market being the dominant driver of demand for logic chips for a few decades.
Today it’s more apparent than ever that manufacturing is the most important factor in the chip business. Lots of firms can design a decent chop and the barriers to entry are far more surmountable than manufacturing. TSMC surpassed Intel despite not having a”TSMC inside” marketing campaign and without x86 compatibility. They did it because smartphones surpassed PCs as the volume driver, and TSMC made deals that Intel wouldn’t make.
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ballsystemlord - Friday, December 15, 2023 - link
Now if only we knew what would become of their (arc) dedicated GPU division...tipoo - Tuesday, December 19, 2023 - link
They also just reiterated Battlemage is coming out and moving higher upballsystemlord - Wednesday, December 20, 2023 - link
Nice!evanh - Friday, December 15, 2023 - link
Wow! Some weed smoking a happening! The fabrication facilities heavily rely on the x86 juggernaut to keep it viable. If Intel was to split itself and then contract out all its x86 business to the lowest bidder then IFS would fall away like GF has.lmcd - Saturday, December 16, 2023 - link
That is a weird statement. GloFo was 4th to a 14nm-class node, and was on track to be 4th to a 14nm-class node for at least half a decade. Two seconds on Wikipedia shows GloFo "second sourced" their 22nm and 14nm, one of which came from STMicro (and went to Samsung first) and the other of which came from Samsung.Intel is either 2nd or 3rd, with a pretty compelling 4nm launch demonstrating comparable density from their "4nm" performance libraries to Samsung's average across all of their 3nm libraries.
Those aren't remotely the same thing. If Samsung lays another egg, we could legitimately see Nvidia build its consumer product on Intel 1.8nm.
zamroni - Tuesday, December 19, 2023 - link
do you mean fake 1.8nm?intel even use tsmc n5 and n6, instead of their fake 4, to produce the gpu, soc and io tiles of meteor lame.
lmcd - Friday, December 22, 2023 - link
Intel's 4 isn't fake, but it is incomplete. We'll see what their 3nm does to finish the node. Intel 7 was a very good DUV node but obviously TSMC's EUV 7nm and refined 6nm outclassed it. Samsung's 8nm was easily as bad though, and while they have less wins total compared to 8nm (in part because TSMC scaled up 5nm quite well), they still have customers.Intel's IO tiles and SoC tiles were TSMC 6 because TSMC 6 is strictly superior to Intel 7 in lower-power scenarios. Intel 4 literally doesn't have low power libraries, so that was off the table too.
Intel's GPU was supposedly originally going to be TSMC 3nm, which Intel fully admits it doesn't have an answer to right now. The tile instead got backported to 5nm (at least that's what I read) and was part of why Meteor Lake slipped. Porting from TSMC to Intel is not trivial at this time, and Intel 4 is low enough volume right now that there's no way that work was getting done.
All of this to say -- Intel pragmatically went with the market leader for substantial parts of their newest CPU. None of that changes that they're still not in 4th place, and they're arguably tied for 2nd given how poor Samsung's recent track record has been. Samsung's early GAA attempts on 3nm might end up being their Intel 10nm patterning.
Nothing in Intel 4 is all that ambitious, and the same can mostly be said for Intel 3. Intel 1.8, again we'll see, but "neck and neck for 2nd place" is a reasonable place to be. You can make a lot of money in 2nd place. 4th place starts to get into commodity territory.
drwho9437 - Sunday, December 17, 2023 - link
You are delusional. Intel may well be first to gate all around nodes mass production. TSMC has been in the lead for just a few years compared to the sweep of 50+ years Intel has been around...Intel fell behind AMD in the P4 era, then it was better than AMD, then it was worse. I think people who say things like this haven't been around long enough to even remember. I suspect you weren't even alive in the 90s or at most were a small child.
evanh - Sunday, December 17, 2023 - link
The PC made Intel, not the other way round.FunBunny2 - Wednesday, December 20, 2023 - link
legend has it (I recall reading the quote, but can't find it right now) that the Intel CEO at the time had this to say:I'd rather have the 8086 in every Ford than every PC.
which makes sense, if one believed the ~2,500 sales expectations of IBM (and no clone yet considered).
and it wasn't the PC that made itself: it was 1-2-3 which was written to MS/DOS assembler alone. Mitch made both Uncle Bill and Mr. Blue rich
evanh - Sunday, December 17, 2023 - link
The PC made Intel what it is today, I should say.evanh - Sunday, December 17, 2023 - link
Itanium proved that in spades.do_not_arrest - Wednesday, December 20, 2023 - link
This rhetoric of "the pc made intel" and not the other way around is just a bunch of BS by people who don't know what they are talking about and weren't around in the 80s to see it happen. IBM was looking for a supplier, and Intel made a HUGE bet (they essentially bet the whole company) that they could pivot from memory to CPUs and be successful that way. The x86 instruction set was designed to reduce memory usage and provide programmers with maximum flexibility. Back on those days, memory was extremely limited and VERY expensive. They bet the company that they could make the chip on time, in high volumes, and cheap enough for mass market PCs. Then they delivered on their promise. The low cost and strong supply of CPUs from Intel opened the door for many different companies to make PCs which drove the price down and caused massive growth in the industry.evanh - Thursday, December 21, 2023 - link
Sure, Intel was smart and ran with it, but the PC was steam-rolling its way with or without Intel.evanh - Thursday, December 21, 2023 - link
In fact the PC didn't require even the x86 architecture to do that. It could have been quite a different outcome if IBM chose differently.FunBunny2 - Thursday, December 21, 2023 - link
"In fact the PC didn't require even the x86 architecture to do that"the Moto 68xxx chips made more sense, technically, but Intel gave (well, begged for) IBM a better deal. again, it would have made no difference. the quality of the chip wasn't what made the 8086/8 lusted for, it was 1-2-3 and Mitch would have written it in whatever assembler was available. little remembered fact - for the first few years (may be 2) IBM would sell the PC with whatever OS the user wanted (well, among 3) - UCSD p-System, CP/M 86, or PC/DOS. Uncle Bill owes Mitch a large debt, since Mitch wasn't going to write 3 versions of 1-2-3 and chose PC DOS for reasons I don't recall.
FunBunny2 - Thursday, December 21, 2023 - link
"PC was steam-rolling its way with or without Intel"without 1-2-3, IBM would have been right - 2,500 units/year would have been about right; a Tonka steamroller, at best. the PC was envisioned as a miniature (very, very) mainframe - the user would write bespoke code to do bespoke tasks, just smaller. the notion that the PC would end up being an appliance where the 'user' ran some packaged code (bunches of them, it turned out) was never considered. what's odd, of course, is that there already was a spreadsheet package in fairly wide use, but on 8 bit machines: VisiCalc. it was so common that Mitch copied most of it to make 1-2-3. lawsuits ensued.
Threska - Friday, December 15, 2023 - link
"With the significant capital required to scale up the chip fab side of the business, it's a decision that, even today, Intel executives still get asked about."Putting that at arms length doesn't change the problems. Plus they'd have to go head to head with others for the same customers.
edzieba - Monday, December 18, 2023 - link
Bingo. We already saw this in action with GloFo:"Oh no, fitting out for new processes is getting expensive!"
"Let's sell off our fab arm, then we don't need to pay for new processes ourselves!"
"Whoopee, now we don't have to invest in fab upgrades but we get the upgrades for free"
"What, the lack of investment in fab upgrades means there AREN'T any fab upgrades? We're stuck on 14nm until we can port our architecture to a new process, company, AND design toolchain?"
lmcd - Friday, December 22, 2023 - link
Their most important architectures for profitability (Atom, whatever their NPU name is, and Arc) are already ported and I'm sure that they have assessed the viability of moving Core over as well. They are not living off a shoestring budget and hoping their last shot at a viable consumer product lands before they hit literally 0 ODM wins. They are absolutely not in AMD's position.Blastdoor - Saturday, December 16, 2023 - link
To support the capital expenditure, Intel needs scale. Once upon a time, the PC business was the biggest user of logic chips and x86 dominated the PC, so Intel operated at the largest scale.Today, the smartphone business is the largest scale user of logic chips, and x86 is nonexistent in smartphones. Taking smartphone SOC business away from TSMC isn’t impossible, but it would be very hard and would require intel to make risky business decisions.
But training AI models is now a rapidly growing business and much closer to Intel’s comfort zone than smartphones. There are many companies designing chips for AI, so it’s a competitive space. But it still might be easier for intel to attain sufficient scale through a combo of x86 and AI than by taking smartphone customers away from TSMC.
So I guess my point is — Intel needs greater scale to support the capex. AI might be the best way to get there.
lemurbutton - Saturday, December 16, 2023 - link
>But it still might be easier for intel to attain sufficient scale through a combo of x86 and AI than by taking smartphone customers away from TSMC.AI companies are moving away from x86. Nvidia is going to use their own ARM-based CPUs in the near future for their datacenter AI accelerators.
nandnandnand - Sunday, December 17, 2023 - link
It doesn't matter. Intel can fab AI chips and ARM CPUs. The x86 part of the combo is Intel fabbing their own stuff, and theoretically some of AMD's according to their public statements but that's not likely.eddman - Saturday, December 16, 2023 - link
I haven't kept up with the foundry news for quite a while. Has there been any information on what actually happened that caused them to suffer so much with their process nodes? Going from being ahead of everyone by quite a distance, to being a good chunk behind.If I remember correctly, there were some posts here and there that they went the wrong direction with 10 nm and hence had to basically start from almost scratch, which in turn caused a delay with future nodes, although they didn't say what exactly went wrong (at least in the ones I read). They could've been just guesses though and not based on anything concrete.
lmcd - Saturday, December 16, 2023 - link
Intel admitted they tried to do too many new features in 10nm at once. They definitely didn't start from scratch, but their ambitious targets for 10nm were highly competitive with TSMC 7 despite not using EUV with the node. Intel relaxed a bunch of the node's measurements and landed a lot closer to Samsung's 8nm (but without the heat problems), which was also a DUV node.At this point, any mistakes Intel commits are from unfamiliarity with EUV.
Blastdoor - Saturday, December 16, 2023 - link
I seem to recall that intel made several other mistakes. They laid off experienced engineers to briefly inflate quarterly profits; they didn’t compete as aggressively as they could have in the smartphone SOC market; and they skimped on capex. All of that to inflate short term profits and executive bonuses.If they could have had another Andy Grove as CEO, I bet they’d be in much better shape today. Gelsinger wants to be Grove-like, but it’s definitely an uphill clim.
Sahrin - Saturday, December 16, 2023 - link
Failing to spin off the fabs is going to go down as one of the stupidest business decisions of all time. If Intel had spun off in 2021, the fabs would’ve been worth $500B+ on the market - more than the combined company is now. It also would’ve solved Intel’s anti-trust problems.Instead, Intel runs a business that most customers are not stupid enough to buy from, because of Intel’s abusive history. TSMC and Samsung are better partners across the board, why on god’s green earth you would open your design portfolio and order book to Intel, one of the most savage companies in the industry, is beyond reason.
Gelsinger needs to be fired, and replaced with someone who has a better understanding of the strategic and financial landscape of the *future* of the industry. He’s 30 years out of date.
lmcd - Saturday, December 16, 2023 - link
The valuation will only improve after they deliver a Qualcomm and/or Nvidia chip as a win over Samsung.If they're going to spin it off, the soonest I'd expect is after a major win.
Kamen Rider Blade - Saturday, December 16, 2023 - link
I doubt IFS is going to get any significant volume of customers until it spins off.The potential for IP / Intellectual theft is too high, especially given Intel's dirty / savage history.
So, until IFS commits to the same seperation of "Church/State" or "Manufacturing/ASIC Design" as TSMC did so long ago, it's going to have a hard time finding customers.
Jimbo123 - Sunday, December 17, 2023 - link
You are the one being stupid, not Gelsinger. I am sorry.FunBunny2 - Saturday, December 16, 2023 - link
The problem with focusing on scale, is that it's often assumed to be a one-sided win: the more the better. But it ain't so. Fact is that capitalists, for the last couple of hundred years, have made the money from replacing humans with machines. Once the BoM has only vanishingly small amount of labour in it, generating profit from labour substitution gets dicey. Withall, the only way to get close to profit is to run said capital 24/7/365, and spit out maximum output. In order to do that, there need be sufficient demand for your widgets. Which isn't clear right these days. As the Great Depression, Great Recession, and garden variety recessions prove - it's the Demand, Stupid.As some wag, somewhere, pointed out a while back: many, if not most, of the embedded chips will forever live on XXnm nodes and not the Node of The Month .Xnm; where it would be too small to see with the naked eye, and a bitch to mount. I sometimes think that the Desktop World has, really, gotten there too; niches like games and AI and whatever notwithstanding.
StevoLincolnite - Saturday, December 16, 2023 - link
We are at that point where fabs are more valuable than chip designers.Makes sense for Intel to keep it's foundries, open them up for 3rd parties and profit like TSMC does.
flgt - Monday, December 18, 2023 - link
This. Recent history has shown it is easier to get a start-up going with industry leading chip design. The foundry business has a huge moat around and US government money to keep it going.Samus - Sunday, December 17, 2023 - link
Regardless of what side of the isle or agreement you are on, it's important Intel have a competitive, independents manufacturing end in the United States for if anything but national security. 90% of the worlds advanced manufacturing happens in a country that is on the verge of being invaded by a nuclear-capable neighbor, with the outcome of Ukraine as a litmus test.Threska - Monday, December 18, 2023 - link
Not really. In other words, geopolitics is complicated.https://youtu.be/Qwdht3h4xjg
mode_13h - Wednesday, December 20, 2023 - link
Maybe Pat won't spin it off, but then his successor probably will. It's a easy payday for Wall St.Blastdoor - Thursday, December 21, 2023 - link
Maybe they’ll spin off their chip design business instead. It’s kind of a technicality as to what is spun off vs retained. Whatever entity loses the name “Intel” and Gelsinger as CEO has been spun off. So maybe Intel becomes a foundry led by pat Gelsinger while “80x86 Design” becomes a new chip design firm.mode_13h - Saturday, December 23, 2023 - link
> Maybe they’ll spin off their chip design business instead. It’s kind of a technicalityYou might be right about that. It sure would be shady for him to speak on such a technicality.
> Whatever entity loses the name “Intel”
Oh, the design firm must keep the name "Intel". That's where 98% of the brand's value lies.
As for the foundry business, I mean it's almost better if it drops any affiliation with Intel, since they want customers who are traditionally competitors of Intel's and constantly reminding them that they're doing business with a part of Intel won't help there.
Blastdoor - Sunday, December 24, 2023 - link
I won’t comment on “brand value” other than to say Intel mostly doesn’t sell direct to consumes so I’m not sure what brand value means for them.But in terms of economic value and IP, I wouldn’t underestimate the value of the manufacturing tech. I think that’s more the heart of Intel than x86.
mode_13h - Tuesday, December 26, 2023 - link
> Intel mostly doesn’t sell direct to consumes so I’m not sure what brand value means for them.Don't tell me you've never heard the phrase "Intel Inside" or seen the stickers!
> I wouldn’t underestimate the value of the manufacturing tech.
I'm not. I'm literally talking about the value of the name, itself. Consumers know the name Intel, and it's likely to weigh on their purchasing decisions.
In contrast, I'm sure fab customers don't care what a fab calls itself, so long as all of the details make sense.
Blastdoor - Tuesday, December 26, 2023 - link
The era of “intel inside” meaning anything to consumers is long gone. And I’m not sure it ever meant all that much on its own. Every time AMD has managed to make a competitive processor, they’ve been successful selling it despite “Intel inside” stickers. The nerds quickly figure out what the best product is, tell their friends, families, and bosses, and the better chip wins in the marketplace.Intel’s past success was built on superior manufacturing, enabled by superior investment, enabled by economies of scale, enabled by huge demand, enabled by the PC market being the dominant driver of demand for logic chips for a few decades.
Today it’s more apparent than ever that manufacturing is the most important factor in the chip business. Lots of firms can design a decent chop and the barriers to entry are far more surmountable than manufacturing. TSMC surpassed Intel despite not having a”TSMC inside” marketing campaign and without x86 compatibility. They did it because smartphones surpassed PCs as the volume driver, and TSMC made deals that Intel wouldn’t make.
evanh - Thursday, December 21, 2023 - link
Sure, Intel was smart and ran with it, but the PC was steam-rolling its way with or without Intel.