https://web.archive.org/web/20241208050739/https://www.theve...

Intel has been hitting all (or enough of) the right notes for about 30 years. In our industry (perhaps everywhere) we have a constant tension between optimising in the current direction and do the same thing but better (CPU general, x86 specifically) and trying another approach. This has to be managed while the world around you changes requiring you to pivot into perhaps a completely different direction.

CPUs are still relevant. And x86 can still provide a lot of value and iterate forward. AMD has spent 20 years getting to the front. It is the short term vision that is killing Intel.

AI accelerators are going to be useful and valuable until the point they are commoditised just like CPU. Until then someone (Nvidia) will gain a lot of profit. They used this money to buy their way into the datacenter with companies like mellanox. Nvidia will be on top for a while. And then the cycle continues and we will see a new company on top.

That they’ve fallen behind in both fabs and processor tech is an indicator that something is deeply wrong. Boeing’s EVP of operations being on the board can’t have helped. This kind of deeply wrong smells like IBM in 1990. But without a second business line (mainframes) that generated a ton of money.

This article says a lot more about Arm than it does about Intel. A couple of sentences stood out:

> Arm is also rumored to be eyeing an expansion into building its own chips and not just licensing its designs

> if you’re a vertically integrated company and the power of your strategy is in the fact that you have a product and you have fabs, inherently, you have a potential huge advantage in terms of cost versus the competition

I don't get this strategy at all. Why is vertical integration of the designs and the fabs any advantage? Sure, there are probably small savings here and there from changing the design to suit the process. But like Intel you'd get fat and lazy and end up with weird tooling that only your one company uses. And you can't concentrate on being the best at one thing with huge volumes like TSMC.

Arm is way overvalued as it is, and now the CEO is going to try something stupid.

He's too nice to call out the real problem, which is hubris.

Intel got arrogant, remained arrogant and despite getting absolutely pummelled by competitors on share price value, believes it is special.

Intel needs to realise it's not going to catch up TSMC and so should focus on cannibalising all other competitors and moving into spaces where TSMC doesn't operate. It's going to be a lower margin game from now on but Intel can survive. Oh and be the nicest folks in town, not the shit on the people we need like Gelsinger did.

Intel is in effect a Will Ferrell movie character. Character is arrogant, becomes arrogant and stupid in defiance, and potentially finally sees the error of its ways and grows a bit.

For me, Intel needs to buy Oxide or Sidero.

And commit to building a simple, powerful, enthusiast/startup friendly platform for running mini-clouds at home/on-premise. And start bringing tech like Optane, Tofino etc to developers so they can get better price/performance than the soon to be ARM dominated cloud.

ARM CEO will tell you otherwise, but RISC-V is the ISA that will be replacing x86.

Article is paywalled.

I have not watched Intel closely for a long time. Seeing that its market cap is down 30% over the last decade is crazy. Considering how IT in general grew so much over the same time period. What happened?

To see how the Intel CEO is thinking, I now scrolled through a few interviews with him.

In this interview, Intel's CEO is asked to describe the difference of a CPU and a GPU:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d07wy5AK72E

His answer is that the CPU is capable of doing general computing, while a GPU is made for very specific tasks.

I'm not sure if that is a good way to put it.

The way I would put it is that a GPU is a bit like an array of many CPUs. And to manage this array of processors all doing computation at the same time brings constraints and management overhead. So it is usually harder to program a GPU but results in better performance.