
Intel Custom Foundry’s 10nm meltdown is crushing a $20+B market cap tech giant - samlittlewood
https://semiaccurate.com/2018/07/02/intel-custom-foundrys-10nm-meltdown-is-crushing-a-20b-market-cap-tech-giant/
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ksec
The Custom Foundry Roadmap [1] shown last November, they were suppose to be on
GA now.

If any of these are true and we assume a company really placed the wrong bet
on Intel, then the only conclusion I can come too, as I have previously
thought; Intel lied, they lied to everyone, investors, partners, and
shareholders about their 10nm progress. They let their pride swallow them.

And then may be everything else made sense. BK's departure, rumours of Apple
ditching _both_ Intel x86 and Modem.

Once you caught someone lying, and it does damage to your interest, it will
take a long time and hard work to earn the trust back. Something that is hard
to quantified in numbers for analyst.

I still have faith in Intel fixing 10nm, this is speaking as someone who has
been labelled as TSMC cheer leader for the past few years. Whether they could
fix it in time is a different story though.

[1]
[https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332527&page_num...](https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332527&page_number=2)

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CodinM
Does anyone really have access to this 1000$/year subscription only magazine
so we can actually read the article?

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ksec
Assuming they need $100K / year to sustain this business, that is two full
time Writer, hosting, going to events etc. You will still need 100 paying
subscribers.

I know Charlie has an record of breaking all sort of secrets from Intel ( and
Nvidia ). But are there really 100 people paying for this?

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bpicolo
> breaking all sort of secrets from Intel ( and Nvidia )

Seems like something hedge funds/private equity would pay for. The biggest
edge those companies have over retail investors is access to knowledge that's
not considered MNPI but is also context the general public doesn't really
have, through news sources like this and also (perhaps most importantly)
expert network companies.

Sidenote: if you could improve compliance or cheapen the cost of it for such
firms, you could make oodles of money. Compliance is a massive, expensive risk
center that the industry hates managing.

~~~
bhouston
The hedge funds would pay dearly for this and they would get it a few days
before publication I would think.

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busterarm
I checked NASDAQ sorted by market cap. Pretty small list of players.

My money is on Motorola, even though it's just under $20B. Other options don't
look as reasonable. Maybe HP?

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slivym
I wouldn't be surprised if it were Nokia - just over 20B, desparately reliant
on 5G. If they're using Intel silicon for their early 5G stuff and miss the
boat they're screwed.

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imeron
This article mentions Nokia and 10nm -
[https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332944](https://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1332944)

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joezydeco
Nokia sure makes a lot of sense. There's nothing left but the infrastructure
biz, and they need a working 5G base system to succeed. If they blow the
rollout, they're toast.

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ksec
Oh God. Yes Nokia were deep in bed with Intel on 5G. How did I miss that? And
that have a $20B+ Market Cap. I don't know about some places of EU and US. But
Ericsson has been winning more 5G infrastructure project then Nokia in most
places I know. Of course by winning I mean that is anything left from Huawei
which may be looking at 50% market share in the next few years.

Ericsson were having a hard time competing, if Nokia screwed up may be a M&A
with Ericsson makes sense.

Godsh this really is a big story if this turn out to be true.

Edit: Having some more thoughts, the delay still doesn't make Nokia bankrupt,
because the initial 5G roll out are small in numbers. Compared to 3G / 4G
recurring infrastructure and patents revenue. So I guess it is going to make
an impact on Nokia, but nothing as bad as Charles has wrote. He is likely
right that his sources suggest Nokia has nothing to deliver or sell in terms
of 5G, but again if you know anything about business I doubt this will bring
Nokia down.

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defenestration
I find the article hard to trust due to the emotional tone the author is
using.

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gilrain
This is a tone argument, obviously. You'll have more access to a broader range
of opinions if you eliminate fallacies like this from your thinking.

Consider, an expert becomes an expert through their passion and dedication to
a topic. If you eliminate emotion from your resources, you eliminate many
knowledgeable people.

~~~
slededit
Tone does convey valuable information though. SemiAccurate has been what can
best be described as "anti INTEL" for a very long time. And while they've been
right a lot about 10nm, it has also lead them astray in the past. He does not
have this tone with articles about other industry players.

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bhouston
No names mentioned? Also why can not this company switch to tmsc or gf?

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JPLeRouzic
Maybe ARM ? :

[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/16/intel_foundry_arm/](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/08/16/intel_foundry_arm/)

[https://www.arm.com/products/physical-
ip](https://www.arm.com/products/physical-ip)

~~~
bhouston
Isn't arm fabless? And doesn't all smartphones use arm but via Qualcomm,
allwinner, Apple's ax, or Samsung?

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HelloNurse
There might be some ARM customer who selected Intel as a foundry for their ARM
design; the question is how much ARM would have to invest on such a customer.

I suppose the worst case would be an expensive R&D initiative (with ARM paying
Intel for prototypes) about how to make ARM cores with Intel's 10nm process,
with no usable result. Not likely to sink ARM.

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sliken
Since this was posted it came out that Apple's ditching the Intel 5G stuff and
as a result Intel killed off the product and the team that was working on it.
I suspect nokia was betting on that product because it was 10nm, just because
it was a good fit for their product plans.

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kingosticks
The team is supposedly working on other 5G chips now, not killed. Nokia
wouldn't have been using that particular product anyway. Its interesting but
I'm not sure it's that related. Apple are always taking more and more stuff
in-house.

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kev009
Does anyone know the history behind the author and intel? He does interesting
stories but sounds like he really has an axe to grind :)

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ksec
He used to be an editor in The inquirer, a spin off from The Register ( UK )
focusing purely on rumours. It was very popular in the early 2000s, and I
don't remember the details but he broke a few Intel stories that got him
pushed out of the site, or The inquirer were punished and not letting them
joining any Intel events. Something similar happen to Nvidia too.

He is very much pro AMD, ATI and Anti Intel, Nvidia.

Although he has a comparatively accurate track record for both Intel and
Nvidia leaks.

He also tends to be over dramatic in writing, that is even before the paywall
and subscription model. So his style were not the results of trying to sell
you $1000/Year subscription. But as long as your know his perspective and
history, then his article are much easier to read.

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kev009
Cool, thanks for the history, that all makes a lot of sense. I didn't find
anything that hard to read about the article, it's just blatantly anti-intel.

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ksec
Well I am just doing the summary for you to save you time searching, and more
time working on FreeBSD :P

Edit: Now I remember, it was the story about Intel Pentium 4 scaling problems.
He broke the story about Intel will never reach whatever silly Ghz they
initially promised. And Intel were not happy. ( That was nearly 20 years
ago... I am getting old)

