
Has Intel lost its mojo? - pieterr
https://bits-chips.nl/artikel/has-intel-lost-its-mojo/
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artemonster
„... in which he blames a management culture that favors MBAs over technical
expertise for making bad technical decisions over the past few years.“ Why do
we keep hearing this over and over again for major technology driven companies
and why they keep doing this?

~~~
DrBazza
"Investor value". It's a symptom of western economies, and the US in
particular.

It's all about the share price and doing whatever you can to boost it, and
then pay dividends (if the share price isn't doing well).

Companies are now seen as financial instruments. If you buy shares now is your
first thought about the company, or about share price and how much money you
can make? That's it really. MBAs know how to inflate share price and 'add
value' in the modern world.

And when the CEO is no longer an engineer, he chases the money, because he's
usually paid in shares and options.

~~~
jmnicolas
> "Investor value". It's a symptom of western economies, and the US in
> particular.

I absolutely agree. And pushed to extremes it makes for sociopathic reasoning
where nothing else matters.

We humans have a hard time finding the middle way : no I don't want communism
but I don't want full blown predatory capitalism either.

~~~
DrBazza
Agreed. Just look at Icahn asset stripping TWA in the 80s at the cost of
thousands of jobs, just so he and his investors could get rich quick.

Here's a good example of a non-technical CEO: Steve Ballmer. From wikipedia

"His tenure and legacy as Microsoft CEO has received mixed reception, with the
company tripling sales and doubling profits, but losing its market dominance
and missing out on 21st-century technology trends.[13][14][15] "

~~~
jmnicolas
I have another simple but revealing example from a few years ago : we had a
biscuit factory where I live that had a financial return of 8% per year but
the shareholders wanted 10% minimum so they demanded the factory to be moved
in a cheaper country without any thoughts for the local employees that would
loose their jobs.

------
_ph_
The success of Intel very largely depended on one single thing: volume. By
owning most of the PC market, Intel could spend a lot of money into R&D. Which
affected both chip design resources as of course manufacturing. For many
years, Intel used to have at least one step advantage in the manufacturing
process, often more. This is how Intel basically killed all non x86 based
processor designs. Most of which were considered technically better, but on
inferior processes lost the competition with Intel (I am thinking about all
the famous RISC-architectures).

AMD could leapfrog Intel from time to time with a really clever design, but
struggled to keep up in manufacturing. This is where the Zen2 gets so
dangerous to Intel, a very good design produced on the better manufacturing
process. Where did that process come from?

That leads to the decisive point to where Intel is today: the emergence of the
smartphone. The impact on Intel is twofold: first of all, the PC market is
shrinking as the smartphones are the computing device many people use, PCs
have lost their importance for many, even if people still have a PC, they
don't get updated as often any more. And secondly: there is a new huge market
for semiconductors.

Which Intel managed to not be a part of.

The volume of the mobile marked helped TSMC to get to the point, where their
processes eclipsed Intel. This benefits all the competitors of Intel to
compete not only on even ground, but on higher ground. Suddenly, non-x86
architectures, mainly ARM become economically feasible. When Apple designs the
Apple Silicon, they can afford to throw enormeous R&D resources at any
problem. Not only because Apple is a rich company, but also, because the
spending is spread across over 200 million iPhones per year. Not counting
iPads and soon Macs. This is, why I am so excited about Apple Silicon. For the
first time since the passing of the classical high-performance RISC vendors, a
non-x86 architecture enters the desktop market, this time backed by huge R&D
spending and a superior process.

Is all lost for Intel? Certainly not, Intel still owns the largest part of the
PC market. While the problems with their 10nm process were huge, they are not
too far behind TSMC, as the 10nm Intel process isn't that much behind the TSMC
7nm as the numbers would suggest. But their moat consisting of volume and
process lead has been breached, so success is no longer automatic and Intel
needs to work hard going forward.

~~~
MangoCoffee
It might be better for Intel to split into two. One part focus on design and
the other on pure-play manufacturing.

AMD and TSMC shown us that it work.

~~~
minipci1321
> It might be better for Intel to split into two.

How exactly would it be better -- again, given the volumes?

\-- The "design" split-off would be instantly lacking modern-node fab
capacities (TSMC already said they wont scale up for Intel),

\-- the manufacturing part would find itself in competition with those already
having better node tech ==> not enough orders to fill the pipe (customers with
comparable volumes are already all set WRT fabbing).

~~~
LargoLasskhyfv
Smaller orgs. Leaner, meaner, faster.

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p1necone
Intel has just ridden on marketing and anti competitive maneuvering for so
long that their actual engineering side has gotten complacent/suffocated. I'm
sure they could be (and probably are on their way to being) back as a serious
player with management that ceases the bullshit.

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jokoon
Spectre and meltdown are key events that explain why intel is in this
situation right now.

~~~
Jweb_Guru
The key thing that caused Intel to be in this situation right now was that
their EUV play totally failed. If it had succeeded when they hoped it would,
they would be so far ahead of the competition that none of this would matter.

~~~
throwaway2048
intel 10nm was never an EUV play.

~~~
Jweb_Guru
I don't recall saying a single thing about 10nm.

~~~
throwaway2048
There was never an EUV play they were making that would have catapulted them
far ahead at this point.

~~~
Jweb_Guru
Prior to 2015, Intel believed they would have production ready, 7nm chips by
2018 using EUV, which would indeed have catapulted them far ahead of the
competition. Obviously, many people were skeptical about this, but if it had
worked out I don't think we'd be having this conversation, nor would people
have cared about them missing the 10nm target.

