I woke up this morning thinking about this kid's original post on this topic. I generally don't think about other people's investments, but this just sounded so bad. I was vicariously suffering through him ahead of time.
I believe that he is a math major or something, everyone on WSB told him that this was a bad idea... there are so many reasons why he should have known better than to do this. Then, in 24 hours he loses 20%. Guh-adjacent.
As long as he's not leveraged, he will likely be fine. Intel will recover in time. May not be the best option, but it's not like he purchased calls expiring next week.
Yeah, I agree. It's ridiculous that my brain chose to focus on this rich kid's problems instead of my own. That's what I found so funny. Here is the latest update.
That's what was so disturbing to me about waking up thinking about this. Why did I care? But apparently, my brain cared. I guess it was an anomaly that needed solving?
In my view Intel is going the way of IBM. It has sat on its market dominance for years, innovated very little, and resorted to cheap tricks/smoke and mirrors when they fell behind. Pat Gelsinger has had years to turn it around. The ship is either sinking too fast or he's not the right man for the job.
I think less than Gelsinger it's just that Intel is banking on it's foundry business for the future, and foundries are mind-blowingly expensive. Like nuclear reactor tier expensive and then double that.
There is good reason the SOTA semi foundry market is basically TSMC, some Samsung, and a touch of intel. No one with big money wants to deal with foundries. Way more profitable to do pretty much anything else.
On the flipside, the US gov wants domestic SOTA semi manufacturing, and it will not let intel disappear. Most reasonable americans should want this too, as pretty much everyone uses a TSMC chip everyday - often all day.
The difference is, sentiment to IBM’s performance is much different from investor’s perspective. They’re almost at all time highs in terms of stock prices as well. My understanding is Intel has to compete with Chinese chip manufacturers as well now, and they don’t seem to be performing well. SMIC and others are catching up (or caught up?) at this point.
SMIC is still 5 years or more behind Intel, TSMC, and to a lesser extent, Samsung in terms of performance. With current geopolitics I doubt SMIC is going to takeover in the short term.
Intel has 20a/18a shipping end of this year and early next year. The success of failure of those chips will be telling.
5 years ? They're 10 years behind on performance, and the chips have waaaay higher tdp then the old Intel/Nvidia/AMD CPUs/gpus had back then... So realistically, they're even more behind.
Still an achievement though, they're at least making am attempt. That's more then can be said for I.e. Europe or India
He’s been CEO for 3 years and some change. Turning around the Titanic takes a ton of effort. I think they’re doing better. Intel Core (edit: Core Ultra) and Raptor Lake are great platforms, better than their AMD equivalents (and that hurts to say as an AMD fan).
> Intel Core and Raptor Lake are great platforms, better than their AMD equivalents
"Intel Core"?
"Raptor Lake" is the codename for the 13th and 14th generation processors, which are in the current news cycle for being buggy and Intel not recalling them.
Not sure what they guy is huffing. I got lucky and went in on Alder Lake and was really close to getting a Raptor, but the half price for Alder swung me.
Well the AMD one aren't as good at barbecuing food for one! (the "raptor lake" he quoted is actually the generation of Intel chip that is currently making the news for melting itself through insane power usage, only to barely keep up to AMD)
AMD and Intel have flipped their approaches a bit. AMD has been working on the X2 chip to smartly integrate two cores, and Intel came along with Pentium-D which was basically just two Pentium dies next to each other.
These days AMD has been playing that same tactic up in spades. Strix Point is a very very nice monolithic APU, but everywhere else they have an IO-Die and then a varying number of Core Complex Die. They're just dropping down variable numbers of cores.
Intel by compare is building interesting bespoke chiplet configurations, is taking on X2 like challenges. And I believe in the eventual gains here. They have parcelled up responsibilities in a really interesting way with Meteor Lake, a CPU, and GPU, a SoC (with its own e-cores as well!), and a io chiplet. Intel's got tons of value add from this. Gobs of usb4 that AMD is nowhere near delivering, a massive image/video processor, the ability to easily drop in new cores or new gpu's as they increment. The modular design is ambitious and interesting.
https://www.anandtech.com/show/20046/intel-unveils-meteor-la...
And Intel seems well ahead in the packaging game. Rather than big interposer dies, Intel's using smaller sized & much finer EIMB bridges between chips. Which helps them save power as well as reducing size. They have Foveros for much more heterogenous chip stacking than what most are pulling off.
Architecturally it feels like Intel's been very much refining & iterating across the multichip era for a long time, from the drastically underrated old Lakefield, to the very very highly integrated upcoming Lunar Lake. AMD is doing a great job making cores and gpu's, but Intel's been doing remarkably good, especially considering their 10nm+++ Intel 7 process, especially with the E-cores being a modest sized nicely performing core.
I also want to complement Intel on their really interesting architecture innovations. But I have severe doubts that their various on-chip accelerators are going to reach critical adoption levels where the developers that matter are excited about spending time optimizing for these awesome luxuries. Like Ponte Vecchio, very interesting tech, and something the hyperscalers and supercomputer can be excited about, but it's hard to see a path towards long term success.
I'd love to see Intel ship photonics-intergated solutions again. Their EIMB tech should complement that well, and that used to be a huge high value offering they had.
Intel’s future will be based on Intel 18a. Pat Gelsinger has said as much. If 18a is better than the competition, which it is projected to be, then their chips and their fab will be popular and Intel should recover well. If it is anything short of the best process Intel is in big trouble.
I am personally bullish on Intel long term under the current leadership, but man are they taking a beating.
Projected to be better by Intel and Intel alone. Intel has disclosed virtually no details of Intel 18A on any industry-standard metric: perf / W with an Arm core, transistor density; precise perf & density improvements over Intel 4, 3, and 20A.
TSMC is far, far more transparent than Intel—which is backwards. Intel is who needs more customers. Intel's silence on 18A's specifics is not inspiring.
Qualcomm resoundingly rejected Intel 18A, according to the Wall Street Journal, due to Intel missing multiple promised 18A milestones.
>Qualcomm, which designs chips and outsources manufacturing, wanted to work with Intel, and assigned a team of engineers to work toward making mobile-phone chips at Intel’s factories. It was particularly interested in a cutting-edge chip-making technology that Intel hopes will be the most advanced in the world by late next year.
>In early 2022, Intel’s foundry arm sent a delegation to Qualcomm’s San Diego headquarters, where they met with CEO Cristiano Amon. Then Intel missed a June performance milestone toward producing those chips commercially. It missed another in December.
>Qualcomm executives concluded Intel would struggle making the kind of cellphone chips they wanted, even if it succeeded in making high-performance processors. Qualcomm told Intel it was pausing work while it waits for Intel to show progress, according to people involved in the discussions.
Without Qualcomm, Intel has only found one real customer after a half-decade of hype: UMC's design subsidiary Faraday is an "evaluation [sever] platform" with Arm Neoverse cores, while Microsoft is making a vague "custom" chip.
Faraday won't even sell those CPUs (it's an ASIC firm primarily) and Microsoft couldn't be bothered to give a single word of detail of what they are producing.
I'm not hopeful, yet, until someone actually ships a key product on Intel 18A.
If Intel can actually get fabs built and operating in the states they'll be fine in the long term. US administration has made it clear domestic chip production is a matter of national security.
Jury is still out on whether they can do that though. Chip fab requires a skilled and specialized manufacturing workforce, which does not exist here in the US. They can build the fabs, but they will need to import the talent to run them.
I'm not seeing the domestic pipeline. What is the pathway for a high school graduate today to work on the line at one of these chip fabs that are coming up? Would any bright young person choose to do that today?
I hear a different by similar version of this same idea, which is that a lot of fab engineers and semiconductor engineers have retired. I wonder if the US lacks the ecosystem to churn out these engineers. I don't mean just the schools but also the non-leading edge foundries that aren't as sophisticated to help new college grads gain experience before they get employed at leading edge foundries.
They did a bit on the local news (Phoenix) about some community college setup which was supposed to be sort of a feeder system.
The wildcard is how effectively they can leverage the national-security angle. I can imagine them tapping government funds to pay ridiculous money to create a supply chain of vetted fourth-generation pure blood citizens to make rad-hardened Pentiums for the Navy or something.
Was there such a pipeline in any country where a fab was built? Or did clever people just apply to the company and get trained on the job? This is not a new problem for the US or any other country. IMO people don't study manufacturing-adjacent stuff as much in the US because there is little manufacturing going on here.
My school had a 1(?) micron fab for EE student projects (among other things), at a time when that wasn't decades behind the bleeding edge. It may have been a few years behind.
We can do it, people have counted out the US innovation and capabilities in the past, people can learn the business, we can import more knowledge for the right prices. I doubt there will that many high schoolers in there, just a whole lot of automation and robotics.
Intel's got a bit of a headache with the disproportionate number of senior engineering positions, especially those Principal Engineer types and up. These folks are pretty much untouchable when it comes to reshuffling the company because firing them is a real pain - you need sign-offs from all over the place. Back in the day, these roles were for Intel's superstars, but now? It's more about who you know than what you know. So we've ended up with a bunch of people pulling in over $750k a year, and a lot of them aren't really bringing that much to the table. It's like having a sports team full of overpaid benchwarmers.
I disagree. AI is a fad to Intel's business. It's not going to replace the core of what Xeon are used for, which is dumb data entry and processing, it's simply not efficient cost or energy wise.
Intel is in actual trouble, but that's because they can't ration the supply of good x86 on one side because AMD leapfrogged them, and they can't limit high performance highly compatible to x86 anymore because not only did they kill their own x86 rebirth (atom) to save absurd margin, they also denied license to everyone who wanted in so they all went with arm.
Intel is in trouble because if I want a laptop or desktop or server chip I have the choice between a powerful arm not from them or a powerful x86 not from them, or their chip that uses twice the energy of the competitor and now it turns out they melt themselves.
In addition Intel has never been able to build the ultra-small EUV geometries that TSMC can, and they got "Boeinged" by shifting from an engineer-driven culture to an MBA-driven culture.
Lol not competitive cost or efficiency wise is what people said about the iPhone compared to blackberry, and here we are - people bought them anyway.
Not trying to argue with you just a funny parallel. I don't really have a horse in this race but it’s clear there’s a lot of uncertainty out there for intel right now.
Which makes Intel a decent target for merger and acquisition. Qualcomm, Apple, Broadcom, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Saudi Aramco, Facebook, TSMC, Samsung and Finally...... AMD.
I don't think AMD would get enough out of that to make it worth for them. And that's before you take into account that a condition of that merger would be spinning off the x86 CPU business to a separate entity to avoid a monopoly there.
The big loss maker here is the fab business - and AMD realized a long time ago they're better off without their own fab (and got heavily criticized back then) - so why would consider investing a shitload of money for a bit of IP just for having to deal with spinning of fab business yet again?
It’s money well spent. I don’t see anyone crying when China subsidizes industries “well thought out”, when the US does it “throwing money in the fire”, it can’t be both, and it isn’t. Companies can come back when given resources.
What's the alternative, let the Chinese get ahead, them buy chips with backdoors from them? Or maybe let Taiwan do it and then get invaded? It was the right decision.
I would've preferred the gov't handing Intel a check and expecting, in return,
1) ownership stake of Intel, including governance, for xx years
2) stock buyback ban
3) stock dividend ban
4) golden parachute ban
5) far more public disclosures of progress, setbacks, and other problems
If Intel—who's spent BILLIONS on buybacks—can't find enough money from the debt or equity or private markets, then, yes, serious strings should be required.
Currently, CHIPS only receives some profit sharing and that's it.
There were way too many alternative ways to implement this and we're paying the price of picking a "winner" that is massively cocky and arrogant with abysmal results. Major mistake and unlikely to deliver because it got wads of cash with very few serious strings attached.
Just exposed yesterday:
>The company is permanently grounding the Intel Air Shuttle, which flies workers between its major sites in Hillsboro, Silicon Valley and Arizona.
>The company stopped the flights last year then resumed flying in April. The shuttle was especially prized by Oregon employees, who sought to avoid the 30-mile drive across the metro area to Portland International Airport.
>The decision to permanently ground the shuttle, just five months after reinstating it, suggests that Intel executives didn’t recognize the severity of their financial situation until very recently.
That’s well and good for Intel, why would TSMC agree to any of those terms? You’re forgetting that CHIPS wasn’t just hand outs for Intel, but to bring other fabs to the US.
https://old.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/1ehjuzj/i_b...