Starting to see a lot of worried people as Intel descends downwards rapidly. Reminds me of Nokia how this is going…
You must log in or register to comment.
Of course intel will collapse within the next 10 years.
They have focused exclusively on high-end, very expensive processors in the past. Now that moore’s law is no longer true, that doesn’t work anymore, because ARM chips are catching up in performance, at 1/10 of the price.
Whilst true, AMD are doing just fine by being fabless. I can’t really see x86 going as soon as you say for many reasons
How do you fuck up so badly when you the largest share of the market? Like what?
In this case prioritizing „shareholder value“ above innovation and hitting engineering roadblocks while trying to catch up.
Isn’t that crazy how even the biggest monopolists are unable to be a stable business for more than a decade or whatever
Capitalism is great, isn’t it?
Yup
Wasn’t it AMD a few years ago?
Sure was… but as Intel rested AMD came out with a decent product followed by great products in the cpu market
We need more competition in HW space tho
True. Hopefully Intel can work things out, but I don’t think this strategy is it.
Losing cash hand over fist and basically screwing everyone over certainly isn’t the way to do it…
Having the main product you have been known for for like ever being so poor isn’t it eitherInvesting money to catch up is the way to do it. The CEO before Gelsinger didn’t invest in R&D, which is why they fell behind in the first place. When you’re behind, you either need to spend crazy amounts of money to catch up, or sell off the fabs and become a design only firm, but they decided to take the government handouts and keep the fabs.
Part of what saved AMD was spinning off their fabs into a separate company. Besides the cash flow, they could focus on design and weren’t hitched to what their own fabs could produce. They could choose the best fab contract they could afford.
Pat Gelsinger floated the idea of spinning off the fabs, but the US government shut it down as part of the deal for building new fabs with government money. The fabs that Intel may not even finish now.
Another factor for AMD was having their SoC in consoles. Kept some cash flow going when they desperately needed it. Intel doesn’t have that benefit, either. AMD owns the PS5 and Xbox, while Nvidia has Nintendo. Steam Deck-like handhelds are a small but growing market, and all the ones people want to buy run AMD.
So the question comes up of what Intel can even do for cash flow. Their GPU division might start showing real profit in another generation, but they have to survive that long while taking a loss. One more uncompetitive generation of CPU releases will probably doom their core product, and the best they can hope for there is “not completely suck”. The datacenter market was holding on because Intel has traditionally been rock solid stable, but that argument was killed with the 13th/14th gen overheating issues (which did affect equivalent server processors, as well). Their other hardware, like networking chipsets, comes with the same dark cloud looming over it, and it isn’t enough to keep the company running, anyway.
I would be absolutely shocked if Intel spun off their fabs. Having worked at an Intel site (Ocotillo), they are extremely controlling of everything going on inside the factory to their own detriment; so much so that if hopping on one foot while doing a specific task on a tool somehow improves yield by any metric, then it’s added to spec and never questioned again.
Hell, they were still running their 1272 process (14nm) on some tools when I left in 2022.
TL;DR - They need to spin off the fabs for their own survival. And its gonna take an act of god to do so.
Exactly this but people I have spoken to recently say that they are pretty much past the point of no return already haven taken (as said) a load of government money around the globe and cannot finish the fabs they were paid in advance to help them. Pretty much the worst fall from grace ever.
My best guess is that it gets sold off to the company who buys the most $1M/plate dinners with Trump.
AMD was absolutely hitched to global foundries for years, it was only because glofo decided to not go for 7nm, that AMD was allowed by glofo to use TSMC for the Ryzen 3000 series (Zen 2), and was partially released from the agreement ahead of time, provided they still had substantial orders with GloFo, which they honored with continuing discounted sales of the Ryzen 2000 series produced at glofo 12nm, and also using GloFo 12nm for their l3 cache chips. AMD maneuvered the situation brilliantly, and turned necessity into an advantage.
We really need Intel to get their shit together.
Me, standing on the shore with a life raft next to me, watching Intel drown: ehhhh… do we really, though…? They tried to cancel a contract with amd and sue them in an attempt to kill the company in its infancy; they bribed major OEMs when amd was first to market with a 1GHz chip, first to market with x64, trying again to kill the company, this time through starvation; then they sat on their ass for 15 years with essentially no progress, just collecting cash for the most minimal of improvements… I’m sure I’m forgetting a ton of other shit the company has done, playing dirty at every opportunity. It’s been about a decade since I took a deep-dive into this.
I don’t have a (monitary) horse in this race, but as this has progressed, with the side addition of their chips literally disintegrating, it’s been very… enjoyable, validating, to have stuck with amd since finding out about all the bullshit intel has, would do, and continues to do, to try and control the market and remain in control, no matter the cost. Karma may, finally, have caught up with them.
We need every competitor in the cpu market. If AMD wins and destroys intel they will act the same way. We need another competitor in the GPU market as well.
Competition is fine, but just like the school bully, if I see him getting his ass handed to him, I’m stopping to watch, not to help. But I’m sure as hell going to enjoy the show.
Intel can stand to still lose a few pegs.
But after a bunch of beatings even a bully can become the underdog.
I think the healthy approach is to let it play out, and stop “meddling” as usual with the “free” market. Everybody’s observing free market karma at play. Let it happen, as much as it will. All those intel mbas deserve it completely.
So far AMD has a good history of not being evil.
Publicly traded companies aren’t children though, where being nice or bad is a force of habit to them, and they are able to learn and improve from their mistakes.
AMD has been an underdog under Intel and Nvidia for most of their existence. If they become the market leader, they will behave like them and start being anti-competitive.
What happened to all that money Biden gave them? Down the toilet? I don’t know about you, but some motherfuckers got paid.
Republicans happened.
Not sure if it’s the same amount of money you’re referring to or if there’s another budget given to them but the video does indicate that for one of them, Intel claims that they have never received the money.
Yup lost it down the back of a sofa in HQ. They are literally looking at losing $10 billion this year
It of course won’t happen, but if Intel went poof next monday then what would happen to the x86 ecosystem. It’s basically co-owned by AMD and Intel. As I recall the sharing partnership that these two have basically prevents neither guy from selling their patents/license to third parties. Would we just be left with AMD monopoly with intel’s corpse hanging from it, until X86 finally croaks? Do these CPU licensing agreements prevent just wholesale acquisition of Intel?
If Intel disappears, I imagine AMD will end up as the sole owner of the relevant Intel x86 patents during bankruptcy proceedings. Then AMD will then either negotiate a new agreement with someone else who wants to make x86 processors, or they end up having a monopoly on x86 and are forced to tread extremely lightly to avoid an antitrust lawsuit.
I think someone would get those Intel X86 rights. However there may be questions on whether the rights from AMD like A64 are transferable. But if some company buys the entire Intel X86 division, I bet that counts as the patents remaining within the division that has the rights, although it is under different ownership. We recently had the Arm vs Qualcomm case that showed this can be allowed.
Anyways this might be disruptive, and the immediate effect would probably be that AMD X86 will be a lot more expensive.This is exactly how I see it panning out. The new owners would be american as well as there is no way the US govt would allow it to go overseas
Companies as big as Intel don’t typically go poof, they have bankruptcy proceedings and sell off their assets. If those assets contractually can’t be sold, then yeah AMD would be the remaining owner.
They are losing money hand over fist right now though and have basically broken hundreds of agreements they have already been paid for…
I do agree - I believe what would happen is they would be split up, as per most of these things, and the US govt would ensure that the X86 division remains american. I would imagine the real issue here is not the cpus but the fabs as they are the things really underperforming and have for at least a decade now
I think the overall risk of investing in a single company is still too much right now, but I’ll be damned if I’m not regretting the timing of selling my shares. I made a big profit either way but dang.
