I am not competent to talk about what the strategy should have been, but I can say with certainty that this current strategy is not working. The question is when the leadership will finally realize that this strategy is not effective and if it will be too late by then.
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OP who is not competent to talk about what the strategy should have been is at least competent enough to define the limits of his competence unlike every self appointed 'influencer' who do not want to lose their 'credibility'
Lmao. The arronagece of the folks posting here as if they are on the elt of samsung and tsmc is just plainly laughable. Why does aws, meta and mediatek all have production contracts with Intel right now if samsung or tsmc is clearly superior and can take on unlimited orders ? I am not even contesting that their process nodes are superior
Just the fact that there is only so much fab resources to go around and shared by all these companies across the world. Intel going fables means potentially laying off like 40,000 people (not including contract workers) across the world and shutting down like 6 fabs. They are plugging ahead with the chips act and the funding from these Canadian loansharks whether you like it or not. Its going to be an uphill battle but just because you lost a battle doesnt mean you lost the war (does anyone remember amd circa 2009?). I wish them all the best
Outsourcing isn’t a bad thing. It’s a natural consequence of economics. Let the specialist solve your problem and you focus on what you do best. It’s been clear for several years now that Intel isn’t the best fab.
Do you farm and butcher your own livestock or do you outsource that to farmers and the supermarket? At some point the specialized operators can do the job far better and more efficiently than you can.
@2eiu+1ilNkajf
They would go to Samsung in Korea which is also way ahead of Intel.
Also, ASML wouldn’t sell any litho machines to China.
TSMC would lose big time if that happened as the equipment would migrate to the 2nd place players. Including a split-off Intel fab company.
There are fundamental conflicts of interest with the IDM model. It doesn’t work and we have numerous existence proofs of companies that thrive as fabless, including our friends at AMD, which by the way is bigger than Intel now.
@1mze+1ilNkajf I agree with you on paper that this statergy would work. But it seems like this is exactly what corporate America has been doing for the past 50 years or so and selling us all down the river tby outsourcing all manufacturing jobs abroad. As cr---y as intel is, it's a necessary entity at this point to retain at least manufacturing of critical semiconductor components in mainland USA. If Taiwan were to get invaded tomorrow by China, what's going to happen to all these fabless companies dependent on cheap outsourced labor?
It’s not too late to spin off fabs.
Fabless companies like nvidia are bigger than Intel.
Intel can unlock value by ditching the IDM model.
Otellini took over in 2005. Intel has been led by dum-dums for 17 years AND counting.
Don't diss TI. Its market cap is higher than Intel's. $156B vs $139B.
Intel's earliest date of hitting a market cap of $140B was back in 2012. Back then NVDA had a market cap of $9B. Yes, NINE Billion.
Flashforward to today, NVDA's market cap is $426B while Intel's is $139B. Is this isn't a complete failure of Intel as an organization and its leadership since 2012 I don't know what is.
Clayton Christensen, the Harvard MBA professor, was a friend of Andy Grove's. He wrote the Innovator's Dilemma which warned about exploiting your money maker (x86) at the expense of disruptive innovation (mobile processors). Otellini through BK should have had Andy G on speed dial until his death; they and Pat G talked endlessly about how they worked closely with Andy G. I guess the students never learned the most important lesson.
https://jamesallworth.medium.com/intels-disruption-is-now-complete-d4fa771f0f2c
It is already too late. Should have spun off the fabs as a pure-play foundry at least 4 or 5 years ago, with some technology leadership still left. Now Intel is 1 or 2 generations behind TSMC and Samsung.
Spin off the fabs.
This is the only way.
Right now it’s a boat anchor on the design teams.
With regard to regaining industry leadership, it was already too late when MR and BS got fired. Probably too late when BK got fired.
Pat knows this, too. But there’s still plenty of money to be made in a declining business that is going to be around for decades (and propped up by the US federal government too). The future of Intel looks more like IBM or Texas Instruments than it does like TSMC.
They just got several billion dollars from the government to build new fabs. I'd say that is a good strategy and a big win for Intel. Ohio project got funded by tax payers.
The question I have is will they be able to deliver a good reason to move some cutting edge designs from TSMC to Intel foundry.