As long as the leadership treats our best employees as commodities instead of making sure they feel valued, we'll keep losing our best talent to competitors who will be overjoyed to have them. This has been happening for years and the consequences are more than evident in our results. This is why Intel is failing.
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Yes AMD is far superior but with their peanut pay many very important contributors are looking elsewhere. Their antiquated system of only lateral moves make sure that the true geniuses leave.
Intel's failing has at least 3 vectors:
- Most aptly described by CB's as a "creosote bush" x86 and its high margins poisoned the ground. There were multiple attempts to diversify the product line from the mostly stupid toys, to the high end graphics chips, to the "me too" efforts to recapture phones, to acquisitions but the moment they failed to track toward x86 level margins investment and resources dried up and guaranteed their failure.
- BH's ill-fated decision to drive cost per transistor for 10nm along Moore's Law. While T and S were allowing cost to transistor to increase, B's decision committed Intel to radical degree of backend scaling. Had Intel been able to pull it off it's technology leadership would be today unquestioned and unthreatened. But it proved a reach too far exacerbated by
- An obsession to protect intellectual property. In this the module engineers were allowed to know only the specifics of their process steps. This placed the entirety of problem solving on the shoulders of a small number of integrators who knew about a specific process segment, and the one who knew the entire front half flow, the one who knew the entire backend (interconnect) flow, and the one who had access to the entire process flow. By "design" the number of people capable of solving problems was reduced as the number of problems created by #2 exploded and the development machine was self-strangled.
Intel was never competitive nor competed anywhere effectively when real competitors were there.
DRAM, EEPROM, Flash, Modems, you name it if they didn’t have a monopoly like they did in x86 they were never competitive.
Now they have lost the x86 monopoly and technology leadership they are totally f*ucked. AMD in partnership with TSMC and Nvidia and AMD and TSMC, Apple and TSMC, Qualcomm and TSMC. Do you see the pattern ? Technology leadership, huge scale and huge ROI with a diverse customer base to fund RD, fabs and macroeconomic problems is a competitive advantage line Wintel was 29 years ago. Too bad Intel BoD and last four CEOs missed it!
Pat and others know it and why they need government billions to stay afloat. But sadly those billions and empty talk can’t change the real situation.
With recession and AMD and others who have superior technology Intel is totally finished, FUBAR
Intel missed out on every new growth market because it couldn’t execute. GPU, AI, mobile, etc. The company has a record of wasted resources as it attempts to expand beyond x86, the only market it could do for 50 years.
What happened to IBM or Motorola or other semiconductor companies is Intel’s fate!
They got no chance to ever being relevant in leading edge Foundry or logic agian, a wet dream.
Big layoffs are coming!
But, but, we got the best ever light drone show! Surely that will save us!?
Intel is failing because they missed the mobile phone megatrend, which 'leadership' failed to acknowledge preferring career enhancing moves or engaging in pi----g contests if not questionable initiatives
Intel is failing because they missed the mobile phone megatrend which supercharged demand for leading edge fab volume.
PC market is not enough to sustain leading edge fab development as it has been flat to shrinking since 2012.
This is the root cause and why Intel needs to become a foundry to stay relevant and keep up with TSMC.
Odds of success are low.
This is not why Intel was failing. The main reason was not able to transition to EUV early. Every company treats their employees more or less the same.