All this negativity is unsettling, but the situation in this company is sad, especially considering that it could have been much better if only we had better leadership. Let's hope for the best, but it would take a miracle to fix things here.
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40+ years ago IBM handed Intel the golden goose miracle and they milked it for a good long time. Sadly there was the iPhone and Foundry pivots both missed by the incompetent CTO, BoD and ELT. That pivot happens a good decade ago and Intel is so out of position the only miracle that will bring it to relevance is CCP invasion of Taiwan, North Korea going nuclear on South Korea. Sadly all scenarios that don’t totally destroy the worlds economy show Intel resurgence at less than 1% probability including this current IDM and IFS dual thrust!
Perhaps there’s an opportunity in the next big thing — processors for implantable devices, nanotech materials manufacturing, not quite sure what just yet. The problem is Intel has not done well in identifying the opportunities that popped up in the last 20 years, let alone exploited any successfully.
It’ll take an R&D reset of some kind to alter this trajectory. Having hippie cultural/UX experts,
clingers-to-the-past, and salesman holding up forever-prototypes ad nauseam in Circuit aren’t going to make that happen.
“What miracle would it take to fix this company?” — a Time Machine. In that manner, we could reverse Paul O’s decision to pass on the iPhone processor contract and redefine Intel as a processor and design company instead of just an X86 processor and design company.
Sadly, Marty, there’s no Time Machine and no 1.2 jigawatts of power to be found.
🤣🤣🤣🤣 it seems that SW solutions are finally starting to get traction in parallel to HW ????!!!??!?!?!
Billions and billions of $$ spent of software acquisitions and most all of it flushed down the toilet. Intel skillset and culture are not software, everyone knows that.
Good try.
On average end users upgrade thier HW every 3 years so demand decline and peeks market wide with new competition joining the party every few years like Apple did.
HW must be kept on a steady performance/cost/battery balance. But what happens when you reach the design barrier? Eventually all HW based companies will reach their design barriers.
HW is not the basis where you should place all your chips (pun intended). Pat knows this and by the shifts and layoffs at the upmost management it seems that SW solutions are finally starting to get traction in parallel to HW. We'll see the results in 5-10 years.
Fire all engineers who are surviving on seniority and hindering every new technology move to improve intel to compete with next generation companies. Engineers not ready to change old style of doing things. Who buys Nokia 3310? Too many engineers talking and not doing real work. Go check how Facebook works.
Intel has the promotion path to Grade 9 and above, Principal Engineer, Senior Principal Engineer, Director, Fellow, Senior Fellow and many many Vice Presidents, This is the path that is measured as succeeding and rewarded amply. Go and check among those cadres who left and claim that they were instrumental in multi billion dollar acquisitions. If they had been so successful in integrating data center and AI (anyone remembers Altera FPGA ), why is Intel at the losing end in those areas and virtually everywhere?
You have to go see the partying in these super communities of those grades in neighborhoods and elsewhere. Get rid of all these bloated people. Bring honesty back in self evaluation and promotions.
lol, @nys+1kuUjyN5... Intel is mainly based in OR, CA, and AZ all of which have legalized recreational pot... this person must work at one of these sites and appears to be smoking a lot of it.
@oqv+1kuUjyN5 Intel product teams could be unleashed and actually have done well if allowed to use TSMC. Agree it is at best a low single digit growth and with system companies doing their own accelerators and AMDs rise as well as ARM and RISC-V it will continue to experience negative revenue for the next three years. Combined with the recession ki----g client it is ugly everywhere!
So Pat can’t spin off the product groups to foundry as it would put 50K TMG employees out to layoff. So he sells Snake Oil IDM/IFS as virtuous cycle dynamic duo of resurrection.
Intel’s core competency is silicon manufacturing? Really, almost nobody at Intel knows how it is done at other companies, they’d be rudely surprised, plus they are two nodes behind and no clue how to do EUV.
They have no capability at Foundry. They don’t know how to run low volume high mix, nor customize process for multiple customers again high mix and from low volume to high volume. Let’s also not forget they don’t have a rich mixture of IP like analog, RF, high voltage, embedded memory across multiple process node.
Intel manufacturing has become narrow, inflexible and uncompetitive running a highly customized process for one product line. Nobody top to bottom knows the innovation nor way to run a trusted customer focused foundry business.
Barring WWIII Intel’s chances are getting Kodak like
Intel is tied to a market in secular decline - the PC. They have (still) a dominant share there and so can’t grow. Furthermore, their existing share is threatened by AMD, Apple and soon Qualcomm.
Server is another large market but growth has slowed to a more mature rate levered to GDP. Here, Intel has a large share but that share is in free fall due to Epyc and will fall further with ARM and RISC V offerings as well as custom cloud silicon. Nvidia and AMD can also undercut at the system level with GPU bundling.
No growth means no revenue to improve and expand the next generation of fabs. We all know that TSMC has the revenue growth to support their growth since they have a diversified customer base building everything - PCs, smartphones, GPU, auto etc.
Intel’s core competency is silicon manufacturing. They are right to address foundry as a business model. However, it will be extremely difficult if not impossible to unseat TSMC. Intel does not have the cash flow to justify investment in foundry, especially with no customers. They need to lean on government handouts and build out trust.
The current strategy is very flawed due to the simple conflict of interest. How can Intel justify fab for their competitors such as AMD, Apple, Nvidia and Qualcomm? Incentives are misaligned.
The only way out is for Intel to split into two independent companies.
Intel design
Intel foundry
Intel design can be free to use TSMC or Intel based on merit.
Intel foundry is free to fab for Intel-design competitors.
I firmly believe this is the actual end game and Pat is just buying time to set the stage for the split. Split too early and the design team won’t have enough time to adjust to a fabless model. Also the fabs need an interim revenue / government money stream to bootstrap into manufacturing readiness.
The plan is clear if you look at what is actually happening.
Honestly? Maybe becoming an IP company and selling hardware design to those better companies. We can't produce the stuff on par or better than the rest.
Huge pivot though, they'd never do it
I have a doubt that we can bolt on any of the process being instituted to change the company and have it be successful. Those who have survived by politics will become more political. The talent/competency will leave as the discover this - even in this market.
Rather than working with what we have, it might be worthwhile to sell off the fabs, and license out the brand.
trust PG- we enter a new era- 2-3 years from now biggest foundry services/leading processors stock at ~98 plus - hang in there- No layoffs only redep and reorg done via all VSP's and attrition for re assigning talent.
Fire every VP, director, fellow and PE.
Complete failure at AMD next generation x86 product., looks like that isn’t happening
Complete failure of TSMC at 3nm, but I hear yields are already pretty good.
So even if Intel executes Intel has little hope.