Is there good coverage of how Intel became so uncompetitive? My instinct is to say this is just the natural result of the presence of MBAs who are trained to focus _exclusively_ on this quarter's results so ignore R&D investment and also shit on employees by doing gimmicks like hotdesking to pinch pennies.
I'm willing to bet my intuition is wrong, especially given my extremely deep bias against MBAs and 'this quarter' thinking. Any great sources on the full story?
I think they have lost a lot of their best employees because their pay is not that great. They aimed for paying at the 50th percentile in wages and the top companies come in and can offer double or more their current pay.
Doesn't help they switched from large cubes with five-foot high cubicle walls which did a good job on minimizing noise and visual distractions to having cubicle walls with a height of about 3-4 feet high and much smaller. Plus they installed sit-stand desks and you have people stand and make phone calls that can be heard 30 feet away. Doesn't help for concentrating on problems.
Seems like there were years when intel did not have much competition from AMD. Each year the "big news" from intel was their their Celeron/Pentium/iX/whatever was now up to 100MHz faster than last year's (during limited situations where temperatures allow blah blah blah). Or they add some new strange trademarked exotic-sounding technology brand name each year like "The new Intel Celeron/Pentium/iX with..." "Intel MaxT"/"Intel TruEvo/"Intel Cartara"/"Intel Artuga Plus"/"Intel Versuvia"/"Intel Centurior Max"/"Intel T-Xe" that no one really understands but is basically some sort of mundane enterprise feature no one actually cares about that does something for remote wifi management
Quick - rush to the store to get a new laptop!!! I totally need an extra 100MHz single-core maximum boost on a 4-core 2Ghz CPU (i.e. 5% max...) with Intel TruStep MagrittePro (TM) technology that does something to the colour gamut of my monitor in certain content creation scenarios.</sarcasm>
It strikes me that Intel have been caught napping and resting on their laurels. AMD appear to have come out with a great competitive product and Intel don't seem to have anything to compete with it with because they've been milking the market for the past 5+ years with tiny incremental clock increases and nothing actually "new".
They've allowed AMD to eat their lunch.
Maybe they've got a "real" new product they've been keeping in reserve that they'll bring to market now and surprise everyone with. Maybe they'll bring out something amazing next year. Who knows. Maybe. Maybe not. Seems like they've blown their lead for now regardless.
Don't look for a change: their position was worse in the days of the Netburst dead-end and back then the company was just lucky that a second, independent path had been followed in the Haifa office to target a niche market (yes, laptops were niche in that age).
So has there been organizational dysfunction for decades? I think not: there are things Intel has always been doing very well and post-Netburst improvements after Core 2 have also been significant.
I believe that a big element is basically luck: you invest in a certain progression path and that investment will yield results so you keep going. Another path might be sufficiently better to write off the inferior path investment but you don't know that. Perhaps the unsatisfying path taken is the least bad of all. Even Netburst improved over time, a bit, and so did whatever forgettable AMD had been building between the Athlon glory days and those of Ryzen. As long as you see progress, it's very hard to just give it up for a fresh start (that may or may not be better). We can just be lucky that a luck/lock-in imbalance has never persisted long enough to make the lucky one the only survivor, because then they would never leave the left dead-end they'll inevitable run into some day.
I think we've all taken the ability to reliably introduce process node improvements for granted to some extent. Intel has clearly been caught out by its inability to get 10nm - which I understand was overambitious - to work and pretty much everything else follows on from there.
At the same time AMD has been fortunate that TSMC has been able to continue with its node shrinks - supported by demand from and cash generated by high end mobile devices.
None of which is to say that Intel has been well run (cough McAfee cough) or that your criticisms aren't valid to some extent.
My perspective is that every process node is so critical that missing the mark on 10nm had far-reaching ramifications. This kind of technology has gargantuan inertia. The entire hardware ecosystem is strongly interconnected between different firms, and each firm's future technology depends strongly on its past execution. Failure to deliver on 10nm not only jeopardized the smooth rollout of the subsequent process node, it also hurt Intel's ability to deliver large quantities of full-featured chips to customers.
I don't personally believe that Apple would be going to in-house silicon instead of Intel for its flagship laptops if there were a viable way to avoid doing so. Intel is so hurt right now that I surmise it'd be willing to negotiate a fat discount for a flag-carrying customer, and the loss of Windows functionality is kind of disappointing at the upper end of the market (where some tools are clearly better supported by windows or at least x86).
> Is there good coverage of how Intel became so uncompetitive?
François Piednoël, performance architect at Intel for 20 years, recently gave a presentation that covers a lot of the reasons behind Intel's decline in his presentation "How to Fix Intel" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiKjzeLco6c
The interesting one I think about is if the current CEO is basically their version of Steve Ballmer at Microsoft. Not highly loved by tech, media or finance, but basically held the ship together long enough to enable Microsoft to figure out how to transition away from the sinking ship that was Microsoft Windows and into new markets.
Basically he just needs to keep it afloat long enough for Intel to be able to find its version of Satya Nadella and Azure to unlock the next leg of growth.
I don't know, but I can tell you why it won't get better. Anyone smart enough to get promoted at Intel is smart enough to move to Apple and make 50% more. I know because I did that. The ones I know left at INTC tell me that financial engineering is off the charts.
There are lots of moving parts with an enormous organisation like Intel.
But if you ask me there is one thing to point the finger to, it would be ex-Intel Chairman Andy Bryant ( He retired earlier this year ). Raised to CFO in 90s. Promoted to CAO in 00s. And later head the process and manufacturing operations while forced out Patrick Gelsinger. That was I think in 2009. The Otellini and Bryant era.
Paul Otellini retired in 2012, and BK ( Brian Krzanich ) was picked ( by Andy Bryant ) as Otellini's successor.
There seems to be lots of power play within Intel that we will never know.
The TL;DR is that Intel has always been a vertically integrated shop (meaning that they usually fab and design their own chips), and that is starting to bite them because pure-play foundries are improving their tech at a faster rate.
Intel has been unable to keep up with process advancements in their foundries, and that has led to pure-play foundries like TSMC taking massive market share. As chips get smaller and smaller, Intel has failed to keep up. They can only do 10nm for their mobile stuff and 14nm for their desktop stuff, whereas fabs like TSMC have been in 7nm territory for a while now and are moving into 5nm territory.
Intel now and 10 years ago are not that different. If not a success of TSMC with EUV process, Intel would not be in a such troubled spot. Few years ago a reasonable assumption in the industry was that EUV would not be production-ready for quite some years. So Intel made a reasonable bet that they would be better with pushing existing technologies further.
But then a company in The Netherlands solved the extreme ultraviolet generation and optics problem and Intel failed to push their existing process to 10nm allowing TSMC and Samsung to overtake it as a technology leader. And Intel now has to deal with a situation that it had no experience for the last 40 years when the company was a technology leader.
I recall Intel intentionally took the foot off the accelerator in the midst of the GFC, and forfeited or skipped some next development to wait things out a while.
Hi, MBA here, not sure what "training" you're referring to. Certainly nothing I learned in school taught me to focus on quarterly results and ignore R&D. I learned to attempt to push ROIC above WACC in order to ensure firms are generating economic profits, I learned that we probably should capitalize R&D and include it in ROIC to show that it does impact value, among other things
My main question would be why Intel would even bother releasing Rocket Lake if, balancing between higher IPC and lower clocks, the performance would be _lower_ than the 10 series chips. So I disagree with the article that this will be an unqualified disaster. It's quite likely that they will be a little faster, at least core for core. But it also seems like these are notebook chips hacked into a desktop socket and limited to just 8 cores.
That means the best case scenario for Intel would be (barely) scraping back their "single threaded gaming performance" crown while completely giving up against the multi-threaded performance of AMD's higher core count Zen 3 chips. The only way Rocket Lake would make any sense in the market would be if these are priced less than $400 (probably a lot less), and so Intel's margins will be much lower on what is likely to be a much larger die with more transistors.
I don't think it's possible to call this anything other than a pure desperation move.
This is just bad all around. Not just for intel, but for the entire industry. I always prefer companies doing well because their products are successful, not because their competitors fall down.
More and more, Apple's timing on their switch to in-house ARM designs seems perfectly timed.
Apple should have switched to AMD instead. They would have almost perfect compatibility with Intel hardware and they would not need investing lots of money to develop chips.
Now they either need to halt some Mac lines or develop all kinds of CPUs, from mobile (which they probably can do, because they should be similar enough to iPhones) to server-grade (which they have no experience at all). And there's no way Mac Pros would sell enough to offset development costs. I just don't understand how they are going to manage that situation.
An unusually unfavourable article, even by the standards of semiaccurate.com.
Can this new processor family be interpreted as something less terrible than "palpable desperation" and effectively giving up on the 10nm process? For example, prices might be aggressively low.
Microsoft turned this around in 2009-2010 with one decision: Give everyone in engineering a 10-15% raise to keep up with competition. Intel’s fallen far behind on pay, so they have a brain drain problem and a morale problem. They won’t fix it until they pay people more. I think Intel’s more than 15% behind - they may need to bump by 25% or more.
Depending on which branch of the company you're talking of (fab design, chip design, ...), and based on what info you can actually get on it which is less fact and more "large amount of anecdotical evidence", Intel's is between more and a lot of than 15% behind.
And while I agree with your proposed first step of the solution, and the urgency to do it given the delay between that and any impact on results, their tendency to look only for short term gains and benefits will probably impede them.
They've learned to love easy money, and they didn't need to really pay their people well because there was no serious competition, not in fab, not in chips. Now they're fallen behind on both, as easily predicted, but for a short while they extracted massive amount of money from their margin.
The US needs to do whatever it takes to get TSMC to build not only top-tier fabs but centers of excellence here. As it stands TSMC on Taiwan, which is threatened by China, has damn near a monopoly on competitive fabrication. A single hit on Taiwan could terminally stall the entire global supply chain for top-tier chips.
Taiwans international relations are pretty delicate. I’m not sure if there is a lot that they want to change right now. Controlling the manufacturing of top end microchips is exactly the kind of card a small “neutral” country with a scary neighbor wants up their sleeve. Sure you could have a US embassy and recognize their sovereignty and put a military base and park some destroyers there but that would be a serious escalation with China.
Think on decades time scale, electron based turing machines are asymptoting in design, there isn’t much space for someone to be ahead until we start making optical computers.
I'd be interested in an x86-64 processor that took the 1+3+4 approach of the Snapdragon 875. One big core with a super high clock rate and massive IPC, three smaller ones, and four that are smaller still. A desktop CPU with a single-core performance equal to half a normal 8-core chip would be an absolutely incredible tool for IPC-constrained applications like game console emulation.
What actually happened to memristors? I read about them nearly a decade ago and we still don't have any on the market if I'm not mistaken. How come Intel didn't invest heavily in those?
And why is it only AMD that has a GPU baked into a CPU? Vega graphics are simply amazing and beat Intel's integrated graphics hands down. It's so nice to have only a single chip without buying an extra graphics card.
Unfortunately, AMD isn't very present. I see Intel sponsoring every eSports event out there and handing out i9s as prizes. I'm not tunes into the gamers but I still have the impression they believe Intel reigns supreme...
With RISC-V about to enter the market and AMD beating Intel on benchmarks, Intel better pull a rabbit out of their behind to stay competitive. But that's just a layman's view on the subject.
For gamers, I expect these will be priced such that Intel will offer a better price-to-performance ratio than AMD. I've seen so many industry pundits talking about the defeat of Intel for the last 2 generations, but gamers just quietly look the frames-per-second to $ ratio and keep buying Intel and the cheaper Intel-based motherboards. I think Rocket Lake will allow this trend to continue while Intel prepares Alder Lake.
It seems like Intel wasted at least 5 years. They thought they are invincible and competition will never catch up, plus they thought if they change the model name and repackage to a new socket, people will still buy it. They however didn't consider the fact that people bought these processors, because there was nothing else and also new people are becoming teens and adults and they need computers as well. Maybe they also counted on brand loyalty? I think brand loyalty ends when you need to waste your time waiting for a task to complete.
I am so happy to pre-order 5950X. I will also buy new Threadripper when it gets released.
Ceding/ignoring the smartphone/ARM market had a double impact on Intel. Obviously they missed a titanically large market.
But that huge market drove investment in fab technology outside of Intel, and allowed them to close the gap and provide competitive, now superior, fabs to AMD.
[+] [-] nxc18|5 years ago|reply
I'm willing to bet my intuition is wrong, especially given my extremely deep bias against MBAs and 'this quarter' thinking. Any great sources on the full story?
[+] [-] graton|5 years ago|reply
Doesn't help they switched from large cubes with five-foot high cubicle walls which did a good job on minimizing noise and visual distractions to having cubicle walls with a height of about 3-4 feet high and much smaller. Plus they installed sit-stand desks and you have people stand and make phone calls that can be heard 30 feet away. Doesn't help for concentrating on problems.
[+] [-] mattlondon|5 years ago|reply
Seems like there were years when intel did not have much competition from AMD. Each year the "big news" from intel was their their Celeron/Pentium/iX/whatever was now up to 100MHz faster than last year's (during limited situations where temperatures allow blah blah blah). Or they add some new strange trademarked exotic-sounding technology brand name each year like "The new Intel Celeron/Pentium/iX with..." "Intel MaxT"/"Intel TruEvo/"Intel Cartara"/"Intel Artuga Plus"/"Intel Versuvia"/"Intel Centurior Max"/"Intel T-Xe" that no one really understands but is basically some sort of mundane enterprise feature no one actually cares about that does something for remote wifi management
Quick - rush to the store to get a new laptop!!! I totally need an extra 100MHz single-core maximum boost on a 4-core 2Ghz CPU (i.e. 5% max...) with Intel TruStep MagrittePro (TM) technology that does something to the colour gamut of my monitor in certain content creation scenarios.</sarcasm>
It strikes me that Intel have been caught napping and resting on their laurels. AMD appear to have come out with a great competitive product and Intel don't seem to have anything to compete with it with because they've been milking the market for the past 5+ years with tiny incremental clock increases and nothing actually "new".
They've allowed AMD to eat their lunch.
Maybe they've got a "real" new product they've been keeping in reserve that they'll bring to market now and surprise everyone with. Maybe they'll bring out something amazing next year. Who knows. Maybe. Maybe not. Seems like they've blown their lead for now regardless.
[+] [-] usrusr|5 years ago|reply
So has there been organizational dysfunction for decades? I think not: there are things Intel has always been doing very well and post-Netburst improvements after Core 2 have also been significant.
I believe that a big element is basically luck: you invest in a certain progression path and that investment will yield results so you keep going. Another path might be sufficiently better to write off the inferior path investment but you don't know that. Perhaps the unsatisfying path taken is the least bad of all. Even Netburst improved over time, a bit, and so did whatever forgettable AMD had been building between the Athlon glory days and those of Ryzen. As long as you see progress, it's very hard to just give it up for a fresh start (that may or may not be better). We can just be lucky that a luck/lock-in imbalance has never persisted long enough to make the lucky one the only survivor, because then they would never leave the left dead-end they'll inevitable run into some day.
[+] [-] klelatti|5 years ago|reply
At the same time AMD has been fortunate that TSMC has been able to continue with its node shrinks - supported by demand from and cash generated by high end mobile devices.
None of which is to say that Intel has been well run (cough McAfee cough) or that your criticisms aren't valid to some extent.
[+] [-] totalZero|5 years ago|reply
I don't personally believe that Apple would be going to in-house silicon instead of Intel for its flagship laptops if there were a viable way to avoid doing so. Intel is so hurt right now that I surmise it'd be willing to negotiate a fat discount for a flag-carrying customer, and the loss of Windows functionality is kind of disappointing at the upper end of the market (where some tools are clearly better supported by windows or at least x86).
[+] [-] incog_nit0|5 years ago|reply
This is an insightful analysis of what’s going wrong at Intel and the lead-up and fall out after Keller left:
Part 1: https://web.archive.org/web/20200730185751/https://twitter.c...
Part 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20200729091548/https://twitter.c...
Part 2.5: https://web.archive.org/web/20200802065407/https://twitter.c...
Part 3: https://web.archive.org/web/20200807105015/https://twitter.c...
Part 4: https://web.archive.org/web/20200812073050/https://twitter.c...
[+] [-] noch|5 years ago|reply
François Piednoël, performance architect at Intel for 20 years, recently gave a presentation that covers a lot of the reasons behind Intel's decline in his presentation "How to Fix Intel" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiKjzeLco6c
[+] [-] baloney1|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] somethoughts|5 years ago|reply
Basically he just needs to keep it afloat long enough for Intel to be able to find its version of Satya Nadella and Azure to unlock the next leg of growth.
[+] [-] Nokinside|5 years ago|reply
This is high risk business. Unseen problems that come after pathfinding when big choices have been made may kill the success.
[+] [-] georgeburdell|5 years ago|reply
INTC deserves that 9 P/E ratio
[+] [-] ksec|5 years ago|reply
There are lots of moving parts with an enormous organisation like Intel.
But if you ask me there is one thing to point the finger to, it would be ex-Intel Chairman Andy Bryant ( He retired earlier this year ). Raised to CFO in 90s. Promoted to CAO in 00s. And later head the process and manufacturing operations while forced out Patrick Gelsinger. That was I think in 2009. The Otellini and Bryant era.
Paul Otellini retired in 2012, and BK ( Brian Krzanich ) was picked ( by Andy Bryant ) as Otellini's successor.
There seems to be lots of power play within Intel that we will never know.
[+] [-] deepnotderp|5 years ago|reply
Very simple: Cultural Decay
[+] [-] DylanBohlender|5 years ago|reply
https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/227720-how-intel-lost-10...
https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-manufacturers/intel/28919...
The TL;DR is that Intel has always been a vertically integrated shop (meaning that they usually fab and design their own chips), and that is starting to bite them because pure-play foundries are improving their tech at a faster rate.
Intel has been unable to keep up with process advancements in their foundries, and that has led to pure-play foundries like TSMC taking massive market share. As chips get smaller and smaller, Intel has failed to keep up. They can only do 10nm for their mobile stuff and 14nm for their desktop stuff, whereas fabs like TSMC have been in 7nm territory for a while now and are moving into 5nm territory.
[+] [-] _0w8t|5 years ago|reply
But then a company in The Netherlands solved the extreme ultraviolet generation and optics problem and Intel failed to push their existing process to 10nm allowing TSMC and Samsung to overtake it as a technology leader. And Intel now has to deal with a situation that it had no experience for the last 40 years when the company was a technology leader.
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[+] [-] henriquez|5 years ago|reply
That means the best case scenario for Intel would be (barely) scraping back their "single threaded gaming performance" crown while completely giving up against the multi-threaded performance of AMD's higher core count Zen 3 chips. The only way Rocket Lake would make any sense in the market would be if these are priced less than $400 (probably a lot less), and so Intel's margins will be much lower on what is likely to be a much larger die with more transistors.
I don't think it's possible to call this anything other than a pure desperation move.
[+] [-] jeffrallen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] herodoturtle|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ogre_codes|5 years ago|reply
More and more, Apple's timing on their switch to in-house ARM designs seems perfectly timed.
[+] [-] vbezhenar|5 years ago|reply
Now they either need to halt some Mac lines or develop all kinds of CPUs, from mobile (which they probably can do, because they should be similar enough to iPhones) to server-grade (which they have no experience at all). And there's no way Mac Pros would sell enough to offset development costs. I just don't understand how they are going to manage that situation.
[+] [-] Spooky23|5 years ago|reply
We’re going to move towards AWS, Microsoft, Apple chips. It’s really hard for a company like Intel or AMD to serve hyper scale customers.
[+] [-] HelloNurse|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Schiendelman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nolok|5 years ago|reply
And while I agree with your proposed first step of the solution, and the urgency to do it given the delay between that and any impact on results, their tendency to look only for short term gains and benefits will probably impede them.
They've learned to love easy money, and they didn't need to really pay their people well because there was no serious competition, not in fab, not in chips. Now they're fallen behind on both, as easily predicted, but for a short while they extracted massive amount of money from their margin.
[+] [-] api|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rasz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redisman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] intelisdead|5 years ago|reply
Single Core:
AMD 5900X - 3643 points (+15% faster)
Intel 10900K - 3178 points
Multicore
AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 3995WX - 88673 points (+130% faster)
Intel Xeon Gold 6248R @ 3.00GHz - 38521 points
By the way, 5900X is not only faster than 10900K, but also consumes less power.
[+] [-] causality0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmf|5 years ago|reply
This isn't possible. The cores are already as fast as they can be, so moving from 10 big to 1 big would only reduce performance.
[+] [-] rasz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] LockAndLol|5 years ago|reply
And why is it only AMD that has a GPU baked into a CPU? Vega graphics are simply amazing and beat Intel's integrated graphics hands down. It's so nice to have only a single chip without buying an extra graphics card.
Unfortunately, AMD isn't very present. I see Intel sponsoring every eSports event out there and handing out i9s as prizes. I'm not tunes into the gamers but I still have the impression they believe Intel reigns supreme...
With RISC-V about to enter the market and AMD beating Intel on benchmarks, Intel better pull a rabbit out of their behind to stay competitive. But that's just a layman's view on the subject.
[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|5 years ago|reply
It can only execute on its core business which the MBA infestation has been riding for a decade with their IP lead and now it finally has run out.
[+] [-] stagger87|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] person_of_color|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] AtlasBarfed|5 years ago|reply
But that huge market drove investment in fab technology outside of Intel, and allowed them to close the gap and provide competitive, now superior, fabs to AMD.