[HN Gopher] Political Chips
___________________________________________________________________
Political Chips
Author : simonpure
Score : 130 points
Date : 2022-08-03 14:40 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (stratechery.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (stratechery.com)
| zbird wrote:
| > This is why Intel's shift to being not simply an integrated
| device manufacturer but also a foundry is important: yes, it's
| the right thing to do for Intel's business, but it's also good
| for the West if Intel can pull it off.
|
| It's good for the US, not "the West".
| MauranKilom wrote:
| Intel is also building a new fab in Germany. So no, it's not
| just the US.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Intel is in big trouble and the only card they have left is the
| nationalism card. And that card is for losers.
|
| We are about to enter a silicon slump with low demand and
| oversupply; for Intel things will get worse.
|
| What will happen when it is clear to everyone including
| politicians that all that subsidy money is going into a black
| hole? And people finally figure out that a rocket that blows up
| stuff doesn't need a 2nm chip?
|
| They are going to lose interest and those subsidies that is
| Intel's last hope will end.
| hotpotamus wrote:
| I've read that the problems with chips for cars are actually
| old processes (greater than 100nm) that are commodity and so no
| one really cares to make them and the equipment has one foot in
| the grave and such, so I don't think anyone cares too much
| about putting chips into rockets since that stuff was figured
| out awhile ago.
|
| My perception of national defense types is somewhat influenced
| by reading their press stuff and somewhat influenced by General
| Buck Turgidson from Dr Strangelove. He would say, "We must not
| have a $weapon gap!" (missiles, mineshafts, whatever he
| perceived to be in the national interest at the moment). And
| today, what occupies the minds of these types is AI which means
| latest gen chips and problems with pesky nerds and their
| ethical considerations. They greatly fear that China has
| surpassed the US in AI and has us outgunned. To be fair to
| them, AI could certainly be a potent weapon, but I have no idea
| how their perceptions of China reflect reality.
| groby_b wrote:
| "We are about to enter a silicon slump with low demand and
| oversupply"
|
| What causes you to assume that?
|
| "What will happen [if...] people finally figure out that a
| rocket that blows up stuff doesn't need a 2nm chip?"
|
| One, they'll learn that we're not doing too hot on custom chip
| fabs in general? They'll also, if they're really that dense,
| learn that we need chips for a few more things than to make
| things go boom. (FWIW, they're not that dense.)
|
| "They are going to lose interest and those subsidies that is
| Intel's last hope will end."
|
| Even if the rest of your statements were correct (and I don't
| think they are), that is absolutely not how subsidies work.
| Local subsidies translate to local jobs translate to votes.
| Keeping them running is rather important to politicians. So,
| no, "lose interest" is not exactly the most likely failure mode
| here.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| This one seems to have translated into dividends while intel
| posts substantial losses.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| I am a Libertarian so this may seem like an odd comment: I
| support some government intervention to design and manufacture of
| at least low tech chips (adequate for laptops, tractors,
| industrial uses in general).
|
| I am not a hardware expert, but given that the Open RISC projects
| seem very worthy of support, both in design efforts and multiple
| inside the US fab facilities.
|
| TSMC's new 5nm factory just opened 60 miles south of where I live
| in Arizona is also the kind of progress I want to see. I am a fan
| of globalization but we need to balance that with good "Plan B's"
| for building what we really need inside the US.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| US is not lacking in CPU design. I agree OpenRISC (and RISC-V)
| is worthy of support, but they benefit China more than US, and
| it would be poor use of US tax money to benefit China more than
| US.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| It is not odd to be Libertarian and support government
| intervention that benefits one's self. Hypocritical, maybe, but
| a common sentiment.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| That is how I see it. I often drift into hypocrisy: I am 100%
| anti-war except if my country was directly attacked, but in
| the financial interests of me and my family, I do own
| "defense" stocks.
|
| Also in my own self interest: I am for our government
| massively supporting poor kids with meals at schools, special
| tutoring, etc. in order for us to have a larger and better
| educated work force in the future.
|
| Anyway sorry for the rant.
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| fwiw it didn't come through as a rant. Most of us if we are
| honest with ourselves have internal contradictions. It's
| important to be aware.
|
| My wife is fundamentally a socialist (we are in Canada so
| it's not a misunderstood bad scary word :-). But she is
| also a home depot manager, where she is the voice of
| capitalist market forces. What she wishes the system should
| be, and the system she is daily a part of, are frequently
| at odds.
|
| I personally find extremes of any given philosophy to be
| impractical and untenable. I respect more people who, like
| it appears yourself, say "this is my general leaning,and
| these are my pragmatical exceptions".
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| In today's world you can't really follow any ideology in
| a clean way. If you want to live you have to make
| compromises somewhere and basically be a hypocrite. I
| only have a problem with people that don't admit that (of
| which there are many and they are very loud).
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Hate to say it but just sounds like you're a regular ass person
| and not a libertarian. You're against government intervention
| except in cases where it benefits you, and in those cases
| you're for it. That's like, most people. Except presumably
| you're privileged economically, probably socially, and so the
| number of things that you need is low and the amount of
| opportunities afforded by your social status is high. If you
| were lower on the totem pole you might find it more important
| for governments to also do things like protect or expand access
| to education or have environmental regulations if you're not
| economically capable of just moving to a wealthy place.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| This is the what I meant with my post.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| Yeah my take is not that he's hypocritical but that like
| most people he's not an actual libertarian. To be
| libertarian is to know there are things that government
| intervention can do that will benefit you but still know to
| forgo those things because their costs are higher to
| society as a whole. What he is is just a republican.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Libertarianism, like any other political ideology, can
| contain moderate stances.
| edmcnulty101 wrote:
| I'm a 'government using funding to improve the world' vs 'govt
| using funding to control people' libertarian.
|
| Scientific r and d falls strongly into the former category.
|
| DEA, FBI, NSA, CIA, TSA, ATF, DoD, state police, county police,
| municipal police, neighborhood police, and other organizations
| used to control people. Plus the literally uncountable number
| of criminal and regulatory laws on the books that keep growing
| exponentially without congress taking time to go back and
| review old laws...
| pphysch wrote:
| I wonder to what extent Washington's fuss over Taiwan is simply
| TSMC lobbying at work. They're an important company that is gonna
| get their lunch eaten by the mainland. But what can Washington
| even do about it?
|
| Beyond the "unsinkable aircraft carrier" angle, that is.
| trynumber9 wrote:
| The US has been sending carrier groups to support Taiwan long
| before they were a leading edge semiconductor manufacturer. So
| it's geopolitics as normal.
|
| As for getting crushed by SMIC, this is only with possible
| massive government investment from the PRC. Now you see many
| other governments reacting with subsidies in kind. It will be a
| totally distorted market in 10 years time.
| pphysch wrote:
| Hence "to what extent". TFA implies that TSMC leaders were
| VIPs at the Pelosi meeting. What does this have to do with
| Washington's long-standing policy of militarizing Taiwan?
| Throwawayaerlei wrote:
| "[TSMC is] an important company that is gonna get their lunch
| eaten by the mainland."
|
| How so? Not for the foreseeable future in bleeding and leading
| edge nodes, where the PRC is some unknown but very long
| distance away from making their own EUV machines.
|
| An invasion of Taiwan just means an end to TSMC production
| there, a point its chairman Mark Liu made a few days ago in a
| CNN interview. That would have _really_ bad effects on the PRC
| 's narrow economy with its export focus.
| pphysch wrote:
| > PRC's narrow economy
|
| Come on. There is not a less "narrow" major economy on the
| planet than China's. This is just silly.
|
| USA would collapse in weeks if China blocked all exports.
| China would run out of dollars, which coincidentally would
| become worthless at the same time.
| tshadley wrote:
| Very good points. Here's the link.
|
| https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/fzgps/date/2022-07-31/segme.
| ..
|
| LIU: Nobody can control TSMC by force. If you take a military
| force or invasion you will render TSMC's factory non-operable
| because this is such a sophisticated manufacturing facility.
| It depends on the real time [correlation] with the outside
| world, with Europe, with Japan, with the U.S., from materials
| to chemicals to spare parts to engineering software
| diagnosis. And it's everybody's effort to maybe this factory
| operable. So if you take it over by force you can no longer
| make it operable.
| keepquestioning wrote:
| How would one profit off the next few years of political
| chipmaking?
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Pork futures.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Chinese semiconductor companies. If this insanity continues
| (nationalism and sanctions), the massive Chinese market will
| end up being serviced only by Chinese chip companies. Some of
| these are investable via the Chinese or Hong Kong stock
| markets.
| mikewarot wrote:
| Chips are great, but you need discrete components, circuit
| boards, and other support, and the manufacturing infrastructure
| for all of that. Do we really have all of that in sufficient
| quantity domestically any more?
| kipchak wrote:
| >"the goal should be to counteract the fundamental forces pushing
| manufacturing to geopolitically risky regions, and Intel is the
| only real conduit available to do that."
|
| I wonder if it's fair to assume based on this the US gov will
| prop up intel as a foundry for as long as necessary, to secure
| it's own supply and reduce reliance on Taiwan/TSMC.
| klelatti wrote:
| Great piece but it seems that Ben doesn't quite finish joining
| the dots.
|
| If Intel is to have a successful foundry business at the cutting
| edge then its customers will be those firms that are designing
| cutting edge CPUs, SoCs and GPUs.
|
| That means Apple & Qualcomm (possibly OK) but also Nvidia, AMD
| and other Arm based competitors with Intel's CPUs and GPUs.
|
| Can't see how this will work with Intel in its current form.
| hyperation wrote:
| Perhaps a duopoly in domestic chip fabrication, with both Intel
| and TSMC operating fabs in the continental U.S.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| I think klelatti is doubting whether AMD could trust Intel to
| pursue AMD's best interest.
| klelatti wrote:
| Absolutely! Handing over your detailed product
| specifications and product plans to a direct competitor is
| inconceivable.
|
| I'm 100% convinced now that an Intel split into foundry and
| CPU vendor is inevitable.
|
| It's a political if not a commercial necessity if Intel is
| to provide a viable alternative to TSMC.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| Samsung manufactured for Apple for a long time. I don't
| think it's inconceivable.
| klelatti wrote:
| That's a fair challenge. I think it's a little different
| though - the SoC was one component of the iPhone - so
| full details of the competing product weren't being
| shared.
|
| Plus when the relationship started volumes were small for
| both iPhone and Samsung phones. As we know Apple ended
| the relationship eventually.
|
| I struggle to see Lisa Su handing this info to Intel even
| with some strong safeguards.
| robocat wrote:
| AMDs spin-off of Global Foundries only gets mentioned once as an
| aside, yet surely there are multiple important reasons why that
| story is relevant to Intel.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| > "The most important decision was shifting to extreme
| ultraviolet lithography at a time when Intel thought it was much
| too expensive and difficult to implement; TSMC, backed by Apple's
| commitment to buy the best chips it could make, committed to EUV
| in 2014, and delivered the first EUV-derived chips in 2019 for
| the iPhone. Those EUV machines are made by one company -- ASML.
| They're worth more than Intel too (and Intel is a customer)."
|
| CNBC toured ASML clean rooms in a very interesting video. IIRC,
| the only thing keeping ASML from exporting these machines to
| China is some EU/USA export control rule:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSVHp6CAyQ8
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Full disclosure: I worked for AMD for about a decade.
|
| I agree with the bottom line here (we should spend gov't $$ to
| make sure significant amounts of chip manufacturing still get
| made in the US, and Intel has to be a big part of that). However,
| it misses the real reason for Intel's decline.
|
| For most of it's existence, if Intel had missed a manufacturing
| node in Moore's Law, it would have been rightly recognized as an
| existential threat, and it would have become the #1 focus of the
| CEO and the rest of the company. Intel fell behind Moore's Law
| for years in its manufacturing, and it never caused them to
| appropriately panic until that hit the bottom line. This is a
| problem of an executive suite too focused on this quarter's
| results, and not focused enough on the engineering that drives
| those results. Previous generations of Intel executives
| understood that. It is likely that the current CEO, brought in
| once the board saw problems in their stock price, realizes it. If
| they had been run by executives who cared more about the
| underlying engineering, they would have had a 5-year head start
| in fixing the situation.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| For an example of a broken company:
|
| https://twitter.com/dylan522p/status/1554889887630761985
|
| Intel with a bunch of Optane related presentations at
| #FlashMemorySummit
|
| Some the Intel folks I spoke to about this (not pictured) had
| no clue it was going to be cancelled until they read it on an
| article from Toms Hardware.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| I think this is a result of the problem of financializaton. I
| don't think that an engineer has to run a company like Intel,
| Boeing or Apple. But if the growth of steady profits becomes a
| higher priority than what you actually produce, you are likely
| to milk the business at the expense of its long term prospects.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| I mostly disagree with this line of reasoning. Yes,
| financialization is bad, but Intel would have been fine if
| its process went fine.
|
| We probably will never know what exactly went wrong, but I
| think the current best guess is this: Intel set minimum metal
| pitch target for its 10 nm process at 36 nm, while TSMC set
| minimum metal pitch target for its 7 nm process (equivalent
| to Intel 10 nm process) at 40 nm. These processes were the
| last before EUV, pushing DUV to its limit. It turned out that
| you can do 40 nm but not 36 nm. That's it.
|
| It was an extremely technical issue, with justifications on
| both sides, and Intel's decision wasn't obviously mistaken,
| even in retrospect. 36 nm was usual scaling to Moore's law.
| It was 40 nm that was unusual, TSMC underscaled metal
| relative to fin and gate. Why 40 nm? Because it was the limit
| of DUV double patterning. But Intel also knew that! That's
| why Intel went with quadruple patterning. It was a
| conservative choice to underscale metal to the limit of
| double patterning, but quadruple patterning wasn't crazy
| either. Everyone was using quadruple patterning for fin at
| this point, so it wasn't thought that risky.
|
| Should Intel have reconsidered this once they encountered
| yield issues? Yes, but that's hindsight. All processes
| experience yield issues. Intel probably thought they can be
| solved, faster than going back to drawing board and doing
| everything again. Unfortunately they couldn't.
|
| (Above analysis was informed by lots of reading on this topic
| I did over the years, but https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-
| manufacturers/intel/7433-... in particular.)
| icelancer wrote:
| Yeah I generally agree with this take. Of course on HN and
| other technical sites the opinion "lol engineers should run
| companies" gets a lot of play, but plenty of engineers tank
| companies and don't get posted here with the alternative
| viewpoint.
|
| Intel made a calculated bet, lost, and furthermore made a
| handful of other bad business decisions. We focus a lot on
| the latter part when in reality it's unlikely the
| "business" decisions were the primary reasons for
| failure... it very well may have been technical problems
| led by engineers in the first place.
|
| I don't think Intel acted irrationally.
|
| Last, this is the journey of almost all industries. The
| titans become too complacent, set for disruption by other
| smaller companies / outsiders. This is just the natural
| course of business due to inertia. Intel is hardly alone
| here.
|
| EDIT: All that being said, the right man for the job is in
| the CEO chair. I personally believe he always should've had
| the role. We'll see how Gelsinger turns it around. I am
| optimistic.
| lazulicurio wrote:
| A big part of this is investors demanding financializaton.
| Unless you're in a sector that investors have decided is a
| "growth" sector, it's all about capital efficiency and
| headcount and how much "fat" you can trim. See, for example,
| the recent gas price situation. Companies are far more
| worried about becoming overcapitalized than they are worried
| about losing out on some sales volume.
| mandevil wrote:
| In general I don't believe that being an engineer is necessary
| to run a technology business (some of my best leaders were
| not), but I have come around to believing that Intel and Boeing
| are exceptions: the nature of their business requires new
| massive bets- not quite 'bet the company' but definitely 'bet
| the next 10 years of company performance' every so often (new
| fabs and new planes), and that one decision really needs to be
| made by an experienced engineer, due to the nature of the
| underlying evaluation. If not, then people who think they can
| bafflegab mother nature the same way they can auditors will
| make the decisions.
| mandevil wrote:
| Just wanted to clarify that singling out Boeing and Intel
| specifically was not my intention: I really meant commercial
| aircraft and semiconductors industries as a whole, using
| those two companies as a syndoche, because of the massive
| investment and large time delays between the commitment of
| money and the result in the market. Those two in particular
| seem to require regular, hugely expensive (10+ billion
| dollar) efforts of 5-10 years in duration to keep up the pace
| of technical development, so picking the wrong horse is
| catastrophic for a long while.
|
| (Obviously the A380 never killed anyone like the 737Max did,
| but it definitely was a massive, 25 billion dollar sinkhole
| for the company- some estimates are that Airbus never even
| turned a profit on the flyaway cost of the airplane,
| excluding development costs! If Boeing hadn't simultaneously
| had the 737Max actual disaster, it would have been much worse
| for Airbus. Intel has seen TSMC power ahead, which has made
| their problems more obvious.)
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| An interesting example is Dennis Muilenberg, who was Boeing
| CEO from 2015-2019, during the 737 Max debacle:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg
|
| He started at Boeing in 1985 as an engineering intern, earned
| a masters in Aeronautics, and worked his way through
| management and engineering positions until he became CEO. I
| have no idea how much of the 737 Max issues could be placed
| on him directly, but he was CEO during its launch and the
| crashes.
| nickff wrote:
| Dennis Muilenberg also featured in the NOVA documentary
| "War of the X-Planes", around the middle of his career,
| where he appeared to be a risk-taking, forward-thinking
| engineering manager. Of note, I believe that a significant
| portion of his career was spent on the 'defense' side of
| Boeing, which some have blamed for the company's problems.
|
| I personally place more blame on Muilenberg's predecessor,
| James McNerney, a former Proctor & Gamble, and 3M
| executive.
| mandevil wrote:
| The key 737 Max decisions were made circa 2011-2013, while
| James McNerney was the CEO (2005-2015). That was when the
| design objective of no simulator training required was set
| for the plane (and Boeing released marketing information
| promising that) while also promising to do it with engines
| that were too big for the wings. That decision was what led
| to everything else, and was loudly announced and marketed
| while Muilenburg was over on the Integrated Defense side of
| the company.
|
| James McNerney was a Harvard MBA who spent time at McKinsey
| before going to the Jack Welch clown show at GE, where he
| ran the aircraft engine business for a long time. When he
| lost out to Immelt to be CEO there, he went to 3M for a few
| years then bounced to Boeing.
|
| Now, Muilenburg has to bear the mistakes he made: pushing
| an unsafe plane through certification, not listening to the
| right people, not investigating the Lion Air crash
| sufficiently, etc. But the evidence I think strongly shows
| that someone who was not an engineer was making the final
| decisions on the "bet the company for the next 10 years"
| choice to go forward with the 737Max rather than a clean-
| sheet design, back in 2011.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's funny. I worked in a geography with a lot of GE
| alums. The ICs were really good for the most part, hard
| workers, smart but reserved.
|
| The managers and executives turned consultants went out
| of their way to tell you about how they met Jack Welch or
| got screamed at by Jack Welch, etc. It was weird, and
| moreover, they almost without exception idiots.
| swyx wrote:
| just looked McNerney up.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McNerney
|
| for his contributions to society, he made between
| 12-29m/year every year for the 10 years he was CEO.
|
| ugh
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| I think it boils down to the messaging that comes from top.
| Do they mainly talk about creating the best products or do
| they talk about shareholder value?
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| You could apply this with slightly different specifics to many
| US national and multinational corporations.
|
| The efficient market rewards inefficient stock buybacks, record
| debt fueled dividends, years of underinvestment, low wages, and
| most of all no strings attached bailouts. They may be a loser,
| but we'll pay for their loss. Socialize the losses/costs and
| privatize the gains.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Based on the performance of publicly listed companies in the
| last 15 years, the stock market has rewarded companies with
| great cash flow, high profits, and relatively rosy outlooks.
|
| Of course there is an underlying assumption the government
| will bail out simultaneous/systemic big failures, but it does
| not seem accurate to assume any random business will be
| bailed out.
|
| Edit : fixed typo
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > but it does it [sic] seem accurate to assume any random
| business will be bailed out.
|
| Precisely the issue. It's not "any random business". It's
| any business with the appropriate properties and
| connections. If it was truly just random business, perhaps
| the bail outs would not create such a level of moral
| hazard. But it's not, and businesses know that.
| megaman821 wrote:
| I don't like the bailout but I understand they were
| necessary. I just wish they came with harsher deterrents.
| Like if the shareholders vote to take a bailout, the
| Board, C-Suite, and VP's all get let go and any financial
| packages can be litigated in special bailout courts.
| amelius wrote:
| Sounds similar to Boeing. You begin to wonder when these kind
| of lessons start entering management textbooks.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| The accountants took over the company, and the good engineers
| left.
|
| I have witnessed this with other companies; and I am sorry
| they are never going to return to what they once were.
|
| It is kind of obvious when you chat with all the sad
| employees: Why didn't you leave? And then you realise that
| the ones, who are left, are the ones who couldn't get a job
| elsewhere.
| formerkrogemp wrote:
| > The accountants took over the company, and the good
| engineers left.
|
| As an accountant, I would quibble with this aspersion and
| lay the blame with management and other, broader issues.
|
| > It is kind of obvious when you chat with all the sad
| employees: Why didn't you leave? And then you realise that
| the ones, who are left, are the ones who couldn't get a job
| elsewhere.
|
| This seems true of many companies. Many of us are just
| playing musical chairs with our careers and jobs trying to
| find that job that doesn't suck.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| I am sorry for insulting accountants and I realise what
| wrote is too harsh (but hey this is the internet so ...).
|
| And you cannot have engineers running everything because
| then you will have a half-built Concorde and a bankrupt
| company.
|
| But there is a balance. And if that balance tips for too
| long, you end up with the whole organisation content with
| just doing maintenance. And when that happens there is
| just no going back.
| adamc wrote:
| You are describing a sort of cultural inflection point.
| It would be interesting to read more about that.
| ArnoVW wrote:
| In the aviation industry, Lockheed Martin famously
| avoided 'resting on its laurels' by having a separate
| 'skunkworks' part (who made the U-2, SR-71 and
| practically invented 'stealth' i.e. F-117, F-22, etc)
|
| It was originally created by Kelly but he managed to
| transmit the spirit to a successor, who wrote an
| interesting book about his time (80's and 90's) called
| 'stealth'. If you look on Google you can find the PDF.
|
| Another book about organisations having to deal with
| ossification is 'the soul of a new machine'. It's written
| by a journalist that was embedded in a R&D department of
| a computer manufacturer in the 70's and 80's. The place
| is run by someone a lot like Kelly Johnson, and the
| author managed very well to get into his mind. Again, I
| believe you can find a PDF on Google.
| Throwawayaerlei wrote:
| "It was originally created by Kelly but he managed to
| transmit the spirit to a successor, who wrote an
| interesting book about his time (80's and 90's) called
| 'stealth'."
|
| The time period doesn't quite match up, but I found
| _Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed_
| by Ben R. Rich
| https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316743003/ to be quite
| interested if not quite as interesting as I'd hoped when
| I bought it.
| jimkleiber wrote:
| I was just gonna say that the Intel case may fit well in this
| book called Obliquity[0], which ironically discusses Boeing.
|
| I believe it said that Boeing was less profitable when it
| focused on increasing profits and more profitable when it
| focused on improving engineering.
|
| [0]: https://www.johnkay.com/product/obliquity/
| spamizbad wrote:
| I've noticed a pattern of how executives approach this:
|
| 1) When looking for more profits/revenue at a technology
| company, they'll often either try to push an R&D "big bet"
| to market half-baked, in hopes of it pulling in new revenue
| OR put the screws to product and engineering to churn out
| some "quick wins" to give them some momentum.
|
| 2) When focusing more on engineering, it's often because
| they're either distracted by other challenges faced by the
| organization outside of engineering OR they are up against
| an existential threat that mandates engineering investment
| and letting them steer the strategy somewhat.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| I went to business school. The management textbooks used to
| tell you that steady profits were the most important thing.
| When I think about the things I was taught, particularly this
| incredible reverence for GE, I laugh.
| Throwawayaerlei wrote:
| "The management textbooks [at my business school] used to
| tell you that steady profits were the most important
| thing."
|
| That's stark raving mad. It is for example one of the
| clearest signs someone is running a Ponzi scheme. Which
| would seem to transfer over to this not quite as dishonest
| domain.
|
| Reverence for GE, a company doing technical things that
| started stack ranking and firing their employees.... Plus
| eventually got first their fingers and then last time I
| checked their whole body burned by going into financial
| businesses, very much not a core competence.
| michaelt wrote:
| _> That 's stark raving mad. It is for example one of the
| clearest signs someone is running a Ponzi scheme._
|
| Not really - I mean, if I run Toyota should I not be
| producing cars I can sell at a profit? And if my sales
| are falling, isn't that a bad thing?
|
| Rising sales are good, of course - but not oscillating
| sales. If the rise is going to be followed by a sales
| slump in a few months time, do I want to take on extra
| staff who I'll then have to lay off, causing them untold
| strife and inconvenience? Do I want to build a new
| factory full of expensive machines, then have them stand
| idle while costing me interest and rent?
|
| Industries like Software and IP licensing are, of course,
| often a different matter!
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| I read a lot of creative accounting case studies and am
| repeatedly surprised when others fall for the same simple
| tricks over and over again. At some point I have to assume
| willful ignorance.
|
| I'm sure there are plenty of case studies in text books that
| management could read. Either they don't read them or they
| take away the wrong message. Don't forget the execs at these
| companies probably cashed in some big bonuses.
| alexashka wrote:
| They can't. It'd undermine the very existence of the ruling
| elite class that doesn't know how to do anything, besides
| 'managing' by following a magic formula taught at Harvard,
| Stanford, etc.
|
| The problem is the _existence_ of a business management layer
| as an idea - it 's an attempt to get back to the good old
| days of feudalism, whose chief characteristics are nepotism,
| stagnation, corruption and nihilism, now that we've gotten
| rid of the mental pacifier of 'heaven' for the oppressed and
| hell for the ruling elites (religion).
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| this is the most resonant comment I've seen in months, as
| it entirely fits my experiences in engineering inside
| Apple, and later Amazon and Facebook.
|
| the inner sanctum of very flat Apple was as far from
| feudalism as could be, for my several years, and it
| functioned like a very performant ecosystem of engineering.
| This diametrically contrasts precisely with Amazon
| engineering, where I saw all the horrors of feudalism and
| generalized nepotism (racism for example, sexism promoting
| incapable people to fit quotas, and flagrant corruption).
| Facebook was somewhere more like Apple but not in its
| DNA...just in the imitation is flattery sense.
| recyclelater wrote:
| Yes but I would argue Amazon has better software than
| apple by a long shot. Ignoring how you felt as a worker
| out what you read Amazon employees feel like, Amazon has
| better results.
| adamc wrote:
| Why do you think that is?
| recyclelater wrote:
| As in can I justify my claim, or what are the reasons
| that Amazon produces better software? I would say the
| former is a qualitative statement and I am going to have
| a hard time backing it up with facts, and the latter I
| have no idea.
|
| I run into non stop issues when interacting with apple
| software as an app producer, from Xcode to iOS to App
| Store to App Store connect. Their apis are pretty
| horrible, both the reliability and the design.
|
| As an end user of apple products, I regularly run into
| odd software problems with my MacBook and iPhone. Every
| CarPlay experience I have had is buggy, both from the
| actual CarPlay connectivity as well as apples own CarPlay
| enabled apps.
|
| Apple Watch is a horrible nightmare to make anything more
| complicated than a simple remote display.
|
| I could go on and on. However on the Amazon side of
| things I have never experienced a significant bug, aside
| from the audible app freezing on occasion when
| interacting with CarPlay. I blame apple though based off
| how their own apps work. I say this as an extensive
| consumer of Amazon products both as a business owner,
| developer, and SRE, as well as an extensive user of
| Amazon consumer products.
|
| All this being said I don't like amazon as a business, I
| can find flaws in their decisions, but they are business
| decision flaws not just straight buggy products.
| lupire wrote:
| ahartmetz wrote:
| It may be that Apple does more of the "inspiration" part
| of the work and Amazon does more of the "transpiration"
| part. There is software that is great on the outside but
| crap on the inside and vice versa. The last 80% of
| quality (after the first 80%) come from testing,
| discipline and other such such unsexy things.
| adamsvystun wrote:
| > The most important decision was shifting to extreme ultraviolet
| lithography at a time when Intel thought it was much too
| expensive and difficult to implement; TSMC, backed by Apple's
| commitment to buy the best chips it could make, committed to EUV
| in 2014, and delivered the first EUV-derived chips in 2019 for
| the iPhone.
|
| Can somebody here correct me if I am wrong, but my impression was
| that Intel did commit early to EUV, with initial plans to start
| high volume manufacturing in line with other fabs (initial
| schedule was to introduce EUV in 2017 [1], it just got postponed
| many times), but they just failed in their execution.
|
| [1] https://wccftech.com/idf13-intel-ship-10nm-chips-2015-7nm-
| ch...
| Throwawayaerlei wrote:
| I think your citation is 9 years old. What I've always heard is
| what they called 10 nm was non-EUV. You are correct that what
| they called 7 nm was going to use EUV, pretty much had to, but
| 10 nm catastrophically failed and the company responded very
| poorly to that.
|
| Not _that_ long ago I remember reading, forget at what
| confidence level, that their old 7 mn was believed to have the
| potential to leapfrog their 10 nm and save the company, but
| others said they had some problematic things in common (not
| counting the very poorly run company!) that made that unlikely.
| In any event what was 7 nm did not ride to the company 's
| rescue.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Their 7 nm process has been renamed now as "Intel 4" and
| there is a presentation of it at Anandtech, which looks more
| credible than the fake presentations of the 10 nm process of
| some years ago.
|
| The first product using this process, Meteor Lake, is
| expected 1 year from now.
| Throwawayaerlei wrote:
| Meteor Lake/Intel 4 would then be six years late if the
| wccftech.com article's commentary on the two nodes was
| correct. Good to hear about the presentation material,
| thanks!
| [deleted]
| throwaway4good wrote:
| Intel tried very hard to get Apple as a customer for the iPhone.
| They knew very well of mr. Christensen but they simply could not
| deliver hinting that Intel's problems are not that of strategy
| but at a lower more fundamental level of competence and ability
| to organise.
|
| (The stuff about RISC/CISC is a red herring - it basically
| doesn't matter on a modern cpu.)
|
| Here is an article about Intel and Christensen with clip of him
| from 2012 (or earlier) where he mentions his work with Intel.
|
| https://www.edgementoring.org/leadership-blog/clayten-christ...
|
| Christensen Taught Intel CEO How To Think And Why It's Important
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I think Intel "tried very hard" from the point of view of a
| small company, but the fraction of Intel's resources put behind
| it was minuscule and felt very perfunctory.
|
| Right or wrong, they had zero interest in betting the future of
| the company on low-power chips for mobile, or any other market.
|
| [edit]
|
| I just read the wikipedia summary of the prescription for
| incumbents in _The Innovator 's Dillema_ and the one thing
| Intel was missing was:
|
| > They allow the disruption organization to utilize all of the
| company's resources when needed but are careful to make sure
| the processes and values were not those of the company.
|
| To a certain extent, it feels like buying a cloud offering from
| AWS vs. Google. Google might have a lot of resources dedicated
| in absolute terms to the cloud offering, but it feels like an
| afterthought that might go away at any moment. The AWS offering
| feels like a real product that Amazon plans on making money
| from.
|
| In both the cases of Intel and Google, I can't say which is
| true, but customers can only make their plans based on
| appearances, not reality.
| throwaway4good wrote:
| The textbook solution is for the incumbent to spin off
| companies to deal with the disruptor. And one of the textbook
| examples is Intel.
| alain94040 wrote:
| I'm usually a big fan of stratechery, but for once I disagree
| with the explanation of Intel's decline.
|
| I think it's much simpler: being number one in fab technology is
| mostly driven by volume: whoever has the most volume wins. During
| the PC era, Intel had the most volume, so they also had the best
| fabs. It's a winner-take-all, self-reinforcing ecosystem.
|
| But in the last 10 years, mobile has had the highest volume.
| That's what allows TSMC to have the best fabs, and Intel is
| struggling. That's all there is to it. Nothing to do with
| services or software.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Which is probably why Pat Gelsinger wants to turn Intel into a
| fab for hire just like TSMC and Samsung.
| klelatti wrote:
| The CISC vs RISC point Ben makes is key here. Intel could have
| been a big player in mobile: it put too much focus on x86
| though when it could have been making (its own or others) Arm
| based SoCs.
|
| Edit: not that Arm is necessarily RISC - but it certainly takes
| an approach that is different to x86 and better suited to
| mobile.
| reindeerer wrote:
| I've lost count how many misguided bids of taking x86 to low-
| power they made. Also the apparent unshakeable confidence
| that ARM will never become viable on server and desktop.
| klelatti wrote:
| In this context the Gelsinger video clip in the article is
| fascinating. Sometimes companies fixate on one element of
| their strategy that has worked in the past.
|
| It seems that Intel had 'always make x86 / backwards
| compatible' as their fixation.
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Intel was making its own ARM chips called Xscale 20 years
| ago, no?
| klelatti wrote:
| Indeed and XScale was successor to StrongARM which I think
| was highest performing Arm design for a while.
|
| Sold to Marvell in 2006 right before the iPhone appeared.
|
| Intel then spent billions trying to make x86 commercially
| viable on mobile.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| That is one of several reasons proposed in TFA; in particular
| TFA mentions TSMC's earlier investment in EUV being due to the
| guaranteed volume of smartphone chips.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| I very much doubt this. When EUV decision was made Intel was
| at the top of the world and had more volume than TSMC. As I
| understand Intel's reluctance was mostly about doubt whether
| ASML could deliver, and while ASML delivered I must say, even
| in retrospect, Intel's doubt was justified.
| Throwawayaerlei wrote:
| Did not read TFA and if it doesn't focus a lot on the 10
| nm/Intel 7 botch it's not fine, but I've read TSMC's very
| roughly equivalent 7 nm node was also non-EUV but less
| aggressive than Intel's. And it succeeded unlike Intel, which
| then made it natural to start introducing _in production_ EUV
| in their 7+ node. Here I suspect gaining real experience in
| chips delivered to customers trumps whatever volume you 'll
| end up doing.
| adrian_b wrote:
| This would the correct explanation if Intel would have made no
| mistakes.
|
| However, it is beyond reasonable doubt that Intel has made some
| extremely ugly management mistakes during their failed attempts
| to transition from 14 nm to 10 nm, which have absolutely
| nothing to do with the competition from TSMC or others.
|
| Maybe Intel would have lost their technological advance
| regardless how the company had been managed, due to the
| difference in volume between smartphone chips and PC chips, but
| now we cannot know which has mattered more, the internal
| mismanagement or the change of the semiconductor device market
| favoring their competition.
|
| I wonder if it will ever become public knowledge which were
| exactly the technology problems of Intel and who are those
| guilty for the decline at the company, because the failures
| could not have had any real technical causes but only bad
| management causes.
|
| During their worst years Intel has been capable even of
| presenting to the public fake technical presentations about the
| alleged great characteristics of their future 10 nm CMOS
| process, which is something that I would never have expected
| from a company like Intel. The marketing messages from any
| company are expected to be full of lies, but the technical
| presentations are expected to match reality.
|
| During many years, unlike TSMC, Intel has behaved as if it were
| completely unable to predict the precise characteristics of the
| CMOS process that they will able to manufacture in the
| following year.
|
| How could this happen is very hard to understand, as the
| manufacturing processes and the future devices made with them
| can be simulated long in advance of their implementation, and
| the models can be tuned continuously while the processes
| evolve, by fabricating and measuring various test structures.
| Unlike for Intel, for TSMC the performance predictions for
| future processes have always been reasonably accurate.
| klelatti wrote:
| There was the infamous demo when they 'forgot' to mention a
| CPU was overclocked. Bit of a red flag for the culture that
| permits that.
|
| https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-28-core-
| cpu-5ghz,372...
| sanxiyn wrote:
| > I wonder if it will ever become public knowledge which were
| exactly the technology problems of Intel and who are those
| guilty for the decline at the company, because the failures
| could not have had any real technical causes but only bad
| management causes.
|
| Why do you think this? It was a yield issue, and the best
| guess is it was caused by multi patterning. (Intel themselves
| said so.)
|
| I found an analysis from SemiWiki titled "Intel 10nm Yield
| Issues" pretty convincing. See
| https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor-
| manufacturers/intel/7433-...
| adrian_b wrote:
| It was not only a yield problem.
|
| The yields are indeed hard to predict, so if that would
| have been the only problem, then there would not have been
| so much reasons to blame the Intel management.
|
| As I have already mentioned, Intel has behaved as if being
| completely unable of predicting the electrical
| characteristics of the devices made with their future 10-nm
| processes.
|
| The first generation of 10-nm products was Cannon Lake,
| launched in 2018. I have actually bought out of curiosity
| the Intel NUC with Cannon Lake U, together with an Intel
| NUC with Coffee Lake U, a 14-nm CPU launched simultaneously
| with Cannon Lake U.
|
| The 10-nm CPU had pathetic performances in comparison with
| the 14-nm CPU, i.e. much lower clock frequency at identical
| power consumption or much higher power consumption at
| identical performance.
|
| This too low performance should have been determined very
| early during the design of Cannon Lake and the project
| should have been canceled even before reaching the tape-out
| phase.
|
| Even the 2nd variant of the 10-nm process, used for Ice
| Lake in 2019 was inferior to the by then 5-year old 14-nm
| process. This should also have been known enough in advance
| to cancel Ice Lake before tape-out.
|
| Converting any Intel factory to mass production of 10-nm
| wafers should have never begun before having a working
| 10-nm process able to make electrically-better transistors
| than in the old 14-nm process.
|
| Intel has begun the mass-production of chips using the
| 14-nm process in 2014. By then they must have already
| started the design of the 10-nm process, but only in 2020
| they have succeeded to make better 10-nm transistors than
| their 14-nm transistors (while still having a lower maximum
| clock frequency) and only in 2021 they have succeeded to
| exceed the old transistors in all parameters.
|
| It is impossible to understand why have they wasted huge
| amounts of money for failed projects like Cannon Lake and
| Ice Lake and for factories using uncompetitive process
| variants, instead of concentrating all their resources to
| their top priority of finding a way to manufacture 10-nm
| transistors that are better than their existing 14-nm
| transistors, which is normally a precondition for starting
| any design process of a CPU using a new process and for
| building a new factory.
|
| It all looks like if most people working at Intel would not
| have been aware that they actually do not have any working
| 10 nm manufacturing process, and they were continuing all
| their usual activities, like designing CPUs, but with fake
| transistor models, or building new factories, while there
| was some gang who knew that the 10-nm process does not
| exist outside fake presentations, but they hoped that there
| will be some miracle and the 10-nm process will just work
| when the time comes to use it.
| Throwawayaerlei wrote:
| Intel has a decades long history of very poor top level
| engineering management. They got petrified about the
| issue of how much DRAM they'd be able to put in a system
| in the 1990 (remember Rambus RDRAM?), and among the
| consequences was a 1 million part recall of motherboards
| shipped to Dell just before they were going to be shipped
| to customers, plus another related one I can't remember
| the details of yet.
|
| This speaks to the sorts of dysfunction you're speaking
| of; certainly _someone_ at Intel realized these parts
| weren 't going to work in the real world.
| kache_ wrote:
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-08-03 23:01 UTC)