[HN Gopher] Numbers that explain Intel's decline
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Numbers that explain Intel's decline
Author : oumua_don17
Score : 45 points
Date : 2022-11-24 16:10 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (techmonitor.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (techmonitor.ai)
| mountainriver wrote:
| Trying to restart an innovation engine in a large old company
| like this seems to be nearly impossible.
|
| I've been a part of a number of startups that were gobbled up by
| big co trying to innovate their business, and it always seems to
| fail.
|
| The problem I continually see is that in big companies anyone who
| sticks around and does "something" gets promoted. Over time as
| the good people leave you have a layer of of really bad managers
| and directors that just effectively block innovation. They've
| spent their careers being shills and are threatened by anyone
| innovating.
| bergenty wrote:
| Next to impossible but not impossible. Steve Jobs did it with
| apple in recent memory.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| True, though that's because Apple basically bought NeXT, it's
| IP, OS, top executives and Jobs had learned alot about the
| mistakes he'd made. Also he was singularly driven and
| charismatic (like him or not).
|
| Basically it's as if Intel bought AMD and switched, but AMD
| had some visionary CEO that could lead Intel to victory.
|
| The days of Moore are over. Still I used to hate Intel, but
| now root for them. I guess I like underdogs.
| mhitza wrote:
| I don't know how you can root for Intel. Until AMD made
| it's comeback Intel charged premium prices for very low
| performance improvement generation after generation.
|
| Intel is still the primary CPU on most laptops produced
| today; and only in the last 6-12 months I've started seeing
| some options to buy AMD powered laptops.
|
| Even ignoring that Intel's vPRO/ME implementation is still
| scarier (potentially more invasive) than the somewhat
| equivalent AMD "feature".
| icedchai wrote:
| You are mostly right, but AMD laptops have been available
| for years. One of my few Windows systems is an HP Envy
| x360 laptop with an AMD 4500U, from mid-2020.
| 0cf8612b2e1e wrote:
| I also blame Intel as the reason ECC memory is not the
| standard in everything.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| adrian_b wrote:
| Yes, I am old enough to remember the years 1994/1995,
| when Intel has introduced the split between the "Pentium
| Pro" CPUs intended for "professionals" who should pay
| dearly for the right of having computers that function
| without errors, and the "Pentium" CPUs (2nd generation
| Pentium @ 90/100 MHz), intended for the naive laymen,
| whose computers are not important, so it does not matter
| if their computers make mistakes from time to time.
|
| This market segmentation introduced by Intel has broken
| the tradition created by IBM, who had taken care from the
| beginning to provide the IBM PC with error-detecting
| memory.
| pengaru wrote:
| > only in the last 6-12 months I've started seeing some
| options to buy AMD powered laptops
|
| The Lenovo X395 was released in 2019 w/2nd gen ryzen.
|
| Then their X13 in 2020 w/3rd gen ryzen, meaning you could
| have been using an 8-core X13 for years by now.
| soco wrote:
| Also Lenovo T495 same year - I'm typing on it right now.
| bbarnett wrote:
| _The days of Moore are over._
|
| I have heard this repeated for almost 30 years. Are they
| really?
|
| Or are they one discovery away from continuing?
| criddell wrote:
| Herb Sutter (Microsoft C++ guy) has been talking about
| the twilight of Moore's law since 2005ish and I think
| he's right.
|
| http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| The graph of CPU density, clock speed, etc has a kink in
| it a decade or two ago. So, yeah, at least what we
| thought of as "Moore's Law" is dead, and has been for a
| while.
|
| Dennard scaling broke down around 2005 or 2006.
|
| Are we one discovery away? No, probably not. Leakage
| current isn't a "one trick" problem, especially as the
| features continue to get smaller. It's a fundamentally
| hard problem, and as you go to smaller feature sizes, it
| keeps getting harder. As we go to 3D approaches, thermal
| issues probably aren't "one trick" away either.
| nine_k wrote:
| Any one discovery isn't going to suffice. Building a
| bunch of technologies to make that discovery usable and
| profitable is hard and long work.
|
| We know for years that carbon nanotubes can make great,
| very compact, very fast transistors. There's nothing
| close to a practical application of this discovery,
| because we barely know how to make nanotubes in tiny
| amounts, a handful of labs, at a great expense.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Yes, for some 10 years at least.
|
| If you go read what his article said, it's very clear and
| incontestable ended. Still, that doesn't stop a bunch of
| people that have no idea what Moore's Law was about from
| claiming whatever they want to.
|
| Anyway, where did you hear Moore's Law ended 30 years
| ago? That one doesn't make sense.
| Someone wrote:
| Have you? There were plenty of people predicting Moore's
| law would end in x years (e.g.
| https://www.technologyreview.com/2000/05/01/236362/the-
| end-o..., from 2000), and some people (including Moore
| himself) argued that progression had slowed a bit, but I
| don't remember anybody saying the law already had ended
| at any time.
|
| (Unless you use an extremely strict definition of it, of
| course. I don't think that's reasonable, though, given,
| reading https://www.researchgate.net/publication/22016691
| 4_The_Lives..., that even Moore changed the definition a
| few times)
| bergenty wrote:
| I like underdogs and I like to buy American.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| Not sure why you are down voted.
| bergenty wrote:
| Probably people uncomfortable with explicit nationalism.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Leaving aside the question of why you like to buy
| American... note that AMD is American too.
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| My read is that people who like to "buy American" are
| often concerned with where the product is manufactured,
| as opposed to where the company is headquartered, or
| where the product was designed. On that score AMD is
| quite a bit less American made than Intel simply due to
| being fabricated it Taiwan and assembled in Malaysia (as
| far as I can find).
| adrian_b wrote:
| I think that there are a few decades since I have last
| seen any Intel CPU that was assembled in USA and not
| somewhere in SE Asia.
|
| It is true that the Intel wafers might be fabricated in
| USA, besides a few other places in Israel or Europe.
|
| However, it is likely that the assembly employs more
| workers than the wafer fabrication plants.
| throwaway9870 wrote:
| In a small organization, people usually succeed by being
| motivated by dream of success. In large organizations, people
| seem to succeed by fearing and avoid failure.
|
| That yields a very different organization.
| danuker wrote:
| Too bad industries of this size need insane amounts of capital
| to stay competitive.
| gumby wrote:
| > Trying to restart an innovation engine in a large old company
| like this seems to be nearly impossible.
|
| It's super hard and I've thought about it for years (even
| though I can't imagine working for a big company -- even with
| my own companies I leave when the headcount gets to about 200).
| But I've wondered if there's a kind of "hayflick limit" for
| corporations too.
|
| Consider Intel. One way to get the old spark back would be to
| simply start a new company. Takes a lot of capital and involves
| a lot of risk. The only tech company I know that does this well
| is Cisco; it's also emerged less intensively in pharma. Other
| than that, no.
|
| Second: Aggressively prune the product line, milk what cash
| cows you have, use the savings to invest heavily (including
| increasing compensation for those who remain, so they feel it's
| worth staying to be part of something growing). The advantage
| of this is that you ignore the deadweight problem you describe:
| it's too hard to root it out when you have a crisis, so just do
| it at a macro level. I've never seen this really be pulled off;
| the closet is late 90s Apple when everybody knew they were in
| an existential crisis and they had enough emotional commitment
| to keep enough people on board (since they couldn't afford to
| do the "raise compensation" path right away).
|
| Actually a not bad example is a company called _Intel_ when
| Grove cut away the cash cow, memory, replacing it with the
| unproven CPU business because he could see memory rapidly
| becoming a commodity boat anchor. But that Intel was a much
| smaller company, with the founders still around, in a immature
| market. And it was a bet the company manoevre.
|
| The prune-and-milk (mixed metaphor) requires a compelling
| vision that includes an extreme sense of urgency. Elop's
| "burning platform" memo at Nokia tried to give the sense of
| urgency but had no compelling vision beyond "the company needs
| to make money in order to survive". Gelsinger did a good job of
| setting out a _coherent_ vision, but is it compelling enough to
| get good people to join & stay? I doubt it.
|
| (The reason for the "milk" part of the approach is because
| while you're in the shit, even if you are digging your way out,
| most of the public articles will be like the submission we are
| discussing, which makes execution harder).
|
| But in general, apart from a big pool of money and a legacy
| customer base, why would you try this with a big, cumbersome
| company when you could just do a startup? That's what Cisco
| honed in the 90s and still does: I think the company needs to
| invest in new tech X using approach Y, but that would threaten
| the revenues of some existing product line. You think tech X is
| great but approach Z is better. We both quit and start
| companies (sometimes Cisco even invests in later rounds).
| Eventually it turns out that one of us was right. That company
| gets bought (big bonus for the founders, who rejoin Cisco) and
| the founders of the one that didn't win also can get their jobs
| back (maybe through a small acquisition so they get a small
| bonus for their risk taking).
|
| This allows them to compensate innovators outside the normal
| process (which doesn't piss off the MBA VPs), allow some
| competing technological developments, and keeps them big. I
| don't know if that process is as big and institutionalized as
| it was in the Chambers/Volpe days, but it was super smart.
| w-j-w wrote:
| Many people complain about how good individual producers, but
| few talk about effective front-line managers being moved to
| where they are less effective. In organizations it's often
| assumed that the best managers need to be near the top of the
| org chart to spread their effectiveness as far as possible, but
| I contend that these great managers might be better off near
| producers in critical areas.
| cma wrote:
| Since hierarchies are usually exponentially shrinking in
| headcount towards the top, this shouldn't have a significant
| impact numerically right?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Very competent people are pretty rare in large
| organizations, once you factor in their environment.
|
| Do you put your one best performing manager at the top or
| at your most impactful project? (I'm not sure about the
| answer, but I'm not sure it a real option exists either.)
| Spooky23 wrote:
| The stakes change. In a small growth org you need to succeed in
| doing something to survive. In a big org, you have to not fuck
| up.
| waboremo wrote:
| I'd say for a big org the priority isn't "not fucking up",
| it's not objecting.
|
| In a small growth org, despite severe rank differences,
| you're likely to have some impact on direction if you
| disagree. In a big org, there is no impact. You either are
| the wavemaker or those gleefully riding the waves. It doesn't
| matter how many "we listen to everybody's opinion" there are
| in these big orgs, wavemakers simply keep a lot of key
| information to themselves which puts everyone else within at
| a huge disadvantage. This also causes innovative thinkers to
| propose ideas less, because they got burned that one time
| when a wavemaker shut them down with previously hidden
| information.
| majormajor wrote:
| > I'd say for a big org the priority isn't "not fucking
| up", it's not objecting.
|
| At the organization's level it's "don't fuck up" since
| you're already making a lot of money and a lot of people's
| livelihoods are depending on that - the trick, if you're
| managing in a big org, is how to avoid that turning to a
| "don't disagree" culture before "not changing" turns into a
| bad thing instead of a good thing.
|
| I haven't figured out how to do that - or to work under
| people who also haven't - so I prefer small orgs.
| waboremo wrote:
| I wonder if the "don't fuck up" principle at an
| organizational level really applies past a certain point.
| I think that's where a lot of the internal dilemmas stem
| from. Google as an example, they can "fuck up"
| tremendously on an organizational level, numerous failed
| products and services costing billions. Yet they still
| roll on, and even interns are very well aware not to do
| something catastrophically detrimental such as turning
| Google Search into a TikTok clone. There's just far too
| much momentum that fucking up should ever be a concern
| once you're at Google/Intel's level.
|
| So perhaps the fear of fucking up plays an integral role
| in creating this atmosphere of unchanging. When you're
| fearful, you're less likely to take risks in general,
| even if that fear is subconscious rather than active.
| hw wrote:
| Or the acquisition was meant to take over / replace an existing
| product and those working on the existing product had no idea,
| and what happens is continued misalignment, pushbacks,
| conflicts and years go by with nothing being done.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| I still can't believe we don't have an explanation of why they
| can't match Samsung and TSMC in node size despite all 3 using
| ASML machines to do the lithography.
|
| Outside of the lithography machines which are all the same what
| is Intel doing wrong in terms of industrial process? Is it the
| pellicle which I know does vary by manufacturer? Why haven't they
| adapted by now?
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| I think something I heard somewhere is that Intel's processes
| are heavily customized for Intel, but I have no data to back
| that up.
| wmf wrote:
| The equipment is a small part of the fab process; the materials
| and process steps are critical and every fab is a little
| different. For example, Intel has been using cobalt wires while
| others use copper; this may or may not have contributed to
| Intel's problems.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| I do understand that but I still want to know some specific
| examples.
|
| I'm expecting stories to come out at some point in the future
| of dysfunction that's preventing Intel from simply
| implementing similar processes as their competitors. And yes
| I understand the competitors probably have trade secrets but
| they've been at least a step behind in process for so long
| now. 14nm when others had 7nm and just starting 7nm when
| others have 5nm. Hell there's already some 3nm TSMC stuff
| coming. The whole ++++++++ debacle was ridiculous.
|
| At this point there has to be some major dysfunction. Are
| there senior people there with pet projects and adamant
| viewpoints that can't change? I'm expecting something along
| the lines of an execs insisting that cobalt conductors and
| liquid pellicles are the only way despite competitors kicking
| their ass by doing it differently. And if there are such
| stories to be told I'm rather shocked that no one at Intel's
| addressing the issues.
|
| There's probably a book to be written here, similar to the
| stories told about Atari and Apple dysfunctions back in the
| day.
| wmf wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if they got stuck in a cycle of
| thinking that fixing the existing process would be faster
| than designing a "plan B" process.
| xenadu02 wrote:
| They spent years being 1-2 process nodes ahead of everyone
| else with excellent execution. Anyone within the
| organization trying to sound alarm bells would have been
| silenced or ignored... after all they pulled the rabbit out
| of the hat so many times before, why would this one be
| different?
|
| As for specifics I doubt we'll get many. Chip manufacturing
| is famously super-secretive and has a culture of not
| discussing the details - even for old process nodes.
| abetusk wrote:
| Wow, this sounds like jingoistic, revisionist history. I don't
| claim to know the details but I certainly don't trust this
| article to be objective.
|
| One alternate theory I've heard is that Intel bet big either
| keeping the feature size it was (7nm?) or on a process that was
| less speculative and risky than the process that ultimately got
| put in place to make sub 7nm chips a reality now. In other words
| they failed to innovate.
|
| The demand for chips has only increased, even if the article is
| suggesting that "PC sales are down". Moore's law has kept pace
| even if CPUs have been stagnant (hint: s/C/G/).
| adrian_b wrote:
| Intel's problems have been much greater than "failing to
| innovate".
|
| During many years, it looks like the Intel CPU design teams
| have been designing for imaginary manufacturing processes,
| which have never been implemented.
|
| The Cannon Lake and Ice Lake CPU generations must have been
| designed for such imaginary processes, because if the
| parameters of the processes that have been actually used for
| their fabrication would have been known in advance, those
| projects would have been canceled already some years before
| their finalization (because the first 2 versions of the Intel
| 10 nm process have been much worse than their old 14 nm
| process, so they should have never been used in commercial
| products and no manufacturing plants should have been converted
| for them), saving a lot of money.
|
| Only with the manufacturing process used for Tiger Lake,
| starting in Q4 2020, Intel has restored the appearance of being
| able to predict how their designs will work.
|
| During the years 2015 to 2019, when Cannon Lake and Ice Lake
| have been designed, someone from those in charge with the
| developing the Intel manufacturing processes must have told
| continuously lies to the other divisions about what parameters
| will be true for their future manufacturing process.
|
| Some of those lies have also been told in public, because Intel
| has published a few presentations about their 10 nm process,
| which supposedly worked perfectly.
|
| There is a very large difference between just being unable to
| find a way to improve a manufacturing process and claiming that
| the process that will be available next year will have a
| certain set of improved parameters, despite knowing that you do
| not have the foggiest idea about how such parameters might be
| achieved, and making thus the company spend many billions for
| developing products based on the fake set of parameters and for
| converting manufacturing plants to implement the fake
| manufacturing processes.
|
| I wonder if it will ever be known who were those guilty of
| Intel's problems, because they have caused losses of many
| billions, while in other places someone who causes losses of a
| few thousands might be fired immediately.
| eulers_secret wrote:
| I quit Intel after working there for a decade. The open source
| work they did (still do in some cases) was great and I loved it.
|
| I couldn't stand supporting products that would come out
| "whenever" and would be marginally improved or not at all.
| 14nm++++++ was a joke. Our customers hated us so much. It was
| obvious in calls.
|
| I got the feeling that Pat G cares, but I think fixing Intel is
| like changing the orbit of a planet.
|
| That said, all my managers were awesome and the people were
| great. Sadly, having so much experience at Intel is almost a red
| flag on my resume.
| ahartmetz wrote:
| The best 14nm++++++ joke I've seen was at SemiAccurate: Tick-
| Tock-Tock-Tock-Sproing
| akulbe wrote:
| There was an post on HN a couple days ago about Intel starting to
| charge for CPU usage.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33717331 <-- here it is.
|
| IMO - it's crap like this that's contributing to Intel's decline.
| Go ARM, go!!
|
| EDIT: fixed link
| d3mon wrote:
| The article is written quite incompetently.
|
| 1. Talks about 45 percent decline in stock value when amd /Nvidia
| declined by almost 60 percent in the same period.
|
| 2. Talks about Nvidia revenue growing by 50 percent in Q3, when
| in reality they fell 17 percent vs the last year. AMD's revenue
| fell too. Perhaps the author is confused that Nvidia's earning
| calendar runs 1 year ahead and they reported q3 2023 results
| recently, not 2022.
|
| Extremely poor reporting.
| bloodyplonker22 wrote:
| If you actually look into the details, Nvidia's revenue growth
| was lower due to their gaming/mining GPU sales seeing a major
| drop from 2021. This was obviously a temporary blip from the
| unusual spike from the pandemic. Meanwhile, Nvidia's datacenter
| revenue is still seeing a large amount of growth. Intel's woes
| are not based on temporary blips and they are certainly not
| still seeing greatly accelerating growth like Nvidia.
| iforgotpassword wrote:
| Side tangent, what about that revenue graph where Singapore is
| second. I can see China being number one just through size, but
| is every Singaporean buying ten PCs a year? Or is there some huge
| OEM based in Singapore that's just evaded my mind?
| yvdriess wrote:
| One explanation I heard is that the Singapore market is the
| gateway to other asian markers.
| williadc wrote:
| Somehow the comparison table is missing TSMC, which grew revenue
| 48%. I looked around for Samsung Foundry revenue but couldn't
| find anything recent.
| squaredot wrote:
| I miss that the comparison is made only on the base of growth,
| without mentioning the absolute size of the companies, or the
| volume of their sales.
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