[HN Gopher] Small AI Chip Maker Marvell Now More Valuable Than I...
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Small AI Chip Maker Marvell Now More Valuable Than Intel
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 72 points
Date : 2024-12-08 17:31 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.wsj.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.wsj.com)
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/tech/marvell-ai-chip-
| manufacturing-faa89...
|
| https://archive.ph/kCPUx
| joe_the_user wrote:
| This phrase, "Gift link" is distinctly pretentious given the
| WSJ is notably benefiting from exposure on HN.
| tgv wrote:
| The WSJ pays it journalists. It's not free. It needs money.
| Bezos' interference may have left a bit of a bad taste, it's
| still a reputable paper that doesn't need exposure here.
| Tostino wrote:
| The Wall Street journal is owned by the Murdoch's not
| Bezos.
| llm_trw wrote:
| A common mistake to make. If you just remember that paper
| that's owned by that billionaire who has politics I don't
| agree with then you've described all of them.
| bookofjoe wrote:
| Hey, wait a sec!
|
| Last week when I didn't use the descriptor "Gift link" I was
| roundly thrashed here for failure to identify it as such.
|
| Even though I thought the criticism was unwarranted, I
| decided to do what the commenter said I should do -- thus
| today's identification as such.
|
| FWIW I pay $38.99/month for a subscription, which enables me
| to provide gift links to HN. No good deed goes unpunished, or
| at least uncriticized here.
| tyre wrote:
| If you don't love being attacked for word choice no matter
| what you do, you don't love Hacker News commenting
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| One Taiwanese invasion or blockade, and Intel is immediately back
| on top, no longer considered incompetent, and Marvell's fighting
| bankruptcy.
|
| Which goes to show how quickly everything can change.
| Everything's built on sand, literally.
| BonoboIO wrote:
| You mean intel that uses TSMC to manufacture their chips,
| because they can not create top of the line chips themself?
| walterbell wrote:
| The older Intel chips used by the defense industrial base are
| Made in America.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Samsung is much closer second to TSMC, not Intel. And in any
| case, we have gone so small that quantum effects have started
| creeping in. My guess is that 5-10 years from now everyone
| would be converged to 5% of each other, unless something
| drastically changes in fabrication process.
| grobbyy wrote:
| An yes. The inevitable, long-predicted end of Moore's Law.
| scrlk wrote:
| > Murphy, who has served as chief executive officer of Marvell
| Technology since 2016, has been among the few names floated as
| potential replacements for the recently ousted Pat Gelsinger at
| Intel's corner office.
|
| As an aside, it's funny to read "Intel's corner office". Andy
| Grove eschewed a private office and other executive perks, opting
| to work in a standard cubicle:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Egalitarian_ethos
| stn8188 wrote:
| Thank you so much for this comment, detail and link. I was not
| aware of this aspect of his management style. The current CEO
| of my company has spoken highly of Andy Grove (I believe he was
| at Intel during Grove's tenure) and learning these details has
| helped me to see some similarities in my own company
| leadership.
| zooweemama wrote:
| If you want to go even deeper, I recommend Andy Grove's books
| "High output management" and "Only the paranoid survive".
| IntelMiner wrote:
| The "job-centric" American economy feels...harrowing now
|
| "While Grove supported helping technology startups, he also
| felt that America was wrong in thinking that those new
| companies would increase employment. "Startups are a wonderful
| thing," he wrote in a 2010 article for Bloomberg, "but they
| cannot by themselves increase tech employment."[40] Although
| many of those startups and entrepreneurs would achieve
| tremendous success and wealth, said Grove, he was more
| concerned with the overall negative effect on America: "What
| kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly
| paid people doing high-value-added work and masses of
| unemployed?"
| jnwatson wrote:
| You can debate the quality of the jobs, but just Uber has
| created millions of jobs. Amazon too.
|
| Even Google which is very hesitant to enter businesses that
| require lots of labor employs hundreds of thousands of
| contractors.
| vkou wrote:
| How many jobs have Uber and Amazon destroyed? How well do
| the jobs pay? How much work do they demand for that pay?
| What's the net? Do they create any negative externalities?
|
| You can't just look at revenues without looking at
| expenses.
| haliskerbas wrote:
| How much do they rely on taxpayer funded social services
| for the survival of their workers.
|
| https://www.cnbc.com/2020/11/19/walmart-and-mcdonalds-
| among-...
| downrightmike wrote:
| The 1920's had gig jobs too, it didn't work out well for
| them and we see parallels today.
| IntelMiner wrote:
| If gig workers have jobs, why does Uber try so hard to
| classify them as "independent contractors" rather than
| employees?
| int0x29 wrote:
| AI chip maker? Not everything needs to be branded AI. They make
| networking ASICs.
| buildbot wrote:
| They make every kind of chip essentially!
| saagarjha wrote:
| I mean AI workloads need networking so
| wtallis wrote:
| Calling Marvell an "AI chip maker" is bizarre. They're mostly a
| networking company, with a fair bit of storage stuff, too. Like
| any tech company these days, they're trying to jump on the AI
| bandwagon, but that hasn't actually changed what markets they're
| operating in.
| dlcarrier wrote:
| They are mostly a chip maker though, both directly selling
| semiconductors and selling products based on them. Sure, they
| call their processors an AI product, but so do Intel, AMD, and
| pretty much every other ARM licensee.
|
| The real kicker is that they picked up their ARM license from
| Intel, when they bought the XScale line (now Armada) in 2006.
| wtallis wrote:
| It's been a long time since Marvell was seeing any lingering
| benefits from that XScale acquisition. Their more compute-
| oriented products owe a lot more to the Cavium acquisition.
| lolinder wrote:
| > that hasn't actually changed what markets they're operating
| in.
|
| Actually, if you look at their quarterly report, the breakdown
| of their revenue by market has changed dramatically in the last
| year. Revenue from the data center market went from 36% to 71%
| of their revenue, a change which they attribute to AI creating
| demand. Meanwhile networking dropped from 24% to 10% of their
| revenue, and other categories have gone down as well.
|
| From the report:
|
| > Net revenue in the third quarter of fiscal 2025 was $1.5
| billion and was 7% higher than net revenue in the third quarter
| of fiscal 2024. This was due to a 98% increase in sales from
| the data center end market compared to the three months ended
| October 28, 2023. The increase was partially offset by
| decreases in sales from the carrier infrastructure end market
| by 73%, from the enterprise networking end market by 44%, from
| the consumer end market by 43% and from the
| automotive/industrial end market by 22%.
|
| > We have seen strong revenue growth from our data center end
| market, driven by robust demand for our electro-optics and
| custom compute products from AI applications.
|
| https://app.quotemedia.com/data/downloadFiling?webmasterId=1...
| wtallis wrote:
| Take a look at https://www.marvell.com/solutions/data-
| center.html
|
| They've sprinkled "AI" everywhere above the fold, but all the
| actual _products_ they 're talking about are still networking
| products.
|
| > Meanwhile networking dropped from 24% to 10% of their
| revenue, and other categories have gone down as well.
|
| _Enterprise networking_ is a category they report as
| dropping from 19% to 10% year-over-year for a three month
| period. I think you got the 24% from an incomparable column
| reporting on a nine month period. But either way,
| _enterprise_ networking is obviously just a small subset of
| all their networking business.
|
| Marvell is _clearly_ still primarily a networking business.
| AI is driving demand for some of their networking products
| (or at least, that 's what they're attributing the demand
| to), but that's not the same thing as Marvell actually making
| products that are doing AI, or selling such products in
| enough volume to double their datacenter revenue.
| lolinder wrote:
| > Enterprise networking is a category they report as
| dropping from 19% to 10% year-over-year for a three month
| period. I think you got the 24% from an incomparable column
| reporting on a nine month period.
|
| Oops, you're right, the comparison I meant to make was 24%
| to 12% over a 9 month period.
|
| > But either way, enterprise networking is obviously just a
| small subset of all their networking business.
|
| Is it, though? That table [0] puts everything "consumer"
| into a chunk that's now only 6% of their revenue. Carrier
| infrastructure is another 6%. Together that adds up to
| roughly equal to the enterprise networking row, but that's
| still a tiny amount compared to the data center revenue.
|
| Are you saying that "data center" includes a lot of
| networking equipment that isn't filed under "enterprise
| networking"?
|
| [0] Looking at page 9
| wtallis wrote:
| > Are you saying that "data center" includes a lot of
| networking equipment that isn't filed under "enterprise
| networking"?
|
| Yes, exactly. "Enterprise" and "data center" are treated
| as disjoint segments by many tech companies, even though
| both tend to refer to rackmount hardware. That's why I
| linked to Marvell's own page describing their data center
| products, so you could see for yourself that they are
| indeed _networking_ products: switches, PHYs, NICs, etc.
|
| _All_ of the categories under the "Net revenue by end
| market" table are comprised primarily of networking
| products: "Data center" is mostly networking stuff,
| "Enterprise networking" is obviously networking stuff,
| "Carrier infrastructure" is where you find networking
| stuff with the now-passe "5G" buzzword, "Consumer" is
| probably mostly networking but might actually be the
| segment with the lowest proportion of networking products
| (though Marvell's SSD controllers aren't too common these
| days in consumer SSDs. Also, Realtek has recently started
| eating away at Marvell's Aquantia revenue for 2.5Gb and
| 5Gb Ethernet in consumer products.)
| "Automotive/industrial" is primarily about _automotive
| Ethernet_.
| baxtr wrote:
| I'm sure they did crypto for a while, too.
| buildbot wrote:
| AI chip or even networking chip maker is somewhat incorrect.
| Marvell makes every kind of chip, will design you a chip, sell
| you IP, whatever you want.
|
| They started with disk drive controllers, recently they've made a
| decent NVME controller. They bought global foundries custom asic
| devision in 2019 and that's when they really got into the custom
| chip business (according to wikipedia).
| mugivarra69 wrote:
| its not a small maker at all, and it is not an ai chip maker.
| lysace wrote:
| Intel: 130k employees
|
| Marvell: 6.5k employees
| dlcarrier wrote:
| Nvidia: 30k employees
|
| AMD: 26k employees
|
| For Intel, the number of employees is a liability, not an
| asset.
| tptacek wrote:
| Marvell has a fraction of the revenue, so I assume this is just a
| verdict on which company has better growth prospects? I mean,
| that's always true of market valuations, but: could have been the
| case whether or not Intel was hitting its marks?
| orliesaurus wrote:
| Does anyone know if the US military has a preference on Intel
| chips vs other manufacturers?
| dlcarrier wrote:
| The US military has a preference for whichever manufacturer can
| specialize in filling out the paperwork. Intel is one of them,
| but so is Marvell: https://www.marvell.com/products/custom-
| asic/marvell-governm...
| pavlov wrote:
| In an ironic twist, Intel used to make the highest-performance
| ARM chips until 2006. They were popular in PDAs and early
| smartphones, but not x86 and therefore strategically
| embarrassing.
|
| So Intel sold the Xscale family, just before iPhone and Android
| happened... To Marvell.
| wtallis wrote:
| Intel sold just one of the XScale product lines to Marvell, who
| almost immediately dropped the XScale CPU cores in favor of
| their own CPU cores and later ARM's CPU core IP.
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(page generated 2024-12-08 23:00 UTC)