[HN Gopher] Intel ruined an Israeli startup it bought for $2B-an...
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Intel ruined an Israeli startup it bought for $2B-and lost the AI
race
Author : danielklnstn
Score : 75 points
Date : 2025-02-09 19:06 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.calcalistech.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.calcalistech.com)
| lnsru wrote:
| Somehow everything what Intel touches turns to ashes. Maybe
| except altera. But I wouldn't use their FPGAs in given situation
| either.
| coder543 wrote:
| Altera seems to have some level of independence from Intel now:
| https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/fpga-company-alte...
| high_na_euv wrote:
| >Nvidia has spent the last two decades refining its AI
| processors, while Intel has only recently recognized the
| opportunity--arriving late, like a sluggish hippopotamus at a
| sprinting contest.
|
| This isnt strongest argument
|
| Copying and improving things takes less time.
|
| For example how many years Nvidia needed to develop 4060 4080 and
| how many years Intel needed to reach similar capabilities
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Shoulda bought Nvidia for $20B when they had the chance
| ein0p wrote:
| It doesn't work that way. As a rule, most large acquisitions
| die a few years later, irrespective of the acquiring company,
| unless they are maintained as separate subsidiaries. And
| there's no way the Intel mafia would allow it to be separate in
| the long run. Old boys network eventually moves in, and
| everything goes to shit. I have seen this happen half a dozen
| times in my career.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| What about Google and YouTube? Seems to have worked out
| pretty well for both.
| ein0p wrote:
| YT is semi-separate. It even has its own CEO.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Fair point. But couldn't have Intel maintained nVidia as
| a separate subsidiary? Or is that run counter to their
| style?
| mgfist wrote:
| And then they'd have ruined Nvidia too
| ein0p wrote:
| What's baffling is the hardware is actually pretty good (from
| direct experience), and the software stack wouldn't take much
| effort to bring up to par either, at least for inference. Perf/$
| is much better than NVIDIA. More HBM than NVIDIA, too. And
| somehow nobody gives a shit.
| mjevans wrote:
| Doesn't AMD have a similar issue, with the 'secret sauce'
| really that entire NV toolchain that is practically a monopoly?
| gdiamos wrote:
| The problem is no differentiation
|
| If you have to do more work to port for no benefit, it
| doesn't make sense except to commoditize it
| alecco wrote:
| Is it? Good luck loading large models over PCIe 4.0. Or running
| things over multiple cards. And it has older HBM2e which is ~2x
| slower than H100 HBM3.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Bandwidth_Memory#HBM2E
|
| "N5, PCIe 4.0, and HBM2e. This chip was probably delayed two
| years." -wmf
| wmf wrote:
| Gaudi 3 at least has PCIe 5.0 but for some reason they stuck
| with HBM2e.
| kittikitti wrote:
| Intel specifically sought Israeli startups, so I'm a little
| confused about how this is framed. It's also hard to understand
| how Intel buying your startup for 2 Billion is ruining it, as
| most people on this site would see that as a huge win. I detect
| bias around this topic.
| whatshisface wrote:
| > _[...] Falcon Shores, had received negative feedback from
| customers and would therefore not be marketed commercially.
| [...] As a result, Intel decided not to develop another
| generation of Gaudi beyond the existing Gaudi 3. This
| effectively marks the failure of Habana Labs as another entry
| in Intel's long history of unsuccessful acquisitions. [...]
| Willenz, considered a genius in the semiconductor world, has a
| long history of successful exits._
|
| The article is saying that Intel failed to lead the startup to
| developing a successful product by taking steps, not detailed,
| that the founder may have taken if he had still owned it.
| wmf wrote:
| It's a failure if you want to ship products that customers use.
| GuB-42 wrote:
| A very one-sided article. Blames everything on Intel without even
| considering that maybe Habana Labs was just better at getting the
| founders rich from the acquisition then at making AI processors.
| And maybe Intel management noticed that all wasn't going as
| planned and tried to intervene, which may have made things worse.
|
| Sure, Intel have quite a history of failures, especially for the
| last decade or so. But I would like to think that even Intel can
| be smart enough not to mess with things that work, so maybe
| things didn't work and Intel management (unsuccessfully) tried to
| save it. It is actually a very common scenario: branch doesn't
| perform as well as expected, upper management tries to do
| something, it doesn't work, people blame management but don't
| mention that without intervention it would have also failed. Of
| course management is to blame, but it is not just because of
| them.
|
| Another point of view would be interesting.
| hedgehog wrote:
| Back in 2019 I looked at what Habana was doing and had a
| conversation with their CTO. My impression was they had
| competent technical execution and a good understanding of some
| of the areas where other chip efforts have stumbled (software
| stack especially). I expressed at the time that I hoped they
| would remain independent, and if they sold not to Intel, but of
| course I don't begrudge the team cashing out for the right
| price.
| Sakos wrote:
| Given Intel's string of failures with nearly everything outside
| their core competency (and in the past decade stumbling even
| there), I don't understand giving them the benefit of the doubt
| in this. What at Intel would have changed between all their
| failures, Habana Labs and the following failures that would
| make Habana Labs not their fault?
| bcantrill wrote:
| The article is -- if anything -- generous to Intel. The
| unvarnished truth (which I have heard from several different
| Intel insiders) is quite a bit less flattering, and shouldn't
| be surprising: Intel's failures at this point are fractal.
|
| (If the article has a failing, it's that it's somehow trying to
| hang the failure of Habana inside of Intel on Avigdor, which is
| absurd.)
| chneu wrote:
| name an intel acquisition in the last decade that has worked
| out.
| marssaxman wrote:
| I worked for another ML-related startup Intel acquired around
| the same time, and nothing in this article sounds biased or
| exaggerated to me. "Pursuing multiple competing AI strategies
| without fully committing to any" is a reasonable description of
| what was going on. We found it very difficult to get anything
| done, and everyone quit after the retention bonus period was
| over.
| shipp02 wrote:
| IIRC, Nvidia was already ahead in software support 5 years ago.
| Image recognition was the big thing and the only way I could
| train them was on Nvidia GPU or Google tpu.
|
| With this context, the articles clain that
|
| >Intel correctly identified AI as the future
|
| seems tenuous at best.
|
| It also claims that Nvidia was just a graphics company in
| 2019-20. This was clearly not the case for anyone training cv
| models at the time.
|
| IDK what Gaudi is or what Habana Labs was developing. Does anyone
| know what the status of pytorch/tensorflow on Intel GPU hardware
| is? Because add far as research is concerned one of the framework
| has to be supported.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Nvidia GPUs have been used to train DNNs since around 2011 (the
| paper on how to do it was written in 2010 I think?). Nvidia was
| also used heavily to mine crypto currency until recently.
| buildbot wrote:
| 2012? If we are using Alexnet as the "starting" mark for DNN
| training on GPUs. Though probably there were efforts before
| that, Alexnet is the most well known for sure.
| buildbot wrote:
| >Intel correctly identified AI as the future
|
| I'd say this is true - they just failed to execute meaningfully
| on it. They were adding stuff like VNNI back in 2018, buying
| Nervana and Habana, but then just...didn't do much with it. At
| the same time, they made Ponte Vecchio.
|
| Software support for all of these is not great, in my personal
| opinion.
|
| For the Ponte Vecchio and Xe GPUs, pytorch 2.5 allegedly
| supports it now: https://pytorch.org/blog/intel-gpu-support-
| pytorch-2-5/
|
| For habana, I think they have a custom interface that hooks
| into Pytorch:
| https://docs.habana.ai/en/latest/PyTorch/Reference/Python_Pa...
|
| There's a random Intel 1100 Max with 48gb HBM on eBay, if
| anyone is inclined to try
| it...https://www.ebay.com/itm/387631533950
| guelermus wrote:
| Once, Nortel Networks was a $100 billion telecommunications giant
| and could have bought Cisco for $20 billion. It was too late for
| Cisco when they realized they were awfully behind in IP
| networking race. So they bought Bay Networks for $4 billion. It
| didn't work and soon after, the company of 96,000 people dropped
| to 30,000 in a few months, and then silently disappeared from the
| history.
| guelermus wrote:
| Imho, the acqusition of Altera was much bigger deal and they also
| ruined it few years ago. So there is an obvious pattern here.
| IshKebab wrote:
| > At the time, Intel and Amazon were the dominant players in the
| market, while Nvidia was primarily known to gamers who admired
| the graphics capabilities of its processors.
|
| In 2020? Uhm... No.
| soganess wrote:
| I couldn't believe that either. The RTX 3090 comes out sept
| 2020. More importantly, the final form of the GA102, the
| A6000/A40 (with 48GB of RAM, every single cuda core enable and
| $5k+ MSRP) comes out a few days later. We were well past the
| point of Nvidia market segmenting out its best parts for
| server. The DGX was on its third generation at that point and
| cost $200k. And I think cuda came out a little before then,
| right? It was... oh yeah... Nov 2006.
|
| This was also the height of the global GPU shortage... I
| suppose anything can fit your narrative, just as long as your
| spin has enough RPMs.
| CapeTheory wrote:
| I attended an Intel "AI day" in London back in about 2018, before
| they bought Habana and had all of their focus on Nervana
| (mentioned in the article) and Saffron - which I've basically
| never heard mention of again since that day. seems a shame; while
| the AI accelerators have obvious utility, it was Saffron which
| sounded like it might be a game-changer.
| lvl155 wrote:
| Intel is #1 example of why you don't let management consultants
| come inside your company. They are simply the worst. Why do you
| let a bunch of PE/VC-rejects dictate your corporate strategy?
| alecco wrote:
| I agree but what does this have to do with this specific
| article?
| gdiamos wrote:
| There are at least three technical reasons why none of these
| accelerators have worked:
|
| 1) systolic arrays without SIMT or general purpose multicore are
| not flexible enough, creating a flawed foundation
|
| 2) everyone targeting tsmc is building the same circuits, leading
| to no differentiation and no motivation to move off an incumbent
|
| 3) the CUDA software stack is so big it creates porting friction
|
| So you have a flawed foundation that makes everything else harder
| together with no advantage and a huge porting effort
|
| No wonder why no one switches
|
| I'd like to see hardware startups take more risk and get off the
| beaten path in ways that enable fundamentally new algorithms
|
| When you put all of this against the backdrop of Intel
| management, what other outcome could there have been?
| pithanyChan wrote:
| sabotage 401
| oytis wrote:
| Honest question: are there any happy acquisition stories? Like, a
| big company acquired a startup and with startup's vision and big
| company's resources it achieved success to the glory of the
| acquirer?
| boznz wrote:
| My guess is no, 1. Remove the competition, 2. Milk the IP, 3.
| Good staff eventually leave as they now become a tiny cog.
| newsclues wrote:
| Apple NeXT and PA Semi?
| xenospn wrote:
| Waze, Android, face.com, Shazam, GitHub - there's tons but they
| don't make headlines if everything works.
| zem wrote:
| google has botched or killed any number of acquisitions, but
| google earth and google docs are spectacular success stories
| that involved acquiring practically unknown startups and then
| scaling them way up. (I do realise this is likely a
| simplification of the actual stories behind them.)
| dismalaf wrote:
| Google has a fair amount of successful acquisitions. YouTube,
| Android, Google Photos and a ton of others that ended up
| being Google products.
|
| Just look at this list: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_
| of_mergers_and_acquisit...
| wmf wrote:
| Cisco and EMC are mostly acquisitions at this point.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| I think many pure businesses have been acquired successfully
| (ie YouTube). But the tech acquisitions require very careful
| management. The hard part is after the acquisition, when tech
| and culture need to ge. Leadership likes to declare victory
| when the acquisition closes.
| edanm wrote:
| Apple acquiring Next.
|
| Facebook acquiring Instagram and Whatsapp.
| softwaredoug wrote:
| How often have you seen acquisitions of technology work out? What
| often happens is new company gets tacked onto an existing
| business unit and there are pretty massive culture clashes, the
| tech was oversold, and at best there's an aquihire of decent
| engineers.
|
| I've more often seen it's something seen as easy and very visual
| thing that looks like you're solving a problem instead of looking
| internally and making tough choices. Or having to take a critical
| look at leadership.
| smashah wrote:
| Never thought I would say this but thank you Intel
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