Technology

Tbh it’s not 100% his fault the engineering competence began to visibly crumble under his leadership, but at the same time he absolutely stayed the course that his predecessors chose, which is what got them here in the first place. So yeah, he deserves to be excoriated for this stuff, but so do his predecessors.

Stellantis CEO just abruptly quit yesterday or day before too.

Yesterday was Sunday and the beginning of the month

Maybe Lisa Su goes to Intel 🙃

Maybe now they can forget all the expensive chipmaking and get back to their core business of stock buybacks.

If they spin off the fabs, I feel like they are really screwed

One of the stipulations of the $8B in CHIPS Act funding that they just recieved last month was that they not separate their fabrication business from the parent company. That's unlikely to happen now unless it gets separated at a bankruptcy auction.

unless they can fix whatever is causing consistent delays

Yup, that's their #1 goal right now. If I were CEO, I'd cut/sell any part of the business that doesn't directly support CPU and GPU sales, which is basically what Intel is doing. My priorities would be:

1. rescue server CPU business - this is their main money printing machine, and while they may lose to ARM in the future, they need a cash cow in the medium term
2. get a competent server-oriented GPU product out - they're late to the game, but they can bundle them w/ their server CPU contracts to get some market share; overwhelm these corporate customers with first class driver support
3. get something to compete w/ Apple's M1 - this means super low-power CPU that can scale to gaming workloads, and capable-enough graphics (something a bit better than AMD's APUs); sell this near cost to keep a foot in the door in the mobile space
4. sell domestic fab capacity - now is the time to get Sony and Microsoft on board with their next gen consoles, and it might not be too late for Nintendo

I would essentially ignore desktop workloads and solve workstation workloads w/ server chips. To me, those sound like the highest margin businesses that they could potentially still capture, and at least 1 & 2 are a bit less sensitive to being behind on their fab process (corporate contracts respond pretty well to bundle discounts).

This probably wouldn't work though, especially since I'm an outside observer with zero industry experience. But I think a good CEO would do something along those lines, which seems to be what Pat Gelsinger was going for as well.

Flail until the light leaves their eyes.

Its a lower midrange only launch like it appears to be, it will be extremely unprofitable. AMD may even eat large chunks of this market with the Strix Halo APU, which could be similar to the B570 with no need for a discrete GPU.

Theres actually a big and growing demand for ANY high VRAM GPU for the LLM crowd (that AMD is ignoring for inexplicable reasons beyond Strix Halo) but it appears Intel can't even compete there. No 256 bit APU, their GPU is 192 bit so capped at like 24GB...

It’s baffling how fast they fell, since they had a monopoly for ~20 years.

I'm personally excited about the actual engineering challenges that come next and think that all 3 big foundries have roughly equal probability of coming out on top in the next stage, as the transistors become more complex three dimensional structures, and as the companies try to deliver power from the back side of the wafer rather than the crowded front side.

Samsung and Intel have always struggled with manufacturing finFETs with the yields/performance of TSMC. Intel's struggles to move on from 14nm led to some fun memes, but also reflected the fact that they hit a plateau they couldn't get around. Samsung and Intel have been eager to get off of the finFET paradigm and tried to jump early to Gate All Around FETs (GAAFETs, which Samsung calls MBCFET and Intel calls RibbonFET), while TSMC sticks around on finFET for another generation.

Samsung switched to GAAFET for its 3nm node, which began production in 2022, but the reports are that it took a while to get yields up to an acceptable level. Intel introduced GAAFET in its 20A node, but basically abandoned it before commercial production and put all of its resources into 18A, which they last reported should be ready for mass production in the first half of 2025 and will be ready for external customers to start taping out their own designs.

Meanwhile, TSMC's 3nm node is still all finFET. Basically the end of the line for this technology that catapulted TSMC way ahead of its peers. Its 2nm node will be the first TSMC node to use GAAFET, and they have quietly abandoned plans to introduce backside power in the generation after that, for their N2P. Their 1.6 nm node is going to have backside power, though. They'll be the last to marker with these two technologies, but maybe they're going to release a more polished process that still produces better results.

So you have the three competitors, with Samsung being the first to market, Intel likely being second, and TSMC being third, but with no guarantees that they'll all solve the next generation challenges in the same amount of lead time. It's a new season, and although past success does show some advantages and disadvantages that may still be there, none of it is a guarantee that the leader right now will remain a leader into the next few generations.

The competition for CPUs can be AMD vs ARM vs RISC-V. It doesn't have to be between two x86 giants.

That's better, not necessarily for instruction set reasons, but because ARM and RISC-V are more open to multiple companies stepping in to produce chips.

Especially one just a small naval visit from China.

They released the same 4 core CPUs for like 6 years in a row

It was 8 years ago. AMD was on the verge of bankruptcy and Intel had been propping them up for years so they wouldn't have to deal with the government going after them for having a total monopoly. If Zen had been a failure AMD wouldn't have survived. I figured Intel had advanced stuff in the pipeline that they were just sitting on waiting for AMD to force their hand (because they were dicks like that). I was wrong.

Eh, he was handed a company in a bad strategic place and he did not fix it.

Lisa Su was in a similar position when she took over AMD, but she managed it. While I don't want to put too much emphasis on the CEO alone, AMD's turnaround is quite remarkable. They very easily could have collapsed at one point.