They've managed to change direction in the past. They were all-in on Itanium and NetBurst until the Opteron showed up. They then kicked both to the curb and went all-in on the Pentium-M/Core microarchitecture.
Intel would be foolish to ignore the ARM market if for no other reason than the server market has started to change their focus on ops/watt rather than just ops/dollar. A 64 core ARM uses less power than a 64 thread Xeon with comparable performance.
That means the lifetime cost of that ARM chip will be much lower than the Xeon since it'll cost less to power and cool it (and the datacenter). Lower power requirements can also change the calculus of datacenter siting.
I don't see Intel getting to ARM ops/watt levels with their x86 designs. The Lakefield designs are promising but the "big.LITTLE" core configuration is more useful in mobile applications than servers.
Intel losing out to ARM designs is really Intel's choice at this point.
Both Intel and Microsoft made some kind of categorical error in 1995-2005 in assuming that their dominance was tied to a particular programming interface. Intel clung to the x86 instruction set while Microsoft operated on a “Windows everywhere” mindset, first pushing Win32 and then .Net.
Wintel seems finally dead, and good riddance.
Itanium launched in 2001 (per Wikipedia); if anything, I'd say they overestimated how readily they could ditch x86. Of course, it might be that replacing x86 was a good idea and it was just that Itanium sucked (I'd accept that possibility, given the whole "needs a smarter compiler than exists" thing). But I do agree with the general feeling that Intel and MS both overestimated how solid/entrenched they were.
However, when AMD released AMD64 it killed this strategy. You could now buy a chip that natively ran x86 32 bit at full speed, plus be able to run code that could address more than 4 GB of RAM.
Once AMD64 came out, Itanium was a dead architecture.
[0] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20150727-00/?p=90...
This means that there is some hardware that checks condition that will not happen during normal course of events - compiler won't generate such code and write to register that reads zero is harmless.
That hardware stays there, occupies space (does not matter how little) and drains energy (no matter how little).
This part of hardware is utterly meaningless and shows how priorities were skewed during design phase. It also shows why Itanium was such a bad chip - features were piled up instead of being cut down.
RISC-V did cut down on features first (compare division overflow in RISC-V and OpenRISC) and has a process to add them. This is why RISC-V is easy to implement even in OoO variant and why it is being picked up by everyone and their dog.
You mean 64 GB limitations? 32-bit x86 could handle that much, and I'm sure it would have without AMD64.
All in all, not ideal, but I'm sure we would have managed with it a bit longer.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Address_Windowing_Extensions
The downfall of the Itanium had several reasons. They went beyond RISC with EPIC, a technology which had great theoretical promises, but had not been shown to yield those results in practise. Also, the project suffered from bad management and delays. Finally AMD pushed x86 just far enough forward to be a viable alternative.
In the beginning, the Itanium was an expensive, power-hungry monster, but it did perform quite well for heavy computations. It could have had a much better future, if Intel had not abandoned it - the software situation could have been much better, if for example Linux boards had been made available to all interested. The latest version only made it to a 32nm process, the transistor count being smaller than in a modern iPhone. So just redoing the same design in a cutting-edge process would make for a very interesting processor.
Intel misjudged both sides, for phones x86 compatibility was never necessary, for business machines, it absolutely is (for the largest number of customers, there have been exceptions).
HP saw the disaster coming and designed their own McKinley Itanium, but a bit later, and HP obviously didn't want Dell to have it.
The compiler support was not good outside HP-UX, if I remember correctly.
And then AMD64 happened, and Microsoft told Intel that there would be no further 64-bit PC instruction sets, and the market would choose between AMD and Itanium.
Cue the guillotine.
Non trivial amount of know-how and - if rumours to be belied[1] - direct design then went from Alpha team at Compaq to AMD, though Intel retained some of it (AMD already had been doing cooperation with Alpha, leading to the funky case of "jig it enough and an Athlon-MP motherboard might just run an Alpha and Athlon at the same time").
[1] - Once heard from semi-reputable source that an early K8 changelog entry contained "dropping support for VAX floating point formats". Unverifiable unless someone somehow publishes those docs, but it did fit with "That opteron looks suspiciously similar to EV7"
it sounds interesting
Intel should have known this, but you buy processors because they are faster or cheaper. These days the third rail is energy but it’s basically the same, if you pay more you want a lot more and “Different” costs. Itaniums where a whisker faster than their ia32 offerings at the time, they cost a lot more though, and they were different. Beyond that, it was like a geek designed the specs with out a market story, risc chips were coveted by x86 dorks because they had 32 registers to the x86’s 5 or 6, well ia64 had 128... If you’re just doing simple stack frame compiler work without full program optimization, how many functions need 32 registers? Let alone 128? everyone could see that you wanted to simplify things in order to put silicon where it mattered for longer term performance, mid to late 90s reordering conditionals for branch prediction was sort of hot in compiler dork and low level circles, well Merced fixed that by adding a lot of complex logic to take both branches and retire the wrong one. IBM, HP and Sun needed different reliability and serviceability features on their high end systems too, from the big enterprise metal perspective they were toy parts for PCs, but they cost more, didn’t run your existing software and weren’t 2x faster or anything like that. They didn’t take a holistic market view as they made it. Rather than work with ibm, sun and hp on those high end issues, they just went back to the lab and told them when the first parts would be out.
Not really sure what goes on inside intel, they have a lot of brilliant people. I suspect that they cannibalize themselves because nothing will ever be as successful as the x86 was when they owned every aspect of the part and package and things are decided to be a failure before they ship. With ia64 nobody asked why. Xeon phi, they gpu and machine learning stuff reflects that too.
As I understand it, these were influenced by SuperH, a 32-bit RISC design that uses 16-bit instructions, so two are always executing at once.
The busybox-armv7m Thumb2 binary is the smallest of all the compiled architectures.
Thumb2 appears to have been much more practical.
Actually their judgement there was correct. There dominance absolutely was tied to monopoly power, via "particular interfaces". Working on alternatives would have undermined the monopoly.
They error was thinking the monopoly wouldn't have eventually been undermined anyways. They upped the risk for more reward, and got bit.
This incidentally is another reason why monopolization is bad: even when it doesn't last indefinitely, it makes for shitty companies that refuse or cannot adapt, and will be stubbornly stick to their ways until more sudden failure. Stagnation and then a jolt is less growth, and irrespective of growth bad for society. No government should want this.
> In fact, Intel pointed out to me in the wake of the article’s publication that it possesses an ARM architectural license, the highest level of relationship with the British intellectual property (IP) licensing firm, which Intel retained when it sold its communications product line to Marvell in 2006.
Given the resulting impact (Intel being far behind in the smartphone market), it might qualify as the costliest Excel error of all time.
>At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought."
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/paul-...
If Intel managed to convince Apple to go x86, and they had low power chips competitive with ARM at the time, then that would be a different story.
You could even argue that it was a happy accident; Intel providing a high performance ARM core may have forced mobile competitors to react, producing high performance ARM chips of their own, and sped up the erosion of the x86 monopoly we're finally witnessing today by several years.
I doubt TSMC would have been able to afford to catch up to Intel without their current high volume business.
Apple pursued custom silicon very aggressively from the start, with the acquisition of PA Semi less than a year after the launch, and the first custom chip coming in the iPad in 2010.
Although with an Intel chip they wouldn't have needed to do this for performance reasons, Intel's fat gross margins would have been equally compelling.
If Intel was willing to design the chips and take TSMC sized margins on them, I guess they could have kept the iPhone business for years, but that isn't in their DNA.
I can't see Intel ARM iPhone chips as anything other than a shortly lived oddity.
By sending all that business to TSMC and Samsung, they were financing their rival's R&D.
If they were willing to do that, I totally buy in to your scenario. It would have been the right play with the benefit of hindsight.
But it would have represented the biggest shift in their business model since they dropped DRAM. Just agreeing to fab the iPhone 1 CPU wouldn't have been nearly enough.
>It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. "The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut," he said. "My gut told me to say yes."
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/paul-...
Keep in mind that they didn't quit their Xeon Phi strategy until 2017, four years after that interview. The parallels are strong.
It's an equally valuable market to mobile, but they weren't willing to get their hands dirty, build a commodity GPU, and either a CUDA bridge ala ROCm or concerted effort on bringing OpenCL up to speed.
Instead, they tried for a decade to bring x86 to GPGPU, not for any technical advantage, but because if they can make it stick they can be an (at worst) duopolistic vendor.
They started with in order cores little better than a Pentium with massive vector units, and progressively improved them to Atom cores once it became clear how much work you'd have to do to port legacy x86 code on to them, at which point why not just port to CUDA?
Now the Xeon Phi torch will be passed to... absolutely standard Xeons with HBM. And they're building that general purpose GPGPU, but it's going up against a version of CUDA that's had a decade longer to mature and a nVidia with 102% of their market cap, instead of 9.9%.
The reason for this insanity is Intel realized just how profitable monopolies are, and they're willing to make risky (almost stupid) bets in the hope that they'll yield their next one. They're searching for the home runs with little enthusiasm or staying power for anything else.
This is the Intel I know, and it's not the kind of Intel that's willing to take crappy gross margins to fab commodity ARM chips. It's the kind of Intel that's going to try to do everything in its power to cram so very out of place Atom processors in to mobiles in the vein hope they'll catch on through a combination of incentives and temporary consumer insanity.
Which is exactly what they did try instead of the ARM thing, from 2008 to 2016. RIP.
If Intel did make ARM CPU for the original iPhone and other early mobiles, it would have followed the same trajectory as Intel's original SSDs. They'd be years ahead of their competition at launch, but left to stagnate as the rest of the market catches up, once Intel realizes they're actually going to have to work for their money with no sustainable advantage.
- He's probably flat-out lying, poopooing the data driven stuff to come off more human, humble, and sympathetic to the interviewer.
- If the numbers really did say they should stick to their monopoly, huge extra revenue be damned, then this is some model the FTC and "...but consumer prices!" crowd needs to be forced to grapple with.
Even Microsoft proved that they could build a featurific program without .Net, in VSCode. It’s an electron and JavaScript application. And, they were able to make it run everywhere.
Worth pointing out the two directional changes That Intel made, from DRAM to Microprocessor and IA64, NetBust High Clockspeed to Pentium M IPC. The first one was Andrew Grove, the 2nd one was from his disciple Patrick Gelsinger.
Those people are gone. Retired or pushed out by Intel's politics. Their legacy and work continues for about 5 years, as that is the lead time of their roadmap. And we saw what happen to Intel since 2016.
The problem is that Intel no longer has the leading state of the art fabs. They used to be two generations ahead of everyone else, and now they're two behind. The inertia of x86 has kept them afloat, but the longer Intel fabs lag the more ground ARM has been able to make up.
Intel fabbing ARM parts isn't going to do them much good unless they also manage to get their process shrink delays worked out and behind them.
There's been some suggestions to replace node size claims with better density metrics https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9063714. It's not like TSMC's fabs are some order of magnitude more advanced than Intel's fabs. If Intel had an ARM chip to produce today they could use their considerable fab volume to produce them profitably. Even at large process sizes they could still produce competitive ARM chips. It's not like their current x86 chips at 14nm are slouches.
Except that everybody seems to forget that Apple's ARM chip isn't commodity.
Apple is going to tune their ARM specifically to run portable workloads. For starters, they're going to have humongous caches that make the chips expensive.
And they're going to bury the expensiveness of the chip in the enormous margins of iDevice ecosystem.
Apple isn’t going to release chips that benchmark slower than the Intel equivalents. To sell the transition they’ll need to say something simple like “2X faster” on the big screen. So I expect to see 8+ core chips as standard even if they don’t need that many to deliver a good product.
The question is whether such a chip would be cheaper for Apple.
The interesting question is going to be how Apple's GPU stacks up to the competition. We know from the A13X that it is already quite good and I fully expect it to exceed Intel embedded graphics. But what about higher end machines? How long till Apple GPUs can take the fight to discrete graphics?
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2020/10686/
I'd be surprised to see discrete graphics in anything below an ARM iMac/iMac Pro.
My bet is that for the iMac & MacPro, Apple will use custom AMD on-die GPUs (like the now discontinued Kaby-Lake G). They just haven't announced it yet and AMD seems to be silent about it. I also bet the demo they showcased of Rise of the Tombraider was running on such an unannounced custom chip.
I you think about it, it doesn't make much sense for Apple to enter the highend segment for GPUs and sink a significant amount of research cost into it. What they need is power-efficient GPUs for their mobile line (iPhone, iPad, Macbook Air & low end Macbook Pro) so that is where an all-Apple GPU design will be used. But for professional high end use, they will not be in the position to ship a GPU (no matter if on-die or discrete) that could compete with AMD or Nvidias performance hogs out of nowhere.
Market share for high-end Macbooks + iMac + MacPro is just too little given their overall product portfolio (including mobile devices) and the research effort too high. Also, AMD would probably happily design them a custom GPU chip for on-die usage, just as they do for consoles and did for the Kaby Lake G. It wouldn't hurt AMDs business, even if Apple plans to replace AMsD with custom all-apple based GPUs in the long run (i doubt it), as it is very unlikely Apple will ever license it to other CPU vendors or even enter the market for discrete GPUs for Wintel machines.
I already play Fortnite, Call of Duty, PUBG, etc at 60fps on my iPhone.
For them to not do this would be strange.
Arguably the r&d costs would still exist for just their iPhone line. And I’m sure the cost to add a Mac line isn’t as much as the intel premium
Literally everyone has humongous caches. In fact Intel cache architectures are far larger and more elaborate than anything on an Apple chip.
Did they have such competition in the past, plus their main market (desktop) becoming irrelevant and mobile (and maybe server) going to another CPU?
So Intel's got the income to make big shifts. There's also enough momentum of continuing x86 sales that their revenue from them won't dry up immediately if they did start building ARM chips.
I don't think absolute numbers are what matters. For a company in the stock market, the fact that mobile has grown 10x the size of desktop sales, where the desktop has become stagnant means they lost big on a market...
While they could be a player in the smartphone CPU market it's not like they had it tied up and lost it. Intel's real challenge now is recognizing that the desktop/laptop and server markets are no longer guaranteed sales for them.
Is a developer in this context a third party who goes out and licenses the different IP Cores for a customer and then designs a chip using them for that customer? If so I'm curious why would someone use a third party developer over ARM itself? Who are some of the bigger ARM developers today?
Historically this seems to be the case most of the time. Market leaders miss the next iteration of their industry. The "Innovators Dilemma" is ever present.
"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. Western Union internal memo, 1876.
ex-ARM employee here.
Also Intel clearly has some sort of license that covers modern cores as well, given it manufactures FPGA's with various newer ARM cores based on its purchase of Altera.
These days, I think you’re right with the possible exception of density: if you have comparable resources, vector extensions, etc. an ISA which uses memory more efficiently is going to get a little more out of its cache and memory bandwidth, but that’s probably not going to be huge.
> In ten years, the US won't be able to make electronics in volume.
Quite possibly, but if this happens, it'll be Intel's fault. Expecting their 500% margin on x86 to last was complete lunacy. They've had 40 years. Anything they manage to invent on the architecture side will not maintain their margin in a world where ARM is good enough. That margin is never coming back.
They need to get their act together, swallow their pride, and learn how to become a foundry like every other state-of-the-art fab on the planet.
IMHO the problem is in the C suites, period. The executives have not provided enough leadership, nor have they recruited others to do so if they themselves are not able.
We still have a ton of great semiconductor design. AMD, NVidia, and Apple's semiconductor division are here. They just don't fab here.
What we have seen with China is that if manufacturing leaves eventually R&D and design will start to leave too. The manufacturers realize they could own the whole shebang if they stand up their own design, product, and marketing, and the US has no talent monopoly.
I am waiting for a Chinese laptop that is built to Apple quality or better, has a fast ARM CPU, and can run either Linux or Windows on ARM. That could be disastrous for the domestic PC industry or what remains of it, especially if Apple flubs the ARM switch.
Edit: Samsung could do it too. They have a sleeper line of ARM laptops, but they are underpowered. Put out one of those with 16-32 cores, 16-64GiB of RAM, 1TB+ SSD, a (maybe optional) high end GPU, and that can run ARM Linux or Windows and Samsung could have a customer. If they invested in helping Linux desktop work very well on the machine they could take a lot of developers from Apple... or if MS removes their head from their posterior and stops stuffing Windows with shit. MS could offer a reasonably priced "no BS edition" without foistware or needless telemetry and I would consider it.
Lee Hutchinson of Ars Technica once wrote that a junior engineer now at Boeing has no viable path for promotion towards the C-suite. The middle rank engineering teams have all been divested and the only way to rise up the ranks is to actually leave Boeing, work at a different company, rise up the ranks there and come back a decade later.
The only difference is that you're less likely to be sent to Gulag, or worse.
AMD and TSMC both have always had technical leaders. Intel had a series of legendary technical CEOs during their most formidable years.
The first non-technical-PhD CEO they had was Otellini, but he had been there for 30 years before becoming CEO.
Think of it like a career change at age 42.
Imagine being married with a couple of children and at 42 you tell your wife that you are going to spend all of your free time, and a lot of your money working on becoming a lawyer. You want to do this because you think your current career is topped out and you want to be prepared for the future. In 6-8 years you'll be ready for the career change, but you'll need to start at the bottom of the laywer pool and work your way back up, your expenses won't change, nor will your obligations, just your income, and it will go down substantially.
I worked in a startup and we had a product that cost $1k per seat and it was full featured and slick as hell, but we started getting competition from a company that was selling a bare bones product for $99 a seat. Our customers really liked their price, but they wanted our features, in the end price won and we started losing business to the competitor.
Because of my company we actually legitimatized a market for an certain type of after market computer cards, we spent a ton of time and money helping to build the surrounding ecosystem so that our product could have a market. Once we invested all the money, the competitor came along and could ride the ecosystem we built, but we still needed to cover all of our costs, hence our high price.
I spent a ton of time arguing with the BOD about pricing and volumes, but they had financial models they had to meet and an $89 product had no place, luckily for us we got acquired because of our expertise and the work that we did to create the market. If we hadn't been acquired we would have been overrun by our competitor, and it had noting to do with lazy.
As Buffett says, "price is what you pay, value is what you get." Your ex-co failed to provide reasons why customers should pay for the value it offers.
Apple excels at this, despite naysayers saying that a premium consumer electronics is a "bad business".
They want to stay the Ferrari, Bang & Olufsen of mobile phones and laptops.
Yep, Apple et al. are reaping what they sow here. All their employees go find suppliers in Asia for their hardware. The travel schedules are so grueling that you basically have to be from the country/province where the supplier is located for it to be a tolerable job (free trips home!). So basically, we have Asian engineers seeking out Asian suppliers on behalf of an American company where only the top few levels are American. The chance those Asian engineers are going to cut out the American company in 10 years is high.
But I was lazy in conflating the two cases so thanks for pointing that out.
By pushing the PC, the nucleus of all development, to ARM they are helping push the whole software industry onto a heavily globalized platform with many vendor choices and generally available IP.
The second justification though is that the CPU architecture is less significant on the system scale. The SOC really is a ”system” (we used to predict this in the 1990s but couldn’t get there then) with a lot of other some what specialized functional units designed to work together.
In that the A series are more reminiscent of the mainframes of old, where the CPU really was merely the central processing unit and a tremendous amount of processing went on in other processing units.
To me this is Apple trying to stay ahead of ARM Chromebooks and the desktop-ification of Android/Chrome. If left alone another half decade, it’s possible that Chromium via either Google or Microsoft could have made more of a dent in the wider market than just education uses. Adobe is already facilitating creatives to cheaper Windows workstations.
Frankly, Apple investing in unique silicon for their software simply means it will be more unique, just as the iPad has defended its place through an unbeatable software ecosystem and “cheap enough” hardware. If the Mac can go “cheap enough” to iPad pricing, this is Apple carving out its niche and market for the decade to come...
Right. ChromeOS is getting interesting. At first glance it seems to be even more limited and appliance-like than iOS, but now you can run both Android and Linux software in containers, which opens up many more potential uses.
I advise you to see how huge are the overseas captive outsourcing centres of all of said companies are.
That's how old empires fall and get replaced by new - and this while everybody in the old remains complacent...
Most of this is out of greed - the corporations got bigger margins if they outsourced production. And the public could short term buy more for less - to the detriment of the local working class, and ultimately, the middle class. And domestic stuff like rent, health, education, etc, would remain expensive.
First you lose the factory jobs, then the factories, then the readily available infrastructure to build one soon as you need it, then the investments to new technology, and ultimately, even the know-how (and meanwhile, lots of patents also go elsewhere, to your subcontractors).
"Corporations" are profit-seeking for the entire lifetime; there isn't a point where the making-money comes to the fore and ruins everything.
Automation explains almost all loss of manufacturing jobs. America today manufactures more than it ever has, with very few jobs needed. A car factory today requires a few hundred people, rather than many thousands.
As for why temporary monopoly companies become less innovative, the answer there is somewhat obvious: because innovation isn't the best profit-making strategy. But that's fine: hence the breakdown of temporary monopolies via competition.
Then there's the question of "why china" is where genuine competition comes from, and that's largely due to economies of scale and large pools of talent. The labour costs are secondary for the capacity to automate and integrate supply lines.
America is a massive country with low density, poor infrastructure and limited talent base for relevant skills. The latter is a choice of its citizens to educate themselves in a particular way. The former is the choice of its citizens to vote for particular government programmes: low-density sprawl, and tax-cuts.
If you want to "bring manufacturing back" (whatever that means) you need significant tax raises to build and subsidise significant amounts of infrastructure and subsidise education and training in the relevant skills.
Of course, that isn't as satisfying for a voting for a rable-rouser.
IMHO large investments in infrastructure and education are the playbook China has followed for the last 40 years to become the world's biggest factory.
In China's case, they didn't fund it by raising taxes on an already-wealthy populace, but rather by going "lol, workers' rights?" and forcing an entire generation (or two) work 12 hours a day for 6 days a week (996) making pennies per hour. [1]
The PPP of Chinese citizens has gone from ~$1000/year in 1990 to ~$17,000/year today. [2] That's a 17 fold increase, compared to just ~2.7 for the US over the same period. [3] I highly doubt any employee in a country like the US, UK, or Germany is going to accept a 996-style work schedule (in fact it would be illegal in many, if not all, of these jurisdictions) and especially not for the current PPP of a Chinese citizen.
> Automation explains almost all loss of manufacturing jobs.
This is also applying to China now. You can't have labour costs increase 17x over 30 years and not consider automation to reduce your costs. However, since China has historically been the destination of outsourced manufacturing, they have built up supply chains that the US used to have back when the US did "manufacturing."
Why would a profit-driven corporation spend money to bring the supply chain back to the US when there is no economic reason to do so? To me, this is a very large issue, separate from "infrastructure" that the US government has yet to seriously discuss. Raising taxes is a politically toxic move in many political systems, and it's incredibly unlikely a corporate entity would voluntarily choose to forego profit to help an OECD country re-develop its lost supply chains.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system
[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...
[3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...
Err... no. 996 is a recent culture of work in Chinese IT.
The reason subsitance-living agricultural workers moved to cities and factories is the same reason they have always done so in history: farming is dangerous, risky toil.
A wage is highly stabilising, and highly attractive. You do not need to "force" people from farms into factories.
> Why would a profit-driven corporation spend money to bring the supply chain back to the US when there is no economic reason to do so?
The US can engage in the same state-funded programme of infrastructure investment, skills subsidy, and massive sector-targeted tax cuts. That it chooses not to is the explanation of why the US isn't competing successfully. NOT "996".
Its just scape-goating to blame "the despicable Chinese!" when at the same time you're doing nothing to compete with them.
The left? That's just reality, not a left/right thing. I think it's now common sense in both the left and right. Heck, Trump (which one would call right) admitted more or less the same (that globalization lost America jobs and sending things to China was a bad idea).
>"Corporations" are profit-seeking for the entire lifetime; there isn't a point where the making-money comes to the fore and ruins everything.
That corporations are profit-seeking for the entire lifetime is neither here, nor there. You can be profit seeking and selling good products and fostering a healthy community, or you can be profit-seeking and fucking customers and polluting and so on.
So, there might not be a "a point where the making-money comes to the fore and ruins everything" but there's absolutely a case that how a corporation goes about making-money can ruin everything.
Which also means there a point in time, where corporations were let (culturally, legally, etc) to run wild with money-making to the detriment of other things (society, externalities, etc).
>America is a massive country with low density, poor infrastructure and limited talent base for relevant skills.
China is an even more massive country and didn't have an educated workforce (tons of farmers etc) before it began investing on building one. As for the population density, that's a red herring - China got workers brought over from the countryside to work in big cities, and America can do the same.
> before it began investing on building one.
That is my point. Americans chose not to do that. A loss of manufacturing didnt "happen to america" like some crime. American society chose to be educated differently, chose to spend and raise taxes differently, and presently, continues to choose to do so.
The "blame china and outsourcing" narrative is just misdirected scape-goating. Trump's repetition of it is a pretty strong signal of its mumbo-jumbo narcissim.
China has invested in its infrastructure to an incomparable degree. The US has not, does not, and will not. It is your fault.
Welcome to Europe, I guess.
Or will that happen, just further down the line?
Tim Cook:
> There's a confusion about China. The popular conception is that companies come to China because of low labor cost. I'm not sure what part of China they go to, but the truth is China stopped being the low-labor-cost country many years ago. And that is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view. The reason is because of the skill, and the quantity of skill in one location and the type of skill it is.
> The products we do require really advanced tooling, and the precision that you have to have, the tooling and working with the materials that we do are state of the art. And the tooling skill is very deep here. In the U.S., you could have a meeting of tooling engineers and I'm not sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.
> The vocational expertise is very very deep here, and I give the education system a lot of credit for continuing to push on that even when others were de-emphasizing vocational. Now I think many countries in the world have woke up and said this is a key thing and we've got to correct that. China called that right from the beginning.
Source: https://www.inc.com/glenn-leibowitz/apple-ceo-tim-cook-this-...
First - cheap labour is still a huge part of the value. Point blank. I quote from China and you can see literally the 'labour' input on the spreadsheet, and on that basis alone, it's still very competitive vis-a-vis the West.
Second - the reason 'all those skills' exist there, and not here, is because of the wages and conditions. They do all those things at far less than 1/2 price than they do here. That's a big deal. And for the most part, they are effectively commodities.
If Apple et. al. wanted to pay 'American wages' for most of that activity, then major clusters of those skills would develop here.
Very importantly, there is the 'trade asymmetry' in that China has trade barriers, the US largely does not.
It would be 'good' if both economies kind of opened up, but it's like a 'prisoner's dilemma strategy game' in that, it's even better if you get your opponent to 'open up' while you 'remain closed'.
The US has lost dramatically by allowing China on the same WTO terms, and all the other shenanigans. The US should really simply implement 'tit for tat' trade policies such as requiring Chinese companies give up their IP in the US while the US hands to a strategic competitor, not allow them to have >50% ownership of anything, put up indirect barriers, the US Treasure could direct major US banks to subsidise Cisco's customers for export, yada, yada. It seems dramatic, but that's what China is doing.
Finally, though we think of a lot of this as 'high tech' ... a lot of it is not. We don't worry too much about China making tons of 'plastic stuff' because we believe it's 'low value' - but as certain kinds of screens, disk drives etc. become truly commoditised, well, in some ways, it's a lot like assembling plastic toys, and the surpluses go to the buyers, not the makers.
Edit: I'm working on a project where our factory price in quantity is $60 here, will be in $20 in China and overall, it all boils down to labour input costs and overhead through the value chain (i.e. N. American manufacturer pays more for Internet, largely due to labour, those costs get passed on). In the end, it's not the price of the materials, it's the layers of services by humans on top.
They would, but you're still talking about a 10-20 year gap. First for masses of people to get the adequate education, apprenticeships, get good at their jobs, and then for these people to mentor the second cohort 8-12 years later to get the kind of volume China and Germany have.
And then you have the 'raw labour' - you still need factories with workers making very little, treated like crap.
The bottom 10% of Americans will not do that. For what it's worth.
Now - there is the possibility for 'full automation'. Sony Playstation in made in Japan by this amazingly automated assembly line.
America could feasibly do this if they wanted for some things, but it will take innovation.
The revolution will be: a 'pair of hands'.
When robotics and AI becomes sophisticated enough that you can buy a 'pair of robot hands' for $100K and very easily train them to do 'anything' ... then this will enable automation in rich countries and it could really damage the entire developing world economies.
> The bottom 10% of Americans will not do that. For what it's worth.
OR you need to find other ways to bolster margins without skimping on labor costs at the bottom end. Intelligent cuts to C-Suite pay and golden parachutes could easy pay for thousands of workers at a living wage at the bottom of any company.
The top 10% of Americans will not do that. For what it's worth.
Nothing will make up for the low wages in China.
America could push up minimum wage some, but it won't change the dynamics of export/import.
> Nothing will make up for the low wages in China.
China's wages aren't even that low anymore. Maybe you are thinking of Bangladesh or somewhere that China is now themselves outsourcing "cheap labor" to?
> America could push up minimum wage some, but it won't change the dynamics of export/import.
Correct, it's not a labor cost issue at the end of the day. As I said, companies are more than capable of finding margins that work and still pay labor what it owes them. There's too many externalities companies are willing to, and legally allowed to, ignore that keep them from feeling any pressure or need to actually do so. The point I tried to make is that is not "low wages exist in China" keeping jobs outside of the US. That's a solvable problem with honest dealing with the labor market. Companies just have no interest to solve it.
(The labor market isn't a fair market, for what that is worth, and has almost no liquidity. Corporate structures impact the labor market a lot more than the labor market affects corporate structures, whether or not you agree that the modern American "gentry" are playing too selfish a game with the American labor market and getting away with it.)
No, this is an ideological statement, not a factual statement.
The 'earnings' (not wealth) of Billionaires would not move the needle that much.
But even the wealth: if Jeff Bezos gave $100B up his wealth, it would be a one-time check to every American for $300. That's it. And just once.
Take up all the billionaires and it wouldn't amount to much for Americans, and it would be shortlived.
"China's wages aren't even that low anymore."
Yes, they absolutely are. To the point wherein there is absolutely no way for America to compete with them on a wage-basis.
"Correct, it's not a labor cost issue at the end of the day."
Yes, it is a labour cost, you're misinterpreting my point. Nothing America can do will make the US competitive with China for things involving labour.
" As I said, companies are more than capable of finding margins that work and still pay labor what it owes them."
This is just fantasy business math. There is no 'finding margins'. There is 'increasing prices' or 'lowering costs'. So either they pay suppliers less, or increase prices in order to pay greater salaries.
And 'owes them' - is again, just made up. How much does Starbucks' 'owe' it's Baristas? What you say they owe? What the market will bear? Minimum wage?
"The labor market isn't a fair market, for what that is worth, and has almost no liquidity"
The term 'liquid' is generally not used for labour markets, you might mean to say 'fungibility'?
The US could afford to pay better minimum wages and probably better for the lower 1/3 - but again, it won't change what's happening vis-a-vis China.
Yet we aren't talking about "every American", we are talking about increasing the labor force, so your math isn't that relevant. Instead, let's say that Amazon required Bezos to put that $100B back into wages for low level employees for ten years: $10B/year works out to as many as 320,512 people employed at a $15/hour full time job minimum wage for those 10 years.
You are correct that I suggested wealth rather than earnings because of course most of the wealthy play shell games with their incomes that launder as much as possible of their income into other things that aren't "earnings" on paper (because one is taxed much higher than most of the "capital gains" taxed sorts of passive incomes). I mentioned golden parachutes, I was not trying to hide that wealth is a bigger component of the debate than just "earnings".
That said, even Bezos' over-the-table non-stock "earnings" are still nearly 3x a $15 minimum wage earner.
All of the above is mathematically true, so easier to consider "facts" just as much as yours. No ideological statements there. I could bring out some actual ideological statements if you wish what those really look like.
> This is just fantasy business math. There is no 'finding margins'. There is 'increasing prices' or 'lowering costs'. So either they pay suppliers less, or increase prices in order to pay greater salaries.
I agree, it is fantasy business math, but it is fantasy business math that is the current language of the MBA and Wall Street folks managing this mess. I did not invent it, and I would use more direct language if it were weren't readily apparent this is the preferred language of those currently propping up the established system.
> And 'owes them' - is again, just made up.
By that logic, all of capitalism is made up. All of human history is made up.
Even setting aside the deeper ethical questions about what an honest society owes to its labor class, I did explicitly define it in that context as capable of meeting the requirements to move those jobs back to the US, which in this case would specifically mean "US minimum wage" as the law of the land people keep claiming makes US noncompetitive with China, and you are just needlessly splitting hairs here.
(To be fair, I'm happy to continue splitting hairs, as I did use "owe" to evoke both the indebtedness meaning as well as the philosophical one as well. But it was well defined in context.)
Germany, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are all developed countries that don’t have “cheap labor” anymore. They found and are holding their niches. Even in terms of “cheap labor”, China’s losing out to places like Bangladesh. A lot of these excuses for why America can’t compete in manufacturing sound like sour grapes to me.
Vocational and apprenticeships are still a thing there.
Exactly. But it’s the “American dream” to send their kids to college, even if that’s the completely inappropriate thing to do for that child’s future prospects.
Sure. That’s ok. It’ll take time to see a return on investment. I don’t see this “but X” as a counterpoint or really an issue at all.
Further, you could make investments now that exceed current capacities and capabilities today with an eye to the future.
Actually the US does a lot of good manufacturing in some fields, like arms. But in other fields, well-intentioned protectionist policies like have backfired. For instance, rather than subsidizing US shipyards, the Jones Act protects them from foreign competition which has led them to significant decline over the past century.
US policy to rebuild or improve US industry has a very mixed history in terms of results. It probably doesn’t help that a lot of these efforts are focused on bailing out the same old manufacturers over and over again to save jobs in battleground states.
The issue with China now is 25% Trump Tax, which is huge. For less sophisticated goods, Malaysia, Vietnam, etc. are becoming options.
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple being a major contributor in propping up China for so long before taking action (like their recent diversifications to India and Brazil for manufacturing) is going to be a stain on his legacy long term.
What does that mean? Are you talking about opinions he has expressed, or are you just saying he's responsible for the opinions of other people you associate him with?
It still remains to be seen how successful they would be, but at least they recognize this situation as a problem in nearest future.
I wish the US had seen this with equal clarity 30 years ago.
Step 2 is to steadily increase prices once they have a manufacturing monopoly, and impose tariffs on imports.
Some people did. Even many politicians did. But they were shouted down as being racist and protectionist, and "globalism" was the future. Anyone who didn't get on board was called old and stupid.
IMO if a foreign adversary spends 20+ years and tens of thousands of dollars (at a minimum) training a highly skilled worker we would be insane not to take that skilled worker for free, if they want to move and work here.
Limiting immigration of highly skilled workers is a massive national security failure. It's a huge mistake. If a Chinese or Russian top tier engineer / AI researcher / wants to immigrate to the US we should roll out the red carpet because they're a strategic asset.
In Canada the only party to consistently oppose NAFTA and the FTA was the NDP, the left wing party.
In my experience, the right was very opposed to NAFTA (while the left was pushing it), in favor of free trade but not at the expense of jobs and manufacturing ability in the USA, and thought all these deals with China were going to enrich a possibly future adversary. By experience, I simply mean social interaction with middle class conservatives/Republicans, not experience in politics or "the party". And, I didn't really start paying attention to what was going on until the early 90s. (edited for a paragraph break)
I remember it the same way, and I was a journalist at the time and wrote many stories about GOP politicians afraid sounding warning bells about American jobs going to Mexico. Which they did. And then they went from Mexico to China.
I also remember that conservative companies like Walmart were so against NAFTA that they actively promoted Made In America goods in store and in advertising. My how times have changed.
> The impetus for a North American free trade zone began with U.S. president Ronald Reagan, who made the idea part of his 1980 presidential campaign. After the signing of the Canada–United States Free Trade Agreement in 1988, the administrations of U.S. president George H. W. Bush, Mexican president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and Canadian prime minister Brian Mulroney agreed to negotiate what became NAFTA. Each submitted the agreement for ratification in their respective capitals in December 1992, but NAFTA faced significant opposition in both the United States and Canada. All three countries ratified NAFTA in 1993 after the addition of two side agreements, the North American Agreement on Labor Cooperation (NAALC) and the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC).
Politically speaking, NAFTA passed in the Clinton administration because he was able to get enough Democrats on board. To this day, free trade doesn't seem to be strongly supported on the left, in part because it's not strongly supported by unions; it's mostly strongly supported by economists, think tanks, and publications that might be characterized more as centrist (the Council on Foreign Relations), center-right (The Economist) or libertarian. I'm not entirely sure why American conservatives in particular moved so strongly against it in the last two decades.
There are a couple of factions that makes up modern American conservationism. I think it was mainly big business/ideological libertarians that were strongly for free trade, but I think they were far from the majority, numbers-wise
The 80s and 90s were the era of the FTA and NAFTA, and the rise of the fortunes of the IMF and the WTO. And apart from Clinton in the late 90s this was an era of (for the time) pretty strongly right wing American politics.
: liberal is not considered "Left" outside of the United States
I see this repeated as a talking point by multiple individuals. I don’t really get what the point of the comment is or what I’m supposed to learn from it or do about it. It feels pretty close to a Scotsman but to what end?
And because Americans are being lied to by their own politicans, and part of that lie is that they have a left wing opposition. They don't, really, apart from the Sanders wing of the Democrats. That Fox News or whatever in the US can with a straight face call Biden "left wing" isn't just a political vocabulary corruption, or a relative shift of frames of reference -- it is an ideological lie, and the purpose of it is to advance an agenda.
And because it would help if Americans looked outside of their own borders at the rest of the world, and gained frame of reference from that.
I'll just quibble with this and say that if we're talking about US politics then we are talking about the same thing when we speak of the "left" in the US, because that's what it is regardless of the state of the rest of the world.
I also am not sure there is much value in arguing about how much more "left" some countries are. The fundamentals aren't really different until you talk about communists (and if that's what you're talking about, I abhor communism and don't want that in my country). If you're talking about universal healthcare for example, you're not really talking about something radically different between "more left countries" like the colloquial Sweden, it's just a matter of degree of difference.
The reason this matters is because as long as Americans accept this false polarity they are missing choice. Not just because they're a two party system, but because their two parties are defined along an ideological axis that misses entire policy choices. And Americans have been mistakenly educated to believe that "socialism" = "government involvement", and that it is an extreme 'left' pole of the political spectrum, and as such they are increasingly ending up with dysfunctional state systems that do not serve the populace.
That and being able to speak to the rest of the world about politics is why clarity of terms here is, I think, important
I think universal healthcare is a suitable minimum definition of left wing despite that, since a minimum definition is “without this element, a thing cannot be left wing” not “with this element, a thing must be left wing”.
> Universal healthcare is off the table by both parties in the coming federal election.
No, it's not, whether you are referring to the Presidential or Congressional elections, both of which are federal elections in and, unlike in most parliamentary systems, are separate-though-concurrent elections where the candidate platforms even from the same party have no necessary alignment.
> Biden is against it,
No, he's not.
> so is he left wing?
No, he's a center-right neoliberal, just like the rest of the dominant faction of the Democratic Party, and up through at least the early 90s the dominant faction of the Republican Party, too.
A sizable minority of the Democratic Party, though, is (mostly center-)left, though, and they are a not-insignificant factor in Democratic policy stances currently (US major political parties are effectively multifaction coalitions, and just like any coalition the policy preferences of the dominant faction aren't always those of the coalition.)
> (No, sorry, the "public option" tack onto Obamacare doesn't count)
While I don't particularly like it, being part of the more-left-than-Biden part of the Democratic Party, the public option proposed by Biden as recently fleshed out by the Biden-Sanders joint policy group is, in fact, a proposal for universal coverage, not to dissimilar from some other OECD countries, all of which have universal healthcare but far from all of which have public single-payer like Canada's Medicare or public provision like the UK NHS.
We're too busy arguing over irrelevant stuff, unfortunately.
More like it transferred that wealth to the managerial class, while the US worker is flipping burgers for minimum wage now.
iPhones are twice as expensive in China and they always have been.
But one important factor why China is ruling this industry right now is not only because the cheap labor, but also the massive supply chain. If you're prototyping some electronic hardware, you're in Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen, you can probably go there and find all the parts you want in one hour.
It's extremely slow and expensive for other places to do the same in the world compared to there. And it still holds true for other parts in China (where many of them with even same quality of labor but cheaper).
This is absolutely the case, and you don't even necessarily need to look to "other [geographic] areas" to find them.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-foxconn-india-apple-exclu...
I watched the same thing happen to Japan way back.
Protective trade polices have a costs, but free trade polices have costs too--they're just different ones.
It's not glamorous, but Texas Instruments still operates a pile of fabs in the US, and is well positioned for the anticipated IoT boom.
If it's IOT, yes definitely. Some things you don't want to plug in every day--they have to run 10yrs on battery. TI is pretty good in that space.
Disks afaik are still made in the US, although not only in the US.
Intel does both designing and fabbing in the US.
What happens to this national infrastructure in a time of war? If one country places it’s infrastructure inside another’s then in a state of war the Emirate would certainly lose access to their chip fab. They’d want to see no one else can use it either.
Would something like the Global Foundries site somehow rigged to be permanently disabled, maybe even remotely, so as to not let it fall into the host state’s hands?
>state of the art
You must work at intel
Add enough local industry to that and there are unspoken pockets of vacuum and two generations of children in poverty and unemployment instead.
Very short sighted.
Apple’s iPhone business collects the majority of worldwide smartphone profits. It’s iPad business collects the majority of tablet profits. It’s Macintosh business collects the majority of pc manufacturing profits.
It does this by focusing on design, development, and usability, primarily through software. It keeps costs down by outsourcing assembly to Asia. If it brought that low value work back, it would make it shareholders and America poorer. It would sell fewer devices at higher prices, losing high paying developer jobs and all for a few more minimum wage level jobs.
If US chip makers have competitive advantages they don’t need our help. If they don’t, helping them is diverting talented resources from better industries hat would have better increased our living standards.
Apple sure makes its shareholders wealthier. I guess you can say that about its 90,000 USA employees, and that's about it- there's pretty much no supplier network to talk about.
Apple pays app developers over $30B a year. It’s created hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs at third party developers.
TikTok is the social media darling not long ago. Now it's in hot water because of privacy issues.
How does one have a social media industry without computers?
do you really think social media(s) appear(s) only with computers?
And I think the situation is similar for other US-based social media sites such as Twitter.
But, this list could very easily grow. There are almost 200 countries in the world, and about one-third of those are authoritarian regimes, and at least another third could be classified as semi-authoritarian. That's a lot of countries which might be inclined to ban US social media and could do so in the future.
I think China could export its own social media services to authoritarian and semi-authoritarian governments in other parts of the world – a lot of those governments would be very interested in social media offerings with built-in tools to enable censorship and information manipulation.
ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, Zuckerberg likes to have a word with you
Chrome is the only major browser left that doesn't block 3rd party cookies, tracking and fingerprinting. We’re probably at peak Facebook right now.
Meanwhile, virtually every device needs semiconductors.
The US already lost the DRAM industry, the disk industry, the display panel industry, most of the small component industry, and the consumer electronics industry. In ten years, the US won't be able to make electronics in volume.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabricat...