"It's just too late to turn them around" is pretty much what people said about Apple when Steve Jobs returned, though (in fact, it's more or less what I thought as well).

As Adam Smith said, "there is a great deal of ruin in a nation", and likewise, big companies generally get more opportunities to reinvent themselves than one would expect.

Similarly some (many?) thought Microsoft was a lost cause due to Ballmer (sales/business development background), but they seem to be doing okay under Nadella (engineering background). That said, only time will tell.

I think the telling thing is would you see a Nadella (and indeed, a Jobs)-like pivot when he takes over. i.e. axe old design/business models that don't work and fully embrace new ones.

Intel's problem isn't really that they're involved in too many businesses that don't make sense or they aren't good at. Their core businesses are still their core competencies. The problem has been a catastrophic set of execution misfires.

The question in my mind - even if Intel executes on its core competencies, has the market and its' structures moved on to make their vertical setup obsolete?

> As Adam Smith said, "there is a great deal of ruin in a nation"

Tired brain read this as "there's a great deal in a ruin of a nation." Close enough, I guess?

That would make a truly horrifying business book: "The Art of the Deal of Ruin in a Nation"

Evidently, 40% of people would buy it.

Must have been reading the news while typing it!

How often do big companies like Apple and Intel succeed in righting a sinking ship though? You can’t keep pointing to the one guy that succeeded.

Maybe classifying Intel as a sinking ship may be too much of an exaggeration.

Competitors maybe passed them in the last couple of years, but Intel is still in a really solid position to turn things around.

Apple's situation was a lot more dramatic. Intel still has a very good market share and can probably take a couple+ years to safely get back on track, in my opinion.

Yeah, absolutely. There's still a lot of excellent engineering being done at Intel that you can't find elsewhere. It's not like Apple where their core product had eroded into irrelevance, they were making tons of undifferentiated products and they literally had nothing of value except the dying embers of fan loyalty to sustain them.

Amongst other things:

- SGX is really far ahead of AMD SEV. The latter is probably easier to sell because it's marketed as "drop in" (encrypts whole VMs), but SEV has been repeatedly hacked or shipped with obvious gaping design holes that they patch later and call features. SGX is a lot more focused, a lot more flexible and frankly a lot more secure.

- Optane NVRAM is completely unique, as far as I know. It's only 10x slower than DRAM which is nothing, but it's persistent! It totally changes the whole IO hierarchy.

- AVX512 / DLBoost are able to hold their own against mid-range GPUs for some AI tasks, which is impressive and useful.

- Their core chips are still very fast. AMD chips are selling more for less, which is a good position for them to be in, and TSMC's process advantage is helping them out for now. But they don't have a truly massive edge in tech like Apple's competitors had when Jobs returned.

- Intel have a long tail of obscure features that AMD doesn't, although it's often hard to know this. SGX and AVX512 are high profile but there are others that are less well known.

I don't count side channels as an issue because it's also an issue for all their competitors, and frankly I found the near single-minded focus on Intel by the security community to be rather misleading. I even read a side channels paper that admitted they suspected AMD had the same problem but they didn't bother to check simply because they didn't have access to any AMD hardware in the first place, which was unusually honest.

Apple's M1 is very impressive in its space, but for high performance cases like servers it's only quad-core - you can't use the little low power cores for much. Apple have shown no interest in making server parts for a long time, and Apple's engineering is bespoke so it tells us nothing about what other ARM vendors can do. So in that space it's still just AMD vs Intel and Intel is a long way from being on its back yet.

> Apple's M1 is very impressive in its space, but for high performance cases like servers it's only quad-core

this is true, but does not account for the fact that apple M1 is just the first (public) iteration of such cpu.

...and that if they wanted to I'm sure Apple could spin a server version with many more cores in pretty short order.

It's not that easy. Adding cores is not just changing "const int CORE_COUNT" somewhere in a VHDL file. Scaling up cores without hitting communication or other bottlenecks is a difficult engineering problem that has taken a lot of effort from Intel and AMD.

What I'm curious is; is how Nuvia and the departure of Williams et al impacted their ability to do this?

> How often do big companies like Apple and Intel succeed in righting a sinking ship though? You can’t keep pointing to the one guy that succeeded.

I feel like the view of Intel as a "sinking ship" is an inside-basebally misread of the situation.

If you buy a PC or a laptop or a server today, you're most likely getting an Intel CPU. It's now at least possible to buy AMD in many market segments from major vendors - and of course many of us do - but to the broader consumer and hosting world Intel still dominates.

You can look ahead and extrapolate and say "they can't compete with TSMC right now, and maybe they're going to start falling behind further." Fair analysis. But they dominate the market to an extent that's hard to overstate.

Contrast this with between-Jobs-stints Apple, which was a tiny shrinking company with a niche product and no clear strategy.

Intel is almost in too-big-to-fail territory. They aren't sinking, just because they now have real competition. Yes, they need to do "something" to maintain dominance - but why would you see their situation and conclude they won't? The new CEO here is a sign that they see the trouble ahead, and they're ready to steer around it.

Perpetually. These companies are always in competition, always under pressure, and always advancing their products. Not every tech company is IBM or Research In Motion. Intel and Apple are juggernauts.

If you have $233 billion (a LOT of money) and you want to own a world-class chipmaker, would you rather start from scratch or just buy Intel for cash?

As you say, Apple can be pretty unequivocally considered a success story. To the extent that it was ever troubled at all in the first place, Microsoft is also widely considered to have turned around its fortunes. Dell seems to be another turnaround story.

Then there are companies that have at least managed to stabilize themselves reasonably, e.g. IBM and HP (I wouldn't consider either of them a huge turnaround success, but I would not expect them to head for bankruptcy anytime soon either).

And even companies that did go under, e.g. Kodak, took an enormous amount of time and effort to do so, and not without launching a cryptocurrency first…

Competition is always an amazing driver for getting large companies to start doing the right thing. As long as they are not completely shut out, they have a chance of succeeding.

Until still have some amazing technology compared to AMD, they're five processes screwed right now but I think they have a chance to succeed. But given the timeline on new CPUs and fab processes, it'll be 4 years before we see the fruits of anything he does.

IBM still exists. Microsoft still exists. Apple still exists. Notably, AMD also still exists and flourishes again. All of these companies were at one time or another considered dead in the water. Did every big company survive? No. But I don't think there's enough data to make a prediction which fate Intel will see.

survivor bias

Yea, I'm not sure what their plan is other than to keep trying to sell to institutions until everyone makes the switch to someone else.

If they actually want to survive long term, there are two paths as I see it:

A) Be legitimately better than AMD, this could include opening up the management engine, much higher performance chips at lower price points, or some sort of space magic utilizing their Altera acquisition.

B) Embrace RISC-V and push it to laptops and desktops HARD, while not pulling the Microsoft Embrace Extend Extinguish™ play. If they go this route then their stock becomes an exceptionally strong buy IMO.

They could give up on design and just try to be an American TSMC.

There's a lot of interest in that from a national security perspective anyway.

With Intel's cashflow, they can do both without any difficulty. But yes, they should be the american TSMC.

I'm not sure they really can do both (because doing the TSMC model well intentionally excludes the other).

Part of TSMC's offer is that they won't do design, they won't compete with you on design etc.

They specialize in the best possible fab and service for your design and that's it.

> Part of TSMC's offer is that they won't do design

That's kind of a hoax. GUC (Global Uni Chip) is huge, and a nearly-wholly-owned subsidiary of TSMC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Unichip_Corporation

TSMC has a large design operation. It simply is part of a subsidiary rather than the parent company, that's all.

There are a lot of shady links between TSMC and GUC. I was once pressured to "collaborate" with GUC as an explicit condition of getting access to the then-bleeding-edge 16nm PDK. I turned it down. A competitor of mine (with whose chief engineer I am friends) had the same screws put to them.

Interesting - thanks, I didn’t know that.

Exactly right.

Someone else mentioned it, but that's really not true about TSMC.

Doesn’t Samsung make a whole bunch of components and use the components to create products laptops tv phones storage

Actually I'd be curious to see how a Korean Chaebol works in this regard. At various points, Apple was competing w/ Samsung (mobile phones) to get fab space on Samsung (chip fab), and I think at various times different parts of Samsung were suing Samsung...

Fly Wheel, a term people used to describe Amazon.

Imagine 100x of that, and that is Samsung.

I would LOVE them to be an American TSMC. Would save so much pain.

That makes no sense. Intel's designs are fine, industry leading actually. Intel's biggest problem by far is the repeated inability to launch new process nodes. It makes no sense for Intel to give up on what it's good at to focus on the part where it's struggling.

I would love a RISC-V laptop, but only if the vector and matrix extensions can be used for training and inferring neural networks. Having separated vectorized processing for CPU (SSE) and a neural engine doesn't make sense to me.

I want to be able to train NNs with a laptop that can normally last 20 hours.

Imagine what Apple does to x64 to work on ARM, Intel having Altera, could do x86 translation to FPGA gates... It wouldn't take whole programs, but it could reconfigure itself to run most commonly executed routines on FPGA.

The same could have been said about AMD 7 years ago. Then Lisa Su came.

Don't forget Keller's contributions there. It was a much smaller operation so it was easier for a couple of people to change it. Intel, on the other hand, is a supertanker that's going to be very difficult to turn around in time.

Consider how quickly Nadella turned around Microsoft. It's not impossible.

I recently purchased a MacbookPro w/ an M1 chip and i'm taken aback at the value/dollar, compute/power, compute/heat, compute/noise. I love the MBP-m1.

I realize that WinTel machines arent going anywhere because of entrenched business use -- but between NVIDIA GPUs for heavy workloads and M1s for day-to-day activities -- what is the feeling inside Intel right now? Is this like a Microsoft-Netscape moment in the 90s?

An M1 equipped Mac Mini with 16 GB of ram and some more storage is still more than £1000. The M1 has to get a lot cheaper to be anything more than a warning shot for Intel.

What it should definitely be, however, is a death-sentence for x86. I bet Intel are proud of it, but ultimately they must be at least somewhat jealous of those who don't have to use it.

you can get a 6c/12t, 64gb ram, 1tb nvme disk intel nuc for that price.

Maybe more like Apple in the 90s?

They still have a lot of money in the bank (and more coming in). I see no reason why they can't turn things around if the right people are in charge.

Convince Keller to go back to Intel too and I'll think there could be a chance. (not likely to happen, of course)

No? It might. Keller's new startup doesn't sound particularly impactful or likely to satisfy a need for big career kills (assuming he has any such need).

We don't really know why Keller left. All we can say is that from the outside it looks like he might have just given up in disgust. Having an engineer at the helm again can make a big difference to an engineering organisation.