[HN Gopher] Political Chips ___________________________________________________________________ Political Chips Author : simonpure Score : 130 points Date : 2022-08-03 14:40 UTC (8 hours ago) (HTM) web link (stratechery.com) (TXT) w3m dump (stratechery.com) | zbird wrote: | > This is why Intel's shift to being not simply an integrated | device manufacturer but also a foundry is important: yes, it's | the right thing to do for Intel's business, but it's also good | for the West if Intel can pull it off. | | It's good for the US, not "the West". | MauranKilom wrote: | Intel is also building a new fab in Germany. So no, it's not | just the US. | throwaway4good wrote: | Intel is in big trouble and the only card they have left is the | nationalism card. And that card is for losers. | | We are about to enter a silicon slump with low demand and | oversupply; for Intel things will get worse. | | What will happen when it is clear to everyone including | politicians that all that subsidy money is going into a black | hole? And people finally figure out that a rocket that blows up | stuff doesn't need a 2nm chip? | | They are going to lose interest and those subsidies that is | Intel's last hope will end. | hotpotamus wrote: | I've read that the problems with chips for cars are actually | old processes (greater than 100nm) that are commodity and so no | one really cares to make them and the equipment has one foot in | the grave and such, so I don't think anyone cares too much | about putting chips into rockets since that stuff was figured | out awhile ago. | | My perception of national defense types is somewhat influenced | by reading their press stuff and somewhat influenced by General | Buck Turgidson from Dr Strangelove. He would say, "We must not | have a $weapon gap!" (missiles, mineshafts, whatever he | perceived to be in the national interest at the moment). And | today, what occupies the minds of these types is AI which means | latest gen chips and problems with pesky nerds and their | ethical considerations. They greatly fear that China has | surpassed the US in AI and has us outgunned. To be fair to | them, AI could certainly be a potent weapon, but I have no idea | how their perceptions of China reflect reality. | groby_b wrote: | "We are about to enter a silicon slump with low demand and | oversupply" | | What causes you to assume that? | | "What will happen [if...] people finally figure out that a | rocket that blows up stuff doesn't need a 2nm chip?" | | One, they'll learn that we're not doing too hot on custom chip | fabs in general? They'll also, if they're really that dense, | learn that we need chips for a few more things than to make | things go boom. (FWIW, they're not that dense.) | | "They are going to lose interest and those subsidies that is | Intel's last hope will end." | | Even if the rest of your statements were correct (and I don't | think they are), that is absolutely not how subsidies work. | Local subsidies translate to local jobs translate to votes. | Keeping them running is rather important to politicians. So, | no, "lose interest" is not exactly the most likely failure mode | here. | JonChesterfield wrote: | This one seems to have translated into dividends while intel | posts substantial losses. | mark_l_watson wrote: | I am a Libertarian so this may seem like an odd comment: I | support some government intervention to design and manufacture of | at least low tech chips (adequate for laptops, tractors, | industrial uses in general). | | I am not a hardware expert, but given that the Open RISC projects | seem very worthy of support, both in design efforts and multiple | inside the US fab facilities. | | TSMC's new 5nm factory just opened 60 miles south of where I live | in Arizona is also the kind of progress I want to see. I am a fan | of globalization but we need to balance that with good "Plan B's" | for building what we really need inside the US. | sanxiyn wrote: | US is not lacking in CPU design. I agree OpenRISC (and RISC-V) | is worthy of support, but they benefit China more than US, and | it would be poor use of US tax money to benefit China more than | US. | lotsofpulp wrote: | It is not odd to be Libertarian and support government | intervention that benefits one's self. Hypocritical, maybe, but | a common sentiment. | mark_l_watson wrote: | That is how I see it. I often drift into hypocrisy: I am 100% | anti-war except if my country was directly attacked, but in | the financial interests of me and my family, I do own | "defense" stocks. | | Also in my own self interest: I am for our government | massively supporting poor kids with meals at schools, special | tutoring, etc. in order for us to have a larger and better | educated work force in the future. | | Anyway sorry for the rant. | NikolaNovak wrote: | fwiw it didn't come through as a rant. Most of us if we are | honest with ourselves have internal contradictions. It's | important to be aware. | | My wife is fundamentally a socialist (we are in Canada so | it's not a misunderstood bad scary word :-). But she is | also a home depot manager, where she is the voice of | capitalist market forces. What she wishes the system should | be, and the system she is daily a part of, are frequently | at odds. | | I personally find extremes of any given philosophy to be | impractical and untenable. I respect more people who, like | it appears yourself, say "this is my general leaning,and | these are my pragmatical exceptions". | spaetzleesser wrote: | In today's world you can't really follow any ideology in | a clean way. If you want to live you have to make | compromises somewhere and basically be a hypocrite. I | only have a problem with people that don't admit that (of | which there are many and they are very loud). | KaoruAoiShiho wrote: | Hate to say it but just sounds like you're a regular ass person | and not a libertarian. You're against government intervention | except in cases where it benefits you, and in those cases | you're for it. That's like, most people. Except presumably | you're privileged economically, probably socially, and so the | number of things that you need is low and the amount of | opportunities afforded by your social status is high. If you | were lower on the totem pole you might find it more important | for governments to also do things like protect or expand access | to education or have environmental regulations if you're not | economically capable of just moving to a wealthy place. | lotsofpulp wrote: | This is the what I meant with my post. | KaoruAoiShiho wrote: | Yeah my take is not that he's hypocritical but that like | most people he's not an actual libertarian. To be | libertarian is to know there are things that government | intervention can do that will benefit you but still know to | forgo those things because their costs are higher to | society as a whole. What he is is just a republican. | Apocryphon wrote: | Libertarianism, like any other political ideology, can | contain moderate stances. | edmcnulty101 wrote: | I'm a 'government using funding to improve the world' vs 'govt | using funding to control people' libertarian. | | Scientific r and d falls strongly into the former category. | | DEA, FBI, NSA, CIA, TSA, ATF, DoD, state police, county police, | municipal police, neighborhood police, and other organizations | used to control people. Plus the literally uncountable number | of criminal and regulatory laws on the books that keep growing | exponentially without congress taking time to go back and | review old laws... | pphysch wrote: | I wonder to what extent Washington's fuss over Taiwan is simply | TSMC lobbying at work. They're an important company that is gonna | get their lunch eaten by the mainland. But what can Washington | even do about it? | | Beyond the "unsinkable aircraft carrier" angle, that is. | trynumber9 wrote: | The US has been sending carrier groups to support Taiwan long | before they were a leading edge semiconductor manufacturer. So | it's geopolitics as normal. | | As for getting crushed by SMIC, this is only with possible | massive government investment from the PRC. Now you see many | other governments reacting with subsidies in kind. It will be a | totally distorted market in 10 years time. | pphysch wrote: | Hence "to what extent". TFA implies that TSMC leaders were | VIPs at the Pelosi meeting. What does this have to do with | Washington's long-standing policy of militarizing Taiwan? | Throwawayaerlei wrote: | "[TSMC is] an important company that is gonna get their lunch | eaten by the mainland." | | How so? Not for the foreseeable future in bleeding and leading | edge nodes, where the PRC is some unknown but very long | distance away from making their own EUV machines. | | An invasion of Taiwan just means an end to TSMC production | there, a point its chairman Mark Liu made a few days ago in a | CNN interview. That would have _really_ bad effects on the PRC | 's narrow economy with its export focus. | pphysch wrote: | > PRC's narrow economy | | Come on. There is not a less "narrow" major economy on the | planet than China's. This is just silly. | | USA would collapse in weeks if China blocked all exports. | China would run out of dollars, which coincidentally would | become worthless at the same time. | tshadley wrote: | Very good points. Here's the link. | | https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/fzgps/date/2022-07-31/segme. | .. | | LIU: Nobody can control TSMC by force. If you take a military | force or invasion you will render TSMC's factory non-operable | because this is such a sophisticated manufacturing facility. | It depends on the real time [correlation] with the outside | world, with Europe, with Japan, with the U.S., from materials | to chemicals to spare parts to engineering software | diagnosis. And it's everybody's effort to maybe this factory | operable. So if you take it over by force you can no longer | make it operable. | keepquestioning wrote: | How would one profit off the next few years of political | chipmaking? | throwaway4good wrote: | Pork futures. | throwaway4good wrote: | Chinese semiconductor companies. If this insanity continues | (nationalism and sanctions), the massive Chinese market will | end up being serviced only by Chinese chip companies. Some of | these are investable via the Chinese or Hong Kong stock | markets. | mikewarot wrote: | Chips are great, but you need discrete components, circuit | boards, and other support, and the manufacturing infrastructure | for all of that. Do we really have all of that in sufficient | quantity domestically any more? | kipchak wrote: | >"the goal should be to counteract the fundamental forces pushing | manufacturing to geopolitically risky regions, and Intel is the | only real conduit available to do that." | | I wonder if it's fair to assume based on this the US gov will | prop up intel as a foundry for as long as necessary, to secure | it's own supply and reduce reliance on Taiwan/TSMC. | klelatti wrote: | Great piece but it seems that Ben doesn't quite finish joining | the dots. | | If Intel is to have a successful foundry business at the cutting | edge then its customers will be those firms that are designing | cutting edge CPUs, SoCs and GPUs. | | That means Apple & Qualcomm (possibly OK) but also Nvidia, AMD | and other Arm based competitors with Intel's CPUs and GPUs. | | Can't see how this will work with Intel in its current form. | hyperation wrote: | Perhaps a duopoly in domestic chip fabrication, with both Intel | and TSMC operating fabs in the continental U.S. | sanxiyn wrote: | I think klelatti is doubting whether AMD could trust Intel to | pursue AMD's best interest. | klelatti wrote: | Absolutely! Handing over your detailed product | specifications and product plans to a direct competitor is | inconceivable. | | I'm 100% convinced now that an Intel split into foundry and | CPU vendor is inevitable. | | It's a political if not a commercial necessity if Intel is | to provide a viable alternative to TSMC. | sanxiyn wrote: | Samsung manufactured for Apple for a long time. I don't | think it's inconceivable. | klelatti wrote: | That's a fair challenge. I think it's a little different | though - the SoC was one component of the iPhone - so | full details of the competing product weren't being | shared. | | Plus when the relationship started volumes were small for | both iPhone and Samsung phones. As we know Apple ended | the relationship eventually. | | I struggle to see Lisa Su handing this info to Intel even | with some strong safeguards. | robocat wrote: | AMDs spin-off of Global Foundries only gets mentioned once as an | aside, yet surely there are multiple important reasons why that | story is relevant to Intel. | photochemsyn wrote: | > "The most important decision was shifting to extreme | ultraviolet lithography at a time when Intel thought it was much | too expensive and difficult to implement; TSMC, backed by Apple's | commitment to buy the best chips it could make, committed to EUV | in 2014, and delivered the first EUV-derived chips in 2019 for | the iPhone. Those EUV machines are made by one company -- ASML. | They're worth more than Intel too (and Intel is a customer)." | | CNBC toured ASML clean rooms in a very interesting video. IIRC, | the only thing keeping ASML from exporting these machines to | China is some EU/USA export control rule: | | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSVHp6CAyQ8 | rossdavidh wrote: | Full disclosure: I worked for AMD for about a decade. | | I agree with the bottom line here (we should spend gov't $$ to | make sure significant amounts of chip manufacturing still get | made in the US, and Intel has to be a big part of that). However, | it misses the real reason for Intel's decline. | | For most of it's existence, if Intel had missed a manufacturing | node in Moore's Law, it would have been rightly recognized as an | existential threat, and it would have become the #1 focus of the | CEO and the rest of the company. Intel fell behind Moore's Law | for years in its manufacturing, and it never caused them to | appropriately panic until that hit the bottom line. This is a | problem of an executive suite too focused on this quarter's | results, and not focused enough on the engineering that drives | those results. Previous generations of Intel executives | understood that. It is likely that the current CEO, brought in | once the board saw problems in their stock price, realizes it. If | they had been run by executives who cared more about the | underlying engineering, they would have had a 5-year head start | in fixing the situation. | throwaway4good wrote: | For an example of a broken company: | | https://twitter.com/dylan522p/status/1554889887630761985 | | Intel with a bunch of Optane related presentations at | #FlashMemorySummit | | Some the Intel folks I spoke to about this (not pictured) had | no clue it was going to be cancelled until they read it on an | article from Toms Hardware. | georgeecollins wrote: | I think this is a result of the problem of financializaton. I | don't think that an engineer has to run a company like Intel, | Boeing or Apple. But if the growth of steady profits becomes a | higher priority than what you actually produce, you are likely | to milk the business at the expense of its long term prospects. | sanxiyn wrote: | I mostly disagree with this line of reasoning. Yes, | financialization is bad, but Intel would have been fine if | its process went fine. | | We probably will never know what exactly went wrong, but I | think the current best guess is this: Intel set minimum metal | pitch target for its 10 nm process at 36 nm, while TSMC set | minimum metal pitch target for its 7 nm process (equivalent | to Intel 10 nm process) at 40 nm. These processes were the | last before EUV, pushing DUV to its limit. It turned out that | you can do 40 nm but not 36 nm. That's it. | | It was an extremely technical issue, with justifications on | both sides, and Intel's decision wasn't obviously mistaken, | even in retrospect. 36 nm was usual scaling to Moore's law. | It was 40 nm that was unusual, TSMC underscaled metal | relative to fin and gate. Why 40 nm? Because it was the limit | of DUV double patterning. But Intel also knew that! That's | why Intel went with quadruple patterning. It was a | conservative choice to underscale metal to the limit of | double patterning, but quadruple patterning wasn't crazy | either. Everyone was using quadruple patterning for fin at | this point, so it wasn't thought that risky. | | Should Intel have reconsidered this once they encountered | yield issues? Yes, but that's hindsight. All processes | experience yield issues. Intel probably thought they can be | solved, faster than going back to drawing board and doing | everything again. Unfortunately they couldn't. | | (Above analysis was informed by lots of reading on this topic | I did over the years, but https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor- | manufacturers/intel/7433-... in particular.) | icelancer wrote: | Yeah I generally agree with this take. Of course on HN and | other technical sites the opinion "lol engineers should run | companies" gets a lot of play, but plenty of engineers tank | companies and don't get posted here with the alternative | viewpoint. | | Intel made a calculated bet, lost, and furthermore made a | handful of other bad business decisions. We focus a lot on | the latter part when in reality it's unlikely the | "business" decisions were the primary reasons for | failure... it very well may have been technical problems | led by engineers in the first place. | | I don't think Intel acted irrationally. | | Last, this is the journey of almost all industries. The | titans become too complacent, set for disruption by other | smaller companies / outsiders. This is just the natural | course of business due to inertia. Intel is hardly alone | here. | | EDIT: All that being said, the right man for the job is in | the CEO chair. I personally believe he always should've had | the role. We'll see how Gelsinger turns it around. I am | optimistic. | lazulicurio wrote: | A big part of this is investors demanding financializaton. | Unless you're in a sector that investors have decided is a | "growth" sector, it's all about capital efficiency and | headcount and how much "fat" you can trim. See, for example, | the recent gas price situation. Companies are far more | worried about becoming overcapitalized than they are worried | about losing out on some sales volume. | mandevil wrote: | In general I don't believe that being an engineer is necessary | to run a technology business (some of my best leaders were | not), but I have come around to believing that Intel and Boeing | are exceptions: the nature of their business requires new | massive bets- not quite 'bet the company' but definitely 'bet | the next 10 years of company performance' every so often (new | fabs and new planes), and that one decision really needs to be | made by an experienced engineer, due to the nature of the | underlying evaluation. If not, then people who think they can | bafflegab mother nature the same way they can auditors will | make the decisions. | mandevil wrote: | Just wanted to clarify that singling out Boeing and Intel | specifically was not my intention: I really meant commercial | aircraft and semiconductors industries as a whole, using | those two companies as a syndoche, because of the massive | investment and large time delays between the commitment of | money and the result in the market. Those two in particular | seem to require regular, hugely expensive (10+ billion | dollar) efforts of 5-10 years in duration to keep up the pace | of technical development, so picking the wrong horse is | catastrophic for a long while. | | (Obviously the A380 never killed anyone like the 737Max did, | but it definitely was a massive, 25 billion dollar sinkhole | for the company- some estimates are that Airbus never even | turned a profit on the flyaway cost of the airplane, | excluding development costs! If Boeing hadn't simultaneously | had the 737Max actual disaster, it would have been much worse | for Airbus. Intel has seen TSMC power ahead, which has made | their problems more obvious.) | neuronexmachina wrote: | An interesting example is Dennis Muilenberg, who was Boeing | CEO from 2015-2019, during the 737 Max debacle: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Muilenburg | | He started at Boeing in 1985 as an engineering intern, earned | a masters in Aeronautics, and worked his way through | management and engineering positions until he became CEO. I | have no idea how much of the 737 Max issues could be placed | on him directly, but he was CEO during its launch and the | crashes. | nickff wrote: | Dennis Muilenberg also featured in the NOVA documentary | "War of the X-Planes", around the middle of his career, | where he appeared to be a risk-taking, forward-thinking | engineering manager. Of note, I believe that a significant | portion of his career was spent on the 'defense' side of | Boeing, which some have blamed for the company's problems. | | I personally place more blame on Muilenberg's predecessor, | James McNerney, a former Proctor & Gamble, and 3M | executive. | mandevil wrote: | The key 737 Max decisions were made circa 2011-2013, while | James McNerney was the CEO (2005-2015). That was when the | design objective of no simulator training required was set | for the plane (and Boeing released marketing information | promising that) while also promising to do it with engines | that were too big for the wings. That decision was what led | to everything else, and was loudly announced and marketed | while Muilenburg was over on the Integrated Defense side of | the company. | | James McNerney was a Harvard MBA who spent time at McKinsey | before going to the Jack Welch clown show at GE, where he | ran the aircraft engine business for a long time. When he | lost out to Immelt to be CEO there, he went to 3M for a few | years then bounced to Boeing. | | Now, Muilenburg has to bear the mistakes he made: pushing | an unsafe plane through certification, not listening to the | right people, not investigating the Lion Air crash | sufficiently, etc. But the evidence I think strongly shows | that someone who was not an engineer was making the final | decisions on the "bet the company for the next 10 years" | choice to go forward with the 737Max rather than a clean- | sheet design, back in 2011. | Spooky23 wrote: | It's funny. I worked in a geography with a lot of GE | alums. The ICs were really good for the most part, hard | workers, smart but reserved. | | The managers and executives turned consultants went out | of their way to tell you about how they met Jack Welch or | got screamed at by Jack Welch, etc. It was weird, and | moreover, they almost without exception idiots. | swyx wrote: | just looked McNerney up. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_McNerney | | for his contributions to society, he made between | 12-29m/year every year for the 10 years he was CEO. | | ugh | spaetzleesser wrote: | I think it boils down to the messaging that comes from top. | Do they mainly talk about creating the best products or do | they talk about shareholder value? | formerkrogemp wrote: | You could apply this with slightly different specifics to many | US national and multinational corporations. | | The efficient market rewards inefficient stock buybacks, record | debt fueled dividends, years of underinvestment, low wages, and | most of all no strings attached bailouts. They may be a loser, | but we'll pay for their loss. Socialize the losses/costs and | privatize the gains. | lotsofpulp wrote: | Based on the performance of publicly listed companies in the | last 15 years, the stock market has rewarded companies with | great cash flow, high profits, and relatively rosy outlooks. | | Of course there is an underlying assumption the government | will bail out simultaneous/systemic big failures, but it does | not seem accurate to assume any random business will be | bailed out. | | Edit : fixed typo | PaulDavisThe1st wrote: | > but it does it [sic] seem accurate to assume any random | business will be bailed out. | | Precisely the issue. It's not "any random business". It's | any business with the appropriate properties and | connections. If it was truly just random business, perhaps | the bail outs would not create such a level of moral | hazard. But it's not, and businesses know that. | megaman821 wrote: | I don't like the bailout but I understand they were | necessary. I just wish they came with harsher deterrents. | Like if the shareholders vote to take a bailout, the | Board, C-Suite, and VP's all get let go and any financial | packages can be litigated in special bailout courts. | amelius wrote: | Sounds similar to Boeing. You begin to wonder when these kind | of lessons start entering management textbooks. | throwaway4good wrote: | The accountants took over the company, and the good engineers | left. | | I have witnessed this with other companies; and I am sorry | they are never going to return to what they once were. | | It is kind of obvious when you chat with all the sad | employees: Why didn't you leave? And then you realise that | the ones, who are left, are the ones who couldn't get a job | elsewhere. | formerkrogemp wrote: | > The accountants took over the company, and the good | engineers left. | | As an accountant, I would quibble with this aspersion and | lay the blame with management and other, broader issues. | | > It is kind of obvious when you chat with all the sad | employees: Why didn't you leave? And then you realise that | the ones, who are left, are the ones who couldn't get a job | elsewhere. | | This seems true of many companies. Many of us are just | playing musical chairs with our careers and jobs trying to | find that job that doesn't suck. | throwaway4good wrote: | I am sorry for insulting accountants and I realise what | wrote is too harsh (but hey this is the internet so ...). | | And you cannot have engineers running everything because | then you will have a half-built Concorde and a bankrupt | company. | | But there is a balance. And if that balance tips for too | long, you end up with the whole organisation content with | just doing maintenance. And when that happens there is | just no going back. | adamc wrote: | You are describing a sort of cultural inflection point. | It would be interesting to read more about that. | ArnoVW wrote: | In the aviation industry, Lockheed Martin famously | avoided 'resting on its laurels' by having a separate | 'skunkworks' part (who made the U-2, SR-71 and | practically invented 'stealth' i.e. F-117, F-22, etc) | | It was originally created by Kelly but he managed to | transmit the spirit to a successor, who wrote an | interesting book about his time (80's and 90's) called | 'stealth'. If you look on Google you can find the PDF. | | Another book about organisations having to deal with | ossification is 'the soul of a new machine'. It's written | by a journalist that was embedded in a R&D department of | a computer manufacturer in the 70's and 80's. The place | is run by someone a lot like Kelly Johnson, and the | author managed very well to get into his mind. Again, I | believe you can find a PDF on Google. | Throwawayaerlei wrote: | "It was originally created by Kelly but he managed to | transmit the spirit to a successor, who wrote an | interesting book about his time (80's and 90's) called | 'stealth'." | | The time period doesn't quite match up, but I found | _Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years at Lockheed_ | by Ben R. Rich | https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316743003/ to be quite | interested if not quite as interesting as I'd hoped when | I bought it. | jimkleiber wrote: | I was just gonna say that the Intel case may fit well in this | book called Obliquity[0], which ironically discusses Boeing. | | I believe it said that Boeing was less profitable when it | focused on increasing profits and more profitable when it | focused on improving engineering. | | [0]: https://www.johnkay.com/product/obliquity/ | spamizbad wrote: | I've noticed a pattern of how executives approach this: | | 1) When looking for more profits/revenue at a technology | company, they'll often either try to push an R&D "big bet" | to market half-baked, in hopes of it pulling in new revenue | OR put the screws to product and engineering to churn out | some "quick wins" to give them some momentum. | | 2) When focusing more on engineering, it's often because | they're either distracted by other challenges faced by the | organization outside of engineering OR they are up against | an existential threat that mandates engineering investment | and letting them steer the strategy somewhat. | georgeecollins wrote: | I went to business school. The management textbooks used to | tell you that steady profits were the most important thing. | When I think about the things I was taught, particularly this | incredible reverence for GE, I laugh. | Throwawayaerlei wrote: | "The management textbooks [at my business school] used to | tell you that steady profits were the most important | thing." | | That's stark raving mad. It is for example one of the | clearest signs someone is running a Ponzi scheme. Which | would seem to transfer over to this not quite as dishonest | domain. | | Reverence for GE, a company doing technical things that | started stack ranking and firing their employees.... Plus | eventually got first their fingers and then last time I | checked their whole body burned by going into financial | businesses, very much not a core competence. | michaelt wrote: | _> That 's stark raving mad. It is for example one of the | clearest signs someone is running a Ponzi scheme._ | | Not really - I mean, if I run Toyota should I not be | producing cars I can sell at a profit? And if my sales | are falling, isn't that a bad thing? | | Rising sales are good, of course - but not oscillating | sales. If the rise is going to be followed by a sales | slump in a few months time, do I want to take on extra | staff who I'll then have to lay off, causing them untold | strife and inconvenience? Do I want to build a new | factory full of expensive machines, then have them stand | idle while costing me interest and rent? | | Industries like Software and IP licensing are, of course, | often a different matter! | cjbgkagh wrote: | I read a lot of creative accounting case studies and am | repeatedly surprised when others fall for the same simple | tricks over and over again. At some point I have to assume | willful ignorance. | | I'm sure there are plenty of case studies in text books that | management could read. Either they don't read them or they | take away the wrong message. Don't forget the execs at these | companies probably cashed in some big bonuses. | alexashka wrote: | They can't. It'd undermine the very existence of the ruling | elite class that doesn't know how to do anything, besides | 'managing' by following a magic formula taught at Harvard, | Stanford, etc. | | The problem is the _existence_ of a business management layer | as an idea - it 's an attempt to get back to the good old | days of feudalism, whose chief characteristics are nepotism, | stagnation, corruption and nihilism, now that we've gotten | rid of the mental pacifier of 'heaven' for the oppressed and | hell for the ruling elites (religion). | jjtheblunt wrote: | this is the most resonant comment I've seen in months, as | it entirely fits my experiences in engineering inside | Apple, and later Amazon and Facebook. | | the inner sanctum of very flat Apple was as far from | feudalism as could be, for my several years, and it | functioned like a very performant ecosystem of engineering. | This diametrically contrasts precisely with Amazon | engineering, where I saw all the horrors of feudalism and | generalized nepotism (racism for example, sexism promoting | incapable people to fit quotas, and flagrant corruption). | Facebook was somewhere more like Apple but not in its | DNA...just in the imitation is flattery sense. | recyclelater wrote: | Yes but I would argue Amazon has better software than | apple by a long shot. Ignoring how you felt as a worker | out what you read Amazon employees feel like, Amazon has | better results. | adamc wrote: | Why do you think that is? | recyclelater wrote: | As in can I justify my claim, or what are the reasons | that Amazon produces better software? I would say the | former is a qualitative statement and I am going to have | a hard time backing it up with facts, and the latter I | have no idea. | | I run into non stop issues when interacting with apple | software as an app producer, from Xcode to iOS to App | Store to App Store connect. Their apis are pretty | horrible, both the reliability and the design. | | As an end user of apple products, I regularly run into | odd software problems with my MacBook and iPhone. Every | CarPlay experience I have had is buggy, both from the | actual CarPlay connectivity as well as apples own CarPlay | enabled apps. | | Apple Watch is a horrible nightmare to make anything more | complicated than a simple remote display. | | I could go on and on. However on the Amazon side of | things I have never experienced a significant bug, aside | from the audible app freezing on occasion when | interacting with CarPlay. I blame apple though based off | how their own apps work. I say this as an extensive | consumer of Amazon products both as a business owner, | developer, and SRE, as well as an extensive user of | Amazon consumer products. | | All this being said I don't like amazon as a business, I | can find flaws in their decisions, but they are business | decision flaws not just straight buggy products. | lupire wrote: | ahartmetz wrote: | It may be that Apple does more of the "inspiration" part | of the work and Amazon does more of the "transpiration" | part. There is software that is great on the outside but | crap on the inside and vice versa. The last 80% of | quality (after the first 80%) come from testing, | discipline and other such such unsexy things. | adamsvystun wrote: | > The most important decision was shifting to extreme ultraviolet | lithography at a time when Intel thought it was much too | expensive and difficult to implement; TSMC, backed by Apple's | commitment to buy the best chips it could make, committed to EUV | in 2014, and delivered the first EUV-derived chips in 2019 for | the iPhone. | | Can somebody here correct me if I am wrong, but my impression was | that Intel did commit early to EUV, with initial plans to start | high volume manufacturing in line with other fabs (initial | schedule was to introduce EUV in 2017 [1], it just got postponed | many times), but they just failed in their execution. | | [1] https://wccftech.com/idf13-intel-ship-10nm-chips-2015-7nm- | ch... | Throwawayaerlei wrote: | I think your citation is 9 years old. What I've always heard is | what they called 10 nm was non-EUV. You are correct that what | they called 7 nm was going to use EUV, pretty much had to, but | 10 nm catastrophically failed and the company responded very | poorly to that. | | Not _that_ long ago I remember reading, forget at what | confidence level, that their old 7 mn was believed to have the | potential to leapfrog their 10 nm and save the company, but | others said they had some problematic things in common (not | counting the very poorly run company!) that made that unlikely. | In any event what was 7 nm did not ride to the company 's | rescue. | adrian_b wrote: | Their 7 nm process has been renamed now as "Intel 4" and | there is a presentation of it at Anandtech, which looks more | credible than the fake presentations of the 10 nm process of | some years ago. | | The first product using this process, Meteor Lake, is | expected 1 year from now. | Throwawayaerlei wrote: | Meteor Lake/Intel 4 would then be six years late if the | wccftech.com article's commentary on the two nodes was | correct. Good to hear about the presentation material, | thanks! | [deleted] | throwaway4good wrote: | Intel tried very hard to get Apple as a customer for the iPhone. | They knew very well of mr. Christensen but they simply could not | deliver hinting that Intel's problems are not that of strategy | but at a lower more fundamental level of competence and ability | to organise. | | (The stuff about RISC/CISC is a red herring - it basically | doesn't matter on a modern cpu.) | | Here is an article about Intel and Christensen with clip of him | from 2012 (or earlier) where he mentions his work with Intel. | | https://www.edgementoring.org/leadership-blog/clayten-christ... | | Christensen Taught Intel CEO How To Think And Why It's Important | aidenn0 wrote: | I think Intel "tried very hard" from the point of view of a | small company, but the fraction of Intel's resources put behind | it was minuscule and felt very perfunctory. | | Right or wrong, they had zero interest in betting the future of | the company on low-power chips for mobile, or any other market. | | [edit] | | I just read the wikipedia summary of the prescription for | incumbents in _The Innovator 's Dillema_ and the one thing | Intel was missing was: | | > They allow the disruption organization to utilize all of the | company's resources when needed but are careful to make sure | the processes and values were not those of the company. | | To a certain extent, it feels like buying a cloud offering from | AWS vs. Google. Google might have a lot of resources dedicated | in absolute terms to the cloud offering, but it feels like an | afterthought that might go away at any moment. The AWS offering | feels like a real product that Amazon plans on making money | from. | | In both the cases of Intel and Google, I can't say which is | true, but customers can only make their plans based on | appearances, not reality. | throwaway4good wrote: | The textbook solution is for the incumbent to spin off | companies to deal with the disruptor. And one of the textbook | examples is Intel. | alain94040 wrote: | I'm usually a big fan of stratechery, but for once I disagree | with the explanation of Intel's decline. | | I think it's much simpler: being number one in fab technology is | mostly driven by volume: whoever has the most volume wins. During | the PC era, Intel had the most volume, so they also had the best | fabs. It's a winner-take-all, self-reinforcing ecosystem. | | But in the last 10 years, mobile has had the highest volume. | That's what allows TSMC to have the best fabs, and Intel is | struggling. That's all there is to it. Nothing to do with | services or software. | babypuncher wrote: | Which is probably why Pat Gelsinger wants to turn Intel into a | fab for hire just like TSMC and Samsung. | klelatti wrote: | The CISC vs RISC point Ben makes is key here. Intel could have | been a big player in mobile: it put too much focus on x86 | though when it could have been making (its own or others) Arm | based SoCs. | | Edit: not that Arm is necessarily RISC - but it certainly takes | an approach that is different to x86 and better suited to | mobile. | reindeerer wrote: | I've lost count how many misguided bids of taking x86 to low- | power they made. Also the apparent unshakeable confidence | that ARM will never become viable on server and desktop. | klelatti wrote: | In this context the Gelsinger video clip in the article is | fascinating. Sometimes companies fixate on one element of | their strategy that has worked in the past. | | It seems that Intel had 'always make x86 / backwards | compatible' as their fixation. | jjtheblunt wrote: | Intel was making its own ARM chips called Xscale 20 years | ago, no? | klelatti wrote: | Indeed and XScale was successor to StrongARM which I think | was highest performing Arm design for a while. | | Sold to Marvell in 2006 right before the iPhone appeared. | | Intel then spent billions trying to make x86 commercially | viable on mobile. | aidenn0 wrote: | That is one of several reasons proposed in TFA; in particular | TFA mentions TSMC's earlier investment in EUV being due to the | guaranteed volume of smartphone chips. | sanxiyn wrote: | I very much doubt this. When EUV decision was made Intel was | at the top of the world and had more volume than TSMC. As I | understand Intel's reluctance was mostly about doubt whether | ASML could deliver, and while ASML delivered I must say, even | in retrospect, Intel's doubt was justified. | Throwawayaerlei wrote: | Did not read TFA and if it doesn't focus a lot on the 10 | nm/Intel 7 botch it's not fine, but I've read TSMC's very | roughly equivalent 7 nm node was also non-EUV but less | aggressive than Intel's. And it succeeded unlike Intel, which | then made it natural to start introducing _in production_ EUV | in their 7+ node. Here I suspect gaining real experience in | chips delivered to customers trumps whatever volume you 'll | end up doing. | adrian_b wrote: | This would the correct explanation if Intel would have made no | mistakes. | | However, it is beyond reasonable doubt that Intel has made some | extremely ugly management mistakes during their failed attempts | to transition from 14 nm to 10 nm, which have absolutely | nothing to do with the competition from TSMC or others. | | Maybe Intel would have lost their technological advance | regardless how the company had been managed, due to the | difference in volume between smartphone chips and PC chips, but | now we cannot know which has mattered more, the internal | mismanagement or the change of the semiconductor device market | favoring their competition. | | I wonder if it will ever become public knowledge which were | exactly the technology problems of Intel and who are those | guilty for the decline at the company, because the failures | could not have had any real technical causes but only bad | management causes. | | During their worst years Intel has been capable even of | presenting to the public fake technical presentations about the | alleged great characteristics of their future 10 nm CMOS | process, which is something that I would never have expected | from a company like Intel. The marketing messages from any | company are expected to be full of lies, but the technical | presentations are expected to match reality. | | During many years, unlike TSMC, Intel has behaved as if it were | completely unable to predict the precise characteristics of the | CMOS process that they will able to manufacture in the | following year. | | How could this happen is very hard to understand, as the | manufacturing processes and the future devices made with them | can be simulated long in advance of their implementation, and | the models can be tuned continuously while the processes | evolve, by fabricating and measuring various test structures. | Unlike for Intel, for TSMC the performance predictions for | future processes have always been reasonably accurate. | klelatti wrote: | There was the infamous demo when they 'forgot' to mention a | CPU was overclocked. Bit of a red flag for the culture that | permits that. | | https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-28-core- | cpu-5ghz,372... | sanxiyn wrote: | > I wonder if it will ever become public knowledge which were | exactly the technology problems of Intel and who are those | guilty for the decline at the company, because the failures | could not have had any real technical causes but only bad | management causes. | | Why do you think this? It was a yield issue, and the best | guess is it was caused by multi patterning. (Intel themselves | said so.) | | I found an analysis from SemiWiki titled "Intel 10nm Yield | Issues" pretty convincing. See | https://semiwiki.com/semiconductor- | manufacturers/intel/7433-... | adrian_b wrote: | It was not only a yield problem. | | The yields are indeed hard to predict, so if that would | have been the only problem, then there would not have been | so much reasons to blame the Intel management. | | As I have already mentioned, Intel has behaved as if being | completely unable of predicting the electrical | characteristics of the devices made with their future 10-nm | processes. | | The first generation of 10-nm products was Cannon Lake, | launched in 2018. I have actually bought out of curiosity | the Intel NUC with Cannon Lake U, together with an Intel | NUC with Coffee Lake U, a 14-nm CPU launched simultaneously | with Cannon Lake U. | | The 10-nm CPU had pathetic performances in comparison with | the 14-nm CPU, i.e. much lower clock frequency at identical | power consumption or much higher power consumption at | identical performance. | | This too low performance should have been determined very | early during the design of Cannon Lake and the project | should have been canceled even before reaching the tape-out | phase. | | Even the 2nd variant of the 10-nm process, used for Ice | Lake in 2019 was inferior to the by then 5-year old 14-nm | process. This should also have been known enough in advance | to cancel Ice Lake before tape-out. | | Converting any Intel factory to mass production of 10-nm | wafers should have never begun before having a working | 10-nm process able to make electrically-better transistors | than in the old 14-nm process. | | Intel has begun the mass-production of chips using the | 14-nm process in 2014. By then they must have already | started the design of the 10-nm process, but only in 2020 | they have succeeded to make better 10-nm transistors than | their 14-nm transistors (while still having a lower maximum | clock frequency) and only in 2021 they have succeeded to | exceed the old transistors in all parameters. | | It is impossible to understand why have they wasted huge | amounts of money for failed projects like Cannon Lake and | Ice Lake and for factories using uncompetitive process | variants, instead of concentrating all their resources to | their top priority of finding a way to manufacture 10-nm | transistors that are better than their existing 14-nm | transistors, which is normally a precondition for starting | any design process of a CPU using a new process and for | building a new factory. | | It all looks like if most people working at Intel would not | have been aware that they actually do not have any working | 10 nm manufacturing process, and they were continuing all | their usual activities, like designing CPUs, but with fake | transistor models, or building new factories, while there | was some gang who knew that the 10-nm process does not | exist outside fake presentations, but they hoped that there | will be some miracle and the 10-nm process will just work | when the time comes to use it. | Throwawayaerlei wrote: | Intel has a decades long history of very poor top level | engineering management. They got petrified about the | issue of how much DRAM they'd be able to put in a system | in the 1990 (remember Rambus RDRAM?), and among the | consequences was a 1 million part recall of motherboards | shipped to Dell just before they were going to be shipped | to customers, plus another related one I can't remember | the details of yet. | | This speaks to the sorts of dysfunction you're speaking | of; certainly _someone_ at Intel realized these parts | weren 't going to work in the real world. | kache_ wrote: ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-08-03 23:01 UTC)