Can’t remember the full details of the deal, but I seem to recall a story about how Apple approached Intel to manufacture a low-powered processor for mobile (for the first iPhone). At the time, Intel didn’t see money in mobile processors and passed on the deal. Additionally, for years, Apple asked for more powerful chips for the MacBooks. At the time, the iPads were surpassing MacBooks in speed on some tasks. Finally, Apple decided that since they were already designing their own silicon for iPhones and iPads, they might as well just do the same for the MacBooks as well since Intel couldn’t keep up.
Again, this is largely from memory. I can’t remember the source, so take it with a grain of salt.
I’ve only watched this from a great distance but what I saw was: Intel didn’t actually manufacture the chips. That was all TSMC. So Intel’s main thing was chip design. And their designs were all about making the transistors smaller. Around 3nm they started running into physical limits. Competitors started out-innovating them with things like GPU deigns and ARM based chips. End of story. They had their time. They ran x86 into the ground and they are fucking done. They would have had to do 5 or 6 things differently to stay on top, and they did none of those.
They always had their own fabs. Utilising TSMC for their GPU’s was a recent thing. For all the mistakes they have done, their GPU efforts are actually noteworthy but you don’t even have to compare them to ARM or other GPU manufacturers, just look at AMD, they’ve been killing it.
Anything they go after today is 18-24 months out. Chasing after AI would be pretty risky. Desktops and laptops are moving to ARM and RISC-V. Their best bet is to go after whatever enterprise data centers will need a couple of years from now.
If I were laying bets, it would be to go after power and heat efficiency. Like, hard. Take their time out in the wilderness, then come back with chips that save the planet from climate collapse.
The same way boeing executives are to blame. They did not order employees to do sub-par cpus, but they did not care about the quality of what was produced either. Good hardware (and software) its always the product of a process that involves QA, HR, Operations, R&D and many other departments. These departments fall under the supervision/control of the executive suite.
Well run cost center departments don’t boost quarterly results, ergo they are deprioritized.
They are looking out for themselves rather then the company, because of the incentives in place.
We are living in weird times where stock price doesn’t really correspond with company health, so their actions reflect against that metric against all others.
I think it was a mindset shift. Right now short term stock value is more important because the shareholder profile also shifted from someone that holded the stock to someone who wants just to turn a quick profit.
There’s a term in tech called “empire building” where middle management looks for promotion up the chain towards directorships or VP roles. If, for example, you have a CEO that’s nuts for AI all you’ll want to do to get on their good side is to build a team around AI for some random service you already have (e.g. AI in Google Search) and you’ll get a ton of funding and HC. Suddenly you run a huge division and get a fancy important title because you can shit some metrics about how well you’re performing while customers say “wait, search is shit now”. That’s the search team’s problem, your AI stuff performs great!
It’s everywhere in big tech, and it’s why so many big tech companies seemingly work extremely hard and have nothing to show for it.
The IC’s at the bottom of the ladder are just minding their own business, trying to do the best work that they can, while the leader of the empire sets ridiculous timelines and goals because they’re trying to cement a legacy, rather than build the right thing. Naturally, the product flops, the director gets moved to a new division to protect them, and the IC’s are laid off - with the CEO saying that they didn’t meet expectations or cost too much.
Sounds similar to what happened to Boeing. Once ran by engineers now ran by people suckling the teat of board members. Quality goes down, profits go up for these assholes.
Intel fell behind on chip manufacturing while the CEO came from that department.
Allegedly because their strategy was too ambitious at the time, or at least that was the official excuse at the time.
So your summary is not entirely fair.
Well, when I was learning about economics being 8 or 9 year old, it seemed for me how it should be.
A person or a group knowledgeable in some area find a bottleneck, some problem to solve, start a company, it grows, it becomes big. Then the next generation is what they pick for leadership, and picking people is always worse than the evolutionary mechanism of a company finding some bottleneck to be widened being gunshot faster than the rest. Then they pick their replacement. And so on. Eventually it dies, but since technologies are patented, they do not become actual secrets, only commercial secrets, and by the time a company dies the patents expire, so everybody can replace it for the humanity.
The niche that company discovered thus becomes competitive.
In our world, if patents would expire as fast as they did initially by design, these big companies would already be dead.
But they’ve bent the rules to make patents virtually eternal and thus big zombie companies are strangling the humanity.
The system wasn’t bad, but eventually power changed it.
You are missing economies of scale. In most industries these create a significant barrier to entry. The patent may expire but the equipment is still expensive.
Especially abominations like patenting an ISA. It’s clear from the very beginning that an ISA is not an invention moving humanity forward, it’s an interface. A language.
As of gigantic companies of today not finding replacement when they die - we would have the whole spectrum if not for IP and patent laws as they exist. For some uses MCs of 80s are sufficient. For some a desktop PC of 1993. For some a desktop PC of 1999.
I dunno why I’m writing these things, Marcus Aurelius has written many wise things, one of them is the advice not to think about things out of your control.
The marketing and advertising and sales teams took over management from the engineering team, and decided to cut all the corners. It’s a classic tale at this point, same thing happened to Boeing and Apple and Google and etc. It’s why everything sucks nowadays.
There might be things that Apple is stagnating on, but silicon and ARM CPU transitions definitely ain’t one of those things. The rest of the industry is scrambling to catch up with them asap.
These new snapdragon based windows laptops have to be a serious wake up call for intel. General personal computing is quickly moving away from x86 and the latest “efficiency” core processors from intel can’t compete.
If you’re talking about the lastest gen desktop CPUs, they just clocked them too high.
This has been an ongoing problem ever since, like, Ivy Bridge/the 3000 series… and yes, probably has to do with management and marketing decisions tbh, so they can be 2% ahead of AMD in some stupid benchmark. AMD is guilty of this too, and you can see what “sanely” clocked chips look like with their X3D series.
My point was that had proper engineers been in charge instead, they would have noticed and listened to the people on the ground that I am certain knew about the problem, and it would have been fixed before any consumers got their hands on the product.
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Can’t remember the full details of the deal, but I seem to recall a story about how Apple approached Intel to manufacture a low-powered processor for mobile (for the first iPhone). At the time, Intel didn’t see money in mobile processors and passed on the deal. Additionally, for years, Apple asked for more powerful chips for the MacBooks. At the time, the iPads were surpassing MacBooks in speed on some tasks. Finally, Apple decided that since they were already designing their own silicon for iPhones and iPads, they might as well just do the same for the MacBooks as well since Intel couldn’t keep up.
Again, this is largely from memory. I can’t remember the source, so take it with a grain of salt.
Going through a period of little competition in a space seems to do that to just about every company in that position.
I’ve only watched this from a great distance but what I saw was: Intel didn’t actually manufacture the chips. That was all TSMC. So Intel’s main thing was chip design. And their designs were all about making the transistors smaller. Around 3nm they started running into physical limits. Competitors started out-innovating them with things like GPU deigns and ARM based chips. End of story. They had their time. They ran x86 into the ground and they are fucking done. They would have had to do 5 or 6 things differently to stay on top, and they did none of those.
They always had their own fabs. Utilising TSMC for their GPU’s was a recent thing. For all the mistakes they have done, their GPU efforts are actually noteworthy but you don’t even have to compare them to ARM or other GPU manufacturers, just look at AMD, they’ve been killing it.
The chips with the oxidisation issue were manufactured by Intel at their Arizona fab plant.
Thank you
Anything they go after today is 18-24 months out. Chasing after AI would be pretty risky. Desktops and laptops are moving to ARM and RISC-V. Their best bet is to go after whatever enterprise data centers will need a couple of years from now.
If I were laying bets, it would be to go after power and heat efficiency. Like, hard. Take their time out in the wilderness, then come back with chips that save the planet from climate collapse.
Their ISA is not their only strong side, so they can reuse a lot of designs and expertise for making ARM and\or RISC-V ISA CPUs.
But they will have to do catching up in, ahem, making things that last more than 2 months again.
🌈 shareholders 🌈
if you keep look at the mirror you crash at the end.
A lack of competition.
Poor practices. They focused on shorr term gains over quality.
Their solution? Lay off a bunch of people to reduce costs and increase profitability immediately.
Large amounts of greed, corruption, and complacency.
This is the handiwork of highly paid executives.
It’s always the executives. But how exactly? Have they ordered their employees to develop sub-par and crashing CPUs?
The same way boeing executives are to blame. They did not order employees to do sub-par cpus, but they did not care about the quality of what was produced either. Good hardware (and software) its always the product of a process that involves QA, HR, Operations, R&D and many other departments. These departments fall under the supervision/control of the executive suite.
Well run cost center departments don’t boost quarterly results, ergo they are deprioritized.
They are looking out for themselves rather then the company, because of the incentives in place.
We are living in weird times where stock price doesn’t really correspond with company health, so their actions reflect against that metric against all others.
I think it was a mindset shift. Right now short term stock value is more important because the shareholder profile also shifted from someone that holded the stock to someone who wants just to turn a quick profit.
I can answer this!
There’s a term in tech called “empire building” where middle management looks for promotion up the chain towards directorships or VP roles. If, for example, you have a CEO that’s nuts for AI all you’ll want to do to get on their good side is to build a team around AI for some random service you already have (e.g. AI in Google Search) and you’ll get a ton of funding and HC. Suddenly you run a huge division and get a fancy important title because you can shit some metrics about how well you’re performing while customers say “wait, search is shit now”. That’s the search team’s problem, your AI stuff performs great!
It’s everywhere in big tech, and it’s why so many big tech companies seemingly work extremely hard and have nothing to show for it.
The IC’s at the bottom of the ladder are just minding their own business, trying to do the best work that they can, while the leader of the empire sets ridiculous timelines and goals because they’re trying to cement a legacy, rather than build the right thing. Naturally, the product flops, the director gets moved to a new division to protect them, and the IC’s are laid off - with the CEO saying that they didn’t meet expectations or cost too much.
I am sure it falls under the category of cost cutting. Death by a thousand self inflicted cuts.
The company had always been run by engineers that came up from chip fab. Then they fired both the CEO and the head of fab for sexual harassment.
Then they make the CFO with a MBA the new CEO. A year or two latter and chip design is having problems and fab is falling behind.
Sounds similar to what happened to Boeing. Once ran by engineers now ran by people suckling the teat of board members. Quality goes down, profits go up for these assholes.
Intel fell behind on chip manufacturing while the CEO came from that department.
Allegedly because their strategy was too ambitious at the time, or at least that was the official excuse at the time.
So your summary is not entirely fair.
Ah, similar to Boeing’s problems, minus the sexual harassment.
removed by mod
Wall St destroys yet another company through sheer greed. Film at 11.
Well, when I was learning about economics being 8 or 9 year old, it seemed for me how it should be.
A person or a group knowledgeable in some area find a bottleneck, some problem to solve, start a company, it grows, it becomes big. Then the next generation is what they pick for leadership, and picking people is always worse than the evolutionary mechanism of a company finding some bottleneck to be widened being gunshot faster than the rest. Then they pick their replacement. And so on. Eventually it dies, but since technologies are patented, they do not become actual secrets, only commercial secrets, and by the time a company dies the patents expire, so everybody can replace it for the humanity.
The niche that company discovered thus becomes competitive.
In our world, if patents would expire as fast as they did initially by design, these big companies would already be dead.
But they’ve bent the rules to make patents virtually eternal and thus big zombie companies are strangling the humanity.
The system wasn’t bad, but eventually power changed it.
You are missing economies of scale. In most industries these create a significant barrier to entry. The patent may expire but the equipment is still expensive.
I’m not missing them. One thing is a
and another is legal monopoly.
Especially abominations like patenting an ISA. It’s clear from the very beginning that an ISA is not an invention moving humanity forward, it’s an interface. A language.
As of gigantic companies of today not finding replacement when they die - we would have the whole spectrum if not for IP and patent laws as they exist. For some uses MCs of 80s are sufficient. For some a desktop PC of 1993. For some a desktop PC of 1999.
I dunno why I’m writing these things, Marcus Aurelius has written many wise things, one of them is the advice not to think about things out of your control.
removed by mod
Greed?
The marketing and advertising and sales teams took over management from the engineering team, and decided to cut all the corners. It’s a classic tale at this point, same thing happened to Boeing and Apple and Google and etc. It’s why everything sucks nowadays.
There might be things that Apple is stagnating on, but silicon and ARM CPU transitions definitely ain’t one of those things. The rest of the industry is scrambling to catch up with them asap.
Just ask Apple, they’ll tell you so.
Don’t trust any silicon manufacturer’s marketing department. Let the processing and battery life benchmarks and real world tests do the talking.
But then Apple would have to drop it’s prices by 40% so people would keep buying.
But that would make it accessible to commoners! *gasp*
These new snapdragon based windows laptops have to be a serious wake up call for intel. General personal computing is quickly moving away from x86 and the latest “efficiency” core processors from intel can’t compete.
If you’re talking about the lastest gen desktop CPUs, they just clocked them too high.
This has been an ongoing problem ever since, like, Ivy Bridge/the 3000 series… and yes, probably has to do with management and marketing decisions tbh, so they can be 2% ahead of AMD in some stupid benchmark. AMD is guilty of this too, and you can see what “sanely” clocked chips look like with their X3D series.
My point was that had proper engineers been in charge instead, they would have noticed and listened to the people on the ground that I am certain knew about the problem, and it would have been fixed before any consumers got their hands on the product.
It’s not just the big tech, some startups are the same because they’re vying for VC cash and that’s the best way to do it
Vulture Capital will collapse capitalism.