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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday July 29 2020, @03:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the golden-parachutes-are-not-for-enginners dept.

ZDNet

Intel is revamping its technology leadership in a bid to turnaround its manufacturing unit after announcing delays in its 7nm processes.

Last week, Intel said on its second quarter earnings report that its 7nm products would be delayed. Rival AMD is already on 7nm as is TSMC. Since Intel's earnings report and market cap hit, analysts have been speculating that the chip giant may leave manufacturing.

In other words, Intel needed to revamp its technology organization. Under Monday's reorg, Dr. Ann Kelleher will lead technology development. She had led Intel manufacturing. Kelleher will focus on developing 7nm and 5nm processes. Murthy Renduchintala, Intel's chief engineering officer, will depart Aug. 3.

Intel is also separating its Technology, Systems Architecture and Client Group unit into teams focused on technology development, manufacturing and operations, design engineering, architecture, software and graphics and supply chain.

Safe to say Intel will be best positioned to fire 3 executives at the next slippage - I guess that may make the stock rebound faster than firing a single one.


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  • (Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday July 29 2020, @11:09AM (5 children)

    by sjames (2882) on Wednesday July 29 2020, @11:09AM (#1028065) Journal

    But will they? If they do, will they ever again be more than the also-ran? Do they know how to be the budget brand?

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Wednesday July 29 2020, @11:25AM (4 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday July 29 2020, @11:25AM (#1028068) Journal

    Intel's Cascade Lake-X CPU for High-End Desktops: 18 cores for Under $1000 [anandtech.com]

    They slashed Cascade Lake-X prices in half compared to Skylake-X, because they were forced to by the existence of AMD's Ryzen 9 3900X, 3950X, and Threadripper.

    But they can also drop the prices in secret... the prices that big customers pay. [soylentnews.org] For consumer chips they will just run them at up to 300 Watts, and set the price to match AMD's price/performance. Losing market share in the consumer space might not be a big hassle for Intel, because it just frees up capacity to shift more CPUs to the datacenters and HPC users. Remember that Intel was having "14nm" shortages [anandtech.com] just recently.

    Intel has all sorts of options and "financial horsepower" [guru3d.com] to persist in the market.

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    • (Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:24AM (3 children)

      by sjames (2882) on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:24AM (#1028435) Journal

      They did cut the price by a lot, but still more expensive than the AMD processor.

      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:36AM (2 children)

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday July 30 2020, @02:36AM (#1028441) Journal

        Many of Intel's sales are to OEMs, datacenters, etc. They are certain to be charging a lot less to some of those customers than what official/tray prices would suggest. Things are happening behind the scenes, and Intel is no stranger to anti-competitive behavior [networkworld.com].

        While Intel's "14nm" CPUs are notably worse than AMD's "7nm" CPUs in some ways, especially power efficiency, the "14nm" process is very mature. They are getting great yields and pumping those things out as fast as they can sell them. Intel is "winning while losing".

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        • (Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday July 30 2020, @12:16PM

          by sjames (2882) on Thursday July 30 2020, @12:16PM (#1028558) Journal

          All of that bolsters my point. Intel doesn't know how to be the budget brand. With all the problems with their latest and greatest, they're still marketing as if they're infallible. They're making it on momentum for now, but that can only go on for so long.

          That's not to say they'll be closing their doors any time soon, behemoths like that take decades to die.

        • (Score: 2) by rleigh on Friday July 31 2020, @07:59AM

          by rleigh (4887) on Friday July 31 2020, @07:59AM (#1029176) Homepage

          The Intel strategy is to target the high-value end of the market and abandon the low end. The low end is completely lost to ARM and other low-cost CPUs and MCUs. The middle is increasingly taken by AMD. They lost their deal with Apple. They don't really have anywhere to go, do they? The future of the cloud is custom ARM systems like Graviton. It will save the cloud providers billions.

          I see them going the same way as IBM as they had to abandon their PC lines, until they were left with the big iron only. They too, chased after the most profitable sectors even to their long-term detriment. These companies have astronomical overheads in personnel and facilities, their strategy makes sense in preserving what they have for as long as they can do so. But CPUs have become a commodity item. It's no wonder other smaller and more nimble companies can undercut them with a better product. Any company which desires one can get their own custom ARM, Sparc or MIPS CPU fabbed with all the custom features they desire, or even custom amd64 silicon from AMD. Or they can adapt an off-the-shelf one. Intel doesn't allow any of that flexibility. In some ways, their fall from dominance is both entirely predictable, and long overdue. They distorted a healthy CPU market for decades, and their anticompetitive practices killed off their competitors and reduced progress.