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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.


Original Submission

Related Stories

Former Intel Principal Engineer Blasts the Company 10 comments

What's wrong with Intel, and how to fix it: Former principal engineer unloads (archive)

In a blunt video posted late Thursday evening, outspoken former Intel principal engineer Francois Pidnoel offered his advice on how to "fix" Intel CPUs, criticized current leadership for not being engineers, said AVX512 was a misadventure, and declared that it's only luck AMD hasn't grabbed more market share.

"First, Intel is really out of focus," Piednoel said in the nearly hour-long video presentation. "The leaders of Intel today are not engineers, they are not people who understand what to design to the market."

[...] Pidnoel flat-out dismissed including AVX512 in consumer chips as a mistake. "You had Skylake and Skylake X for a reason," Piednoel said. "AVX512 is designed for a race of throughput that is lost to the GPU already. There's two ways to get throughput. One is to get the throughput is by having larger vectors to your core, and the other way is to have more cores."

[...] "Intel is very lucky AMD cannot get the volume, to be able to compete," Piednoel. "If they were getting volume, the price difference would definitely cost Intel market share a lot more than what they are losing right now."

Related: AVX-512: A "Hidden Gem"?
Intel CEO Blames "10nm" Delays on Aggressive Density Target, Promises "7nm" for 2021
Intel's Process Nodes Will Trail Behind Competitors Until at Least Late 2021
Linus Torvalds: Don't Hide Rust in Linux Kernel; Death to AVX-512
Intel Engineering Chief Out After 7nm Product Delays
Intel Faces Class-Action Lawsuit Over "7nm" Delays


Original Submission

Intel Faces Class-Action Lawsuit Over "7nm" Delays 36 comments

Intel facing class-action lawsuit over 7nm delay

Intel's revenue was up 20 percent in its Q2 2020 earnings report, but its 7nm processors have been delayed by at least six months because production has fallen a year behind. The subsequent decline in share price resulted in AMD's stock jumping above its rival's for the first time in around 15 years.

On Friday, the Hagens Berman law firm put out a call to Intel investors who suffered significant losses to contact the company for a possible class-action suit. It also seeks people who may be able to assist in its investigation of possible securities fraud.

"Beginning at the Company's 2019 annual investor conference, Intel continuously represented that it would start shipping its first 7nm chips in 2021. The news was well-received since the Company claimed the 7nm chip would deliver double the area efficiency of its 10nm chips. Moreover, in the wake of severe delays derailing its 10nm chips, Intel assuaged concerns by stating, "We've made time-to-market the priority," and repeatedly affirmed the 7nm chip's timetable," states Hagens Berman.

Also at Guru3D.

Previously: Intel Delays "7nm" Products by 6 Months
Intel Engineering Chief Out After 7nm Product Delays


Original Submission

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  • (Score: 0, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2020, @04:29AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2020, @04:29AM (#1027995)
    • (Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2020, @04:57AM (1 child)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2020, @04:57AM (#1028005)

      Here's how to fix things. [theonion.com]

      • (Score: 2) by arslan on Wednesday July 29 2020, @06:14AM

        by arslan (3462) on Wednesday July 29 2020, @06:14AM (#1028021)

        hahaha! this is gold. The amount of puns and innuendos.

    • (Score: 1) by snmygos on Thursday July 30 2020, @12:08PM

      by snmygos (6274) on Thursday July 30 2020, @12:08PM (#1028556)

      "And yet, even with fewer qualified female and minority candidates for jobs at the company, Intel says it can do more to recruit employees from those groups."

      Until now Intel hired the best engineers available (without consideration to race, gender, size of nose and others things). Now they will hire people based on these criteria. That will change their fate for sure.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2020, @04:51AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2020, @04:51AM (#1028001)

    About time Intel snag some key TSMC engineers to help them get its fab operation shits together.

    Too bad, they won't come - not worth dying with covid-19 in America.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2020, @05:28AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2020, @05:28AM (#1028010)

      With TSMC front and centre of the trade war with the mainland, Trump should chuck a wad of cash at Samsung.

      Open a 5nm plant on US soil to produce Exynos for the US market, which Qualcomm & Apple Silicon currently dominate, with excess capacity toward making CPUs for Intel.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday July 29 2020, @05:03AM (21 children)

    by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Wednesday July 29 2020, @05:03AM (#1028006) Journal

    Why would anyone buy Intel stock these days at all?

    Through my lifetime, I already witnessed demise of several other CPU makers, some of them in much better temporal technological perspective than Intel is today.
    Burroughs, Sperry Univac, Digital, Wang, Sun, ... No one remembers those brands today.
    Capitalism is a harsh master of technology.
    Intel will be just as forgotten for next generation of IT people.

    --
    Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2020, @05:36AM (13 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2020, @05:36AM (#1028013)

      They are making huge profits. They can cut their prices in half and continue to profit. Intel isn't going away.

      • (Score: 2) by leon_the_cat on Wednesday July 29 2020, @06:00AM

        by leon_the_cat (10052) on Wednesday July 29 2020, @06:00AM (#1028019) Journal

        that and most users don't give a damn what cpu they have in their laptop as they are all fast enough anyway.

      • (Score: 4, Insightful) by rleigh on Wednesday July 29 2020, @07:07AM

        by rleigh (4887) on Wednesday July 29 2020, @07:07AM (#1028031) Homepage

        This has been true of many a dying company. Their most profitable years come before the sudden fall. Current profitability is no indication of future performance, and never has been. Big industrial giants have fallen throughout the last two centuries. Their size and assets did not help them in the long run.

      • (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?

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

          by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> 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.

          --
          [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
          • (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) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> 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".

              --
              [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
              • (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.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by RamiK on Wednesday July 29 2020, @11:26AM (4 children)

        by RamiK (1813) on Wednesday July 29 2020, @11:26AM (#1028069)

        They are making huge profits. They can cut their prices in half and continue to profit. Intel isn't going away.

        Actually much of Intel's revenues is on a steep log curve where losing a certain amount of core orders would double dip into their production scale as well as the "No one gets fired from buying Intel" type customers like in the public sector that have very low requirements but won't (personally) benefit from buying cheap so they're buying the safest to cover their own asses in case something goes sideways.

        It's why they fought so hard to keep AMD from overtaking a certain percentage of the server market: That number represented the scale in which they start hurting bad and lose their ability to compete over prices for bulk orders.

        --
        compiling...
        • (Score: 4, Insightful) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday July 29 2020, @05:52PM (3 children)

          by bzipitidoo (4388) on Wednesday July 29 2020, @05:52PM (#1028196) Journal

          I find the upgrade treadmill irresistible. Can hold off for a while, but eventually the difference in performance and capability becomes so gross the only sensible thing to do is abandon the old computer. Any kind of breakdown, like an HDD going bad, is a whole bag of nails in the coffin. I'm still using a few decade old machines, but they are clearly obsolete. No SSE4 instructions. 45nm and 65nm dies. Consumes so much more power than a low power but still more performant 14nm that the difference in cost of electricity to run those boxes for a year is a significant portion of the cost of a new computer. Might be a difference of 500 kWh, and at 10 cent per kWh, that's $50 in electricity costs. And that's not factoring in the performance difference.

          There are a ton of enhancements that have been added over the years. Support for virtualization, with the VT-x and AMD-V stuff, has improved. Room for still more improvement there. I have completely abandoned 32bit x86 machines. Somewhere in there, mp4 decode in hardware crept in. We may expect AV1 codecs, and even AV2 in hardware eventually. Core counts are really climbing, and now a 2 core chip is low end. Integrated graphics are pretty common now, and their performance doesn't completely suck like the early Intel 845G crap from circa 2000. Another addition there is OpenCL and Vulkan support. Then there's fixes for the massive class of Spectre vulnerbilities. Old though my old machines are, they aren't so old as to predate Spectre. I wonder is it really such a performance penalty to completely fix Spectre?

          In short, as long as CPU makers can keep adding massive enhancements, as long as Moore's Law holds, they'll have a market. There's just too many things to do yet. I don't see it ending anytime in the near future. i guess it could easily continue for another 50 years.

          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2020, @08:16PM (2 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2020, @08:16PM (#1028274)

            Either requires signed firmware or has built-in signed backdoors.

            Most commercially available arm devices since the mid 1990s, the same thing (BREW+Proprietary OS, then Trustzone+stage1 signing.)

            Even GPUs since Maxwell v2 and between AMD R800 and Vega (Depending on what restrictions you accept) are now signed out the ass.

            I run older hardware because that was the last time hardware was trustworthy. Most of it still runs the latest software. A lot of it that doesn't natively run the latest software can run it with a binary recompiler like Intel's instruction emulator or in some cases qemu-. Very few of the modern instructions are 'Mandatory' after SSE2, although some of them will solve latency issues at different points in the codebase. Most software didn't even need that while Windows 7 was still supported, although I imagine we may see that change now that Windows 10 is the minimum supported platform, although linux hardware can still support any cpu with PCIe and x86_64 with a modern GPU, which limits the need to upgrade if you have at least 8GB of RAM and a modern gpu running at x8-x16 PCIe 1.1 lanes. Speaking from personal experience, very few games actually REQUIRE the full PCIe bandwidth we have available today, even if you wanted to run them at 120hz. The later OpenGL and Vulkan standards helped eliminate a lot of the bus bandwidth the earlier generations of hardware demanded while setting up all geometry on the cpu and dumping it to the gpu every frame.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by coolgopher on Wednesday July 29 2020, @06:33AM (2 children)

      by coolgopher (1157) on Wednesday July 29 2020, @06:33AM (#1028028)

      Look, when your motto is "the network is the computer" and you then focus on building computers rather than networks, is it any surprise things don't go well?

      • (Score: 2) by Mojibake Tengu on Wednesday July 29 2020, @07:08AM (1 child)

        by Mojibake Tengu (8598) on Wednesday July 29 2020, @07:08AM (#1028032) Journal

        Exactly!
        AMD's Infinity Fabric (Hypertransport) is more important now than the CPU architecture itself. Intel has no adequate technology in hand.
        I used to think all the Thunderbolt patents could keep Intel above the surface with licensing to AMD and chipmakeres, giving them time to recover, but latest hardware exploits (Thunderspy and others) pushed them under the water.

        --
        Rust programming language offends both my Intelligence and my Spirit.
        • (Score: 4, Interesting) by coolgopher on Wednesday July 29 2020, @07:19AM

          by coolgopher (1157) on Wednesday July 29 2020, @07:19AM (#1028034)

          The last few years have really helped turn the tag line of "Intel inside" into "Insecurity inside".

    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday July 29 2020, @03:54PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 29 2020, @03:54PM (#1028146) Journal

      I wish there was a mod for: "I wish it could happen sooner"

      --
      Santa maintains a database and does double verification of it.
    • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday July 29 2020, @04:00PM

      by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 29 2020, @04:00PM (#1028150) Journal

      Intel could save itself!

      All it needs to do is:
      1. Outsource chip manufacturing to TSMC -- currently in early stages
      2. Outsource chip design to AMD
      3. Outsource management to Japan

      --
      Santa maintains a database and does double verification of it.
    • (Score: 4, Insightful) by mattTheOne on Wednesday July 29 2020, @05:14PM (1 child)

      by mattTheOne (1788) on Wednesday July 29 2020, @05:14PM (#1028179)

      I bought in, at current prices INTC $50 is a steal with P/E of 10. Yes the company sucks but they rake in huge profits. They made 21B net income and AMD made 341M in 2019. Currently AMD is worth 90B and INTC is 200B, There's no way AMD is worth half as much as Intel, Intel has a lot of non-CPU IP too!

      I agree AMD CPUs are great and so are Intels, lets say they're about equal. Why would that mean AMD is worth >100P/E vs Intel's 10 P/E.

      Intel might be dying but it'll be 5 yrs to know, their biggest limitation right now is a lack of foundry capacity, not lack of demand or customers!!

      • (Score: 2) by Mykl on Wednesday July 29 2020, @10:19PM

        by Mykl (1112) on Wednesday July 29 2020, @10:19PM (#1028326)

        You're assuming that the share market operates rationally.

  • (Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2020, @12:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2020, @12:32PM (#1028081)

    That would allow them to focus on their core competency: data exfiltration code. But then how do they know the third-party manufacturers won't add their own code on top of IME to divert the data stream from Israel to some other country?

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2020, @01:47PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 29 2020, @01:47PM (#1028103)

    not sure this is relevant. if we assume that maybe 3nm is the smallest for this kind of computer tech (electron switching) and we see ... uhm ... errr intel ~10 nm single thread performance at X Ghz be the same as AMD at 7 nm single thread at same X Ghz then that is a intel lead of uhm ... err ... 30%?
    ofc we gotta look at TDP and $$$ also.
    but my guess is that if push comes to shove, intel flips a switch and a week later they got 7nm.
    it's probably because "core architecture" hammered AMD hard and it was on the brink of turning intel into a monopoly ... so process shrinking problems to the rescue.
    let AMD refill their financial coffers at the cost of having to move closer to the limit (3nm) whilst leaving intel comfortable breathing room (- 7 nm to go to limit) to "catch up"...
    all said, i think the shrink delay is a "monopoly" deferring tactics.
    note: i like AMD. used to have tons of 'em.

    • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday July 29 2020, @02:05PM

      by takyon (881) <takyonNO@SPAMsoylentnews.org> on Wednesday July 29 2020, @02:05PM (#1028108) Journal

      There are plans for nodes called "2nm" [guru3d.com], "1.4nm" [anandtech.com], "1nm" [semiengineering.com], etc. Those are marketing names, but they signify planned transistor density gains and at least slight performance and power efficiency gains. Many larger nodes can be reused to make monolithic 3D chips with further performance gains (and density if you count layers).

      There is no magic duopoly. Just trading good and bad luck. AMD got stuck with a badly designed Bulldozer family of architectures and had to make the best of it for a few years. But becoming fabless gave them flexibility that Intel doesn't have right now.

      There isn't any need for two x86 companies. If Intel was obliterated, AMD would still have to compete... with ARM. ARM is making inroads into servers, supercomputers, laptops, potentially desktops/workstations if you count Apple's plans, and is already dominating in phones, tablets, TVs, smartwatches, smartglasses, and headsets. If AMD's Epyc didn't improve for a few years, Amazon's Graviton, Ampere's Altra, and Marvell's ThunderX would eat its lunch. If Ryzen Mobile stopped improving, Qualcomm's Snapdragon and others could move in (with x86/x64 emulation where necessary). ARM designs may have to compete with RISC-V, so ARM softened its licensing fees. There's plenty of competition even without Intel in the picture.

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      [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
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