Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Just like Boeing, once upon a time, Intel was the darling of the engineering world. Both companies were the premier tech companies in their day, but those days are long gone now.
[...] Intel hasn't experienced such speculator public failures, but it is tripping over its own feet a lot lately. As everyone knows, Intel's 13th and 14th Gen processors, particularly the Raptor Lake series, have been failing… a lot.
[...] Today, adding insult to injury, these problems appear most often in its top-of-the-line Core i9-13900K and Core i9-14900K CPUs. When you pay north of $500 or £400 for a single processor, you're not likely to take it kindly when the video flips out. Funny that.
[...] In addition, Intel has been struggling with yields on its new chip families. Now, Intel hopes to catch up with AMD and TSMC by 2026 with its next-generation 2nm CPUs. I hate to tell you this, Intel, but it's not like they'll be sitting around waiting for you.
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger referred to this struggle as a “death march" back in 2022. I don't think I would have used that phrase, but it appears to be more apt than ever.
Numerous soon-to-be ex-Intel employees doubtlessly would agree with me. Recently, Intel announced it would soon be laying off 16,000 staffers. That's 15 percent of its workforce if you're playing the stock market.
The market wasn't impressed. Between the layoffs, missing its guidance numbers, and chopping back its dividend, Intel's share price is dropping like it's in a, well, death march.
Why is all this happening? I think it's the result of poor management decisions and underinvestment in critical manufacturing technologies. In particular, it was how Intel prioritized business strategies and financial performance over engineering excellence.
Starting with Paul Otellini as CEO in 2005 through Brian Krzanich, who became CEO in 2013, and Bob Swan, who succeeded Krzanich in 2019, bean-counting and not engineering, was the name of Intel's game. That's not a recipe for success.
Intel also made several strategic blunders. Chipzilla's decision to pass on producing chips for the iPhone, considering the mobile market unprofitable, was a critical error. Would Arm even exist, never mind dominating the mobile space, if Intel had played its cards right? Seriously, did anyone ever believe that Intel Atom processors would power iPhones? I don't think so!
This was followed by Intel's botched venture into the 5G modem market. Despite grand announcements and promises, Intel failed to deliver a competitive product, ultimately losing out to competitors such as Qualcomm.
[...] Oh, and Intel does have an AI chip. I bet you didn't know that. I didn't until I started researching for this story. And I make my living from watching tech developments all day long.
The chip is named the Gaudi 3. This is an AI accelerator that Intel claims can beat Nvidia's H100 AI processors. We'll see. I'm not holding my breath.
I also noticed, though, that Intel doesn't actually make this chip. It relies instead on TSMC, at least until Intel gets its AI foundry business up and running.
I'm not counting Intel out — not yet, anyway. But a few years ago, I wouldn't have written Boeing off either, and that was a bad bet. It wouldn't surprise me if my hope for Intel to get its act together also turns out to be forlorn.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snotnose on Monday August 12 2024, @03:54PM (1 child)
Cutting expensive employees, spending money on stock buybacks instead of R&D, and getting CHIPs money has been great for management and wall street. Now that Intel is a dried up husk the money folks will move on to the next successful company to make even more $$$ for already rich people.
Or are you a naive simpleton who thinks things like employees, the community, and society in general should benefit when a company does good?
Of course I'm against DEI. Donald, Eric, and Ivanka.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Mykl on Monday August 12 2024, @10:32PM
It's MBA syndrome. Focus on maximising shareholder value for the next quarter - the one after that is a problem for 3 months' time!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 12 2024, @05:04PM
>Intel hasn't experienced such speculator public failures
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug [wikipedia.org]
At the time, the Pentium bug was a huge blow to Intel, maker of the brains of all the worlds' computers, computers that everyone had grown to implicitly trust as "always doing the math 100% correctly, every time" (regardless of how true that was or wasn't prior to and after the bug...) The stock cratered (turned out to be a buying opportunity), pundits raved, little old women of both sexes wet their pants in fear of the repercussions.
So, now, they've screwed up a little bigger... Maybe not quite as bad as having your car burst into flames inside your garage: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2006/03/flaming-fords/ [motherjones.com] https://www.autosafety.org/ford-ignition-switch-fires [autosafety.org]
There are worse problems in today's world: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c984l87l2w6o [bbc.com]
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Troll) by DadaDoofy on Monday August 12 2024, @05:22PM (17 children)
This was left unmentioned in TFS, but it obviously plays a significant role in Intel's ongoing decline.
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/diversity/diversity-at-intel.html [intel.com]
When a company embraces the idea that hiring the best person for the job is racist, it shouldn't be a surprise when things don't turn out well.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 12 2024, @05:58PM
I forget.. are you one of Runaway's sock puppets?
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 12 2024, @06:17PM
For worse, and for better in a lot of cases, those racial equity policies have been in place all over the U.S. for 60 years now.
The specifics change, but the basic effects have been the same all that time.
(Score: 4, Touché) by Tork on Monday August 12 2024, @07:59PM (13 children)
The entire scope of your evidence is use of the word 'obvious'. Shame on whoever modded this 'insightful'.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 13 2024, @01:40AM (7 children)
It's because the "DEI" culture is like a religion. It's as if Intel announcing it adopted Islam as its corporate religion. When you hear a corporation do the DEI thing it's a sign it's focusing too much on bragging about its wokeness than actually being awake.
I bet when they started this in 2014 the whites were actually underrepresented (e.g. where the percentage of whites in Intel https://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/corporate-information/diversity-annual-report-2015-final.pdf
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Tork on Tuesday August 13 2024, @02:26AM (3 children)
Heh! You should listen to yourself, you're saying, without a speck of facts or evidence of any kind, that Intel spent ten years forgetting they want to make money because... uh well they must have a new religion or something and... uh... oh and you wanted to bitch about Islam, too.
You're so easily manipulated someone could use the word "children" to talk you into happily inviting nanny states and banning books.
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2024, @09:32AM (2 children)
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2024, @01:43PM (1 child)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 16 2024, @02:18PM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Mykl on Wednesday August 14 2024, @01:30AM (2 children)
DEI Culture is like a religion in some organizations, but in most it is more akin to protection money from the mob.
Which mob is that, you ask? The large state-based investment funds such as the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS). Those funds invest a _lot_ of money, and they have sought to influence the market to support their state's public policies. Fund managers were told in no uncertain terms that investment in companies by CalPERS would be dependent on the adoption of certain policies. Don't want to play the game? That's fine - we'll sell off all of our stock in that company and abandon them, causing the share price to crash and potentially bankrupting the company or making it fodder for a takeover from another company that _does_ follow our lead.
Regardless of the merit or otherwise of DEI policies, many companies have embraced them not as a way of making more money, but to protect the stock price from fund-manager-based attacks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 15 2024, @05:43PM (1 child)
Sure but many companies don't depend on their share prices to operate. They depend on profit and cash flow.
The share price going down might annoy some "investors". But others might be just as happy to buy more.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Thursday August 15 2024, @11:05PM
And how many of those smaller companies have DEI policies? Thought so
Have a look at any large company on the stock market. The bulk of their stock is held by institutional investors, not small individuals. The story of Gamestop is very entertaining, but that was a different scenario (over-extending of short positions by hedge funds) - the dumping of stock by institutions can't be made up for by mum-and-dad (mom-and-pop) investors.
(Score: 5, Informative) by RTJunkie on Tuesday August 13 2024, @01:22PM (2 children)
Here is your evidence. Unlike Mr. Anti-DEI, I HAVE worked in science and engineering organizations for many decades. I started when there were very few women in engineering, but there are several in my group now. I know a lot of good male engineers, some are even brilliant. Some, not so much. But I have rarely worked with a female engineer who wasn't truly outstanding. They know that they have to be, to survive in our world.
We all know it's the pointy-haired bosses who screw everything up. It's not the women and minority engineers. Find something else to whine about.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2024, @05:54AM
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Thursday August 15 2024, @08:46AM
Well, I have met both, the excellent ones that you describe, but also the mediocre ones that tend to play the sexist card when they do not get their way. Discrimination does exist and has to be tackled. But it is a balance always to be re-found and re-calibrated, not a I-am-on-the-good-side-and-you-are-wrong game.
(Score: 0, Troll) by DadaDoofy on Tuesday August 13 2024, @01:28PM (1 child)
Seriously? I provided a link to Intel's very own DEI page. What more evidence could you possibly need?
(Score: 5, Touché) by Tork on Tuesday August 13 2024, @02:01PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 14 2024, @02:40AM
For years I had a hard time looking at an engineer without thinking that the only reason they got the job wasn't because they were the best candidate, but that they were white and male. I know it isn't fair to all the white male engineers, but it is sure hard to think about all of the better qualified candidates that were passed up so that the company could maintain their white male quota.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 12 2024, @07:16PM (7 children)
Sometime near the end of the last century, we started hearing about the "information age". We were going to do away with paper and pencil, books, ledgers and all that other dead tree stuff. We were going to commit everything to electrons floating in the cloud.
I was all gung ho on that idea. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?
Ooops. Turns out the bad guys can steal our electrons more easily than they could steal our papers and ledgers. The vulnerabilities are baked into the silicon. Imagine that.
Have faith though. The next generation will bake out the current vulnerabilites, and bake in some new ones.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 3, Insightful) by drussell on Monday August 12 2024, @07:26PM (2 children)
You are somehow conflating two completely different things.
Why are you equating the "information age," (which was always totally going to increasingly be a thing) with the "paperless office?"
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday August 12 2024, @08:23PM (1 child)
One follows from the other, unless you're into repetitive redundancy. Every office in the history of man has been required to keep records, but few offices keep multiple sets of books. In fact, those offices that maintained multiple sets of books have often been hauled into court on corruption charges.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 13 2024, @02:07PM
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday August 12 2024, @07:41PM (3 children)
They liked pushing the "paperless office" until they found out how much money they can make selling printer ink compared to ball point pen ink.
That is interesting, isn't it? Printer ink is more valuable than precious metals but pen ink is nearly as cheap as water.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Monday August 12 2024, @08:36PM (1 child)
Pound per pound, the hot air coming out of a psychiatrist's mouth costs more than platinum. It may carry some cognitive therapy in the sound waves accompanying the halitosis, but all in all - it's very expensive stuff.
Ink for quills is a bit more refined than Og's cave paste.
Ink for ball-point is a bit more refined, still. Further if you get into pressurized cartridge ballpoint pens (does anybody bother with those, anymore?)
The technological miracle of ink-jet ink (and the disposable print head it comes shipped in) are orders of magnitude more refined that ballpoint ink, it would be as microchips are to Moses' stone tablets. How dare you malign the intent of the companies which sell you such precious marvels of the modern age?!? /s
I have an office-supply outrage dilemma: am I more pissed off at HP for holding printing technology hostage with only disposable crap machines available below the $10K price point, or am I more pissed off at 3M for their Post-It price gouging?
Elect me king of the world, the Royal printer company will sell you sensible printers - only charging you for the environmental impacts of your decision to use dead trees - with all profits used to support pulpwood plantation expansions into non-ecologically sensitive areas.
🌻🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Tuesday August 13 2024, @03:47AM
Why are you insulting the Royal Consumer Information Products, Inc., the maker of Royal typewriters?
(Score: 2) by ChrisMaple on Tuesday August 13 2024, @03:54AM
Most office work uses B&W laser printers. Toner can be fairly cheap (although not always), and on a price-per-page basis is a real bargain.
(Score: 2) by vali.magni on Tuesday August 13 2024, @12:13AM (1 child)
Perhaps the blurb was typed out in haste? The extract here reads:
> Intel hasn't experienced such _speculator_ public failures
while the original article has the word "spectacular" right.
(Score: 3, Informative) by ChrisMaple on Tuesday August 13 2024, @03:56AM
Freud was caught wearing a slip.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Wednesday August 14 2024, @03:43AM
What with the silicon problems (FDIV), microcode to fix silicon problems (MELTDOWN etc. etc. etc.), design problems requiring firmware updates to prevent the CPU from burning itself out (13th and 14th gen Intel), and now to top it off... performance regression from Meteor Lake.
I understand AMD has had it's share of problems but they seem to be getting better, not progressively worse.
(Disclaimer, I have never owned an AMD CPU.)
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A