[midjji]

Something is very weird with intel. Compared to fang pe around 30 or nvidia, amd around 100, intel has 10. Which combined with long term stable decently high profits is insane for an am tech company. Intel has been offered gigantic subsidies to build american fabs, and more recently just fabs period, but they arent, and at least one of these is approaching the point where they might get sued for not having even tried.

The answers I hear range from a deeply embarrassing and complete loss of competency on all levels, but primarily on the fab side, to an utterly incompetent and out of touch leadership. I favor the latter explanation as intel has been underperforming for nearly two decades now. My best guess is that intel has entered its cash cow phase, and will simply phase out product after product as they become obsolete, ending up as a half dead zombie barely supporting a few rare products in a few decades. Problem is, even if thats what is happening, their stock is surprisingly cheap. So it seems analysts seem to know something important I am completely missing.

Not to say they are the only company that fucked up, amd has been offered the same subsidies for building more fabs, and we arent talking 2020, we are talking for more than a decade, and they also havent for very unclear reasons. Amd also fucked up and completely missed machinelearning due to being unwilling to make a convenient interface or even just halfassed support for cuda. But they did that while nvidia went, ah fuck it, well let amd get every major console, and basically only make gpus with graphics ports as a side project.

Amd and nvidia is havent acted optimally and both have failed to exploit what seems like low hanging fruit, but they are highly valued in a way which matches market demand (which has been increasing quickly since 2014, not just 2020), and their improving technology. Intel however, does not even appear to have tried. Performance improvements have been incremental at best, and some "features" like the built in gpus are so terrible they mostly degrade performance.

[bsder]

> I favor the latter explanation as intel has been underperforming for nearly two decades now.

Remember "Only the paranoid survive"?

Well, people steeped in Intel took that to heart. So, when they retired or died, a lot of them had no heir apparent and their knowledge went with them.

[sliken]

No argument on the fab side, but that's easy to outsource. Samsung, TSMC, and Global Foundries will happily make Intel chips.

Alder lake is a good example, from what I can tell it's a market leading core, generally faster than the AMD competition, and a good basis to make future products. Future Intel GPUs seem likely to compete on price/perf, at least when any GPU from the last 3 generations seems to sell out instantly.

[anamax]

> Samsung, TSMC, and Global Foundries will happily make Intel chips.

And how long will it take to "port" those designs to another fab?

It's not a matter of "make install."

Yes, everything comes together with tools, but every one of those tools and its inputs is verging on full-custom and those designs were tweaked with the characteristics of those tools in mind.

The folks who know how to do that work are currently working on new products (either for Intel or someone else), so are you willing to slip those products?

[sliken]

Quite a bit faster than building a fab for a leading process and making a new product on that fab.

Alder lake seems plenty competitive (even market leading) for today, AMD has nothing big (like zen4) due anytime soon. Moving the next gen to some other fab in time to replace alder lake looks quite feasible.

[anamax]

Yes, Intel can do new designs for other fabs.

The question is when it makes sense to port old designs to other fabs.

FWIW, I'm not convinced that it takes less time to bring up a new design on a new fab than it takes to bring up an old design on a new fab. (The exception being a new fab that is identical to the old fab.)