I would not. There is nothing to indicate Intel leadership is capable of executing. Bean counters are not the kind of leadership you need in a changing environment.
Isn't the whole problem that it wasn't QA'd out precisely because Intel no longer know how to ship good products? Sure Intel have the resources to make their customers whole on this screw up but the concern is that Intel have had a pattern of poor execution in the fast 10-15 years and this is just the most recent example.
One of the videos from the well connected tech youtubers (I think it was GamersNexus) said that QA had caught the issue (if you push this bus too hard with voltage, there will be issues) but management ignored it because they needed to compete with AMD. There was also something about pushing previously binned i7 parts out as i9's by pushing the voltages to meet demand too. I'll see if I can find the reference a bit later.
There are few absolutes so stop trying to reduce the problem to one such as "Intel bad" because that's disingenuous.
It's really hard to reason about things until you hit large quantities of hardware in production, separate statistical failures from non-statistical failures, separate end user idiocy from real issues and do the analysis, then reproduce it conclusively. This is not helped by the target end of the market demand being interested in running things close to the line on boards kicked out by the lowest bidder. On top of that you have large vendors like Dell and Lenovo who take forever to feed information back on warranty claims because their end user support is fucking awful.
Basically it's very hard to reason about this pre-production despite every effort and QA step in the book being followed.
I am not reducing it to "Intel bad". There's tons of evidence of them having execution problems in recent years. Is it savable? Possibly. Intel is huge and has a good amount of time and support so they certainly have the resources to do so.
The available evidence that they are actually doing the right things to turn the ship around isn't that positive in my, or apparently many very large shareholders view though.
Intel publishes much more information about their future roadmap than any other company in this industry.
During the last couple of years they have achieved in time all the product and process launches that had been announced with years in advance, up to Meteor Lake on the new Intel 4 CMOS process at the end of 2023 and Sierra Forest on the new Intel 3 CMOS process at the middle of 2024.
The only things that could be considered as under-achievements are the facts that in the Intel 4 process the maximum clock frequencies have been lower than hoped and the production yields are still low. Nevertheless, these 2 problems are not surprises. Every new CMOS process launched by Intel during the last decade has been affected exactly by these 2 problems, at least for its first year. For each such process, Intel has succeeded eventually to solve the problems, but they have always needed the experience of multiple years of production for that. With Intel 4 this will not happen, because it will not be used again for another product, being replaced by Intel 3, which probably incorporates whatever fixes were suggested by the experience with Intel 4.
So the financial problems of Intel are not caused by Intel failing to execute their roadmap.
Nevertheless, the bad financial results have been perfectly predictable from the Intel roadmap, as it had been known for years, because that roadmap does not attempt to achieve parity with the AMD server CPUs before the end of 2026 at the earliest.
The financial results of Intel have shown profits for the client CPUs. They have shown losses for their foundry, which have been unavoidable, due to their need to invest huge amounts of money to recover Intel's handicap vs. TSMC and due to the need to transfer a part of their chip production to TSMC, while they are developing their new processes.
They have also shown great losses for the server CPUs. The losses in server CPUs are likely to be caused by Intel having to cut their prices a lot when selling to big customers, in order to convince them to not buy the superior AMD server CPUs.
It is very likely that Intel will continue to have great losses in the foundry and in the server CPUs for at least one more year, based on their public roadmap. After that, their results will depend on how good the Intel 18A CMOS process will be in comparison with the competing CMOS processes of TSMC.
The Intel roadmap for manufacturing processes and for client CPUs has been decent. While some of the Intel choices may be undesirable for their customers, other choices would not have improved their financial results.
Where Intel could have conceived a much better roadmap is in server CPUs, where they have their greatest losses. When AMD launches a new microarchitecture, like now with Zen 5, after 3 or 4 months they also launch their server CPUs with that microarchitecture, like with AMD Turin later this year. On the other hand, when Intel launches a new microarchitecture in their client CPUs, like in the next couple of months with Lunar Lake and with Arrow Lake S, they follow with server CPUs using the same up-to-date microarchitecture usually only one or two years later, e.g. in the second half of 2026 in this case.
While the Lion Cove and Skymont cores of Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake S are competitive with Zen 5, the Intel server CPUs launched these days, Sierra Forest and Granite Rapids, continue to use cores that are only marginally better than the cores used in Alder Lake three years ago.
The new Granite Rapids server CPUs will be able to match the number of cores per socket of the AMD server CPUs, for the first time after many years. However, they will use cores not much better than Zen 4, which will be inferior to Zen 5.
This situation would have been easily avoided by Intel if they would have launched now only CPUs using their up-to-date cores, instead of using obsolete cores in their server CPUs.
The reason why AMD does not have this problem is because they design a single CPU chiplet that will be used both in their desktop and high-power laptop CPUs and in their server CPUs. On the other hand, Intel duplicates their design and validation efforts by designing distinct chips for desktops and for servers. When AMD finishes the design of a chiplet, it is ready for both desktops and servers. Their server CPUs use a few months of additional testing, but that is all of the delay. It is not clear how the design work is organized at Intel, but it appears that there is not enough overlap in the design of the client CPUs and of the server CPUs, so the latter are finished only after one extra year or two.
But boring stuff has low margins. Intel has been living in a high-margin world at least since the 8086. They currently don't know how to survive on low margins. I'm not sure they can learn.
This is what a lot of people who have no idea about the semi industry miss because they get all their education from news headlines. Which is what I assume leads to Intel's massive stock drop. People voting on FUD, kind of like the opposite of the hype that pushed Nvidia to the moon, but when you asked investors who bought Nvidia, what Nvidia actually makes, most are clueless and only bought out of hype and FOMO.
Everyone assumes the world only needs 3nm chips because that's what TSMCs latest cutting edge node is and that's what they learned powers their iPhone, but the reality is the world runs on nodes much larger than that. To put this into perspective, the new TSMC fab being built in Germany will tape out 28/22nm nodes and then upgrade to 16/12 nm nodes mostly for robotics, industrial, IoT and especially automotive. Just let that sink in. Even Global Foundries is stuck at 12nm.
Intel's 4 process is cutting edge by comparison and plenty of international players who can't afford TSMC or Samsung would gladly pick up that node capacity for the right price.
Yh, 28+16 is basically pretty much all you need for industrial semis. The other key part I think is basically going to be military, I've watched an interview with one of the big wigs at Baikal and he claimed that the Russian miltech industry would be fully self-sustaining if there was domestic 28nm capacity.
I remember one comment from during covid when the supply chain was messed up (possibly from Intel) saying productivity could be improved a lot for non-leading edge chips by getting designs off relative ancient processes to relatively recent, which would let the industry modernize old fabrication plants. It requires work for that new design though, and moving away from thoroughly tried and tested
That was quite naive. The problem is there is little motivation to do that. The designs can't just be scaled down, they need to be recompiled from scratch with the target process' standard cells and verification. That work is expensive as fuck. Then there's packaging and managing the supply chain and data around it. Why bother when demand causes prices to go up? Just pocket the money and wait. If you spend that on more capacity and reengineering you just burn the money.
I never said what you're claiming. Please read comments carefully, assume good faith in the comments you read, and don't put words in my mouth.
Like I said, Intel's layoffs are a reaction to their stock tanking, and their stock tanking is due to investor behavior which is sometimes rational, but a lot of the times not.
I would not. There is nothing to indicate Intel leadership is capable of executing. Bean counters are not the kind of leadership you need in a changing environment.