[ajross]

It's not 20 years. Just 12 years ago Intel was launching Ivy Bridge on 22nm and was absolutely on top of the world.

It's true they've completely fallen off the pace. But people tend to forget how rapidly this happened. Even as late as the semi-aborted 2018 launch of Cannon Lake it seemed like it was just a routine burp they'd correct with a process respin. Then TSMC quietly reached parity with 7nm, shipped 5nm which was a better process, and by 2021 Apple had jumped ship and Intel was falling behind even AMD.

The disaster happened fast. Boards of Directors aren't that agile.

[wtallis]

The 2017 "launch" of Cannonlake wasn't something that anyone inside or outside of Intel could have reasonably considered to be a "routine burp". It was a desperate move to avoid shareholder lawsuits and possible criminal prosecution. Intel had to ship something under the 10nm label before the end of the year, because they had made far too many (false) promises that 10nm would be working Soon. Cannonlake was a mostly-broken chip because their 10nm process did not work, and Intel never even tried to make significant revenue from it or ramp it to volume production (though they kept promising for months that they were going to ramp). And it was still two years late.

Meanwhile, Intel's chip designers kept targeting an unusable process, and wasted years that they should have been iterating on designs for the fab process that actually worked. Skylake shipped in 2015. They didn't deliver a new CPU microarchitecture on 14nm until 5.5 years later, a year and a half after they shipped that same microarchitecture in a mobile-only form when their 10nm finally started to be somewhat usable (but not fast enough for desktop).

What were the chip designers doing for all those years? In 2015, Intel knew that 14nm had been harder to bring up than any previous fab process, and they knew that 10nm was proving even harder, but they refused to try making an updated CPU design for 14nm. How could the management not have realized that spending multiple consecutive years not shipping new designs would cause long-term damage to their capability to iterate on CPU designs? Not participating in the feedback loop of actually shipping left Intel with an oversized P-core design and an E-core design that wasn't well-matched to it, making Alder Lake awkward and slapdash when they finally got 10nm working well enough for desktop CPUs.

[spwa4]

Sure ... THIS is what I don't get. Non-technical (ie. CEO + board before Gelsinger) people are responsible for a technical disaster. They did not, of course, stop creating new technical disasters. Which ended in complete panic and Pat Gelsinger on top.

They complain about arrogance, but even if you accept that, it was arrogance BEFORE Gelsinger, with Intel under the control of MBAs that they're talking about.

And can I just say, I've seen some seriously arrogant assholes in the tech departments I've worked ... but for absolute incredible arrogance, you need MBAs.

[newsclues]

It’s almost like there is a deep cultural problem.

The leadership (not technical) are disconnected from reality.

Did engineers know there were problems? Of course, they are smart, but the leadership doesn’t listen

[Intoldie]

There was always a deep cultural problem in Intel - at least since otellini when I was there. But it's not just the management that was arrogant - engineers too were a bit arrogant because they were taught that Intel was the best. The cultural problem was Intel assumed that they did not need to look outside the company about how the world and tech landscape was changing, and really they assumed they could always depend on the semiconductor process advantage to cover design inefficiencies. So the whole company was living in the past. Plus they did not hire the best - either in terms of thought leaders or in terms of senior people who were really really innovative. Intel had or has this culture of hiring lots of recent college graduates who would push new designs that were iterative but they were not of the level of new patents, or truly an outcome of research. Whereas amd was being successful with a much smaller number of employees, because of new patents and hired mostly senior people.

Once Intel lost its research focus it became an extractive company extracting the riches that were already there, instead of creating true innovation. Case in point - Intel stopped doing it's research day long time ago.

[yvdriess]

In defense of the chip designers:

Design pipelines are deep and Intel at the time famously had very node-specific designs without industry-standard PDKs. The moment engineers were told to switch a design to 14nm, it basically reset the 5 year design-to-product pipeline. Management failed because they did not hedge the risk by starting a parallel 14nm design effort at first sign of 10nm troubles. They likely were engaged in magical thinking or some variation of the "Are YOU going to tell him?" Silicon Valley scene. It does not help that information like that is considered actionable insider trading information. I bet a lot of people working on 10nm designs first heard the news about the delays from the quarterly investor calls.

[wtallis]

> Design pipelines are deep and Intel at the time famously had very node-specific designs without industry-standard PDKs. The moment engineers were told to switch a design to 14nm, it basically reset the 5 year design-to-product pipeline.

Right. It was well-known publicly that Intel was running their business in a way that maximized the damage any fab troubles would have on their product roadmap. It was obvious a decade ago that Intel needed more flexibility to bring their CPU designs to other fab processes. It took them too long to start working on Rocket Lake, and too long to deliver it. But they have at least made some progress on the problem, since they've been selling x86 CPU cores made at TSMC for the past year.

(On a related note: Buying Altera and forcing them to port their entire roadmap over to a broken 10nm process was made even more stupid by the fact that Intel didn't have a usable PDK that outsiders and acquisitions could work with.)

[sangnoir]

> ...Intel was falling behind even AMD

The "even" makes the tone of your comment feel a tiny bit disrespectful towards AMD. By 2021, it was clear to me that AMD had their gloves off and were winning. Zen 3 was released in 2020 - the third generation of nearly flawless execution by AMD that Intel failed to respond to - outside of cutting the prices on some CPUs. For a while, Intel held onto the "fastest single-core speeds". Back in 2017, my first thought after being blown away by the performance of a first-gen Zen PC build was "I should buy shares in AMD" - AMD clearly had a superior product with an even better value proposition.

[mmaniac]

I think the point is that Intel had such a lead in the Bulldozer era that for AMD to overtake them was a tremendous failure.

I would not say that the first gen of Zen is was a clear winner over Skylake. It took a couple iterations before AMD clearly took the lead. AMD was simply so far behind that several large generational improvements were needed to do better than Intel.

[sangnoir]

> I would not say that the first gen of Zen is was a clear winner over Skylake.

In 2017, I would not have said that either for Zen 1 without qualification[1]. Zen 3 on the other hand, was a winner.

That said, 1st gen Zen had better bang-for-buck than Intel, for multicore workloads - in my case, I had built a workstation and thr equivalent intel build would have cost much more, expensive Ryzen motherboards notwithstanding.

1. In my comparison as I buyer, I didn't compare Intel and AMD processors by core count, but by what I'd get with my budget. The AMD build I eent with was better than an intel build for the same amount of money.

[throwaway48476]

Zen1 was 20% behind skylake but cheaper per core. Zen2 was 5% behind. Zen3 was faster.

[lotsofpulp]

Mobile phones were picking up a lot of steam by the mid 2000s, and it doesn’t seem like Intel bothered to even investigate developing more power efficient chips.

Seems like the leaders just lost the stomach for taking risks, a long time ago. No forays into mobile or GPUs, at least not in the billions of dollar and many years scale that was needed. No stomach to pay the competitive salaries necessary to compete with Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Netflix, etc for talent.

[ThrowawayB7]

They did as recently as 2016 and then gave up on it: "Intel could be on the verge of exiting the market for smartphones and standalone tablets, wasting billions of dollars it spent trying to expand in those markets. The company is immediately canceling Atom chips, code-named Sofia and Broxton, for mobile devices, an Intel spokeswoman confirmed." (https://www.pcworld.com/article/414673/intel-is-on-the-verge...)

[easygenes]

Yeah, Otellini famously turned down Steve Jobs' request to make the chip for the first iPhone, thinking the market wouldn't be big enough. When he got pie in his face, he tried to correct course. By the time he needed to retire, the board wanted to give up on mobile, thinking they would never catch up, and double down on data center.

[twoodfin]

AFAICT, this was a self-serving bit of reverse myth-making from Otellini. If there really had been a single binary decision Intel got wrong—saying no to Jobs when they might have said yes—then their collapse looks like bad luck: Nobody bats 1.000.

But the way Apple insiders tells this story, there was no way Intel was even being considered in the (short!) window when the original iPhone was being built. Intel was in the middle of selling Xscale, and even that design was too power-hungry.

Intel missing mobile was a long history of poor strategic and tactical choices, not one bad call.

[easygenes]

Jobs had two iPhone teams working in secret against each other, and was setting up things on the side. He likely approached Otellini before either team was far along.

[usr1106]

They did more than investigate. Nokia, at that time still market leader in mobile phones, wasted a lot of time and effort because management wanted them to move to Intel. Nokia engineers did not believe that Intel would ever reach the required power efficiency. Whether it was self-fullfilling prophecy or just technically impossible is anyone's guess. (No, Nokia did not fail because of Intel, but that miss certainly made the disaster more complete.)

[Maakuth]

Intel connection was not the sole reason for Nokia's demise in phones, but it contributed on the failure of their effort to recover from the tailspin. Symbian their old mobile platform was clearly due to be replaced and they had a pretty viable in-house Linux platform, Maemo, that already shipped with N900 in 2009. Instead of iterating on that, they decided to "join forces" with Intel and merged Maemo with Intel MobLin to create MeeGo. They wasted at least a year on that and not with a lot to show for it as the Intel chips they planned for never materialized.

Obviously it was going to be very difficult to compete as a third platform with the behemoths iOS and Android become during those years. At least the MeeGo and Windows Phone cards were not the winning ones.

[usr1106]

That's the software part of the story, which became fully public in form of MeeGo.

But there was also a hardware story how Nokia would start Intel silicon. I don't think anything of that has ever been publicly annouced before it failed. Wasting a year seems to be massive underestimate. I believe it must have been much longer. After Nokia started to fail Intel hired former Nokia engineers. I have no reliable insights what they did there, but I believe at least in the beginning they still worked with phone hardware on low-level software.

[throwaway48476]

You forget networks and atoms, and the horrible failure that was x86 android.

[bee_rider]

They did Atom. They just didn’t beat ARM.

[kasabali]

Atom has always been a laptop chip. They tried to shoeshorn it to handhelds but it sucked for obvious reasons. Think Apple's chips started in iPhone, then iPads and finally very recently ramped up to Macbooks. Even Snapdragon has only very recently released a laptop worthy chip because of the design they've acquihired from Nuvia.

[bee_rider]

Basically agree.

Well, it did good enough in netbooks. It could probably have been good in tablets if they kept trying (and if non-iPad tablets really caught on).

[chithanh]

"didn't beat" puts it mildly. Every attempt Intel made at entering the smartphone business was doomed because they were years behind ARM. Paul Thurrott confirmed this with HP when discussing the Elite x3 smartphone:

https://www.thurrott.com/hardware/64677/elite-x3-hp-takes-wi...

[szundi]

Apple was an interested customer, but rumors are they perceived Intel extremely arrogant. The chip would have been to iPhone.

[Dalewyn]

>Then TSMC quietly reached parity with 7nm

The true embarrassment was when SMIC (read: China) reached 7nm and thereby surpassed Intel last year (or was that 2022?).

Intel then proceeded to waste CHIPS monies and other aid on five digit layoffs and now ousted the one CEO who ostensibly at least had the right idea.

At this point I want to see Intel fail (and Boeing too), American Exceptionalism(tm) absolutely needs to have its longass Pinocchio nose broken in half before we have any hope of rebooting ourselves.

[telendram]

As in many large projects, even more so with a large company, the point is not to react when the problems are happening, it is to preempt these problems, foresee them and prevent their happening.

So indeed, by 2018, even though Intel has not yet fallen, it's actually already late. The roots of the problems seems to be earlier, and that's where the CEO, and the Board, should have reacted.