[scarface_74]

Innovate on what though? There was no market for performant very low power chips before the iPhone and then Android took off.

I am sure if IBM had more of a market than the minuscule Mac market for laptop class PPC chips back in 2005, they could have poured money into making that work.

Even today, I doubt it would be worth Apple’s money to design and manufacture its own M class desktop chips just for around 25 million Macs + iPads if they weren’t reusing a lot of the R&D

[tgma]

In 2010s, Intel pretty much sold the same Haswell design for more than half a decade and lipsticked the pig. It is not just low power that they missed. They had time to improve the performance/watt for server use, add core counts, do big-little, improve the iGPU, etc.

They just sat on it, their marketing dept made fancy boxes for high end CPUs and their HR department innovated DEI strategies.

[JustExAWS]

Yes I’m sure that Intel fell behind because a for profit company was more concerned with hiring minorities than hiring the best employees they could find.

It’s amazing that the “take responsibility”, “pull yourself up by your bootstraps crowd” has now become the “we can’t get ahead because of minorities crowd”

[tgma]

Huh, it's not clear what you are suggesting. Who's "we" and who's not taking responsibility?

The best people were clearly not staying at Intel and they have been winning hard at AMD, Tesla, NVIDIA, Apple, Qualcomm, and TSMC, in case you have not been paying attention. They could not stop winning and getting ahead in the past 5-10 years, in fact. So much semiconductor innovation happened.

Yes, if you start promoting the wrong people, very quickly the best ones leave. No one likes to report to their stupid peer who just got promoted or the idiot they hire from the outside when there are more qualified people they could promote from within.

--

And re marketing boxes, just check out where Intel chose to innovate:

https://www.reddit.com/r/intel/comments/15dx55m/which_i9_box...

[JustExAWS]

The problem with Intel weren’t the technical people. It started with the board laying off people, borrowing money to pay dividends to investors, bad strategy, not building relationships with customers who didn’t want to work with them for fabs, etc and then firing the CEO who had a strategy that they knew was going to take years fo implement

It wasn’t because of “DI&E” initiatives and a refusal to hire white people

[anticensor]

> borrowing money to pay dividends to investor

That's scam. If you fail to profit, you should admit it, not fake it.

[scarface_74]

Apple did that too for awhile just because it was cheaper for them to borrow money than repatriate their foreign income and pay taxes.

The issue with Intel though is that they needed the money to invest in R&D.

[tgma]

Cool. And the bad decisions were made by who exactly? Intel executives & employees.

[scarface_74]

Intel didn’t hire the board. The board did hire the CEO. The bad decisions either made weren’t the results of “DE&I” initiatives.