[throwaway48476]

Gamers are buying at $250. If you pay more you can find B580 on the shelves now. That Xe cores and driver development are shared with other products is the only reason they haven't canceled the dGPU division. The hardware business is all about designing IP and amortizing the cost in as many products as possible.

Of course consumers don't care about die size and cost, only the value of the end product. The problem is intel and their negative margins. Maybe people are too blitz scale brained but running a negative margin hardware business is a really bad idea. Typically they target 50% margins.

Now if intel was healthy maybe they could survive a few negative margin products by subsidizing from their profitable SKUs. However intel is not healthy and reported losses every quarter last year. It's a sinking ship and they need a come to Jesus monent before they go bankrupt.

I'm arguing that their product segmentation strategy is stuck in the past and a significant reason why they're unprofitable. On desktop CPUs they lock ECC even though the Xeons are cheaper because they remove the E cores so AVX512 will work. On dGPUs they lock out SRIOV even though the desktop iGPUs support it. On the server they created accelerators which they then tried to charge for which means no one bothered to write integrations to make it work with their software. It's a broken culture which is so up it's own ass that management only cares about intel and is completely disconnected from the customers. Intel needs product features and value differentiators that aren't just negative margin products, changing product segmentation is low hanging fruit.

Being intransigent and the same as the competition but slightly worse had led them to unprofitability and soon, bankrupty. Interest rates are going up and companies carrying debt are going to be in a rough spot.

[sitkack]

Intel needs to vastly streamline and cut down their SKUs (antithetical to the PM regime they have built up over the last 25+ years).

They need to stop artificially crippling their products to segment them. Simplify naming and have mid, great and greatest. The lowend shit products should be dumped. This means SRV-IO and ECC available everywhere. All of their GPUs should shift right by 8GB or more.

Streamlining their SKUs would streamline their wafer processing in the fabs.

[throwaway48476]

SKU binning doesn't take any fab time.

They do have too many SKUs though.

[sitkack]

How much has SKU explosion lead to mask set explosion and having to do runs, bank that and switching to another set of masks?

At this point they should just produce Xeons and support at most 2 sockets. I don't care if they fuse off features with cryptographic keys. Ship one piece of silicon to everyone, streamline the shit out of that.

ECC everywhere, no questions asked.

[throwaway48476]

Basically none at all.

I haven't checked in a while but for client there's basically two die masks. In 13th and 14th gen half the SKUs were 12th gen masks.

Mobile is either the same as client or a smaller mobile efficiency die, but only one mobile mask.

For server there's just E cores and P core tiles. The limitation is packaging not fab.

The SKU is just fuses and written at validation after binning.

ECC everywhere would be a far better excuse for enterprises to upgrade their old PCs that 'AI PCs'

[yvdriess]

Agreed, Intel needs to win back customers. Removing the MBA-staple strategy of artificial market segmentation would be a strong signal that they are serious about becoming an actual customer-first company.