IMO, Intel is circling the drain and will die without intervention. And their death will have some pretty crazy ramifications.
If the US had competent leaders, they’d realize Intel was important to global security, and they’d come up with some sort of way to break up the fab and design business.
No one wants to send their designs to Intel’s fab because they don’t want Intel to copy their homework. That’s why Intel’s design competitors use TSMC. And TSMC scales faster because of increased money and experience.
Trump’s 100% tariffs on chips made outside the USA is puzzling. It it an attempt to force Intel, who do make chips in the USA, to become more competitive just through bullying everyone? Or does he know it will just cause more trouble and is he trying to drive Intel into the ground for revenge because they took Biden’s money? Why is he also demanding that Intel’s CEO resign? Does none of it make sense because Trump is a crazy old narcissist who has lost touch with reality and is now losing his mind?
Trump loooves to take action. Coherent plan or direction is irrelevant.
Good luck US, still some to go.
Point 3 of Umberto Eco’s traits of ur-fascism.
Irrationalism also depends on the cult of action for action’s sake. Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form of emasculation. Therefore culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with critical attitudes. Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement (“When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun”) to the frequent use of such expressions as “degenerate intellectuals,” “eggheads,” “effete snobs,” “universities are a nest of reds.” The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values.
Right? Good Luck America. FAFO.
Thanks
there is no real rationale. Trump is all impulse, no long range thinking/planning.
The tariff thing just shows that Trump doesn’t understand why people use TSMC. TSMC doesn’t have a brand of chips that they sell, and they can’t copy your designs.
Companies don’t manufacture with Intel because Intel isn’t just their manufacturer, it’s their competitor. Also, Intel’s fab is now behind the curve. It literally can’t manufacture some of the shit Apple and Nvidia want.
Trump sees a rash and is prescribing cortisone cream. But the skin irritation is from melanoma.
There’s no way politicians will let one of the most important chip manufacturers die. If push comes to shove, they’ll get subsidies
… Have you seen the competence of the politicians on display in the US right now?
sure, but if the us doesn’t china will.
Didn’t the orange one threaten tsmc to buy 49% of Intel or will get higher tariffs?
Probably not, but these morons will probably wait until too much damage is done. They’re shortsighted AF.
or they will just move overseas.
So, their chips become unsuitable for enterprise servers. Datacenters avoiding them and buying AMD. Intel losing enterprise market share and revenue. Reduced revenue causes next layoffs, probably again people working on things that keep the business working. Shoots itself in the foot and being surprised about the consequences.
And AMD becoming a monopoly, nice, nice world
Yes :(
Monopolies are good for the consumer as it makes purchasing decisions easier. Some tech markets such as the GPU one show how well a monopoly can work for shareholders.
Monopolies are good for the consumer?
Respectfully, what the fuck are you talking about. That has never been true ever.
Based on the last sentence, I believe it’s satire.
I thought the second sentence made that clear but apparently not.
If only there was an understood way to convey sarcasm.
There is /s but I opted not to use it. Using it makes the sarcasm less “fun”/rewarding for me.
I am quite surprised at the amount of people that think people exist that would praise a monopoly and celebrate shareholder value. Sadly people thinking that means that they have encountered people who hold such beliefs seriously. Which is quite sad.
How did you get that downvote? Must have been a mistake.
Am i being wooshed?
Yeah, wouldn’t it be amazing if for example Apple has the monopoly on the smartphone market, so your purchasing decision would be to buy an iPhone, or a slightly larger iPhone? And they would have no competition - which is the definition of a monopoly - so they could price them at whatever they wanted to, they could even make the American iPhone a reality, because let’s be real, it’s kinda hard to function without a phone these days so who cares if it costs $5k, you can just sell a kidney, right? You got two of 'em.
Monopolies are such a great thing for consumers :)
(Please don’t sell a kidney for an iPhone, it’s a really bad decision.)
That story is really sad. To me it seems like a failing of the parents/education system to not teach the son who was 17 that selling a kidney is a bad idea.
That is what the tariffs are for and Apple has promised to invest a shit ton of money into manufacturing those phones here… so they can raise the prices to the ceiling of the tariffs imposed on China, India, Thailand, Indonesia … etc. There are no other smart phones manufactured in the US so they will effectively… have a monopoly.
Decisions easier, quality and sanity suffers, though.
Worst bot?
Coretemp and Ethernet. Also a few years ago the guy that maintained meshcentral (the only reason to pay extra $$$ for having Intel vPro compatibile computers in the workspace)
Basically this tells their biggest customers “next server needs to be based on AMD epyc”
How much money they could possibly “save” with those THREE salaries? Just cut one week of travel with private jet for the C class and the same savings are served
But how else is the CEO going to cheat on his wife? Cold play concerts are def out of the picture now.
Mass layoffs are never done in a thoughtful way. It’s often the C-suite telling each division “cut x number of staff underneath you”. That order is filtered down through layers of management until it gets to the people who do actual work. If they’re lucky, they can negotiate some room on their team with one or two layers of management above them, but it just means another team underneath the same management layer is getting hit that much more.
Remember that when a CEO says “we had to make the hard but necessary decision”. All that asshole had to do was say “cut 10,000 people” and filter that order down the stack. All the actual hard decisions were made far, far away from the board of directors.
Mostly nontechnical person here: how much active maintenance does this driver need? To the uninitiated, it sounds like it should be basic and standard.
Not much, but it does need to be maintained. Every time someone pushes an update to code that the driver uses, something changes in the Linux kernel, or Intel releases be hardware that needs a different register map or whatever, the driver will fail. If nobody steps up to maintain it, it could stop working in a matter of months.
Okay, thanks!
This doesn’t sound like a 40-hour per week kind of a job
I doubt maintaining a single deriver was their only responsibility.
Their “real” job was some standard cog-in-the-machine engineering work, which is why they got laid off. Just another number.
Most open-source work happens outside of corporate planning and so it’s invisible to the company. When the reality is, it would absolutely be worth it to Intel to pay a 40/w salary just to maintain this little bit of code. The value is there, but the humans running the company would never be able to get over the hurdle of “he’s not working very hard so he doesn’t deserve the money.”
When I got a new desktop PC this year I specifically avoided anything with Intel in it because of how bad they dropped the ball with their GPUs basically disintegrating.
This is just a small glimpse into how Intel is breaking down from the inside. It may take a few years but if the US government doesn’t intervene somehow on their behalf I truly think Intel might be done for in the next 5 years.
Same. Intel and Nvidia are both on the boycott list.
As great as AMD is right now, I still don’t want them to become a monopoly. The fact that we have a duopoly is already a major problem.
Maybe we can dig up VIA and get a new Cyrix CPU.
It’s time for Voodoo to make a triumphant return!
Imagine if x86-64 got blown open because of it? Might literally be the best thing to happen to computing in like 40 years.
Really fuckin’ doubt it’ll happen, but a girl can dream XP
Or, what if it just became irrelevant. It’s had a great run. But honestly ARM has shown plenty of versatility and power. While being licensable unlike x86. And things like riscv have similar of not better potential.
Its always going to be relevant, even if only emulated, simply because of how many code bases are stuck on x86/x86-64.
Open sourcing it and all of its extensions solves the licensing problems of not only itself, but Arm, while providing a battle tested architecture with decades of maturity.
Also imagine the fun FPGA consoles could have with that?
Oh I have no issues with it being relevant in the same sense the Z80 68k or 6502 still being relevant. Just not part of a controlling duopoly.
Thank you. Thank you for giving me hope lol
The base x86-64 patents expired in 2021. Also, it was held by AMD, not Intel.
However, there are a lot of extensions that are still under patent. You can make an x86-64 processor the way it was when Opteron was released in 2003, but it won’t be competitive with current offerings. Those extensions are patented by a mix of both Intel and AMD. Intel failing isn’t going to fully open x86-64.
Edit: also, it’s not just the patents, it’s the people. Via is still technically out there and could theoretically make its own x86-64 to modern standards. However, x86-64 is a very difficult architecture to optimize, and all the people who know how to do it already work for either Intel or AMD. Actually, they might only work for AMD, even before the layoffs.
But if history is any indicator, they will. “Too big to fail!”
What’s crazy is, people will say “See how capitalism fails us?” when that is socialized capitalism. The government should not be bailing out any companies. If they can’t survive without government money, they don’t need to exist.
socialized capitalism
I think I understand your complaint, but I’d say “free market” rather than “capitalism”. But regardless of what we call it, it doesn’t actually exist unless you have a more powerful external system regulating it.
Start with a truly free-market capitalist system. One company manages to temporarily pull ahead (through luck and skill). The rational thing for the company to do isn’t “make better products” (that’s hard) but “destroy competing companies” (much easier). And the end-product would be that the company becomes a government so it can force consumers to pay.
So I’d argue that socialized capitalism (which I’m picturing as a socialist system that permits certain specific free markets and handles the fallout of business failures) is what you actually want.
Not exactly. And larger companies simply CANT destroy competition without assistance from the government.
If you are free to choose what to buy, and who to buy it from, you can choose to buy from the startup. You can choose to buy from the guy running a business out of the back of his pickup. Or out of his garage. Or any number of options.
Problem is, right now we have our government enabling monopolies. Propping up failing, or non-profitable businesses by making it illegal to do business without spending millions or more on regulations that seem good on the surface, but when you start to dig into them, you see the vast majority of them were actually pushed by the big name businesses to stifle competition.
Our wallets should be the only regulation. Would you willingly buy products from a company that doesn’t respect the environment? No? Well guess what! That’s the power of the free market.
There’s, right now, a hybrid truck manufacturer in Canada that is staring down the barrel of excessive regulations that will limit their ability to build hybrid semi trucks.
How many other would-be entrepreneurs simply don’t even bother trying because there’s no way they can afford it?
How many small 1 to 2 person businesses would be in existence right now to compete with all these large companies?
When I read your message, I get the impression that you think of “The Government” as this independent actor. I see it as a system that is primarily controlled by wealthy people. Either directly or through their funding advertisements (including astroturfing/bot-farms) to promote what they want.
So the larger companies do get government assistance… because they are the government. And this isn’t some kind of weird coincidence. It’s fundamental to capitalism’s operation. You can’t have a system that’s based on capital and then have it be unbiased towards entities who have vastly more capital!
It’s odd that you think it’s fundamental to capitalism when it’s exactly the opposite. True capitalism is an unfettered marketplace.
What we have now is a system here the profits are private, but the losses are socialized.
You may think that’s an effect of capitalism, but it most definitely is not.
You are conflating a system of governance with a system of economics. And I get it, because in a controlled economy, the government is usually the one doing the controlling.
What we have is something in the middle, taking the worst aspects of truly free-market capitalism, and marrying it with the worst aspects of a controlled economy.
Our government the picks winners in this setup we have. Instead of letting the market decide.
Your issue is that you see all the things this half-breed, partially-socialist economy gives us, and you blame it on the market. But the market didn’t get us here.
History tells me what will happen if we finally give in, and give total control of the economy over to the politicians. And I do not want that for my children, or their children.
In an unfettered marketplace, what stops a dominant player from introducing fetters?
Competition.
Without force, how can they stop a small player from offering a competitive option?
So just stick with what I’ve been doing and avoid Intel? Got it.
AMD all the way baby!
Sure, but in the meantime I need to work with what I have… which is Intel (on some machines, at least).
Nothing wrong with that, but when given the choice… I’ll go AMD. I think I bought an i5 one time only in my life and I’m old.
The problems at Intel haven’t even begun. When a big company does layoffs like that, there’s a certain amount of institutional knowledge that just evaporates.
There are going to be a large amount of dropped balls at Intel and this is just one of them.
Sadly, I think instead of the market responding and Intel going under, Intel will mutate into a government subsidized technology company. At least for the present moment, they serve as an example of what could be domestic manufacturing.
To me, their attitudes strongly resemble Blackberry just prior to the iPhone coming out. They have a certain amount of arrogance and are resting on past glories. It’s pretty clear that just cranking up the wattage and shipping a new product isn’t a path they can walk forever.
It’s a shame that Intel was actually on a plan to get things fixed up. Their former CEO pay Gelsinger had told them they had to endure some years of pain before things would be better. Unfortunately, the board was not so tolerant and kicked him out before the plan was fully realized.
Their board has some really questionable members on it too, so all around not a very good situation. Probably the only thing in Intel’s favor is that starting a new microprocessor company isn’t just something you do in the basement, so they have some room to turn the ship around.
Stop buying Intel products, got it thanks!
Hey this is kind of interesting since I just met up with my friend who works for Intel today for his kids first birthday and he was telling me about this issue and how they’re trying to get him to be part of a related team (not specifically related to Linux) on top of his other responsibilities…
He went on at some length describing how absolutely absurd the whole structure was of related systems and how it’s a miracle any of it works lol
it’s a miracle any of it works
After 25 years in software development, I can say that’s how I feel as well.
I’m a network engineer and lately I’ve dived deep on wifi. I feel the same way about wifi.
Man, wifi is black magic. Not the nice kind that draws kittens out of hats, but that one that need a blood sacrifice to work
Since I had comp architecture in undergrad I find it a miracle that any of it works.
Another reason to go for Amd
I’ve been a gushing fanboy since I had a discount $200 laptop that ran mass effect 3 with an integrated GPU.
