<story><title>Intel&apos;s Humbling</title><url>https://stratechery.com/2024/intels-humbling/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tgtweak</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m kind of bullish on Intel right now.  They&amp;#x27;ve moved up so many process nodes so quickly and have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab.   Let&amp;#x27;s ignore the elephant in the room which is taiwan and it&amp;#x27;s sovereignty, and only focus on the core r&amp;amp;d.&lt;p&gt;Intel flopped so hard on process nodes for 4 years up until Gelsinger took the reigns... it was honestly unprecedented levels of R&amp;amp;D failure.  What happened over the 8 years prior was hedge funds and banks had saddled up on Intel stock which was paying healthy dividends due to cost cutting and &amp;quot;coasting&amp;quot;.  This sudden shock of &amp;quot;we&amp;#x27;re going to invest everything in R&amp;amp;D and catch back up&amp;quot; was news that a lot of intel shareholders didn&amp;#x27;t want to hear.  They dumped the stock and the price adjusted in kind.&lt;p&gt;Intel&amp;#x27;s 18A is roughly 6 months ahead of schedule, set to begin manufacturing in the latter half of 2024. Most accounts put this ahead of TSMC&amp;#x27;s equivalent N2 node...&lt;p&gt;Fab investments have a 3 year lag on delivering value.  We&amp;#x27;re only starting to see the effect of putting serious capital and focus on this, as of this year.  I also think we&amp;#x27;ll see more companies getting smart about having all of their fabrication eggs in one of two baskets (samsung or tsmc) both within a 500 mile radius circle in the south china sea.&lt;p&gt;Intel has had 4 years of technical debt on it&amp;#x27;s fabrication side, negative stock pressure from the vacuum created by AMD and Nvidia, and is still managing to be profitable.&lt;p&gt;I think the market (and analysts like this) are all throwing the towel in on the one company that has quite a lot to gain at this point after losing a disproportionate amount of share value and market.&lt;p&gt;I just hope they keep Pat at the helm for another 2 years to fully deliver on his strategy or Intel will continue where it was headed 4 years ago.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adrian_b</author><text>There is a good chance for Intel to recover, but that remains to be proven.&lt;p&gt;From their long pipeline of future CMOS manufacturing processes with which Intel hopes to close the performance gap between them and TSMC, for now there exists a single commercial product: Meteor Lake, which consists mostly of chips made by TSMC, with one single Intel 4 die, the CPU tile.&lt;p&gt;The Meteor Lake CPU seems to have finally reached the energy efficiency of the TSMC 5-nm process of almost 4 years ago, but it also has obvious difficulties in reaching high clock frequencies, exactly like Ice Lake in the past, so once more Intel has been forced to accompany Meteor Lake with Raptor Lake Refresh made in the old technology, to cover the high-performance segment.&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, Meteor Lake demonstrates reaching the first step with Intel 4.&lt;p&gt;If they will succeed to launch on time and with good performance, later this year, their server products based on Intel 3, that will be a much stronger demonstration of their real progress than this Meteor Lake preview, which has also retained their old microarchitecture for the big cores, so it shows nothing new there.&lt;p&gt;Only by the end of 2024 it will become known whether Intel has really become competitive again, after seeing the Arrow Lake microarchitecture and the Intel 20A manufacturing process.</text></comment>
<story><title>Intel&apos;s Humbling</title><url>https://stratechery.com/2024/intels-humbling/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>tgtweak</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m kind of bullish on Intel right now.  They&amp;#x27;ve moved up so many process nodes so quickly and have made some earnest headway in being an actual fab.   Let&amp;#x27;s ignore the elephant in the room which is taiwan and it&amp;#x27;s sovereignty, and only focus on the core r&amp;amp;d.&lt;p&gt;Intel flopped so hard on process nodes for 4 years up until Gelsinger took the reigns... it was honestly unprecedented levels of R&amp;amp;D failure.  What happened over the 8 years prior was hedge funds and banks had saddled up on Intel stock which was paying healthy dividends due to cost cutting and &amp;quot;coasting&amp;quot;.  This sudden shock of &amp;quot;we&amp;#x27;re going to invest everything in R&amp;amp;D and catch back up&amp;quot; was news that a lot of intel shareholders didn&amp;#x27;t want to hear.  They dumped the stock and the price adjusted in kind.&lt;p&gt;Intel&amp;#x27;s 18A is roughly 6 months ahead of schedule, set to begin manufacturing in the latter half of 2024. Most accounts put this ahead of TSMC&amp;#x27;s equivalent N2 node...&lt;p&gt;Fab investments have a 3 year lag on delivering value.  We&amp;#x27;re only starting to see the effect of putting serious capital and focus on this, as of this year.  I also think we&amp;#x27;ll see more companies getting smart about having all of their fabrication eggs in one of two baskets (samsung or tsmc) both within a 500 mile radius circle in the south china sea.&lt;p&gt;Intel has had 4 years of technical debt on it&amp;#x27;s fabrication side, negative stock pressure from the vacuum created by AMD and Nvidia, and is still managing to be profitable.&lt;p&gt;I think the market (and analysts like this) are all throwing the towel in on the one company that has quite a lot to gain at this point after losing a disproportionate amount of share value and market.&lt;p&gt;I just hope they keep Pat at the helm for another 2 years to fully deliver on his strategy or Intel will continue where it was headed 4 years ago.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway4good</author><text>What I worry about with Intel is that they have gotten too much into politics; relying on CHIPS act and other subsidies, encouraging sanctions on Chinese competitors while relying on full access to the Chinese market for sales.&lt;p&gt;It is not a good long term strategy: The winds of politics may change, politicians may set more terms (labour and environment), foreign market access may become politicized too (US politicians will have to sell chips like they sell airplanes on foreign trips).&lt;p&gt;So Intel will end up like the old US car makers or Boeing - no longer driven by technological innovation but instead by its relationship to Washington.</text></comment>