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NVIDIA Replaces Rival Chipmaker Intel on the Dow Jones Industrial Average (cnbc.com) 39

In 1896 the Dow Jones Industrial Average (or DJIA) was created as a kind of proxy indicator for the wider stock market. "A stock is typically added only if the company has an excellent reputation, demonstrates sustained growth and is of interest to a large number of investors," according to a source cited by Yahoo Finance. Its mix of stocks might be informally considered a sign of the times, since it's made up of 30 stocks that according to Wikipedia have been changed only 57 times over the last 128 years.

Wait — make that 58.... CNBC reports that NVIDIA is replacing Intel in the DJIA, "a shakeup to the blue-chip index that reflects the boom in AI and a major shift in the semiconductor industry." Companies including Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon are purchasing Nvidia's GPUs, such as the H100, in massive quantities to build clusters of computers for their AI work. Nvidia's revenue has more than doubled in each of the past five quarters, and has at least tripled in three of them. The company has sginaled that demand for its next-generation AI GPU called Blackwell is "insane...."

While Nvidia has been soaring, Intel has been slumping. Long the dominant maker of PC chips, Intel has lost market share to Advanced Micro Devices and has made very little headway in AI. Intel shares have fallen by more than half this year as the company struggles with manufacturing challenges and new competition for its central processors. Intel said in a filing this week that the board's audit and finance committee approved cost and capital reduction activities, including lowering head count by 16,500 employees and reducing its real estate footprint. The job cuts were originally announced in August."

The DJIA will now include four of six tech companies worth $1 trillion — Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Amazon (which joined in February, replacing the owners of the Walgreens pharmacy chain). The other two trillion-dollar tech companies (not included in the DJIA) are Meta and Alphabet.

Adding NVIDIA to the DJIA will ensure "more representative exposure to the semiconductors industry" within the average, the index's curators told the Washington Post.

And also leaving the DJIA is power-generation company AES (which according to CNBC had a power mix of 54% renewables, 27% natural gas, 17% coal). It will be replaced by Vistra, defined by Wikipedia as America's largest competitive power generator, "with a capacity of approximately 39GW powered by a diverse portfolio including natural gas, nuclear, solar, and battery energy storage facilities." In the 2020 Forbes Global 2000, Vistra Energy was ranked as the 756th-largest public company in the world. The company owns the Moss Landing Power Plant in California which currently (2021) contains the largest battery energy storage system in the world (400-MW/1,600-MWh). As of 2020, the company was ranked as the highest CO2 emitter in the U.S.

NVIDIA Replaces Rival Chipmaker Intel on the Dow Jones Industrial Average

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  • by ClickOnThis ( 137803 ) on Saturday November 02, 2024 @12:48PM (#64914819) Journal

    The Dow is not a good index. [stanford.edu] It began as an average of stock-prices of a couple dozen companies, and the kludge has been patched and repatched ever since.

    The Nikkei 225 has the same weakness.

    The better indexes use market-cap weighting. S&P US 500, S&P TSX 60, and so on.

    • Here are some other (better?) critiques of the Dow.

      https://www.investopedia.com/a... [investopedia.com]
      https://retirementresearcher.c... [retirementresearcher.com]

      • I'm not going to argue against math but this is mostly a psychological event which will send large investors to pull ever more money from Intel and move it to Nvidia, AMD and others.

        Watch for further Intel price drops as they get sucked further into their death spiral.

  • by kriston ( 7886 ) on Saturday November 02, 2024 @12:51PM (#64914823) Homepage Journal

    How are nVidia and Intel rivals?

    Intel video cards, up to and including the ARC brand, have always been distant thirds behind nVidia and AMD/ATI.

    nVidia doesn't even make a general-purpose CPU anymore like Intel always has.

    • by DrMrLordX ( 559371 ) on Saturday November 02, 2024 @12:57PM (#64914837)

      Intel wants to sell AI accelerators like Gaudi 3 while NV is starting to produce enterprise system solutions to host their accelerators (Grace/Hopper). There is market overlap.

      Traditionally, system integrators that sold a heterogeneous compute solution would source platform and CPU tech from a company like Intel and compute cards from someone like NV. They're both encroaching on the other's territory. Intel isn't doing very well at it.

    • nVidia doesn't even make a general-purpose CPU anymore like Intel always has.

      Uh...wut?

      https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/d... [nvidia.com]

      And coming soon:

      https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/... [nvidia.com]

      You probably haven't heard of these because they don't market them to consumers, only businesses. This is basically because there isn't really a direct consumer market for them. E.g. no enthusiasts are going around building arm based computers, x86 still has a monopoly on that, mainly because Microsoft has been dragging their feet with Arm support, and software developers have shown little interest in supporting it (e

      • by Guspaz ( 556486 )

        People probably haven't heard of them because even nVidia doesn't even use them in their own servers: they put AMD and Intel CPUs in DGX/HGX boxes. nVidia has CPU ambitions. Several of their attempts have flopped hard, like how they ended up reverting Tegra from nVidia-designed CPUs to ARM-designed CPUs. They may eventually succeed, of course.

  • I remember when Intel was regarded as well-nigh invincible in the CPU market.

    Other markets, not so much. They had success in networking Ethernet adapter chips, but every other venture puttered along for a few years and then eventually folded up and they would return to their "core competency" and that would be a nonstop cash cow for them.

    Hard to imagine a future where they return to the preeminence they once had.

  • Intel has long been one of America's greatest companies. It saddens me to see them eclipsed and losing money and market share. They still do a lot of interesting work, for example building the world's largest neuromorphic engine as announced in April '24 [intel.com].

    There's also the Core Ultra processor family [intel.com], announced last December, with integrated bluetooth, wifi, 16 cores, etc. I'm not a PC marketing expert but this seems like a pretty powerful chip, albeit they appear to have lost the Apple market to the M ser
    • by war4peace ( 1628283 ) on Saturday November 02, 2024 @01:20PM (#64914859)

      The Core Ultra is a 1st-gen of an architecture change. While promising, it stumbles a bit, and will continue to do so for a few months, until software and firmware related kinks are ironed out. I'd venture to say it will become better (at least in gaming) after a Windows Scheduler update.
      It also kind of mandates using CU-DIMM DDR5, which is also relatively new and might have some kinks of its own. While it does work with regular DDR5, the overall performance is a bit strangled.

      This pretty much means you need to buy a new CPU, a new motherboard and new RAM in case of an upgrade - which becomes pretty expensive very quickly.
      It also makes little sense to upgrade if you already own a 13th/14th gen (maybe even 12th gen) Intel CPU.

      • by Guspaz ( 556486 )

        Core Ultra suffers from inter-tile latency issues, Windows updates aren't going to move the needle there. Architectural changes are needed, and probably coming in the next generation.

        • Using CU-DIMM instead of non-CU-DIMM saw a pretty sizeable uptick in performance already.
          Even with regular DDR5, the 285K beats the 14900K by 5-10%, while using less power and being very stable voltage-wise.

          Interestingly, overclocking the E-cores yields more performance than overclocking the P-cores.

          Of course, this generation has its limits, and the next one is going to be an improvement. The only question is... will thee CPUs still be made by Intel? :)

          • by Guspaz ( 556486 )

            Asking if the CPUs will "still" be made by Intel implies that they are today. They aren't. Meteor Lake moved everything but the compute tile to TSMC. Arrow Lake moved the compute tile to TSMC too, so the whole chip. They now use TSMC N3B for the compute tile, TSMC N5P for the graphics tile, and TSMC N6 for the SoC and I/O tiles.

            We already know who will be making what in the next generation too. According to Intel in their latest earnings call, "70% plus" of Panther Lake's silicon area will be made by Intel,

    • by iAmWaySmarterThanYou ( 10095012 ) on Saturday November 02, 2024 @02:13PM (#64914927)

      It has been a long time since Intel was a great company.

      This is a joy to watch. This is capitalism in action. Poorly run company turns to dust while better run company takes its place.

      It's beautiful.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        This is slashdot, remember? Capitalism bad, socialism good. The product corporations have a responsibility to deliver is jobs, not anything people find useful. It's better that we all have shit technology so long as we're all employed. As rsilvergun teaches, and most slashdotters readily accept, it's that nobody ever breaks the law because they're just being an asshole, it's an act of desperation for food and a job. You see, people like Osama Bin Laden, if he would have simply had a job, he wouldn't have pr

        • This is slashdot, remember? Capitalism bad, socialism good.

          No it's slashdot where inexplicably people who aren't raging morons still remain. Blindly cheerleading for capitalism as if its a sports team is about as stupid as blindly cheering for a political party as if its a sports team.

          It's great ot see capitalism giving a beating to a company that richly deserved it. Except that again companies aren't people. Intel aren't going to be replaced by new entrant to the market, we will instead see more consolidat

          • No it's slashdot where inexplicably people who aren't raging morons still remain. Blindly cheerleading for capitalism as if its a sports team is about as stupid as blindly cheering for a political party as if its a sports team.

            I look at capitalism a lot like I look at democracy: A system with many flaws, but basically the best we've ever had. So naturally, I'm going to shit on the people who want to fascism the economy, which is really what socialism is all about. People who tell you otherwise either have no idea how a command economy works, or they're like Bernie where they openly advocated for one until the USSR blew up spectacularly where they promptly and forevermore lost the economy argument, so now he just pretends that he

  • Intel owned the CPU world for many many years. They were innovative and always working hard to make the next big thing while holding prices down.

    And then they forgot to innovate. They thought they could shift the entire world to Itanium and when that failed (because it was stupid) they refused to play ball with customers and kept pushing it anyway because of their inflated egos.

    Meanwhile AMD gave people what they wanted at a fair price and grew and grew and grew and became the little train that could, und

    • What's strange is that Intel hasn't really been knocked off their throne. People still buy CPU's, and they still buy them mostly from Intel. AMD has chipped away and Intel's market share has eroded from high 80%'s to high 70%'s - which is still pretty damn high!

      https://pcviewed.com/wp-conten... [pcviewed.com]

      Compare that to, say, Blackberry, whose market share would bounce around by that much even during their heyday, before a truly precipitous death spiral:

      https://ipcarrier.blogspot.com... [blogspot.com]

      It's as if Intel can n

      • Intel has a huge brand name and contracts with manufacturers.

        Their actual offerings are weak and their brand is no longer "no one ever got fired buying XYZ".

        It can take years for large companies to completely crumble but they're clearly on the way. I give them 2 generations of CPU's to recover. If their i15 and/or i16 aren't very whiz bang must-have above AMD or they don't come out with a highly competitive AI chip to challenge Nvidia or create something completely new and amazing we never knew we needed

      • by Guspaz ( 556486 )

        Intel's CPU market share is still strong, but's steadily and consistently shrinking, and the reputational damage has been severe. But that's not what's sinking the company, their fabs are. They've been burning through their cash reserves rapidly trying to get 18A done, and cancelled 20A to try to stem the bleeding. And of course, 18A isn't the end of the money pit, they'll need to dump tons of cash into 14A after that. That is to say, even if 18A is a successful node, that won't change the fact that their f

  • To the pinksheets with ya. Yeh, this probably ain't coming back.
  • No people, Intel is not going to go fade away. The stock price has already factored in all the bad news. Arrow Lake and Lunar Lake are decent stop gaps until the new fabs start coming online in 2025. Plenty of new partnerships too. You go short INTC. I'm going long.

  • When nobody notices any technological advancements anymore due to all the marketing bullshit from Intel.

What we anticipate seldom occurs; what we least expect generally happens. -- Bengamin Disraeli

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