What Arm's CEO makes of the Intel debacle (theverge.com) 17
Arm " is worth almost $150 billion," writes the Verge, "which is now considerably more than Intel."
"With the news earlier this week that Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger 'retired' and Intel is evaluating its options for a possible spinoff or outright sale, I wanted to hear what [Arm CEO Rene] Haas thought should happen to his longtime frenemy. There were reports that [Haas] approached Intel about buying a big chunk of the company before Gelsinger was ousted...." Haas: As someone who has been in the industry my whole career, it is a little sad to see what's happening... Intel is an innovation powerhouse. At the same time, you have to innovate in our industry. There are lots of tombstones of great tech companies that don't reinvent themselves.
I think Intel's biggest dilemma is how to disassociate being either a vertical company [where a company owns its supply chain] or a fabless company, to oversimplify it. That is the fork in the road that they've faced for the last decade. Pat [Gelsinger] had a strategy that was very clear that vertical was the way to win. In my opinion, when he took that strategy on in 2021, that was not a three-year strategy. That was a five-to-10-year strategy. He's gone and there's a new CEO to be brought in and the decision has to be made.
My personal bias says that vertical integration is a pretty powerful thing. If they could get that right, I think they would be in an amazing position. But the cost associated with it is so high that it may be too big of a hill to climb. I'm not going to comment on the rumors that we wanted to buy them. But I think, again, if you're a vertically integrated company and the power of your strategy is in the fact that you have a product and you have fabs, inherently, you have a potential huge advantage in terms of cost versus the competition.
When Pat was the CEO, I did tell him more than once, "You ought to license Arm because if you've got your own fabs, fabs are all about volume and we can provide volume." I wasn't successful in convincing him to do that...
Haas also obliquely commented on rumors that Arm will build its own AI chips, saying that companies making hardware are closer to the "interlock" of between hardware and software and "have a much better perspective in terms of the design tradeoffs to make. So, if we were to do something, that would be one of the reasons."
The full interview will be coming to the Verge's Decoder podcast soon...
"With the news earlier this week that Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger 'retired' and Intel is evaluating its options for a possible spinoff or outright sale, I wanted to hear what [Arm CEO Rene] Haas thought should happen to his longtime frenemy. There were reports that [Haas] approached Intel about buying a big chunk of the company before Gelsinger was ousted...." Haas: As someone who has been in the industry my whole career, it is a little sad to see what's happening... Intel is an innovation powerhouse. At the same time, you have to innovate in our industry. There are lots of tombstones of great tech companies that don't reinvent themselves.
I think Intel's biggest dilemma is how to disassociate being either a vertical company [where a company owns its supply chain] or a fabless company, to oversimplify it. That is the fork in the road that they've faced for the last decade. Pat [Gelsinger] had a strategy that was very clear that vertical was the way to win. In my opinion, when he took that strategy on in 2021, that was not a three-year strategy. That was a five-to-10-year strategy. He's gone and there's a new CEO to be brought in and the decision has to be made.
My personal bias says that vertical integration is a pretty powerful thing. If they could get that right, I think they would be in an amazing position. But the cost associated with it is so high that it may be too big of a hill to climb. I'm not going to comment on the rumors that we wanted to buy them. But I think, again, if you're a vertically integrated company and the power of your strategy is in the fact that you have a product and you have fabs, inherently, you have a potential huge advantage in terms of cost versus the competition.
When Pat was the CEO, I did tell him more than once, "You ought to license Arm because if you've got your own fabs, fabs are all about volume and we can provide volume." I wasn't successful in convincing him to do that...
Haas also obliquely commented on rumors that Arm will build its own AI chips, saying that companies making hardware are closer to the "interlock" of between hardware and software and "have a much better perspective in terms of the design tradeoffs to make. So, if we were to do something, that would be one of the reasons."
The full interview will be coming to the Verge's Decoder podcast soon...
Re:"What do you make of your enemy's misfortunes?" (Score:5, Insightful)
Go away with your FUD.
He was asked a question and sounded quite lucid.
I was glad to read your reply, because I basically came here to say "Holy shit! A CEO who isn't spouting HR / PR pseudo-language and who's actually making sense". I don't know enough to say whether he's right or wrong; but at least he makes direct, coherent, logical statements. He doesn't sound like he's sitting on a fence with a picket shoved up his ass. That's a rarity these days.
Re: "What do you make of your enemy's misfortunes? (Score:2)
What? He's worse than AI. "Intel is an innovation powerhouse. At the same time, you have to innovate in our industry." That's self-contradictory.
Re: "What do you make of your enemy's misfortunes? (Score:2)
He doesn't sound like Schadenfreude, he seems to share his view of the industry with a major player in a bad spot. There's very few players so they need each other in a way.
Does Intel have anything? (Score:5, Insightful)
Does Intel have anything anyone wants today?
Their bread and butter, x86 CPUS, are completely outclassed by AMD on server and desktop, and has zero play in portable. They have discrete GPUs now, and they work, but they aren't that great; slightly lower cost than competitors is all you get. They have a bunch of ancillary stuff: network, storage, etc. But it's all matched by competitors as well. Intel offers nothing in the new hotness of AI. I guess their laptop/table stuff is pretty good and still competitive.
At one time I valued Intel's quality: the stability and solid design of chipsets, network devices, drivers, etc. Now, though, you see the 13/14 series CPU power management debacle and that's squandered. Not to mention Spectre et al.
Intel needs radical change. Price cuts, de-tiering products, opening designs to third parties, etc.
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Logic silicon isn't the only game in town; it's a somewhat different list for analog and mixed signal, DRAM, NAND, and optoelectronics(especially non-networking ones, like camera sensors); but for most of thing things Intel actually does their competitors are fabless outfits.
Apparently Intel can't actually avoid losing money while AMD and Nvidia are
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Good answer to the question.
The direction the federal government has been going with Intel: subsidies, with requirements to keep the manufacturing domestic, is something I agree with. The future is automation, and that includes war.
Making shitty GPUs ever since (Score:2)
Intel always thought they could get away wit making shitty GPUs and selling them with a ton of buzzwords.
Cognitive Dissonance Killed Intel? (Score:2)
1. "I'm going to spend the money necessary to achieve vertical integration"
2. "I'm going to spend the money necessary to keep the stock price up"
He clearly prioritized #2 over #1 and the result is the absolute failure of the key corporate strategy of Intel.
same as ever (Score:2)
Intel is and was very good at making what they make. The problem is that the world has moved on, and Intel hasn't. It's part of the life cycle of companies. IBM was and is very good at making mainframes...
Competition breeds efficiency (Score:3)
1. A couple of centuries ago, the big players in the watch industry were the British and the French. Dutch merchants, rich from trading with India and the "new world" invested money into watch-making in Switzerland. These were known as the "Dutch forgeries" and utilised the untapped idle labor of the Swiss essentially in Winter lockdown. Lots and lots of Swiss watch brands appeared and they were the opposite of vertically integrated. Once company would make make cases, and supply many companies. The same for dials, hands, movements, bracelets etc. They created some of the world's first production lines. The Swiss came to dominate with this approach, and the added competition meant that the best case makers, bracelet makers, movement makers, hand makers etc came to dominate, and resources became very efficiently allocated due to this competition.
2. Another example is from this year, and it was very telling. For a business I do IT for, they had a CRM system that everyone loved. It is from an independent company and they sell their CRM system on the open market and compete with everyone, in order to survive. People were very happy. Then this year, the head office told all the branches that they have to stop using their custom CRM systems, and that everyone had to standardise on the company's own in-house CRM system. And Oh My Lord is it a stinking pile of crap! Some sales staff have even quit of it - it's that bad. On the back end, it uses a
These things all happen due to vertical integration. I HATE VERTICAL INTEGRATION! It's the devil. And we all know how IBM fared. So many examples. OK I'll shut up now.
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The ARM thing (Score:2)
Didn't Intel do ARM chips once? Goes looking ... yep, the DEC StrongARM, which became XScale.
Looks like they never made it to general CPU status under Intel even those that's exactly what DEC had intended.
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StrongARM was the best-performing ARM implementation when Intel bought it. The Newton MessagePad 2100 had performance that was competitive with desktops at the time. When Paul Otellini became CEO of Intel, he tried to insist on forcing x86 everywhere. To him, Intel and x86 were synonymous. They sold their ARM IP to Marvell who just wanted it to use for embedded processors on their accelerated network interfaces. Intel tried to replace the XScale line with Atom, but it was never competitive with ARM imp