pointyfence

It's more than a year. They're sampling this to customers in the second half of 2026. It's a 2027 launch at best.

Intel has practically nothing to show for an AI capex boom for the ages. I suspect that Intel is talking about it early for a shred of AI relevance.

TSMC isn't a monopoly. You could go to Samsung like Tesla did. People weren't bringing monopoly worries in 2018 when Intel shut down their first disastrous attempt at being a foundry after about 5 years.

What you're seeing now is an "offer you can't refuse" to the fabless designers to direct private capital to Intel by the US for national security reasons and some political points. It buys Intel cash which it desperately needs for its foundry efforts and is a quasi-bailout of Intel shareholders and debtholders. The problem is that Intel doesn't know how to be a foundry in terms of volume and breadth of customers and will need an indefinite amount of capital to learn.

It will be more than just Apple. Trump got in first. He'll arm twist the others to take token stakes and set up some working relationship. Nvidia doesn't need to take a $5B stake in Intel. Did Apple ever have a stake in TSMC? Whether or not this changes any of Intel's actual problems over the long term is a different matter.

I talked about this in another comment here, but the danger in unhealthy introspection is getting lost in your own mind in an Escher stair fashion where the immediate scope of your thinking appears to make sense. But in reality you've constructed a faulty, hard to escape representation.

It takes some time, but it helps to take a somewhat adversarial approach and try to falsify your introspection. That's why writing is important. It forces you to lay out the structure for later review. When you just think about something, how that thinking "felt" makes up a lot more of your judgement than the actual coherence or validity.

You need to be able to step outside yourself which is easier said than done, but that's a good skill for a variety of reasons. Writing is an important way of doing it. It's like a snapshot of you in a moment of time that you can review later when you are a slightly different person. Sharing your introspection with others who you trust but don't think like you can also help: good friends, therapists, mentors. LLMs can be great for this sort of thing if you approach it with healthy skepticism and avoid leading it to your answer of choice (but if people can't, who knows where they'll end up).

Setting time boundaries help a lot. Also, resetting your mind by doing something that doesn't bend much to navel gazing helps. Your garden doesn't give a shit about your thoughts. I took judo on a trial run once. Your mind clears very fast when somebody is trying to re-introduce you to the ground.

I think that today, people's ability to do this has greatly diminished. Technology has made it much easier for people to get trapped in those staircases just because it makes them feel good in the short-term. With networks, it's even worse because now they are comforted by the shared experience. Those staircases become the identity and reality rather than something to escape from.

I journal to create a concrete representation of my thoughts at a point in time. Writing with intent to explain to yourself forces a structured view on assumptions, deductions, inductions, etc. rather than having them bounce around in your head as a wobbly mass of jello.

The structuring of your thoughts and emotions, by nature, forces a certain amount of meta cognition and distance from your feelings as you can more easily identify and further think about the insights, inconsistencies, etc. You have a scaffolding that you can continue to build on or rebuild.

Beyond the immediate thinking, it's also interesting to see how the thoughts on something change over time or how they relate to other topics. Now, I'm thinking about my thinking rather than just focusing on the immediate topic.

Deep thinking without a sense of permanence can be great as a start of ideas. You need a low cost way for ideas to form where you can pick the most promising ones for more introspection. But without permanence, there's this danger that you get lost in your half-formed thoughts because it has a lot of "feel" in it and makes it hard to build on or critique. There's a danger that you end up going down an Escher staircase mentally and emotionally that seems like the logical, immediate thing to do but is a contradiction at a higher level.

One CEO is gone mainly because he thought that he could home run his way back to prominence with a "Fabs to Nowhere" strategy which has crippled the company's finances.

One "Product CEO" had a material chunk of her responsibilities re-allocated to Tan after he came on board with him frequently saying that their product roadmap has been subpar.

Charlie was pretty big on Gelsinger. And he is big on Holthaus.

Perhaps this says more about Charlie than Intel.

I'm with you. For some reason, the hardware / tech crowd insist that evil finance people or evil MBAs killed Intel. It's such lazy thinking.

But if you look at the past CEOs, Intel had Krzanich (fab guy), Swan (CFO guy who didn't even want the job but they couldn't find anyone else), and Gelsinger (design guy and Grove disciple) in 11 years. I'll even throw in Jim Keller, not a CEO but still The Chip God, who left in frustration after two years.

What's the one common problem that all of them had despite all their different backgrounds? Getting relevant nodes to market and scaling them up. Their foundry efforts (v1 and v2) have been disastrous. The CEOs or MBAs perhaps were a friction, but they aren't the root cause. Technology Development has been the center of power that the fabs and products revolved around for decades.

That's what the market has been saying for a while: the cost of the assets were mal-invested in its current context and are not worth what the accounting says they are.

Markets obviously can be wrong, but to think that markets are so inefficient that it confuses book value with liquidation value for a company like Intel is much more wrong.

Intel has been backpedaling away from the idea of 18A as an node for external customers for a few quarters now as the external demand for 18A is very low. CFO has said external customer revenue isn't expected to have a material financial impact even by 2027. Intel has been pushing the narrative that 18A is primarily an internal node from the start.

I think what's more disconcerting if you are an Intel fan is that Intel likely now recognizes that 18A will not have the impact that they originally thought when the ex-CEO "bet the whole company on 18A." Rather than dump more resources into it, they are instead trying to get ahead of the problem by moving resources to 14A which in theory has broader appeal.

Work is an intersection between what the company wants and what I'm willing to do. I can leave the company, try to change it from the inside and accept the consequences, or adapt to the situation until I can find or create something better.

But I find that whinging that work should fit my worldview becomes dis-empowering quickly. The temporary dopamine hit from getting sympathy venting and believing that the rest of the world is crazy makes me feel like something has changed when nothing has or perhaps will. And that just causes me to feel worse over time.

It's also interesting to see how opinions of what is fair, right, reasonsable, etc start to change as the contributor becomes a manager of a team and then an owner. The individual's context can have a lot to do with shaping the opinion.

I tell people that if they get a new boss who is at Director or above, assume that you are re-interviewing for your job for the first 6 months with the new boss.

I think Pat enforced his dismissive optimism on the entire company which made a tough job even tougher. A number of Intel executives, new and old, have taken indirect shots at Pat when he got pushed out even before Tan came on board.

I still see a lot of people worship Gelsinger just because he was supposedly the engineer CEO messiah that Intel needed. But he had a flawed strategy made worse by naive, arrogant execution.

What you're describing is what Nassim Taleb calls "tawkers." People like economists, journalists, pundits, etc. who talk big but don't have any skin in the game for being wrong or irrelevant (time is a great example). Since there is no feedback loop to punish bad or irrelevant takes, they can continue tawking for a long time.

When I have similarly strong opinions, I do act on it because I enjoy seeing how right or wrong I was. Markets are a harsh, expensive teacher. You either learn a trick or two about uncertainty, overconfidence, humility, etc, or you run out of money.

I think you're better at it than you're letting on even if you decided to not play. You already understand the properties of the game.

The market, net, thinks that Intel is going to shrink from a profitability perspective.

In 2022, Intel is going to have its first negative free cash flow in at least 15 years. It's going to have negligible free cash flow for the two years after. All of its cash flow and then some is going to build out fab capacity and node tech as it tries to dramatically increase capacity for its design business and its foundry business. Meanwhile, their most lucrative business segments, in particular datacenter, are getting gobbled up quickly by the competition. In Q1, Intel decreased -5% in cloud YOY despite that segment growing quickly.

If you believe that everything will go well with Intel, then this is money well spent and the stock is cheap. But given their historic difficulties and the quality and quantity of their competition in XPU design and manufacturing, there's a meaningful chance that their profitability will be greatly diminished.

I feel bad for the wife and kid, but I don't have any sympathy for the person.

"I am always recommending people using burner but I was nervous and fomo the "Monkey Kingdom Mint. Never thought it was not a legit mint link in official discord."

Some people can't learn by theory. They have to learn by practice. FOMO isn't a mistake. That's just greed calling the shots.

The best way to learn how to control FOMO is to experience its consequences. The only question is how much tuition are you willing to pay. He paid a lot.

As the saying goes: Bulls make money. Bears make money. Pigs get slaughtered.

Rocket lake is 14nm

I was thinking more along the lines of selecting a company that plays better with the rest of the industry and has a better operational history if you wanted to bring back more of a general semiconductor manufacturing ecosystem back to the US. Focus more on building out capabilities for the rest of the industries that don't need bleeding edge node development while Intel figures out its bleeding edge.

Intel strikes me as historically one of the more ethically challenged companies that heavily relied on monopolistic power. And then when it got into trouble and that monopoly's cracks were widening at a good pace, it started waving the flag after spending $20B+ on stock buybacks.

Given Intel's operational track record for the last say 7 years, a manufacturing group that's been tightly coupled to its internal design group for eons focused on a very narrow product line, its past half-hearted and unsuccessful attempts at being a foundry, competing against its potential customers, years of organizational and operational mal and under investment, and a competitor like TSMC, it doesn't seem like this has a good probability of success.

Anything can happen, but basically, Gelsinger is selling a pivot that goes against Intel's intrinsic nature for a really long time. Which customers are going to sign up to be the test customers for Intel for anything of meaningful scale? I guess Intel could discount prices immensely like Samsung, but is that worth the risk to a major player?

If I had to pick a company to be a national US champion to revitalize the US semiconductor industry, is Intel really the right pick vs. say Texas Instruments?

We had a much more primitive version of this for our product roadmap. After working with mostly the same dev team for a few years, we felt that in a given year we seem to consistently be able to complete X “big” projects, Y “mediums” and Z “smalls” despite all the random stuff that invariably pops up.

So that list was the spine of our annual planning, the stuff that we really prioritized. The rest of the stuff that people wanted to do would have to fall in between the gaps of that master set.

It worked surprisingly well for us, but we had to build this group experience first. After a few years with another dev team at another company, I brought it up as an alternative to over ambitious roadmaps and it worked well there too.

How much of this was just due to more team familiarity and experience or this oversimplified process? Don’t know. But it felt like the roadmap trade offs were more thoughtful, devs felt more relaxed and had reserves if we had to red line a bit, and fewer missed commitments.

"Rehiring retired people to me signals the new CEO has no trust in people that already are there. And that is usually bad news."

That's right. Any time an organization goes with "let's bring back the band," I become a little more skeptical than before. Not just because of what it implies on the quality of the bench, but I'm also wary of this halo effect of the good old days masking what's really needed today instead of living in yesteryear.

Gelsinger seems like a pretty good pick for Intel given how disastrous their last CEO search went, but in the earnings call today, there was a lot of invoking the Old Gods and Intel history. I get why they're doing it, but it's a different competitive landscape and Intel today.

That's the general route that I took. As an applicant or hiring manager, I view the interview as a meeting between two equal sides looking for a mutually beneficial fit. If there isn't a fit, it's ok. Onto the next interview. It makes interviews a lot less stressful and more engaging to me. But to go down that route as an applicant, it helps a lot to think about what's needed to have those options.

Just one class of common shares for all the investor groups. New money didn't appear to be coming in. We were either going to go poof, or we were going to get sold.

I'm a sucker for turnaround plays because a lot of BS gets beaten out of the organization, and they're more receptive to change.

"Theoretically, a startup that actually wants to compete on compensation by sharing in good fortune could craft an equity package which is simple and standardized enough to be comprehensible by ordinary humans."

One time, I received an offer from a small, struggling startup. But because it's equity structure was so simple (struggling has a way of simplifying things), I counter-proposed taking less salary for more equity, and they agreed.

With the typical equity opacity removed, I viewed the trade-off as more of a bet on myself: the impact that I could make and if I assessed the company correctly.

The payoff when we were acquired was just the equivalent of a nice extra bonus. The real satisfaction was having more skin in the game, having the expected impact, being correct on the assessment, etc.

But it wouldn't have happened if I felt lost in the complex equity structure and confidentiality barriers that seem to be present in many startups.

Spotify has definitely changed how I listen to music over the years. I have my core segments, but I'd say that 33% of my time on Spotify is just stuff that I bump into for random of reasons: a music beef between artists I don't listen to, stories from friends with different tastes in music, a news article about a band in the 50s, etc.

I find myself listening to the music to give context to the stories I bump into. And then I just sort of get lost in it for a bit like you would reading random stuff on Wikipedia. Wrecks havoc on my music suggestions though.

I was having a similar conversation a few days ago. I think that people are conflating how essential a function is with how essential any given person in that function is.

As someone on the more extroverted side, I see office work as an easy source of meaningful social stimulation / bonding (well, assuming I like my coworkers) with little personal setup required on my end. Although the in-person component can be a distraction, I mostly saw it as a source of energy and creativity. I met some of my best friends at work.

I've been working from home for about 2 years, a legacy consequence of a few acquisitions. Despite its perks, I don't think that I would've stayed with it past the first year if not for 1) a local set of friends that I could still take breaks / lunches with 2) going to the corporate office once a month for about a week which allowed me to form a nice social network in the mothership city.

But covid-19 stopped both, and I'm stuck with this ennui that's been hard to shake.

In preparation for their first lousy boss (I hope that I'm not it), I advise my less experienced reports to first think hard on what's important to them about their job before acting. Since the organization might not be working from their view of what's fair or rational, they should plan around some best and worst case scenarios of acting on that belief.

For instance, if working at that company in a particular position is the most important thing to you, then standing up to your bosses is a bad tactic. They could clip your wings or worse. Or if the pay is the most important thing to you but you can get that pay somewhere else, then you should probably leave on good terms for another job. I've seen a lot of people put themselves through unnecessary drama because they just reacted.

In my case, I find bad bosses to be intellectually and emotionally offensive. So, I will work the system to either see if they can be better or manage them out. This is a terrible way to manage your career if you care about job security.

But I plan accordingly. I had to build up my savings, create a strong internal network of people across departments with similar values, deliver business results to build credibility with more senior managers and execs, etc. And most importantly, recognize that I could lose and be ok with it. There are some real downsides, but it works for who I am.

I know folks here are beating up the author for being naive or whatever, but I respect people who put skin in the game for what they believe is right, trying to build a better environment, and helping people that they care about.

In the mishmash that comes with acquisitions, I'm a remote manager who manages a team at the corporate office and few others remotely. On top of this, my team is an internal agency which works across multiple business lines, some of which are at satellite offices.

My biggest business gripe is the lower fidelity and higher friction with collaboration (planned and not) with my team and other departments / businesses. There's a loss of energy, creativity, focus, ease, alignment, etc. that just isn't there for me with email, video/phone, chat, etc. My biggest personal gripe is related. I'm more extraverted and the loss of regular social interactions is tough. I miss going out for lunches, breaks, drinks, walks, etc. with people that I think are interesting without having to do much to set it up.

I come in to the corporate office once a month for about a week. It feels like we get more done, have a good amount of fun, and clear things up faster. Even remote, we're still doing much better than the team before us which was full onsite. I guess that's why they keep me around. But I miss the tighter vibe and will probably soon start looking for something near me.

I've always felt that some hybrid approach would work well. Some days, everybody's in (group stuff); some days, everybody's working from home (crank).