The point is Intel can't compete as a fab or as a design house.

It's doubtful if Intel would have been able to design an equivalent to the M1, even with access to TSMC's 5nm process and an ARM license.

Which suggests there's no point in throwing money at Intel because the management culture ("management debt") itself is no longer competitive.

It would take a genius CEO to fix this, and it's not obvious that CEO exists anywhere in the industry.

I don't know how you can predict the future like this. Yes, intel greedily choose not to participate in the phone soc market and are paying the price.

But their choice not to invest in EUV early doesn't mean that they will never catch up. They still have plenty of cash, and presumably if they woke up and decided to, they wouldn't be any worse off than Samsung. And definitely better off than SMIC.

Similarly, plenty of smart microarch people work at intel, freeing them to create a design competitive with zen3 or the m1 is entirely possible. Given amd is still on 7nm, and are just a couple percent off of the M1 seems to indicate that if nothing else intel could be there too.

But as you point out Intel's failings are 100% bad mgmt at this point. Its hard to believe they can't hire or unleash whats needed to move themselves forward. But at the moment they seem to be very "IBM" in their moves, but one has to believe that a good CEO with a good engineering background can cut the mgmt bullcrap and get back to basics. They fundamentally just have a single product to worry about unlike IBM.

AMD looked just as bad not so long ago.

Plus even though Intel has been super fat for 3 decades or so, everyone has predicted their death for at least another 3 decades (during their switch from memory to CPUs and then afterwards when RISCs were going to take over the world).

So they do have a bit of history with overcoming these predictions. We'll just have to see if they became too rusty to turn the ship around.

AMD looked far worse... if Intel is “dying” with a yearly revenue of ~$70B or so AMD should’ve been bankrupt 10 times already.

Intel is managing to compete in per core performance while being essentially 2-3 nodes behind, and generating times the revenue of their competitor.

Zen is awesome and we need more competition but Intel isn’t nearly as far behind as it was during the P4 days and it’s revenue is nearing ATH and it’s business more diversified it ever been, if you exclude the datacenter and client computing groups it still is bringing in more revenue than AMD.

>Not unless they catch up with TSMC in process technology

1. Intel doesn't have to catch up. Intel's 14nm is more than enough for a lot of fabless. Not every chip needs cutting edge node

2. split up Intel foundry into a pure play allowed Intel to build up an ecosystem like TSMC.

3. Intel's 10nm is much denser than TSMC's 7nm. Intel is not too far behind. they just needs to solve the yield problem. split up Intel's design and foundry allowed each group to be more agile and not handcuffed to each other.

in fact Intel Design should licensed out x86 like ARM. why not take best biz model from the current leaders? Intel Design take ARM business model and Intel foundry take TSMC business model.

The ARM business model isn't that profitable. Intel's market cap right now is about 240 billion, 6 times the amount Nvidia is paying for ARM.

>Intel's market cap right now is about 240 billion, 6 times the amount Nvidia is paying for ARM

so what? yahoo was a giant in its heyday. blackberry was the king with its phone. no empire stay on top forever.

Apple/Amazon created its own cpu. ARM killing it in mobile space.

intel is the king right now but with more and more its customers design their own cpu. how long before intel fall?

ARM Ltd. is earning relatively very little from this and there seems to be little reason why would that change in the future. This is why it can’t really survive as an independent company.

If you compare net income instead of mkt. cap Intel is ahead by 70 times (instead of 6) and is relatively undervalued compared to other tech companies.