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points by throwaway_45 3 days ago | 0 comments
Also Intel decided to not improve for a long time. They were just happy collecting rent and protecting margin. Only the paranoid survive. Intel used to be a memory company and they pivoted cause Andy grove could see what was coming.
[–] toast0 3 days ago
Intel didn't decide not to improve. Their CPU R&D has a long pipeline and they made the wrong prediction on tech (10nm), which resulted in a decade long pipeline stall. They're just about through that now, we'll see if they've got their groove back in the next few generations.

Before the 10nm issues, they were making consistent IPC improvement every generation, and although core counts were pretty stagnant for consumers, they would add a couple cores every generation on top Xeon skus. Maybe they could have done bigger changes with more time between, but it was nice being able to expect new server CPUs every 12-18 months that were meaningfully better.

[–] fc417fc802 3 days ago
> they made the wrong prediction on tech (10nm), which resulted in a decade long pipeline stall

I don't think their node problems were anywhere near that simple. You also left out the part where AMD moved to chiplets while intel stubbornly remained monolithic for quite a while. And a whole list of other missteps.

[–] tester756 3 days ago
Not really - 10nm node was too ambitious and failed cuz of that.
[–] Tuna-Fish 3 days ago
It wasn't just that. Intel could have survived a failed node, or a few of them. Certainly wouldn't be their first.

Krzanich "optimized" the company for profit, by cutting out things he considered to be excess. Including a lot of their irreplaceable validation & verification talent, that AMD instantly snapped up. The lack of validation resources is directly responsible for the failures of many key Intel products during his tenure and later, because major bugs that could have been spotted earlier slipped through, and then resulted in horrible delays and even cancellations. He then spent the surplus of the company on 30 major acquisitions, of which only two were in any reasonable degree successful.

There are CEOs who have destroyed more value than Krzanich, but not many.

[–] selimthegrim 3 days ago
As someone who was working in validation around 2012 or so you would be hard pressed to think of Intel treating them as "talent"
[–] yborg 3 days ago
Cheating on his wife with one of his subordinates probably didn't help sharpen his focus.