Intel was once a Silicon Valley leader. How did it fall so far?

The marketing and advertising and sales teams took over management from the engineering team, and decided to cut all the corners. It's a classic tale at this point, same thing happened to Boeing and Apple and Google and etc. It's why everything sucks nowadays.

Probably bureaucracy. Also an inability to pivot even when things make no sense. Everything is a giant freight train that has very little ability to change direction or stop.

Oh and of course a healthy taste of not being transparent or honest.

Source: I used to work there years ago.

The company had always been run by engineers that came up from chip fab. Then they fired both the CEO and the head of fab for sexual harassment.

Then they make the CFO with a MBA the new CEO. A year or two latter and chip design is having problems and fab is falling behind.

Bean counting?

Large amounts of greed, corruption, and complacency.

This is the handiwork of highly paid executives.

🌈 shareholders 🌈

Intel was once a Silicon Valley leader.

Well, any specific stuff that Intel has done recently aside, Silicon Valley has been more about software, not hardware, for quite some years.

Intel is a hardware company.

Poor practices. They focused on shorr term gains over quality.

Greed?

Capitalism

Anything they go after today is 18-24 months out. Chasing after AI would be pretty risky. Desktops and laptops are moving to ARM and RISC-V. Their best bet is to go after whatever enterprise data centers will need a couple of years from now.

If I were laying bets, it would be to go after power and heat efficiency. Like, hard. Take their time out in the wilderness, then come back with chips that save the planet from climate collapse.

Just watched a video on the failure of windows phone, they went from 34% market share ( world top 1) to 1.4% in 5 years. Then they recover a little bit to 3%, just to drop to 0.4% 5 year later and then completely dead 2 years after.

Going through a period of little competition in a space seems to do that to just about every company in that position.

Comfort zone and believed in Microsoft's talk that the market of the future would be desktops, but Apple came and said: Not today

Apple killed Blackberry and Intel

I think they'll recover. Letting them fail would be a national security problem.

A lack of competition.

Can’t remember the full details of the deal, but I seem to recall a story about how Apple approached Intel to manufacture a low-powered processor for mobile (for the first iPhone). At the time, Intel didn’t see money in mobile processors and passed on the deal. Additionally, for years, Apple asked for more powerful chips for the MacBooks. At the time, the iPads were surpassing MacBooks in speed on some tasks. Finally, Apple decided that since they were already designing their own silicon for iPhones and iPads, they might as well just do the same for the MacBooks as well since Intel couldn’t keep up.

Again, this is largely from memory. I can’t remember the source, so take it with a grain of salt.

Mobile strategy, I.E. lack thereof.

if you keep look at the mirror you crash at the end.

G.P.U.

I’ve only watched this from a great distance but what I saw was: Intel didn’t actually manufacture the chips. That was all TSMC. So Intel’s main thing was chip design. And their designs were all about making the transistors smaller. Around 3nm they started running into physical limits. Competitors started out-innovating them with things like GPU deigns and ARM based chips. End of story. They had their time. They ran x86 into the ground and they are fucking done. They would have had to do 5 or 6 things differently to stay on top, and they did none of those.

I’m personally in love with ARM. I choose it for my router, Raspberry Pi and my MacBook is also ARM.

…but this still saddens me. I want to see good competition in the sector and I still have a soft spot for x86_64 on the server.