Damn, this guy is utterly fantastic at ruining huge tech firms.
this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2024
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Eh, he was handed a company in a bad strategic place and he did not fix it.
Lisa Su was in a similar position when she took over AMD, but she managed it. While I don't want to put too much emphasis on the CEO alone, AMD's turnaround is quite remarkable. They very easily could have collapsed at one point.
He was handed a company in a horrible strategic place and he did the right things to fix it. Reinvest in process technology mainly. Those investments do not bear fruit overnight. They take years. Whoever replaces him could basically be a stuffed suit and will probably have some success if only from his investments starting to pay off. It's too bad he didn't get a few more quarters to see it happen.
Nah, they're stuck. The most recent 2xx series Intel chips are actually on a better TSMC fab than what AMD's 9000 series chips are using, but you wouldn't know it from almost any benchmark available. Their architecture is just bad, and a fab improvement can't even save it.
All they need to do is hold out and survive until China invades Taiwan and the chip foundry game will change overnight. I bet they'll even get free access to TSMC patents just to try to get the west back into the chip lead. They won't be allowed to fail at that point.
Though I don't see the consumer semiconductor industry thriving after that.
China will never invade Taiwan. Taiwan has a backchannel protection deal with the US and China knows it.
China's too smart to 'invade' Taiwan. There will be no tanks and helicopters invading. China / CCP may be assholes but they are also fucking smart.
Look at Hong Kong. There were no tanks or helicopters. Just steadily increasing political control. More or less the entirety of HK protested for weeks/months. It did fuck all.
That will be what happens with Taiwan. It won't be an invasion. It will be a gradual slide.
Right now, USA officially supports the 'One China' policy to appease China even though we want Taiwan to be independent. It's let us keep huge trade with China (which the Chinese also want/need) while we depend (and NEED) Taiwan for a lot of tech manufacturing especially computer chips.
Thing is, China has no desire to be dependent on us. They want us dependent on them for manufacturing, but don't want to need that business. That's why China is doing aggressive R&D on pretty much every high tech area they depend on the West for, trying to ensure that everything China needs can be made in China from Chinese tech. To do that they need to be able to design and manufacture the latest computer chips, which they currently can't. But they're pouring billions into figuring it out.
If China takes over Taiwan, either openly or covertly, they get TSMC. And that gives them all the chipmaking tech they need.
Don't expect tanks. Expect state sponsored industrial espionage at TSMC and their own suppliers. Then expect Chinese chipmakers to flood the market with top-line or near-top-line hardware at low prices, which US won't embargo and thus we'll get even more dependent on China.
Lol the biggest reason you're wrong to make that comparison is that Hong Kong was never its won country. Hong Kong was a British colony and then a Chinese special administrative region (SAR) given a degree of administrative autonomy by the Chinese government voluntarily as part of a treaty with the British. The treaty expired and then China decided to change the rules for Hong Kong.
Taiwan meanwhile was the territory that the Republic of China (RoC aka Nationalist China) held on to when it lost the Chinese Civil War against the People's Republic of China (PRC aka Communist China) who now control the mainland. The PRC never controlled Taiwan and the RoC government which rules there does not answer to the PRC nor has it ever. The PRC and it's Communist Partt can claim that Taiwan is a rogue province all they want but that's a lie. Taiwan is not theirs it was and still is under the government of the ROC even if the ROC has lost the rest of its territory to the PRC since the Civil War and World War 2.
Hong Kong's city government allowed China to take more direct control because it always answered to China since the British gave it to China. Meanwhile the ROC government in Taiwan has never answered to the PRC and it never will. Opposing the PRC is literally one of the main goals of that government and country and I don't think there are any major politicians there who want to join the PRC willingly nor would amy such politician be popular there.
Long story short the ROC (Taiwan) and Hong Kong are not even remotely comparable and the former won't just accept any attempted takeover by the communists.
That depends on Trump giving a shit about protecting anyone. I wouldn't be surprised at any outcome.
Trump hates China so he would do it just to show that he's opposing it.
Trump isn't given enough ego bait from China to not rally against them to feed his base. If he can spin it as "the beat deal" he will do it.
I doubt even he can spin it that way. His popularity would plummet and that's something he cares a lot about since he has a fragile ego.
I agree and my comment had obviously no nuance. I’m still dealing with VMware fallout in my professional life which is on Broadcom but still, this dude had control of another huge sinking ship previously…
VMware had some pretty cool stuff in the pipeline related to DPUs that would've been killer in hypervisor networking but I'm pretty sure that's out the window post-acquisition.
Honestly with how good kvm and qemu have been getting and the number of competitors building hypervisor off of open source virtualization technologies it was probably a ticking time bomb before it fell to cheaper, freer competition. This way we have a bad guy to blame and not just pure corporate hubris
Yea, he was CEO of VMware from 2012 to early 2021. All the issues VMware has now came from broadcom buying them which happened well after he left.
I hope Intel gets their act together soon. We can't have a monopoly on chips on the CPU or GPU space.
I'm personally excited about the actual engineering challenges that come next and think that all 3 big foundries have roughly equal probability of coming out on top in the next stage, as the transistors become more complex three dimensional structures, and as the companies try to deliver power from the back side of the wafer rather than the crowded front side.
Samsung and Intel have always struggled with manufacturing finFETs with the yields/performance of TSMC. Intel's struggles to move on from 14nm led to some fun memes, but also reflected the fact that they hit a plateau they couldn't get around. Samsung and Intel have been eager to get off of the finFET paradigm and tried to jump early to Gate All Around FETs (GAAFETs, which Samsung calls MBCFET and Intel calls RibbonFET), while TSMC sticks around on finFET for another generation.
Samsung switched to GAAFET for its 3nm node, which began production in 2022, but the reports are that it took a while to get yields up to an acceptable level. Intel introduced GAAFET in its 20A node, but basically abandoned it before commercial production and put all of its resources into 18A, which they last reported should be ready for mass production in the first half of 2025 and will be ready for external customers to start taping out their own designs.
Meanwhile, TSMC's 3nm node is still all finFET. Basically the end of the line for this technology that catapulted TSMC way ahead of its peers. Its 2nm node will be the first TSMC node to use GAAFET, and they have quietly abandoned plans to introduce backside power in the generation after that, for their N2P. Their 1.6 nm node is going to have backside power, though. They'll be the last to marker with these two technologies, but maybe they're going to release a more polished process that still produces better results.
So you have the three competitors, with Samsung being the first to market, Intel likely being second, and TSMC being third, but with no guarantees that they'll all solve the next generation challenges in the same amount of lead time. It's a new season, and although past success does show some advantages and disadvantages that may still be there, none of it is a guarantee that the leader right now will remain a leader into the next few generations.
Packaging/interconnect tech is starting to be a big factor though, and TSMC is very strong in this area, no? They can lean on that.
Also its weird to even imagine Intel with big external customers...
Intel's packaging doesn't seem to be that far behind TSMC's, just with different strengths and weaknesses, at least on the foundry side. On the design side they were slow to actually implement chiplet based design in the actual chips, compared to AMD who embraced it full force early on, and Apple who rely almost exclusively on System-in-a-Package designs (including their "ultra" line of M-series chips that are two massive Max chips stitched together) where memory and storage are all in one package.
The competition for CPUs can be AMD vs ARM vs RISC-V. It doesn't have to be between two x86 giants.
That's better, not necessarily for instruction set reasons, but because ARM and RISC-V are more open to multiple companies stepping in to produce chips.
Eh, a lot of big players have backed off from custom ARM CPU cores. So the question is how many even have the muscle to compete?
Double so for RISC-V.
It’s baffling how fast they fell, since they had a monopoly for ~20 years.
They had untouchable market dominance from the mid 80's through the mid 2010's, so probably closer to 30 years.
AMD and Apple caught up on consumer PC processors, as the consumer PC market as a whole kinda started to fall behind tablets and phones as the preferred method of computing. Even in the data center, the importance of the CPU has lost ground to GPU and AI chips in the past 5 years, too. We'll see how Intel protects its current position in the data center.
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