Gotta juice your government contract. Charge a scrappage fee for removing the naughty crane, charge full price for a new crane and a special surcharge for over-night installation... and then have the chutzpah to explain that yes, Chinese and American cranes do look very similar... convergent design something something <cough>.
But that course of action would require the state to be somewhat tech literate and use their big brain.
Why pay a small company a six figure bounty to reverse engineer and patch out the phoning home spyware, when you can pay upwards of eight figures via juicy government contracts to someone like Allen Bradley or Rockwell?
I think the idea was that China cutting off TSMC would prevent TSMC from accessing ASML fab tools and maintenance, which would quickly degrade TSMC capabilities.
Edited to specify China as the one who would potentially cut off TSMC from the rest of the world, which would also cut off ASML->TSMC.
At this time, US sanctions cover even NXT:1980Di (Netherlands will be soon pressured to do the same). That is from 2016 and is least advanced DI ASML still makes.
As they always say in investing, "Past performance is no guarantee of future results."
It wasn't that long ago that Intel was dominating and it looked like nobody would ever dislodge them. Once the top management that drove a company to success retire, they are almost guaranteed to be replaced by people whose main skill set was political navigating in a large bureaucracy and then the decline begins.
In this case it does make sense for Intel to catch up - right now NVIDIA is a quasi-monopoly in the AI space due to the stranglehold on CUDA - and all competitors are working day and night to close the gap in the toolchain.
I think it's a plausible conservative prediction that Intel will close the gap somewhat and will have a significant (but not dominant) slice of the pie.
To be fair their stock wasn't necessarily doing that great at all (relative to AMD , let alone Nvidia over the last few years) when they were completely dominated the market.
Even with all dividends included their stock is worth about as much as back in 2000 (which they only managed to surpass in 2019/2020)), and if they are excluded they are yet to surpass their dot.com peak...
Even if they can catch up with the technology...can they high volume manufacture it? Can they manufacture it at a similar price point as TSMC?
All signs point to No. They have the talent to have competing tech...but they have shown time and time again that they can't do high volume manufacturing or do it at a price that also allows their customers to have high gross margins (like AMD, NVIDIA, etc).
There is a big difference in making a technology work and making a lot of high yielding wafers with it. I'm not sure Intel 7nm ever got to high volume manufacturing...there were constant delays and yield issues. Read the 3rd article I have below to show how bad it is. Plans to implement SR in 2021, but yields were crap and mass production was put out to 1H23. Intel and TSMC use very different terminology for when things are ready...manufacturing ready (Intel) is being assumed to be the same as high volume manufacturing (TSMC), but they are not the same at all. TSMC is doing 2nm risk production in Q4 this year, we will see what Intel ends up doing...
The far ahead argument is something I read weekly on investing boards
Some claim tsmc is decade ahead, other say it is 3 to 5 years, etc, etc.
From my understanding both are in a race that will be decided in next 10-14 months and when it comes to the future, Intel has priority on next gen EUV (HighNA), so there is a chance
Various medias report that Intel has 1-2 year advantage due on tech like PowerVia
So, it is not that clear how far ahead TSMC is
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>TSMC isnt stupid
Yes, they arent, so arent their customers who want geo diversified supply chain and risk amortization (Earthquake? War? Drought?)
Also they will have leverage when negotiating deals with TSMC
I am somewhat skeptical about high-NA EUV. There are reasons why Intel got priority on that: ASML marketing materials themselves imply high-NA EUV is worse than low-NA EUV in terms of cost.
> Also they will have leverage when negotiating deals with TSMC
Except Intel hasn't talked about price at all...they have a completely different cost structure that isn't competitive at all. Think about AMD gross margin vs. Intel's gross margin. AMD has similar...all while giving TSMC 50%+ gross margin also. Now tell me Intel's cost will be similar to TSMC...
Their foundry business is a tiny fraction of their revenue at this point and I'm not sure their overall gross margin is particularly relevant here (also Intel has lower gross margins than AMD or TSMC these days?)
If they can't make good gross margin when making their own products that are higher priced (than similar AMD products)...how are they going to do it when they have to support an end customer that expects high gross margins?
In 2015, why would anyone have believed AMD could catch up to Intel? Let's not forget that the Bulldozer/Excavator days are not that long ago, and those chips were even less competitive in 2011-2016 than Intel's current offerings are in 2024. I think we can confidently say that bigger architectural gaps have been closed before.
Comparing Intel to other fabs, it's uglier, sure. The Krzanich years were characterized by over-promising and under-delivering, and Intel isn't far enough removed from that period for trust to be rebuilt. That said, they have shrunk the process gap over the last couple years, even if the gap isn't entirely closed.
Given the firehose of government money being directed at domestic manufacturing right now, I assume Intel is doing fine on the "shitloads of money" front.
I don't think Intel is a favorite to be the world's process leader by 2025, but it's reasonable to think they could get close. I don't think the doom-and-gloom perspective is well-founded at all.
I invested in AMD around 95 levels, but I started selling them on recent tops around 175-180 to buy more INTC when they dropped after their guidance for Q1
It is not that I dont believe in AMD, I just believe that their growth potential is lower than INTCs.
Foundry businsss is crazy and has waaay higher entry level
What is your cost analysis on Intel's foundry arm? If AMD can support high profits using TSMC as a supplier...who also has high profits, why do you think Intel can compete on price and make good money?
I see TSMC and Intel cost structures all the time...they run fabs very differently and the costs are no where near close to each other. When running a foundry the main component of being competitive is price and yield. Intel will struggle with both...mark my words.
Well, current bleeding edge semicos require like hundreds of billions if you start from 0
Meanwhile what about those materials that could allow you to make 1000x faster cpus, but we arent capable of manufacturing them at scale and also their lifespan is way shorter than silicon.
Im not saying 7T is reasonable, but if thats what he want to do, then it is very interesting and expensive as hell
Netflix always writes those engineering blogs about their fancy microservices and infra
Meanwhile adult sites probably run on some boring php and serve orders of magnitude more content (harder to cache) while being free and top visited sites in the world
Maybe the earlier working years and experience, as well as money saved, was worth more than the opportunities the degree could open up. If not, and being passed over for jobs later in life is becoming a problem, maybe that original assessment was incorrect.
This is generally only something a person can have certainty about in hindsight.
There’s always value in completing, but if you instead do something more valueable, and can explain it, it might be the opposite of a red flag.
But the comment explicitly stated “dislike the content”.
Every product decision is innovation. Being able to configure hardware the way you want without having to comply with government b.s. or design new communication protocols or software systems without the gov dictating how you do that is pro-innovation right? Are you saying people don't make new hardware or software?
Both, people who work with the resources of companies. Individuals can't design and manufacture smartphones. I am not a "companies are people too" person, I am actually heavily pro-regulation but like anything else fairness and justice trumps all. If android and other vendors can't compete because of apple or apple and other vendors collude against people I see your sentiment but I am very much for fairness even for the rich and powerful as well as companies not just people.
