Disposing of 'Intel Inside'

[tw]

Originally Posted by dar512

Coca-Cola has manufacturing plants around the world. That doesn't make CC a Saudi or Russian company.

Boeing corporate offices are in Chicago. Therefore Boeing aircraft are a product of Illinois? Of course not. AMD’s processors are manufacturered in Germany - a fact that most certainly surprises most every lurker since AMD does not advertise it. I really don't care where the CEO hangs his hat. Only bean counter types feel that is important. A product person instead asks about the important people - the little people. Boeing aircraft are built in Aisa, Washington, et al. Only those who don't know how work gets done (finance types) would call Boeing aircraft a product of Illinois.

Meanwhile, a more interesting point is AMD's strategic objectives. A tripling of production? AMD implies the MBA now running Intel will not solve Intel's management problems.

[dar512]

Originally Posted by tw

AMD - a German processor manufacturer

I still think this is misleading. It implies that AMD is a German company.

I think the competition between AMD and Intel is a good thing. I don't get your hand-wringing over Intel's current issues.

[tw]

Originally Posted by dar512

I still think this is misleading. It implies that AMD is a German company.

I think the competition between AMD and Intel is a good thing. I don't get your hand-wringing over Intel's current issues.

I don't understand why it makes a difference where an HQ is located. I'm not quite sure how all or so much of AMD (processor group) ended up in Dresden. But Dresden is AMD processors. And what happens in Dresden says much about what/where AMDs sees of their industry and market.

When I was using AMD products, company was TX – I believe a spin off from Texas Instruments. That HQ moved to Sunnyvale was a surprise.

I don't understand what is meant by 'hand-wringing'? Does that imply a feeling or frustration? If so, then eliminate that assumption. Intel has severe product problems that I suspect are deeper than publicly realized. Too much new product development in the past few years - since Andy Grove moved upstairs - has stumbled (sometimes repeatedly). It was the same classic cancer that attacked HP both under John Young and Carly Fiorina.

Among other things (assuming I am accurate), this is an opportunity to make money on the stock market - if you have more balls than I do.

They are facts. Will this new marketing guy turn Intel around? History says a resounding no. History says Intel will only keep losing market share just like GM and for same reasons. Apparently AMD in Germany is making the same bet.

[Maui Nick]

I just did a little research on this.

The Register, the UK tech publication, reported that Intel lost half of a percentage point of market share going from the last quarter of 2005 to the first quarter of 2006. However, AMD was up less than a third of a percentage point in that same time period, with Transmeta and VIA picking up the remainder of Intel's great, overwhelming loss.

However, increased sales of x86 laptops help to boost Intel's market share in an area where it already has an overwhelming advantage, and AMD's new Turion is a laptop battery killer. AMD used a little sleight-of-hand to make it appear that the Turion is superior to the Pentium M, but failed to mention to anybody that it did not compare similar systems. In other words, the Turion's perceived advantage is bupkis.

Speaking of laptops ... As the Register noted elsewhere, Intel's Centrino brand covers not only the laptop processor, but the computer's logic board and the wireless rig and is a stronger marketing proposition then a brand focused solely on the processor.

And some final notes about market share: Intel now owns 100% of the marketplace for processors in new Apple Macintosh computers. Oh, by the way ... Intel still holds 81.7 percent of the world's processor market share for x86-based computers.

So, um, what was it you were complaining about, exactly?

[Undertoad]

You're talking about Intel's past and present. tw is talking about their future.

[mbpark]

True about the laptop and Apple markets, however AMD just signed up the biggest customer of all, Dell. They already have IBM and HP as customers. In the segment of the market where the margins are very high, AMD is making major inroads.

Intel spent billions on the Itanium and ended up having to issue processors based on AMD's x64 instruction set (the Yamhill processor) to keep up.

This reminds me of when IBM was king, and Compaq shipped the first 386-based PCs. Intel may have the market now, but that doesn't mean so for the future. Oftentimes decisions made for the long term a few years back come back to bite you in the future. This is esp. true for Intel. While Conroe and the new chips may be excellent chips, they may be a stopgap that shows less innovation in future designs.

Intel's Israel division basically handed them the Centrino, Core, Core Duo, and Core 2 Duo chips because they utilized sound engineering practice and built on proven technology, while the rest of the company pushed NetBurst, which was not so sound .

What I believe that TW is saying is that Intel's misstep with Netburst, which lasted approx. 7-8 years, and their dalliance with Itanium, which has lasted much longer, may have shifted valuable engineering resources away from much more practical long-term projects.

AMD has come in with a long-term plan for x86-64, and now has the backing of the major hardware and software vendors, including Microsoft, Red Hat/IBM (since IBM Global Services is providing a large chunk of their enterprise support), Novell, EMC (and VMWare), HP, Oracle, and many of the major Open Source operating systems. They also did not lock up their interconnect technology (HyperTransport) in licenses and costs.

Intel, on the other hand, has waffled incredibly on this front, esp. with Itanium, NetBurst, and the x64 extensions. CIO-level people are beginning to see this, and it is damaging.

It's going to really hurt HP first with the Itanium decisions. The current PA-RISC to Itanium transition involves a very complex migration to Itanium, as binaries from PA-RISC don't run very well on Itanium. This means that you have to re-qualify the software you utilize on Itanium, and possibly purchase new licenses for Itanium, which cost a lot of money. By the time you factor in what you pay for performance, those Opteron boxes seem a lot more attractive just on price alone. When you also realize you can utilize the same staff and tools to maintain hardware across the enterprise for your large-scale applications (SAP, Peoplesoft, Exchange, Oracle) as you do for your middle-tier and departmental applications, you also see the power of what AMD has brought to the market.

The big companies that buy truckloads of this stuff see this, and also have a much higher profit margin on what they buy. I think Dell actually loses more money than they say on their consumer PCs due to the fact that they can charge much higher margins for their business lines to make up for it. The overall cost of equipment is not just in the equipment, but how much power and manpower it takes to provide a certain amount of computing power to get the job done for the customer. AMD's solution provides a very large amount of power at a very low cost per watt for the large-scale applications, and scales out to a very large scale once reserved for non-x86 chips. They also have backward compatibility which has been tested back to DOS 2.11 with the AMD64 chips, and will support unmodified versions of Windows on their chips. You can run what you already have on their chips without the cost of upgrading the applications as well.

Intel doesn't have a long-term plan for that scenario. People like tw and I, who work within those parameters, understand what is brought to the table by both parties. If a proposal from a vendor comes across my desk requiring a very large amount of hardware to be purchased, vs. a solution which is more sane in the hardware, software, and infrastructure requirements, the latter will always win.

[Maui Nick]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

You're talking about Intel's past and present. tw is talking about their future.

Seems like he's being Chicken Little to me.

[jaguar]

NetBurst gave AMD a window and they've done a damn fine job of taking advantage of that but Conroe, Woodcrest & merom are shaping up very well indeed & AMD still haven't sorted their supply problems.

Of course they eventually will, and Intel will with any luck (hey, I'm in Apple hardware these days, I want Intel to make some nice stuff) continue kicking ass with the new gear. That should result in one very competitive market that we, as consumers benefit from. Awesome.

[tw]

Early speculation suggested Intel would divest its memory division. Instead, on Jun 6, 2006 from CBSMarketWatch is a different part of Intel that may be divested. Intel spent up to $9billion to create this group that may sell for $1billion:

Intel Corp. is in talks with several private investment firms and rival chipmakers to sell all or part of its struggling communication-chip businesses ...

Intel's communications group, which was split apart during a realignment of the company early last year, contributed $5 billion in sales in 2004 -- or 15% of Intel's total revenue that year. But it also posted an operating loss of $791 million. ...

Intel's push into the market for chips used in networking gear, cell phones and other devices has been a disappointment. During the late 1990s, the company spent more than $9 billion in cash and stock to beef up its line of communications-related products.

Intel is expected to hold onto its business that makes wireless chips used to connect laptop computers to the Internet, a market that has helped Intel post double-digit sales growth last year.

[tw]

From EE Times of 12 Jun 2006:

AMD to invest $2.5 billion in new Dresden fab
Advanced Micro Devices said Monday (May 29) it will invest $2.5 billion in its fabs here [Dresden], adding a new 300-mm fab to replace an existing 200-mm facility that will be closed. AMD said the expansion will quadruple its processor production here within the next 30 months.

Construction of the new Fab 38 will not require an entirely new factory. Instead, AMD plans a thorough transformation of Fab 30. ... At the same time, the company will increase the capacity of existing 300-mm fab 36 by 25 percent to 25,000 monthly wafer starts. Fab 36 was launched in October 2005.

... By the end of next year, the new facility will produce 20,000 wafer starts a month at full capacity.

Combined, AMD's Dresden fabs will produce 45,000 wafers a month. According to plans announced here, the new fabs initially will produce 65-nm chips, but AMD will switch to 45-nm process technology by mid-2008 and eventually move to 32 nm.

[tw]

Intel is addressing previous mistakes directly traceable to top management. For the first time in a while, Intel may actually succeed in some engineering accomplishments - may have products that turn back the AMD challenge. Intel is testing 45 nm IC designs when the competition is still struggling with 65 nm designs. Intel is finally addressing multiprocessing as a solution to what would otherwise require a 10 Ghz processor.

Tomorrow, Intel will announce an accomplishment that other have been struggling with for years. IBM was actually in production when their high-K (Dupont? designed) material pealed off ICs during manufacturing. Intel will be using a high-K material in 6 months in processors. AMD-IBM-Toshiba consortium probably will not have same for at least another year.

Original transistors were germanium. Silicon replaced germanium for one key reason - glass - silicon dioxide. Germanium oxide (as a glass insulator) was not possible.

Push (or turn) on a facuet so that water enters from mains and exits via tap. Transistors work similar. On one side of glass (silicon dioxide) is a channel that permits electrons to enter on one side and leave on other channel end. To switch (on and off) that channel, electrons are removed or piled on the other side of that glass. That other side is called the 'gate'. To make a transistor run faster, that glass was made thinner. Less electrons into the gate could switch that channel faster. Well that glass is as thin as 3 atoms thick. Therefore electrons piled into gate were leaking across glass. You feel that leaking as heat; CPUs created as much heat as a 60 or 100 watt incandescant bulb.

Semicondutor manufactures have done just about everything to solve that smaller and thinner glass problem. But everyone knew what was needed. Glass needed a high-K material. Intel has been experimenting for years with hafnium - having eliminate other possible solutions long ago. In six months, Pentiums using that new material will be sold maybe using 45 nm transistors.

The actual buzz words are high-K and low-K materials. To make that glass requires higher-K materials so that glass can be thicker; gate operates like 3 atom thick glass without electrons leaking through that glass. Low-K materials means signals travel across the IC faster. Low-K materials are not as necessary since 10 Ghz processors are not in the pipeline. But high-K materials have again averted a brick wall. An innovation schedule called Moore's Law is met again.