The Fall of Intel

From the WSJ:

“Intel had also been exploring a potential acquisition of an AI business, the people said. Proponents of the deal, including Tan, saw it as an opportunity for the company to catch up to rivals such as Nvidia and AMD, which are much further ahead in AI. But the board took its time deliberating the potential deal, and another publicly traded technology company appears poised to buy the target instead, the people said.”

I smell Apple.
 
He’s conflicted!!!!

IMG_7469.jpeg
 
dada_dave said:
www.tomshardware.com

Former Intel CEO lays out radical plan to rescue the company — Suggests outing Lip-Bu Tan and asks for $40 billion investment from Nvidia, Apple, and others

Craig Barrett was Intel's CEO for seven years.
www.tomshardware.com www.tomshardware.com

Despite the headline, the body of the texts that Barrett did not directly address outing Tan, but otherwise asks Intel’s potential customers, including Apple, to bail out Intel to the tune of $40 billion.
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Read that yesterday. The problem is why would the potential customers be willing to risk it?
 
casperes1996 said:
In hopes of avoiding tsmc monopoly pricing I assume
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Big gamble that Intel can get it working. Plus there is always sort of a pseudo monopoly, since you can’t easily move a chip design back and forth between fabs, especially when one of them is Intel which does everything so goofy. Customers would be better off investing in globalfoundries or something.
 
Cmaier said:
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I’d say there’s a party of free markets joke (with this and trying to take a percentage of AMD & Nvidia’s Chinese revenue and tariffs and … and … and …) but we’re so far beyond that … that joke is long in the rear view mirror
(Not saying US investing in domestic fab capacity is necessarily wrong, but still always amusing to see how the myths of what the Republicans purport to believe in run up against the reality of their actions even before and beyond Trump).
 
the US gov’t taking a stake will surely be comforting to all sorts of countries
dada_dave said:
I’d say there’s a party of free markets joke (with this and trying to take a percentage of AMD & Nvidia’s Chinese revenue and tariffs and … and … and …) but we’re so far beyond that … that joke is long in the rear view mirror
(Not saying US investing in domestic fab capacity is necessarily wrong, but still always amusing to see how the myths of what the Republicans purport to believe in run up against the reality of their actions even before and beyond Trump).
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I think I recently suggested that if I was the new CEO of Intel I would beg for U.S. gov’t money. But giving up an ownership stake to the U.S. is going to get Intel banned in certain places. Makes it much more likely that chips get backdoors, etc.
 
Cmaier said:
From the WSJ:

“Intel had also been exploring a potential acquisition of an AI business, the people said. Proponents of the deal, including Tan, saw it as an opportunity for the company to catch up to rivals such as Nvidia and AMD, which are much further ahead in AI. But the board took its time deliberating the potential deal, and another publicly traded technology company appears poised to buy the target instead, the people said.”

I smell Apple.
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I wonder which one. I feel like Mistral is the only big lab Intel has any chance of affording. Apple, otoh, could afford even Anthropic. However, the industry is evolving so quickly that it may not make sense to buy a company verses poaching talent.
 
Altaic said:
I wonder which one. I feel like Mistral is the only big lab Intel has any chance of affording. Apple, otoh, could afford even Anthropic. However, the industry is evolving so quickly that it may not make sense to buy a company verses poaching talent.
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The rumors wrt Apple have been centered on Perplexity. I dunno if that’s the same being referenced wrt Intel. I’ve not heard about any deals actually going through though so either it’s a very small company or it’s being kept a very tight secret or no one has actually bought anything. If that part is true at all.
 
dada_dave said:
The rumors wrt Apple have been centered on Perplexity. I dunno about Intel.
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Ah that’s certainly more affordable. I think making something like Perplexity wouldn’t be too difficult for a company with solid infrastructure talent, though. There isn’t much secret sauce to it these days.
 
Cmaier said:
the US gov’t taking a stake will surely be comforting to all sorts of countries

I think I recently suggested that if I was the new CEO of Intel I would beg for U.S. gov’t money. But giving up an ownership stake to the U.S. is going to get Intel banned in certain places. Makes it much more likely that chips get backdoors, etc.
Click to expand...

Well, that’s really alarming to me. Most people think CPUs when they think Intel, but their high speed i/o portfolio is one of the best out there. Backdoors in datacenter networking would be really bad, and there are not many alternatives that I know of.
 
Funnily enough, I was thinking of mentioning Cohere as an ML lab that would be worth acquiring, and I just heard that they're acquiring Perplexity. Seems like a good investment for them since they'll benefit from Perplexity's infrastructure, though I'm not sure if it adds much value if they're looking to be acquired themselves in the near term.
 

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