Just look at how they dragged their feet in transitioning to EUV because it was too expensive. This contributed to large delays in their 10 and 7 nm processes and a total loss in their process leadership.

And look at how many billions they poured into making a 5G modem only to give up and sell their IP to Apple.

Or how they dragged their feet in getting into mobile, then came out with Atom way too late to be successful in the market. They essentially gave the market to ARM.

Optane is another recent example. Cool technology, but if a product is not a smashing success right away, Intel throws in the towel.

There’s no real long term vision that I can see. No resilience to challenges or ability to solve truly difficult problems.

Obviously, they are kind of big enough to do both — make a half hearted attempt and fight it all the same due to some internal politics. However, for something this existential, one would think that the smart people and the leadership would try to put some focus on the field. Was it that bad? Really, looking for some insight on what really went down.

Losing a product line that drove that fab improvement process isn't going to help.

No. Managing innovation at the scale of Intel is a challenge. And their customer base (PCs and servers) is shrinking. Also, this is only like 15% of the workforce. Which is only 5% more than a typical culling.

(On the other hand, I've often pointed out that Intel's attempts to develop two microarchitectures in parallel have always failed in the long run, with one project ending up woefully uncompetitive.)

From what I've heard, they didn't try very hard. Apparently they thought all they had to do was make chips, and that the sheer "technical superiority" of their process meant that they could treat their customers as second-class stakeholders, withhold information about their production timelines, etc.

The financials tell a different story.

People forget that 2 out of 4 companies failed in this round. It was not just Intel. GF completely quit the race of high-end microprocessor nodes in the middle of development.

This article is rambling and over-complicated.

For a much more insightful and compelling view into Intel at its greatest I recommend “The Pentium Chronicles”.

I left in about a year and a half and moved to a startup company. My issue with Intel was that, as a monopoly, they had grown fat and complacent.

I am not exaggerating when I say that in 1998-99, engineers were working maybe 4-5 productive hours in a week. Political savvy and alliance-building were the most important things for promotions and influence.

Those who actually produced good work had credit for their work diluted through many layers of management. You could do something amazing and your manager's manager might present it in a powerpoint to the company without mentioning your name at all, and acting like the idea was his all along.

I'm surprised the company has lasted this long. Its a place where mediocre people gather.

This is interesting to me, how did they end up like this?

"This article does a good job of confirming this reality, from the initial introduction, to the diligence process. It's unfortunate that capital allocation has turned into a popularity contest."

I think you've arrived at the wrong conclusion, allow me to share an anecdote which illustrates why I think that.

I came to Silicon Valley in the 80's and went to work for Intel. Intel at the time joked they were the biggest semiconductor company in the world because they were losing money less fast than everyone else. I had a freshly minted EE degree and unlike many of my peers I actually had been building microcomputer systems for 6 years already (I soldered together my own Digital Group Z-80 system in high school). As was their policy at the time, Intel started new college grads (they even had a term NCG) on projects which gave them an opportunity to demonstrate their strengths and weaknesses in a relatively 'safe' way. I was handed the 80186 to deal with but there were other, sexier, projects using the 80286 and 80287 at the time. I thought at the time it was 'unfair' and possibly a 'popularity contest' that other engineers had the opportunity to work on those projects in the spotlight when I was 'forced' to work on what was, even then, a 'loser' CPU.

It was later, through a period of some introspection, that I came to realize that it wasn't any of these things, it was simply time. Just like a finance person is loathe to predict a trend based on a small number of data points, or a scientist to come to a conclusion with a small number of samples, engineers and entrepreneurs need 'run time hours' where they have encountered a variety of situations and come away making good and bad decisions and adjusting themselves appropriately. Better test scores, having the 'right' answer now which is validated some time in the future, and being able to reason clearly, are not a substitute for run-time when it comes to evaluating an investment in people.

My conclusion was that what I characterized as a 'popularity contest' was actually the 'understanding my strengths/weaknesses' relative to other folks who might do the same job. The people who had a longer track record were 'lower risk' because the decision maker felt more confident in their evaluation. So lets bring that back to the VC community.

So some times it looks like the VC community is a 'boys club' or a 'walled garden' where if you don't know the right people or go to the right social events you can't 'break in'. And when you do get the introduction but don't get the investment, and that investment goes to someone who has worked with the VC before, it doesn't feel all that great. And yet, from the VC's perspective something completely different is going on.

So a VC or Angel sees your pitch, they pass, but generally they remember that you pitched them something. If the person who did fund it, or if you boot strapped it into existence, and they see that success they get a data point so that the next time they talk to you, rather than being a 'new' thing, you have some run time where they have a data point (your original pitch). So now the discussion can be 'well we passed when you pitched Foobar tell us the story between then and now.' That experience or outcome lets them evaluate your capabilities in a much more objective light. Once you are a 'known' quantity the whole tone of the conversation changes and it becomes relatively easier both to get a meeting and to close a round of funding.

"But it's a chicken and egg conundrum!" is a common retort to this. It does seem that way, but its not. Working in a startup (which is easy to do, just apply) gives you visibility to entrepreneurs who got funding, and depending on scale, to the people who funded them. Excelling in that environment will give you a better understanding of what makes startups successful (or not) and can give you insights into what you would do the same, or differently. While there are always stories of people who turn a dorm room project into a big success, the much more common story is someone who works for an established company and invests in understanding how that works, then works for a smaller company to get a grasp of how all of it fits together, and then perhaps co-founds or bootstraps a company to see what they can do when they have more control over the life and death decisions that startups face every month.

Now if you want to commiserate that it takes 3, 5, or even 10 years of 'minor league' play before someone will trust you with their money in your own venture. I hear ya. I would love to find ways to reliably evaluate the long term success potential of someone with less historical data. Picking entreprenuers who can execute their visions successfully is at least as hard as picking out ideas which will be successful when executed well.

(ie, not investing in EUV, assuming SAQP would work forever, ignoring the consequences of everything being power-limited...)

This kind of decision is hard, because it's a technical-economic tradeoff, and the latter is more voodoo than math. And that's not even addressing whether you get surprised by things like the LLM boom...