News Qualcomm fishes in Intel's troubled waters: Examines acquiring different pieces of Intel

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turtile

Senior member
Aug 19, 2014
629
307
136
The only people who have any use for the foundries are Sam Altman and Elon Musk. If they have custom chip designs, they can make the chips without massive margins going to TSMC. Of course, I don't see their projects turning a profit so who knows how this will turn out.
 

turtile

Senior member
Aug 19, 2014
629
307
136
Broadcom and Qualcomm likely are producing more silicon.

Yes, but given that Intel doesn't have much going for it outside of Intel, is it worth taking the loss when they have the needed capacity from TSMC? Intel has plenty of capacity to brute force AI chips.
 
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PingSpike

Lifer
Feb 25, 2004
21,751
595
126
AMD/Qualcomm/Nvidia are companies I wouldn't want to buy Intel. Any of these would lead to killing off a lot of consumer products.
I'd rather see Broadcom. The complaints against them seem to be that they'd increase prices. But that won't work with any of Intel's consumer products, they all have competition.

Broadcom strikes me as the worst name mentioned IMO.

Broadcom's M.O. is to jack up the price sky high to extract all the money they can from their large and conservative (read as slow moving) customers while not caring about the ones that can quickly leave. After screwing those customers for all they can they sell the carcass of the business for scrap and it dies. Intel's main strategic advantage is they can supply large numbers of servers and client chips mostly to business. Broadcom would likely focus on screwing those businesses with terrible contract requirements while they struggled to buy enough AMD or ARM chips to kick Intel out. Maybe AMD and TSMC could replace that demand but it would take years and Broadcom could screw at will until such a time. Not because AMD can't make a similar product, but because they couldn't make enough fast enough. It will destroy Intel x86 as a business in the long term just like it destroys vmware but Broadcom doesn't care about the long term.

I would much rather see Nvidia merge with Intel. They actually give a damn about the technology, and won't destroy the company in a ketamine fugue

Jensen is way to smart to buy Intel at this point. I doubt he wants to pay for a bunch of fabs that haven't ever fabbed anything but Intel x86 CPUs and maybe never will, especially since they aren't even the best anymore. And I'm sure he wants nothing to do with the garbo management that likely has infested Intel top to bottom to the point it is probably unremovable. All he might be interested in is an x86 license to strike at some product categories they can't at the moment and maybe some of the design side. Even if that somehow got approved I think Nvidia is halfway into a project with ARM to lessen their dependence on the x86 ecosystem so the prospect isn't as appealing to them as it once might have been.

I have no idea what Elon's plan is. Probably some stock related scam using a protectionist law angle. Something that will probably look obviously illegal but we're in a clown world now so I literally anything could happen. I could see the Trump admin requiring all AI research be done using American manufactured chips conventiently after Musk buys a majority stake in Intel fabs at pennies on the dollar. The TikTok ban already sets a precedent for this kind of ruling. Or he might just have no idea what he's doing.
 

DZero

Senior member
Jun 20, 2024
410
161
76
If the competiton gets Intel, a lot of products will end EOS.
But if Broadcomm pulls it... it will turn into another SPARC. And that is awful.

Heck even IBM looks as an option if they don't have Power PC still with them. Because they opened their Open Power option, which has the potential to be the next RISC-V if done well.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
22,371
12,177
136
I would much rather see Nvidia merge with Intel. They actually give a damn about the technology, and won't destroy the company in a ketamine fugue
Ugh no, say goodbye to any open source software Intel has produced over the years. Plus that's when NV hardware starts to break on anything that isn't NV/Intel.
 

NTMBK

Lifer
Nov 14, 2011
10,377
5,520
136
Ugh no, say goodbye to any open source software Intel has produced over the years. Plus that's when NV hardware starts to break on anything that isn't NV/Intel.
Judging from how Twitter went, Elon will fire the teams supporting those open source projects and try to charge for access to them. So we're screwed either way

Amazing
 
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DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
22,371
12,177
136
Judging from how Twitter went, Elon will fire the teams supporting those open source projects and try to charge for access to them. So we're screwed either way

Amazing
He might. It's hard to say based on how he's handled SpaceX and Tesla. Tesla definitely isn't customer-friendly though (wrt software upgrades being non-transferable when selling used cars). Though he's probably only interested in the fabs.
 

RTX

Member
Nov 5, 2020
153
112
116

Morgan: What’s the biggest AI training cluster that somebody is serious about – you don’t have to name names. Has somebody come to you and said with MI500, I need 1.2 million GPUs or whatever.

Forrest Norrod: It’s in that range? Yes.

Morgan: You can’t just say “it’s in that range.” What’s the biggest actual number?

Forrest Norrod: I am dead serious, it is in that range.

Morgan: For one machine.

Forrest Norrod: Yes, I’m talking about one machine.

Morgan: It boggles the mind a little bit, you know?

1.2 million GPUs is an absurd number (mind-boggling, as Forest quips later in the interview). AI-training clusters are often built with a few thousand GPUs connected via a high-speed interconnect across several server racks or less. By contrast, creating an AI cluster with 1.2 million GPUs seems virtually impossible.
Is this the reason to buy Intel? Not Falcon Shores but a custom MI500 cluster on 14A. Would AMD say no if offered to build this many GPUs?
 

gdansk

Diamond Member
Feb 8, 2011
3,768
6,020
136


Is this the reason to buy Intel? Not Falcon Shores but a custom MI500 cluster on 14A. Would AMD say no if offered to build this many GPUs?
I wonder which "podcasting bro" approached them about 1.2 million GPUs. 🤔
 

NTMBK

Lifer
Nov 14, 2011
10,377
5,520
136
I wonder which "podcasting bro" approached them about 1.2 million GPUs. 🤔
I'm more curious which dumbass will give them enough funding for this. The podcast bros are just spending other people's money, who is going to pay the multiple billions to build and run a computer of that size? It's just utter stupidity.

So much energy and money being wasted on this nonsense.
 

LightningZ71

Platinum Member
Mar 10, 2017
2,021
2,456
136
The scale on such a cluster would be obscene. If they were putting 4 of them in 2U units, that would be 96 per cabinet. Let's use 100 per. That's 10000 cabinets for 1 million GPUs. Each cabinet is roughly 4 sq feet. You need enough room to walk around, which is going to be roughly 6 sq feet per cabinet, so make it 10 sq feet per. That's 1 million square feet. That's roughly a US Football field long and wide, with infrastructure, that's about the size of an enclosed football stadium such as the Louisiana Superdome, though nowhere near as tall.

With the heat that these things can produce, it's possible that they only get half that density and double the size needs.
 
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marees

Senior member
Apr 28, 2024
744
903
96
SemiAccurate heard another name that was said to be in active talks with Intel over the fabs. This isn’t to say the company in question is interested in buying them all, it could just be a specific one or unloading unneeded equipment. We were able to verify that this company and Intel are talking about the fabs but not specifically what parts. So who is this mystery company and what does this new twist portend?

Note: The following is analysis for professional level subscribers only.

https://www.semiaccurate.com/2025/01/21/another-suitor-talking-to-intel/
 

gdansk

Diamond Member
Feb 8, 2011
3,768
6,020
136
I'm more curious which dumbass will give them enough funding for this. The podcast bros are just spending other people's money, who is going to pay the multiple billions to build and run a computer of that size? It's just utter stupidity.

So much energy and money being wasted on this nonsense.
Podcasting bro. So it would be Microsoft by proxy.
 
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