News Intel 2Q24 Financial Results

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jpiniero

Lifer
Oct 1, 2010
15,102
5,661
136
They can't spin off the Fabs, we've mentioned this several times.
Intel was never designed with a clean break between Lab and Fab. The Fab has hard requirements for people in the Labs.
If they had two years maybe.

That used to be the case but isn't anymore. Even for the dies made at the Intel Foundry. And presumably could fab the existing products at Intel Foundry as long as it exists.
 

linkgoron

Platinum Member
Mar 9, 2005
2,395
969
136
His vision was the foundries will save us, yet it appears the competition is producing all of their best stuff. If you are a stockholder, how does that sit with you?

This company has a CEO that thinks invisible magical friends will help them. And worse yet, takes solace in that. Push ups Pat is a failure, and they need to can him and find a Lisa Su before they end up on the scrap pile of history.

That was harsh. I will now entertain posts that convince me I am overly pessimistic.
You are pessimistic, just wait until... er... Alder Lake is released and AMD will be in the rearview mirror and never again will they be in the windshield.
 

inquiss

Member
Oct 13, 2010
179
261
136

Intel Brags of $152 Billion in Stock Buybacks Over Last 35 Years.​


Is it Gelsinger's fault or the BoD? Gelsinger said he wasn't able to cut dividends and stock buybacks as quickly as he'd liked. It should have been cut IMMEDIATELY in 2021 soon as he was CEO.

I thought they gave him more control?

This is why mega corporations fail. Even if the CEO is actually capable, one hand is tied behind his back. AMD's meteoric rise was because they didn't have the bureaucratic nonsense Intel had(and still does).

The only way to change this completely is for it to completely break. And I fear this will break the company permanently too.
Lisa Su is both Chairman and CEO to stop that nonsense right? Think she is
 
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maddie

Diamond Member
Jul 18, 2010
4,878
4,950
136
Is anyone thinking that in the next few years we might get another chance to buy cheap as happened with AMD just before Zen? Keep an on Intel if crashes, but stays in business.
 

Markfw

Moderator Emeritus, Elite Member
May 16, 2002
26,051
15,191
136
I hate to say it, but I think Intel WILL fail. I see no wonderful products, no real vison for products that might change that, and still the "too big a company with too many managers and not enough workers" mentality. I had hope until recently, but I will now admit, I see no other alternative than failure. I actually hope I am wrong. we NEED 2 big companies to make competition work !
 

Josh128

Senior member
Oct 14, 2022
283
402
96
If rumors are true, all of their best stuff is being produced by the company they are supposed to be competing with successfully. How the hell does that work long term when your vision is the foundries will save us? Which now partially belongs to private equity. IEEE types always miss the forest for all of the trees in the way. I have never seen anything like this. I am over here like -

Their most profitable stuff, Xeon, is still being produced on Intel 3. The TSMC 3nm stuff for consumer was put in place years ago because they knew Intel 3 wouldnt have the capacity for Xeon and consumer. They are doing what they need to do to get by until 20A/18A become viable. Customers backing out from IFS could be for a number of reasons, not strictly performance. None of those reasons are good for Intel, though. Could be running late, could underperform, could be too expensive/yields not good enough to meet cust requirements.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,996
11,547
136
This will change nothing, Gelsinger is only a convenient scape goat, the mistakes were made years ago, i mean, instead of throwing 20bn $, if not more, in stock buy backs they could have bought for that amount something like 150 bleeding hedge ASML EUV scaners, and know they talk of being an all around foundry, with such short sighted decisions the writings were on the wall years before their current turmoil.

I sort-of agree. However, Gelsinger could have taken moves to spin off the fabs or do any number of the other cuts that will take place over the next 3-6 months with several years advance warning. Instead he hedged his bets on Intel 4/3 and 20a/18a in low volumes to save the company.

PE is the devil. I have never seen any good come out of it.
Anything that isn't public money or stock exchange money is "PE". The mom & pop gas station down the way - assuming they haven't all been wiped out in your area - is PE. The difference is, they aren't showing up with billions of dollars to buy a piece of some publicly-traded company and reshuffling assets to make a quick buck. A few sharks do that. Don't assume that every other private party is a shark.
 

Thunder 57

Platinum Member
Aug 19, 2007
2,950
4,476
136
I sort-of agree. However, Gelsinger could have taken moves to spin off the fabs or do any number of the other cuts that will take place over the next 3-6 months with several years advance warning. Instead he hedged his bets on Intel 4/3 and 20a/18a in low volumes to save the company.


Anything that isn't public money or stock exchange money is "PE". The mom & pop gas station down the way - assuming they haven't all been wiped out in your area - is PE. The difference is, they aren't showing up with billions of dollars to buy a piece of some publicly-traded company and reshuffling assets to make a quick buck. A few sharks do that. Don't assume that every other private party is a shark.

Call it what you will. You know I was talking about the sharks. However I do not wish to go OT so I'll leave it at that.
 

DavidC1

Senior member
Dec 29, 2023
777
1,236
96
IEEE types always miss the forest for all of the trees in the way. I have never seen anything like this. I am over here like -
Yea I noticed this too. I think this is true for IT guys as well.

There's limit of time and resources. And one of those resources is brainpower. Can't be good at everything. So there's myopia being developed.
 
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DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,996
11,547
136
Call it what you will. You know I was talking about the sharks. However I do not wish to go OT so I'll leave it at that.
Let's take it back on-topic then.

Intel only recently started parceling out significant portions of their fabs to outside monetary interests. And Intel is still a publicly-traded company, so they haven't been "taken private" yet. We don't know how outside investors will affect the performance of those fabs. Certainly Intel could do worse - take a look at the oxidation problems on 13th gen Raptor Lakes and ask yourself, "how did this happen? Who allowed it?". Was it a private equity firm? No, they entered the picture later. And I don't think any of them have a non-controlling interest in any of Intel's 10nm/Intel 7 fabs (if they do, that'd be news to me, or I wasn't paying attention).

My guess is investors smell an opportunity to either grab up free government money (CHIPS, or a future variant thereof) or to orchestrate a spin-off which could be lucrative in the short-term depending on who shows up to be a buyer/investor. Possibly both. For now the private money doesn't have a controlling interest in anything. It's going to take the board and the shareholders making some panic moves to enact significant changes.

If Intel wants their foundry business to emerge as a healthy entity in the future, they need to consider collaborations and cross-licensing. Samsung and Globalfoundries are probably the best candidates, for different reasons.
 
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Mahboi

Senior member
Apr 4, 2024
979
1,763
96
It doesn't have to mean it if the total pie gets much bigger.
Yeah like 400% bigger in 2 years. For a market that was already global. Get real...
Let's say last year Intel made 50 dollars and Nvidia 10 dollars, and this year Intel still makes 50 dollars but Nvidia makes 100. Intel had 83% last year, but this year they only have 33%, but they've made the same amount of money.
That ain't what you should have read from this chart.
Assuming Intel and AMD only sell CPUs to DC, they used to be 8/1. They are now 1/1 on CPUs.
It doesn't matter how you spin it, Intel has lost a terrifying amount of ground. For a company with 4 times more employees, that volume loss is death. They need to downsize extremely hard, even the 15% workforce can only be one step on the way.
They probably do make less money going in, but it's difficult to gauge what the difference is by looking at percentages vs an exponentially growing company like Nvidia.
It's not difficult to say that the Bubble Company will eventually crash back down, no.
When this bubble will have blown, Nvidia will probably recede to 1/4th their current DC sales. And AMD will also have more competition to offer. Maybe 1/3rd if they find a good angle.
Someone showed here that they went down 3% YoY in Q2 2024 vs Q2 2023 in DC, that's not remotely close to going down by 50% like they did in the chart you posted in the same time frame (going down from something like 20% to 10%).
Intel is going DOWN when AMD is going way up and Nvidia is exploding in a bubble.
That's like the boat sinking from the tide while everyone else's rides.
They are in an extremely battered ship, if the bubble hadn't fed the hyperscalers with absurd amounts of money, we'd have seen way way, wayyyyyy more than 3% loss. I'd project at around 25% at least. All the while AMD would've gained 20%.
So, it doesn't sound like he's a competent CEO - at least not for a company like Intel. It's a hard job and he needed to do hard things, and he didn't do them (at least not on time).
I feel like everyone here is pointing some serious fingers without knowing all that much.
Internally, it seems Intel suffers from a culture problem. On a 50 year old company that was on top of the world, that is an incredibly difficult thing to deal with.
Just look at AMD: can anyone tell that Lisa Su wasn't the AMD CEO at some point? That she used to think differently? No, you can't, because when she left whatever corpo she was at before, she fit into AMD like any member does. Being the CEO doesn't make you an instant God-Emperor, you have to understand the company from the POV of a lot of its members. You can ransack the place sure, you have the power, but if you do that, you could lose years rebuilding what worked before. And the bigger the beast is, the harder it is to control it.

From my seat, it seems that Pat came in trying to rebuild a company that had lost a lot of its engineers and a lot of its technical advantages. He also tried to pursue markets that Intel could realistically enter with their internal competence and had great promise (I.E GPUs). He focused on getting the main engine (CPUs and Fabs) running again, but those things take time. Hella time. If Intel 3 is what it promises to be, then it's likely that at least some success was found. So in this regard I have little to criticize, he analysed the business, went for what was doable and would bring returns, and stopped the insanely complicated and expensive nodes for something more viable. I think he was a good leader.

Now the BAD side of Pat, is that he tried to hold the great beast without shaking it. He quietly fired some employees but kept most, and kept repeating along with everyone like a Cult that "Intel is still ahead/Intel is back on top" every single generation, no matter how false that was. He also chose to accept RPL as being what it is, an overburdened gen on a dated node that had to be pushed way past its limits and released very early to keep looking "competitive".

On the strategy front, I can't fault him. He couldn't let go of GPUs because that's the future and he would condemn Intel if he did anyway. CPUs were obviously the main goal to repair. Getting to a more financially viable node (heard somewhere that at some point an Intel node of equivalent performance to TSMC's was FIVE TIMES more expensive) was paramount since Intel's "Eternal N°1 Always Growing Never Weakening" position was getting battered since Zen 2.
On the "boss" front, it's more subtle. Perhaps he had good cause to try and avoid breakage. Perhaps sounding all the alarm bells in a company that had lost a lot of its engineers and goodwill and was getting diffed in salary returns by Nvidia or Apple and even AMD later on would've just caused all the remaining good people to leave the ship and for the rats to hold on to the seats. Perhaps he deeply underestimated the problems and just felt like the beast needed some tweaking and redirecting instead of a full blown revolution.
Whether it was weakness/meekness on his part, or underestimating the depth of the internal damage, whether it was Intel's size that turned it into a Holy Roman Empire of modern times with little lords that kept doing things their way and ignoring him, whether it was that he just couldn't do anything since the money river was already running dry and the cards had been dealt before his time and he could just preside over the slow crumbling, whether it was that every rat would've turned against him...I don't know, we'd need Intel insiders to tell us.

But I'm getting pretty sick of people going "Pat's the problem". Intel had a zillion problems. If anything, he tried fixing them. I would blame Krzanich 100 times before Pat. Even Bob Swan held the ship as well as he could and found someone to replace him that would fit better. If there's one thing I'd blame on Pat is that he held a monster under its reigns and treated it too kindly, if Intel was to die anyway, he should have roughed them up before they would just expire quietly. Seems that now it's getting out of his hands slowly.
 

linkgoron

Platinum Member
Mar 9, 2005
2,395
969
136
Yeah like 400% bigger in 2 years. For a market that was already global. Get real...

Let's look at the data from Statista


I dislike comparing different Qs, so I'll compare Q2 2021 to Q2 2024 (although max for Intel was q4 2021 with 6.7, but we don't have Q4 2024 yet).

You can see that Intel went from Q2 2021 with 5.7B to about half in Q2 2024 (3B), yet of course their market share loss is much greater than that. They went from having 64% (5.7/8.9) to just about 9.3% (3/32.1) because AMD has grown 3.5 times (0.8 -> 2.8) and Nvidia grew 11 times (2.4 -> 26.3). So even though they lost "just" half (obviously that's a lot of money) of DC revenue, they totally cratered in revenue market share because the strongest effect was Nvidia exploding and AMD's growth as well. That's why I said that it's difficult to gauge the actual loss Intel has had by just looking at percentages. Their old revenue is twice as what they have now, but revenue market share was about 7 times higher. For reference, even if their revenue was unchanged they would have still only had 16% of the revenue - 5.7/34.8.

That ain't what you should have read from this chart.
Assuming Intel and AMD only sell CPUs to DC, they used to be 8/1. They are now 1/1 on CPUs.
Why would you assume that AMD doesn't sell GPUs to DC? AMD Has stated that they'll make around 4.5 Billion USD in fiscal year 2024 from DC GPUs. Indeed, 1 Billion of their Q2 2024 DC revenue was GPUs.

Intel is going DOWN when AMD is going way up and Nvidia is exploding in a bubble.
That's like the boat sinking from the tide while everyone else's rides.
They are in an extremely battered ship, if the bubble hadn't fed the hyperscalers with absurd amounts of money, we'd have seen way way, wayyyyyy more than 3% loss. I'd project at around 25% at least. All the while AMD would've gained 20%.
Intel is a failing company, you don't need to convince me.

I feel like everyone here is pointing some serious fingers without knowing all that much.
Internally, it seems Intel suffers from a culture problem. On a 50 year old company that was on top of the world, that is an incredibly difficult thing to deal with.
It was clear that Intel was going down years ago, and the execs had to know it.
On the strategy front, I can't fault him. He couldn't let go of GPUs because that's the future and he would condemn Intel if he did anyway.
GPUs are the future, they had to be MORE aggressive with GPUs - not less. He should've fired Koduri and hired someone actually competent, instead of letting him stay until 2023 and even promoting him on the way. Instead they are way off schedule on both releases and performance.

On the "boss" front, it's more subtle. Perhaps he had good cause to try and avoid breakage. Perhaps sounding all the alarm bells in a company that had lost a lot of its engineers and goodwill and was getting diffed in salary returns by Nvidia or Apple and even AMD later on would've just caused all the remaining good people to leave the ship and for the rats to hold on to the seats. Perhaps he deeply underestimated the problems and just felt like the beast needed some tweaking and redirecting instead of a full blown revolution.
Whether it was weakness/meekness on his part, or underestimating the depth of the internal damage, whether it was Intel's size that turned it into a Holy Roman Empire of modern times with little lords that kept doing things their way and ignoring him, whether it was that he just couldn't do anything since the money river was already running dry and the cards had been dealt before his time and he could just preside over the slow crumbling, whether it was that every rat would've turned against him...I don't know, we'd need Intel insiders to tell us.

But I'm getting pretty sick of people going "Pat's the problem". Intel had a zillion problems. If anything, he tried fixing them. I would blame Krzanich 100 times before Pat. Even Bob Swan held the ship as well as he could and found someone to replace him that would fit better. If there's one thing I'd blame on Pat is that he held a monster under its reigns and treated it too kindly, if Intel was to die anyway, he should have roughed them up before they would just expire quietly. Seems that now it's getting out of his hands slowly.
Gelslinger is definitely not the source of the problem/s, but he IMO just played it too safe. He had to move faster, take more risks and be more aggressive. He could have still failed, and hindsight is 20/20. However, there's a reason why Jim Keller left (albeit, a bit before Gelslinger returned), and it doesn't look like Intel took him seriously (enough). IMO, Gelslinger is just not good enough. You could argue that no CEO could do the job (which I feel is what you're mostly arguing) and it might be true - but we can only point on the one that failed to turn the ship around.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
21,996
11,547
136
GPUs are the future, they had to be MORE aggressive with GPUs - not less. He should've fired Koduri and hired someone actually competent, instead of letting him stay until 2023 and even promoting him on the way. Instead they are way off schedule on both releases and performance.

Who else was available?

Gelslinger is definitely not the source of the problem/s, but he IMO just played it too safe. He had to move faster, take more risks and be more aggressive. He could have still failed, and hindsight is 20/20. However, there's a reason why Jim Keller left (albeit, a bit before Gelslinger returned), and it doesn't look like Intel took him seriously (enough). IMO, Gelslinger is just not good enough. You could argue that no CEO could do the job (which I feel is what you're mostly arguing) and it might be true - but we can only point on the one that failed to turn the ship around.
He either needed to be more aggressive or more pessimistic. Gelsinger exudes a certain confidence in Intel that seemed (and still seems) unwarranted.
 

jpiniero

Lifer
Oct 1, 2010
15,102
5,661
136
Anything that isn't public money or stock exchange money is "PE". The mom & pop gas station down the way - assuming they haven't all been wiped out in your area - is PE. The difference is, they aren't showing up with billions of dollars to buy a piece of some publicly-traded company and reshuffling assets to make a quick buck. A few sharks do that. Don't assume that every other private party is a shark.

I will say that I think the execs are concerned that PE smells blood in the water and is angling to kill Intel for a quick buck. Which is causing the current panic moreso than their financial situation.
 
Reactions: Gideon
Jul 27, 2020
19,613
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He either needed to be more aggressive or more pessimistic. Gelsinger exudes a certain confidence in Intel that seemed (and still seems) unwarranted.
I think he suffered some bout with a degenerative disease because he looks emaciated (probably way before he became Intel CEO) and that may have contributed to his weakness as Intel's CEO. Upon being presented with the opportunity to lead Intel, he must've thought, "At least I'll go out being remembered as someone like Steve Jobs". Because both of them were begged to return by companies they were fired/forced to resign from.
 

controlflow

Member
Feb 17, 2015
148
241
116
I hate to say it, but I think Intel WILL fail. I see no wonderful products, no real vison for products that might change that, and still the "too big a company with too many managers and not enough workers" mentality. I had hope until recently, but I will now admit, I see no other alternative than failure. I actually hope I am wrong. we NEED 2 big companies to make competition work !
You really don't think Clear Water Forest is an interesting product with potential? Lunar Lake?

You really don't see how GNR 128C on Intel 3 vs Turin 128c on N3 is a much better situation for Intel than Genoa vs SPR/EMR on Intel 7? The roadmap isn't really the problem. It is the surviving long enough to actually deliver it under the ridiculous 6-7 bn/quarter CapEx that is the issue. Spending shifting from CPUs to GPUs (temporarily IMO) is hitting Intel just when their CapEx is at the peak, bad timing.

Intel being in serious financial trouble isn't news to anyone, but I don't think your assessment is objective. They are a fat and inefficient company with bloated headcount and expenses. A forcing function to improve efficiency is probably a good thing long term. Sometimes this type of thing is the only way to clean up a bureaucratic mess assuming you survive.
 

Joe NYC

Platinum Member
Jun 26, 2021
2,463
3,347
106
The real cause for concern is the absurdly bad cashflow.

More precisely, cashflow requirements to build out the fabs Intel committed itself to.

Instead of a much lower risk approach to try to upgrade their existing fabs to EUV, Intel chose high risk approach, announced 2 giga fabs (in Ohio and Germany IIRC) before the process nodes were competitive, before any foundry customers were on board.
 

Mahboi

Senior member
Apr 4, 2024
979
1,763
96
More precisely, cashflow requirements to build out the fabs Intel committed itself to.

Instead of a much lower risk approach to try to upgrade their existing fabs to EUV, Intel chose high risk approach, announced 2 giga fabs (in Ohio and Germany IIRC) before the process nodes were competitive, before any foundry customers were on board.
I don't think there were many choices there.
Intel can't afford to lowball things either. Not when it was playing to stay competitive vs TSMC/AMD.
 

controlflow

Member
Feb 17, 2015
148
241
116
Instead of a much lower risk approach to try to upgrade their existing fabs to EUV, Intel chose high risk approach, announced 2 giga fabs (in Ohio and Germany IIRC) before the process nodes were competitive, before any foundry customers were on board.
The "lower risk" approach was never a real option.

If you want to stay on leading edge process, you had to increase scale to make the node cost competitive and you had to also sell some of the wafer capacity externally since Intel products alone could no longer fill the volume needed.

It was either do that or give up entirely on developing new process nodes and turn the fabs into the new GloFo.
 
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