I think we’d heard about this before but for some reason it’s in my headlines today.
Basically the problem with bespoke accelerators is that if the market shifts you can’t necessarily repurpose what you were working on…
As an ASIC maybe it wasn’t a super-heavy investment. But NVidia may have the right idea on building something sufficiently general-purpose that it can with modest modifications be fit for crypto mining one year and AI the next.
Pat G. said he would be chopping products and businesses, and he certainly has been. They report headcount at quarterly earnings, and I expect them to be down at least 20k people.
Where are all the “Intel War-chest shall never be defeated” crowd now? Not saying that Intel is done, far from it. These are however definitely signs of trouble.
Continually missing schedules indicates to me that they were spread too thin. Eliminating the “marginal” products should help with this, but it will be a couple of years before the effect is seen. The Intel R&D budget is still HUGE compared to AMD, NVDA, or TSMC.
Alan