After the Intel-pocalypse
A lot about Intel, and more about servers, firmware and a little about industrial policy.
In which we dig into more of the turmoil swirling around Intel, explore the world of server firmware. We also take a look at some of the recent developments in the networking world around and the brewing confrontation between Nvidia and Broadcom.
Just a reminder that we operate our newsletters on a paid model. Paid subscribers will get three newsletters a month including our China Deep Tech notes. Paid subscribers will also get early access to the newsletter as well other benefits coming soon. Please subscribe and support our work.
Highlights from our Blog
Apparently, our blog is now the Intel Channel. We have spent a lot of time looking at the company in recent weeks as we try to keep up with the news flow. Put simply, Intel is vulnerable and is likely in play. However, at this point, there are so many leaks, rumors and counter-rumors that our sense is we are deep into the silly season. Something has to give, and most people on the Street think that means a sale of the company or some split-up. But it could also mean some form of sizable outside investment.
The popularity of one of our most highly-viewed pieces stems from its title - “Should Intel Just Close its Fabs?”. We do not think that makes much sense, but apparently a lot of other people think it does.
As tempting as that idea seems on paper, we think it is important to remember that there are still significant sources of value within Intel. The fabs and the capability for developing leading edge semis manufacturing processes is going to be very valuable to someone, as is the company’s PC CPU business. There is a bargain to be had here for a very patient buyer or investor.
It is not all bad news at Intel. The CEO put out a letter to “The Team” highlighting some recent good news - Amazon is a customer for 18A, a cleaner split of the Foundry business and further capital discipline. Of course, the fact that a third that of that letter was devoted to securities law disclosures tell a story in its own right.
We have spent a lot of time researching the dark corners of the server business lately. One area which we found both deeply esoteric and oddly fascinating was firmware. This is both incredibly important for servers and so prosaic as to be almost entirely ignored.
We had the opportunity to speak to a group of developed world finance policy makers last month about growing the semiconductor industry. While the American policy people and industry professionals framed their thoughts on the topic around confronting the PRC, European policy makers were equally concerned about avoiding investing heavily in local companies only to see them acquired by (American) corporate giants.
If you like this content, you should check out our podcast The Circuit
Semis, Hardware and Deep Tech
Amazon opened access to its Graviton 4 CPUs on AWS. These are powerful, capable CPUs, competing with the best that AMD and Intel produce. Amazon bills the new instances as “memory optimized”. These are not intended for AI workloads, they are still greatly lacking on-chip memory bandwidth, but we have to wonder if AWS is planning for a newer version of the chip, say Graviton 6, that can do heavy AI inferencing.
A few people sent us links about Flow Computing, a Finnish start-up, designing a new generation of CPUs. Flow’s chips have 4 ‘CPU cores’ and 64 ‘parallel processing units for AI’. We appreciate new approaches, and Finland has some incredible semis design talent. But this is a System on a Chip (SoC), so maybe we can just do away with the whole CPU/GPU/ASIC classifications. Processors of the future (and the present for that matter) just lump together a bunch of functions, to the point that the old labels do not make much sense anymore.
Amidst all the other bad news about Intel, we forgot to mention the fact that Intel lost the bid to make the processor for Sony’s next-generation Playstation. It sounds like Intel just wanted too high a price for the business, which strikes us as entirely missing the point. We have written a few times about how much of Intel seems to be stuck in the wrong era. They should be falling over themselves to get every piece of business they can to fill Intel Foundry, rather than worrying about a point or two of gross margins. This reminds us a lot of the US auto makers who just got too wed to their cost models and failed to notice the whole market had moved away from them.
Does anyone know how to say “Podcasting Bro” in Chinese?
Networking and Wireless
The inestimable Stacey Higginbotham published a report on Smart Appliances for Consumer Reports. Turns out that software is not as reliable as the washing machines and refrigerators they run on.
Deutsche Telekom and Meta have been engaged in a multi-year dispute. Meta just lost the accompanying lawsuit. And while the intricacies of their fight are a bit esoteric, the implications are important in so much as they are part of a larger, ongoing fight between the Internet companies and the telecom companies. The operators carry a lot of Facebook traffic - should Facebook pay them for that? But Dt’s customers pay DT for “Internet”, isn’t that enough? Facebook’s statement. DT’s statement.
A few companies have now introduced window glass that comes with embedded 5G antennas. We saw this at MWC earlier this year, but it now seems to have real legs. A big problem with 5G and a lot of the plans hopes for 6G are using higher frequencies which struggle with getting signals indoor. This is one approach to bridging that gap.
Software and the Cloud
We have been tracking the networking side of AI servers lately. We think this is one area where Nvidia is a bit vulnerable to competition, if for no other reason than their competitor here is the highly capable Broadcom. So we noticed this post on a Linux blog about the efforts Nvidia has been putting into providing full Linux support for its Mellamox cards. Nvidia is doing the work in the areas it sees competition like networking, but less active in upstreaming code for areas where it has less competition like device drivers for GPUs (i.e. CUDA). We are oversimplifying this, but it is revealing. And one more example, Nvidia also published virtualization software for GPUs (vGPU), because you know who else cares a lot about virtualization? - VMWare, a wholly owned subsidiary of Broadcom.
“I Am Tired of AI”, a sentiment we can fully agree with. One software engineer’s separating the hype from the reality.
One real use case for AI - finding new Nazca Lines in Peru using AI to scan aerial images.
Science and Climate
People in the US are increasingly becoming aware that our electrical grid needs a serious upgrade. One simple yet highly effective option is “reconductoring”, a great word for adding additional wire spans to existing towers.
Diversions
Scientists describe a geometry that exists outside of space and time. Brain bending ideas, but the math is simple enough to “explain to a fifth grader”. So apparently, we now have to repeat Fifth Grade.
Image by Google Gemini. We do not understand the giraffes either. Our prompt asked for zombies.
Thank you for reading D2D Newsletter. This post is public so feel free to share it.