D2D: Intel and the Fast-running Zombies
Earnings from AMD, INTC, QCOM, Cloudflare and more news
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Highlights from our Blog
Like the hero in zombie movie, Intel has woken from a coma to find the world radically altered. They have fixed their manufacturing process (probably), but now need to compete in the marketplace where their product portfolio has a lot of holes. The competition is running fast and clawing at the doors.
Its earnings season. Intel reported decent earnings but was buoyed by signs of real progress in turning around its manufacturing operations. AMD is actually making good progress, but it remains a battleground stock. Their quarter had a lot of moving parts, not as bad as the stock reacted but not inspiring. And then there was Qualcomm. Their results were not great, and then everything management said on the call just seemed to make it worse. They remain stuck in a race between the potential loss of Apple and the long product cycles of the parts of their business that are working well.
Cloudflare reported another good quarter. Most intriguing is their position in the rapidly evolving AI investible universe. Their position at the edge of everywhere and their foundational position around data sovereignty could make them very important as AI Inference comes to the fore.
We spend a lot of time helping companies and investors raise money, but these are challenging times for fundraising. Put simply, no one knows the value of money right now. Lean times for start-ups, with valuations often coming down 50%. For their part, VCs are finding LPs moving in slow motion as they try to assess how much they really have allocated to venture.
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Noteworthy Items
Semis and Deep Tech
Start-up Tenstorrent raised $100 million. Encouraging to see a US-based semis start-up raise that kind of money, on the other hand, they are going to need all of that and probably more. They have some big ambitions.
A deep dive into the shortage of high end Nvidia H100 GPUs, with tons of supporting detail.
Qualcomm, Infineon, Bosch, NXP and Nordic Semi launched a joint venture to do RISC V stuff. The press release is vague and we have not had time to speak with Qualcomm yet, so a lot of this is unclear. From the press release it sounds like this yet-to-be-named company will compete with SiFive, CodaSip and Andes in helping companies to harden RISC V projects. Maybe there is more to it, but it is interesting to see Qualcomm team up with all those European companies, many of whom compete with Qualcomm.
Three interesting looks at the changes that Electric Vehicles (EV) are bringing to the automotive industry. Vietnam’s Vinfast has big plans for the US market, but seems to be undergoing some very expensive growing pains adapting its corporate culture to the US. And a story about how Mexico learned to stop worrying and love the EV. Mexico is a major oil producer, but it also has pinned its industrial ambitions on supplying US auto makers who suddenly care a lot about EVs. Finally, European governments are struggling to find a response to the surge in EV imports from China. Automakers there do not want to antagonize Beijing and risk their significant profits and investments. German autoworkers, on the other hand, have much clearer opinions on the subject, and their voices are getting louder.
High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) is one of the clear beneficiaries of the AI spending surge. It is expensive but many AI systems have architected themselves into corners from which only HBM can extricate them.
Battery life is the quintessential modern problem. Improvements in battery technology move slowly, there is no Moore’s Law here. Understanding what affects battery life, especially in low-power IoT devices, turns out to be incredibly complex with all kinds of mitigating factors. Worth reading while you are waiting for your Tesla to charge.
Wireless and Networking
Hughes/Echostar just launched the world’s biggest communications satellite. With all the talk about cube-sats and massive satellite constellations, this stands out as heavy iron and a serious engineering project. That being said, its total bandwidth is 500 GB/s which is tiny when compared to what Starlink offers and Kuiper has planned.
A handy tutorial on how the wireless standards-body, 3GPP, works. We knew it was multi-layered, but had not realized just how byzantine it actually is.
Meta/Facebook published an academic paper examining their networking architecture. It is very dense but holds some clues as to how that company looks at data center architecture and probably a few clues on what they are planning to do with semis.
GoGo, the company that provides much of in-air Wi-Fi for planes in the US has been building a 5G service for years. They have tried to build much of the equipment themselves and so not surprisingly, they have hit yet another delay.
Antennas are as close to black magic as the modern world gets. Full of arcane secrets and strange behavior. If this sounds like your thing, the Marine Corps Antenna Handbook is a good place to start.
Software and the Cloud
We do not link to the New Yorker that often here, but they published a good piece on AI. It is important, but let’s not mythologize it, and maybe we should not even call it AI.
Google seems to be further reducing the scope of its Fuchsia operating system (OS), abandoning plans to port their smart speakers to it. Fuchsia seems to have some solid technical appeal, but it makes no sense for Google to maintain two (three?) operating systems all going after the same consumer electronics market. A few hard decisions on their part could do wonders for their ambitions.
Other Interesting News
An interesting study of Chicago’s role as the hub of the US rail system. Worth reading to think about the long tail of infrastructure dependencies.