🌈 N A T I O N A L I S A T I O N 🌈
💪letting it fail anyway 👍
Is it really a good idea to let Taiwan and Samsung control all semiconductor manufacturing?
Yes. Not Samsung but Taiwan. It would force the us to not tiptoe around China.
Also Intel is one of many, maybe the biggest name but for a Long time not the biggest player at all.
Ever read the name AMD? The ones actually behind x86 64bit and many other things?
Nvidia (even though they invest to much into a double that will pop)
ARM?
Texas instruments?
Bosh?
There is more than enough without intel.
*Apple
[A day after mainland China invades Taiwan]
“Fuck, why did graphics cards quintuple in price?”
Yeah guess what, thats why Taiwan needs protection and China enough pressure to not even think about it. Wich can only be achieved by being important to the world.
Most of the companies you’re mentioning do not have their own chip foundries. The only - and I do mean only - companies that have working lithography lines to support bleeding edge chips at massive scale are Samsung, TSMC, and Intel. Several other companies are investing in eventually gaining that capability, but right now, thats it. And these things take a LONG time to spin up and iron out the issues.
TL;DR: the problem is how few companies actually MAKE the chips, not how many companies DESIGN them.
I didn’t think any of those companies did any manufacturing. Are we talking about the same thing? My understanding was there was only three names in manufacturing (the ones I mentioned)
What do you mean by it would force us not to tiptoe around China?
On that note, what do you think about Trump’s policy against Huawei when he was president? I’m inclined to think it’s a good thing despite it not being something Obama (or Clinton or Biden/Harris) would do
I didn’t think any of those companies did any manufacturing.
They don’t. Well, TI does but not anywhere near the the node size of the three you mentioned: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/technology_node
By that definition Intel isn’t manufacturing either, its foxcon that manufacturers for them.
Huh Intel has its own fabs.
I love that paranoia and xenophobia. As if a corrupt domestic company is somehow magically better than a corrupt international company.
It’s been quite obvious over the past few years that yes there’s potentially some risk of foreign countries trying to install spy code, but actually that doesn’t seem to happen very often, and what’s much more damaging to our society are large corporations that use their power to screw over the general public, and most of these large corporations are domestic.
It’s not xenophobia, it’s a matter of national security for every single western nation. Without Intel, x86 processor manufacturing would be limited to TSMC in Taiwan, and would only serve to further incentivise Chinese aggression over the island.
So yes, paranoia - but sometimes that can be a good thing.
And there’s also resilience against natural disasters. Having processor manufacturing limited to one place is just a bad idea.
I mean, what did you think when you learned that the US was worried about something as basic as surgical/n95 masks during the pandemic because we simply didn’t produce any domestically?
Seems absolutely silly not to think your country should have some say in how computer processors are developed. I highly recommend the book Chip War to anyone interested in learning more.
That all said, my understanding is all chip design is dependent on design software entirely owned by US companies - so there’s that at least.
What does that mean exactly? Is the company expected to compete or just support existing products or be sold to other owners?
Let’s start with what we’re not doing. We’re not handing out money to private investors in the old “socializing losses privatizing profits” bullshit we’ve been doing since the nineties.
So, if there’s a compelling national security reason to keep the company alive, we, the state buy it. Then we, the state, run it. We run it in a way that benefits our interests as owners and customers.
Maybe a few years down the line we can find a way to sell it (or our share in it) in a way that satisfies our national security requirements and makes us a load of money. This is not unheard of, see the acquisition and subsequent sale of ABN AMRO by the kingdom of the Netherlands.
Maybe split it up, write off some parts, sell some others, keep others.
Or we strip maybe it’s IP, and license it out to contractors to get the shit we need.
We can do whatever. We own it.
A tech company is not like a bank though, its value is not just in assets but in expertise. Is the plan to layoff all the engineers or pay them less? Is the plan the company generates profit? What if it can’t compete anymore and is just a money sink? And if you’re just going to sell it for assets then how’s that different from letting the company go bankrupt?
And licensing it out to contractors? That just sounds like a huge money sink.
Listen, Intel is fucked. It’s fucked right now, and getting bought out by someone else isn’t magically going to unfuck it. Saving the company is going to take money and effort.
We can also just let it go up in flames. No skin off my back.
Privatize profits, and socialize losses…
If Intel can’t pay their own bills from Intel’s money, they can be sold to a private company, file for chapter 11, or go out of business.
And let all those backdoors just walk away?
I assume that you’re at least halfway joking about backdoors in Intel.
Intel silicon has historically had a lot of “bugs”…
Every and any hardware manufacturer can or has.
What he means is the feature of having a lightweight OS with no documentation running under the OS you as a customer is running.
That’s not going to go away by switching to AMD or some ARM implementation, they all have their own equivalent. Maybe if you’re running some fully libre open-source RISC-V chip, but those are currently nowhere near capable of competing on the big stage for anything other than embedded/hobbyist stuff.
as much as I think Intel is dumb, it’s definitely not in the consumers best interest for Intel to go out of business or absorbed into another company
I will take Intel being sold or going under over cronyism and corporate welfare.
Why is it in anyone’s best interest to keep it as a monopoly if it can’t pay its bills? Its products are going to stagnate either way, injecting money is useless.
They deserve to fail so fucking hard though
You’re only saying that because it’s true.
Feeding people that can’t afford to eat because of low salaries and high prices: That’s socialism!
Giving billions to a company that deserves to be replaced: That’s capitalism!
Cram them under AMD and make it not-a-monopoly by ending all x86 patents.
Even if they did, starting a chip company is fucking difficult AF. You don’t want one mega company. You end up in a situation like Canada where they have one airline company and barely any cell carriers.
Competition is healthy. Fingers crossed that Nvidia starts making x86 CPUs as well as Qualcomm. AMD needs more competition too.
The GPU industry also needs some real competition.
Other chip companies abound, they just cannot make x86. That’s been a duopoly for nearly thirty years. VIA was an asterisk on that until they got bought by some Chinese company. Cyrix tried faking their way around it via what we’d now call microcode, and it went poorly.
x86 would become like ARM… which admittedly could be devastating toward RISC-V.
Oh, so if China helps out their companies, it’s meddling but if the US government fucking bails out a company that should go bankrupt because of dreadful and shit management, it’s a necessary step to secure national interests. So much for “the free market will regulate itself”.
Hypocrites.
Q: how do you remain competitive against your competitors if those have the backing of an entire nation behind them?
A: you don’t.
You do have to consider that Intel has a head start of multiple decades, should’ve had a war-chest the size of a nation (like Nintendo), and has a nigh monopoly position in the CPU market. Intel also has preferential treatment in the US (similar to Microsoft), so it’s not it isn’t already being funded by the US government.
You don’t catch up on decades of research just by pumping in money. That’s like trying to have a baby faster by having more women.
Trying to pretend Intel is the underdog in this scenario is not credible. Despite - or maybe exactly due to, their head start, pseudo-leaders who thought they could survive any boneheaded decision are giving that lead away. And yet again, tax payer money may have to be used to correct the decisions of a private company (yes publicly traded but the government doesn’t own Intel). Privatise profits, nationalise debt. Works every time!
AMD should be the next monopoly. Let Intel die in peace.
