Huh, I'm used to "stock collapses" headlines being a 2% daily fluctuation. Actually down 50% over the past month. But then again, up 50% over the past year. Sure is great when stocks of companies that are foundationally important to the world economy are being traded like meme stocks.
My interpretation is that the stock market is just reflecting the rising value of power/influence assets relative to currency, which is to say, the falling value of currency relative to power/influence (which stocks are). Stocks aren't going up because the companies are that much better, they're going up because the macroeconomy is that much more fucked.
I submit exhibit 1: the US monetary supply. [1] We're 'printing' money like there's no tomorrow. Up ~6% in a single year, well over a trillion dollars. That's obviously going to make an economy look increasingly nonsensical.
I increasingly get the same feeling I did as back in the early 2000s when there were endless 'house flipping' shows on TV where somebody would go buy a house on an insta-improved loan, add some granite counter tops and mop the floor, then resell it within a couple of weeks for $20k profit and repeat. Not sure how people didn't see that was basically 'Bubble - The TV Show!'
I don't think this chain of arguments holds with Intel.
Fwiw, I bought 100 shares when they were 19€/share and sold 80 when they reached 100 this summer, so I followed it's development somewhat.
The low was itself after it's share dropped by like 25+%. That's what made me buy them - I thought "no way is the USA government going to let them go insolvent, their losses are gonna get socialized for sure". One year later Trump announced a large injection into Intel, causing the stock price to overshoot my expectation massively.
This fall is just it's share going closer to a more realistic valuation after Trump blew it up, I think it's gonna settle around 40 in a year or so
Power is being able to get people to do things you want them to do. It's become clear that you can do that a lot better with stocks than within currency, although you can also do it with a huge amount of currency.
I think it works like this: If it's going to rain, the value of an umbrella is $50, if not, it is 0.
Since you don't know if it's going to rain or not, you are going to value it based on how likely each of these events are. Now the weather report came out, and there's not going to be any rain.
The stock market has lots of guards against volatility, but the AI story bypasses all of them - they're saying that AI is the only thing that is going to matter economically, and AI value is exponential - meaning past performance can be discounted, since almost all value resides in the future.
This means that all companies valuations have been reduced to a single dimension - how much companies can contribute to AI, this increases volatility, since now their value is highly correllated with AI
This is an ideal, but in reality, there are insiders that know when a storm will come, but delay the warning long enough to buy all umbrellas cheap, so the rest of the fools that thought the market was being fair are caught paying $100 or more for each.
Intel has been the one tech stock most connected to reality. They had good plans and multiple admins trying to bring chips back to the US so they mooned, then they disappointed so they crashed. They're way closer to the phases of the moon than a casino.
The stock market is basically a system for abstracting ownership away from human beings.
When you have a small business, or even a large business that has a single owner, that person has to care about things like their own reputation and might sometimes have preferences for things other than maximizing returns. There is a significant difference in behavior between a profitable company that makes money by providing something people want and a company that makes slightly more money by turning the screws at every opportunity.
And typical funds only care about number go up. Even the ones that nominally exclude "bad" companies/industries have their rules, but then hold shares in Comcast rather than Exxon and still expect Comcast to turn the screws. Whereas to do the real thing, you would need funds with missions to do things like specifically fund companies who are new entrants to concentrated markets to increase the amount of competition. Which to most funds is a conflict of interest, because if the fund has that industry as a target then it already owns shares in the companies the new entrant would be competing with. Conversely, mergers they're all for, because they own shares in all three companies in that industry, so causing three to become two is higher margins for everybody.
So it produces market concentration and drives obsession with quarterly profits, harming customers and employees. The consequently larger companies then buy off the government to get subsidies and insist they're too big to fail whenever they screw up, use the nature of multinational conglomerates to arbitrage tax rates and shift tax incidence to purely domestic companies and workers, etc. All of which the funds like because they make number go up.
It's basically a paperclip optimizer which is trying to accumulate money rather than paperclips.
One difference: the longer your money is in a casino, the more likely you are to lose it; while the longer your money is in the stock market (especially in a total market index fund), the more likely you are to win:
Isn't that the place where if I win loads of money, they give me lots of free stuff and invite me back? The same place where if I lose loads of money, they give me lots of free stuff and invite me back?
I understand that at a lofty, ethical plane, it's a reflection of value, of growth and progress and confidence in all of that.
But in practice, it's not even gambling. It's humanity's hope bastardised by HFT and recurring insider trading. It's confidence for all the wrong reasons, institutional HODL.
The stock market should be a mechanism for allocation of wealth that helps the country and the economy. What people have done over the last 50 years is called "a race to the bottom", where everyone puts personal wealth gain over social behavior and teamwork like what made america great in the first place. The moral collapse of the US lead the way to the collapse of it's power.
Over the long term it’s the investment class most likely to grow capital.
Occasionally there are long periods where returns are low (or even negative), but in terms of risk it’s the least risky place to put your money compared to all the alternatives (if properly diversified).
(Not financial advice, just my rule-of-thumb understanding)
> Occasionally there are long periods where returns are low (or even negative), but in terms of risk it’s the least risky place to put your money compared to all the alternatives (if properly diversified).
This is a very US-centric viewpoint, my recollection is that the FTSE didn't beat inflation for like a 20 year period.
That being said, index funds focused on equity are definitely a good way of getting reasonable returns over time (as long as you don't retire into a massive crash).
How exactly would you design a meter of actual reality, in the sense of where capital value is going to go in [delta-time]?
It's how everything always works. If you perceive that you have cancer, based on doctors' gathered and interpreted data, you will act on that perception.
Yup we live inside an ever growing noise factory thanks to modern news/social media attention harvesting dynamics. All sides are using it on autopilot.
The systems are optimized for pumping more and more bits out. Not to measure/reduce noise and increase signal.
Individually its easier to tune it out.
Intel was at 15 bucks for multiple years post its peaks.
The people doing most of the buying of most stocks are able to understand what is 'tik tok' and what is real.
The bulk of the buying is done by people who use modelling to derive the valuation, not vibes.
Because Intel is a household names, it's subject to vibes, but it's mostly math.
Underlying swings is usually some kind of new data point that, because there is so much growth involved, implies greater swings in valuation. So the impact of the news is amplified.
Because of the opaque nature of the inputs - and the leverage behind it.
Nobody knows what demand is going to be for AI in a few years, and that's causing this wild volatility.
It doesn't matter how well you understand the supply chain - that helps.
In many cases, it's literally trying to predict a herd: if the herd steers away from AI based on bad news about it not creating ROI, if the media sours, CEO's pullback, that could cause a slowdown in growth and therefore a crash.
Everything is highly leveraged.
An opaque input on Verizon forecasting model would not result in such a wild variation, they have more predictable operations.
I'm not so much surprised about the volatility as I am about all fund houses arriving at the same variation. I would've expected different models to arrive at different predictions and thus smooth out potential big jumps. So I'm finding it hard to understand how every model predicted 25% down instantaneously and simulatneously.
I don't know much about forecasting models and all, are you saying opaque forecasting is some kinda standardized technique and anybody doing opaque forecasting with the same data will likely end up with similar predictions?
They don't arrive at the same valuation. If they did there wouldn't be so much volatility.
They arrive at different conclusions - then they go and buy and sell and their analysts separately report different 'targets' and then other investors do the same.
Then the market has to clear and find a new equilibrium.
During these time, people start top panic and do 'herd stuff' which gives everyone the jitters.
The 'herd' is always 'more correct' than any analyst.
It's like predicting how many people can walk through a tight walkway - if people start to panic, all predictions are off.
But if the bulk of trades is being done by institutions, is the herd enough to move the price this much and this quickly?
On this note it would actually be interesting to see percentage split of purchases/sales between retail and institutions during that 5 minute window. Anywhere such data would be available?
You are getting to the question of all questions that makes this impossible.
There are very different kinds of herds.
You have institutional investors with varying kinds of rules, covenants, leverage. They might be required to have certain kind of balanced portfolio, reflecting certain kinds of risk. They might be required to value companies certain way depending on their bond ratings even if they are not buying bonds. So they will be 'forced' into making certain kinds of moves which may not be specifically oriented around valuation.
Some hedge funds might be more levered, and might have to sell to cover that leverage.
Then you have a lot of family offices - professionals but they don't have access to all the 'inner goings on and research' - they are more risk averse and have their eyes on the main players.
You have massive sovereign wealth funds - some professionally managed like Noway, some on a whim and sometimes politically, sometimes 'on the whim of a guy' like Softbank. Recently someone said that Masayoshi is like a 'riverboat gambler' and I'm inclined to agree.
And retail investors who, in some cases, act like a cultish movement.
We can absolutely have a situations where very smart people using very smart math have a price, but maybe there is a lot more leverage in the system than we thought, and some funds are forced to sell to cover themselves. So - will this spook the herd? If 'everyone else runs' then you want to be the first to run. Obviously. But your 'running early' will help induce the movement.
I guess I should have used the 'Poker' Analogy - you can do the math on the cards that you have, what is on the table, and some knowledge about what other players are. But in the end, so much will depend on what other actors do, and they all have differing levels of risk tolerance, information, leverage, specific conditions and covenants.
When there is leverage in that, you get the big swings.
Usually crashes only happen when there is 'hidden information' that is truly bad, and it happens suddenly. Like Bear Stearns collapse, or 1929 mania etc. otherwise bubbles can 'unwind without the crash' kind of thing.
Anyone remember when a college student invested $700,000 of his grandmother's inheritance into Intel back in August 2024? He was a huge meme at the time; I bet he was singing a different tune a few weeks back!
I don't remember that at all so I have no idea what kinds of memes this spurred, but I can look at the price history:
It was ~$22 back in August of '24. It is ~$66 today in November of '26. That's ~3x in a little over two years; that's fairly excellent.
If he had a magic looking glass and sold at the recent-ish July peak of ~$120, then that'd have been even better. But it's still a very good (potential) return if he still holds it today.
I agree with Intel, who claims that this time it is not their fault.
Their sales of CPUs for personal computers dropped because the huge prices of memories discouraged everybody to make upgrades.
On the other hand, they sold every server CPU that they could produce, despite the fact that the AMD server CPUs are much better, but AMD also could not produce enough of them, so both AMD and Intel sold every server CPU that they could produce.
So their earnings in personal computers dropped, but their earnings in server CPUs have risen like never before, bringing a profit instead of the losses of the previous years (when they had to accept great discounts when selling server CPUs, to prevent their customers to buy better AMD server CPUs).
He's referring to the magnitude of the drop. Stocks don't generally drop 50% after an earnings miss. Rapid swongs of 50% are like a penny stock, or a meme stock.
Nah I’ve a pretty sizeable long position that I’ve pretty much just sat on for a decade - I expect serious compression and then serious backlash over the next year though, as I don’t think their sales are going to slow down as the market seems to assume - we are still just in the foothills, the Newcomen engine. We ain’t seen nothing yet, and Nvidia is positioned to own a serious fraction of the future global economy.
Im still bullish on them at this price though. The terafab (already under construction) collab with Elon and 14A being the most powerful chip when they get it right has a lot of potential.
I'm still salty at them for fumbling Optane, Gaudi, Altera and the Xeon Phi. the company seems like it's full of talented engineers working under terrible leadership.
No. I worked on p1274 and p1276. They didnt take years to hit profitability because of leadership. There was a decade of brain drain and we just could not overcome the technical challenges. But that is heresy to ears of techies. The fact that something is just too hard for the talent at hand is just never offered up. Intel engineers, to put to bluntly: suck. (Me included. I was a senior principal.) There just isn’t enough talent there because they don’t pay enough. I took voluntary retirement and went to work for a smaller instrument maker. I’m way happier.
I hear you about the heresy, but are you sure you aren't being too hard on yourself? mismanagement can turn brilliant, passionate people into aimless zombies through demotivation and throwing you at problems that don't fit you.
also, my old boss thought Larabee was cool as hell when he got to play with it at MSR.
The "Larrabee New Instructions" were an instruction set much better designed than any other instruction set designed at Intel, presumably because for this they had brought in some people from outside Intel, with great experience in writing low-level optimized programs.
The hardware of the first Larrabee implementations was bad, being designed by some third-tier team in older technologies, without the resources used by the A-team that designed the Sandy Bridge CPU and its successors.
Nonetheless, after a couple of rebrandings the "Larrabee New Instructions" have become "AVX-512", and more recently "AVX10", and they are now the best part of the Intel-AMD instruction set.
Intel has tried to reserve the better instruction set for big spenders, but fortunately AMD has forced them to unify again their ISA, so starting next year, when Intel should launch the "Nova Lake" CPUs, Intel will have for the first time really competitive CPUs for personal computers, since the launch of AMD Zen 2 (mid 2019, so about 8 years before the launch of Intel Nova Lake; Zen 2 was when AMD switched to TSMC and they also doubled the computational throughput of their desktop CPUs in comparison with the best Intel desktop CPUs).
Maybe this is a layperson’s misunderstanding but after seeing Panther Lake hit the consumer scene I have a hard time believing Intel has a talent problem.
I’d even say what Intel is doing with Arc graphics is incredibly impressive. Coming out of nowhere to legitimately compete with a decent set of AMD/Nvidia consumer and workstation graphics cards is no small feat.
Panther Lake is very nice, but they did not sell much of it, in part because of the huge increase in memory price, but also because Panther Lake is much more expensive than the Arrow Lake H that it replaces, even twice more expensive for the variants with good GPU.
The great increase in price of Panther Lake is obfuscated by the fact that some part numbers that look like replacements for the corresponding part numbers of Arrow Lake H, and which do not have much higher prices, in reality are not replacements because they have much worse specs, e.g. a much smaller GPU, so for a real upgrade you must go to a higher part number, with a much steeper price increase.
I am among those who wanted to buy a Panther Lake based mini-PC, but I dropped my plans after analyzing the new prices, even those of the barebone systems, which have not been affected by the memory crysis.
The GPU of Panther Lake continues to be made by TSMC, in about the same technology as for the previous Intel CPUs. Because the greatest increases in Panther Lake prices are in the models with big GPUs, I assume that TSMC has increased the prices that it demands from Intel, due to the shortage of production capacity caused by the demands for AI datacenters, so it is likely that Panther Lake is also an indirect victim of the AI companies.
I really hope that Intel will continue to design ARC GPUs with good FP64 performance, because they are the only GPU vendor with good FP64 throughput, which has even increased in the Battlemage generation, while all the other GPU vendors attempt to reduce more and more all the "professional" features of their "consumer" GPUs, in order to reserve them for overpriced "datacenter" GPUs, which are not affordable for small businesses or for individuals.
I don’t see how it’s a problem that TSMC fabs the GPU, it’s not like Qualcomm, ANd, or Apple have their own fabs. Apple product pricing has increased recently, too. The whole industry is struggling with consumer sales, not just Intel.
> I took voluntary retirement and went to work for a smaller instrument maker. I’m way happier.
I was not so lucky. I would have loved the voluntary separation package. They did get around to doing straight large layoffs one year. My manager got laid off, I was not so lucky. I wanted the layoff package. I told him I'd happily trade places with him. He tried, but was denied. I ended up leaving anyway. Now, like you, working for a small company and much much happier.
me and a quarter of my company are looking up the barrel of a voluntary separation package. but I just moved to a team full of brilliant people working on a project that's a zen garden of algorithm design, so I won't go gently into that dark night.
> The fact that something is just too hard for the talent at hand is just never offered up.
Those of us who've worked at less illustrious companies are all too familiar with that. It's definitely unpopular to mention, but it drives a lot of consulting sales.
The list of shit that Intel was within the ballpark of the right tech or 5 years mistimed from having a huge hit is ridiculous. Fuckers don't have good management, but also must have terrible luck to keep _just_ missing the mark?
How are they doing fab wise ? I was a serious investor at around 20 dollars before Trump came in and messed timeline. Foundry is an incredibly hard business and idiots bought in just because of Trump, China and AI. I’m wondering if foundry made tangible progress in the last 1.5 years?
Intel bring the knowledge but doesn't operate and it's not the only partners in talk. They are not tied into the production at any step beyond the blueprints.
Knowing them they'll have all this stuff online just as the AI bubble pops. Basically the same thing they did when they belatedly tried to get into mobile chips
Pet peeve: when the news reports in absolute points. "S&P down 125 points!" OK, now I have to do (trivial, but some) math to size it up. Oh, that's 1.3% drop? OK, now I get the magnitude.
It's always crazy running into people that are somehow unaware that Wintel has achieved worldwide domination of IT infrastructure (by number of users). This site is like a sealed terrarium of people using macOS on Apple ARM hardware blissfully unaware of the infinite black pit outside the glass.
And yet Intel is the one taking a dump here, because it has no moat. People use Wintel because people use Wintel, the same way people bought Gros Michel bananas because people bought Gros Michel bananas. When they went away, people bought something else.
There isn't a single country in the world that can make advanced chips on its own. It takes machines, raw materials an chemicals from over a dozen different countries.
You're absolutely right! And that is why the last couple of years has been fascinating to watch from a geopolitical and trade standpoint.
Watching China push its weight around earlier in the year with REM and REE was crazy. The US, and the rest of the world for that matter, were brought to our knees. Germany's auto industry and weeks of chips left, the US started shipping F35's to allies _without_ radar. Truly astounding trade power to see.
Made it very clear to every nation that you must have a sovereign story to tell about chip manufacturing.
> A country must feed itself, power itself, and in 2026 it must be able to manufacture its own chips (from ore, to refining, to the foundry)
This is only possible if you (a) fudge the definitions of "everything" a bit and (b) are one of the largest countries in the world. This is only ever going to be possible for US and China. And even then the US really is the "lucky country" with which natural resources it has ended up holding within its borders.
While Intel had bad sales of CPUs for personal computers, due to the memory crysis, they have sold every server CPU they could make, despite the fact that their server CPUs are much inferior in comparison with the AMD server CPUs.
The reason is that AMD could not make enough server CPUs to satisfy the demand for datacenters, due to limited production capacity at TSMC, so Intel, who makes server CPUs in their own fabs, could also sell everything they got.
So as you say, even the older fabs of Intel, which use the somewhat obsolete "Intel 3" CMOS manufacturing process, with which the old Intel Granite Rapids server CPUs are made, have been an important asset in these circumstances.
Still, a lot of that lost share went to AMD and that is ultimately a safe thing for Intel compared to losing share to alternative CPU platforms. More than just safe, mutually beneficial for both companies.
Sure, losing Apple was a huge deal, but ultimately Apple still only has ~20% of the consumer PC market and far less in enterprise, and even less than that in more niche applications since their form factors are so limited, and 0% marketshare in data centers.
I’m not sure how hard Intel is trying to get into the enterprise AI data center scene but Intel ARC cards are definitely floating around in the local LLM scene for their stellar value and I’d be surprised if Intel doesn’t see a massive opportunity to take advantage in that area. They are one of three companies who have reasonably modern GPU designs.
If you pick out one sentence and strip out the rest of the context then all you’re doing is removing meaning from what I was actually saying.
The competitive pressure of AMD versus Intel is mutually beneficial, as long as they don’t totally crush each other into bankruptcy, their small leapfrogs of each other’s x86 technology keeps x86 relevant and dominant.
Key word there is had, while the comment you're replying to is speaking as to today minus ten years roughly.
And yeah, as a millennial I know lots of people who had a shared desktop at home, probably had a laptop in college, used a work laptop, and hasn't had a personal computing device outside an iPad and iPhone for a decade or more. Outside of those who play PC games or other niche hobbies it's getting more and more rare, at least for the people I know.
This is often said, but incorrect. 81% of households have a desktop/laptop. [1] And the breakdown is basically a proxy for wealth. Only 56% of households with earnings of less $25,000 have a desktop/laptop whereas it's 96% for $150k+. For millennials (approximately - age range 35-44) the rate is 87%.
You'd open your phone and nothing would work, not even the connection to the cellular network since your phone company has management components running on AWS.
You might have that problem, but us-east-1 going dark is unlikely to impact my Australian carrier enough to knock cellular service out. But granted, I might notice something is up if I tried to use my phone for much. If us-east-1 vanished at the right time of day I might notice on my phone first, sure.
> You'd open your phone and nothing would work, not even the connection to the cellular network since your phone company has management components running on AWS.
I'm pretty confident, sitting here on a different continent, that I wouldn't have that problem at all.
I think parent is trying to say that the number of services that rely themselves on AWS or some of their internal services is enormous and potentially impacts many.
Nah they've been "out of fashion" for 5+ years, and in that time AMD took their datacenter crown, which was also encroached on by various ARM hyperscaler systems.
PCs are like 5% of computing devices. Very important for business offices but not outside of that niche. And mass amounts of servers can be adapted to whatever is cheapest. Google wouldn't insist on AMD64 - they'd port to ARM if ARM was cheaper. And if you do want AMD64, AMD currently makes better AMD64 chips.
Yep, like technicians. Especially technicians that work on, well, everything. Every industrial machine, robot, PLC, industrial vehicle, mining equipment, power plant, etc etc.
Stocks are valued as the sum total of all the profits they ever make (net present value of future earnings).
So even at $1 profit/year - technically worth infinity.
But due to 'time value of money and risk' (aka some risk free discount rate you can put your money elsewhere at get the same return for zero risk, like your bank account), then the infinite sum of those $1/year becomes some finite sum.
The problem wit this math is when profits grow perpetually higher than the cost of borrowing - the net present value goes to infinity.
A P/E ratio = 1/(cost of capital - growth rate). Assuming no dividends.
An investor with 8% cost of capital, a company growing at 3% per year woudl have a P/E of 20.
At 7% growth the value is p/e 100x ...
Any growth over the 'cost of capital' and the P/E goes to infinity because the infinite sum of all future cash flows does not converge.
What this means is that the valuation math breaks down when there are gigantic swings of in growth at rates of even like 30% more for any extended period; it's extremely hard to value.
Verizon is valued as it is because they have an operational lock on a system; they will never grow that much but their returns are predictable. You can spreadsheet their valuation.
All this AI stuff is 'inherently wild' because growth is high, but opaque. Yes, there is a lot of hyperbole and speculation but this is very different than Space X which is a 'Musk Meme' stock, upheld be retail investors.
Edit: this is the most rudimentary articulation of how stocks are valued. It's not made up hunches, and companies that invest a lot in these things have a lot of numeric justification they have to use to make the assessment - and NPV is at the core of it. That 'math' is the first order concept that underlies valuation and it's the hyperbolic nature of growth beyond cost of capital that makes the it come undone which is the mechanical basis for the wild swings. It's what happens to valuation when you make small adjustments in only a few parts of the model.
There will be a company using Intel's fabs to make chips 5, 10 or 20 years from now. Because it is in the national interest of US to make sure that happens.
It is not in the national interest to make sure that the Intel common stock remains valued above 0. Plenty of companies that are of national interest were saved directly from bankruptcy, by nationalizing them in a way that wipes out the common stock.
The lack of self awareness of HN posters thinking that these 'dumb finance people' can't understand how 'chips are made'.
Good gosh. Goldman probably has 50-100 people, inc. maybe 20 Engineers just on that alone, full time.
And yes, Intel can fail 100%. They can absolutely go into receivership and/or be broken up and bought for pennies by other entities.
It would be a strategic dismantling, obviously the government won't allow certain things to happen, but they could 100% allow investors to be wiped out.
Boeing is a bit different as there are no substitutes, but it could go into receivership. Some parts of Boeing will 'always exist' but the corporate entity can fail.
>> Intel, like Boeing cannot fail. If you believe they can, you better start searching for a bunker.
>> Advanced chip manufacturing is so incredibly hard. The finance bozos are clueless, again.
> The lack of self awareness of HN posters thinking that these 'dumb finance people' can't understand how 'chips are made'.
Finance people are even dumber. However that can just mean "they will happily welcome next 2k or 2008 crash". Dumb or evil - do not realy matter for most of
computer/phone users...
> Goldman probably has 50-100 people, inc. maybe 20 Engineers just on that alone, full time.
So what ? Goldman people are Goldman peoples and not some active government or good fairies - not their responsibility to save US, without a hefty profit that is.
And "finance peoples" are responsible for a lot of things... Example: it was I WW or II WW they caused ? SO plain DUMB ! Lehman bros was financial peoples too...
> And yes, Intel can fail 100%. They can absolutely go into receivership and/or be broken up and bought for pennies by other entities.
Possible by law. But it would mean that US (or US owning peoples) wants to dismantle their schame - IBM at the bottom, wintel in the middle and Apple for dumb peoples with creative skills.
Also Intel trying to do something with photonics what looks like future. But it's possible that that know-how will be extracted from company, some new entity will be created and shareholders will be left with Intel corpse.
So yes, Intel is like Boening and can't fail for some time. And no reason for Intel falling yet, they have better stuff that AMD which always mess something.
So dumb HN peoples are quite good at seeing reality, just not so machiavellic like financial peoples that plain choose to do dumb and evil things. Modulo CEOs beliving in llms...
Goldman “engineers” are English majors who did a six week visual studio training course in 2006. Can’t tell you the difference between RAM, CPU, and GPU.
Dunno what to tell you but the dude I’m thinking of is a department lead, and I remember helping him stuff his head with an MCSE 20 years back, and it was excruciating.
English Majors are not Engineers, that's just what it is.
A Dept Head of Research for silicon/fabs etc - absolutely may not be an Engineer, and their ability to do MCSE is maybe distressing but not really that important. And they can manage Analysts who are actually Engineers - that is fine. At least nominally.
Failure here is getting restructured and people losing money in the stock market, which I guess is so detached from the actual companies and reality that it might as well be a polymarket bet (I mean overall stock market and not intel specifically).
A lot of retail investors lose the shirts off their backs holding Intel stock well before Intel every approaches anything close to "failure". Intel stock could drop 90% and the machines will still be running, because stock valuations which aren't tied to fundamentals on the way up are also not tied to fundamentals on the way down.
"Failure" here can be something like the stock going to near 0 and then the govt hands Intel fabs to some other rich company that it likes, for example SpaceX at a criminally low rate
I think this is a geopolitical question beyond any cabinet or chair. In general, I think it would surprise people, but a Democratic cabinet would have to do many of the same geopolitical choices as Trump has done.
If you read Chokepoints by Fishman, it's for example clear that US had to do something with Iran soon, because all of the economical sanctional options were squeezed to the max, there was no offramp for that country.
Is it? Obama era actions against Iran were pulled back by the following administration and unfortunately the world will never know if Harris could have been goaded into bombing Iran the same way the current President was. Hillary Clinton, while working for the state department has stories about being told that jets were hot on the runway and the US needed to jump in as well.
> a Democratic cabinet would have to do many of the same geopolitical choices as Trump has done. , it's for example clear that US had to do something with Iran soon, because all of the economical sanctional options were squeezed to the max, there was no offramp for that country.
That is just not true. No, US did not had to start a war with Iran. There was zero reason for that, rationally. It was against all the recommendations. And especially, it did not had to waste its assets in such ridiculous way while gaining nothing. Fishman may agree with Trump or support Netanyahu or whatever, but US did not had to do it.
It also did not had to threaten Greenland. It did not had to ally itself with Putin. It did not had to try to destroy NATO. It did not had to start trade wars. It did not had to mock and insult foreign leaders. It did not had to support Orban or Bolsnaro. It did not had to murder fishermen on boats.
Going back in history, US did not had to tear down nuclear agreement with Iran either. Democratic president made it, Republican destroyed it. Claiming that Democrats would do the same choice is absurd.
In the worst case when the free market deems Intel worthless, the government will nationalize Intel at a cheap nominal price. Shareholders are wiped out anyways.
Of course Intel can fail. If revenue is down, they have to reduce investment in future nodes, making them even more uncompetitive in the future, reducing revenue even more, etc.
Intel is particular: they managed to keep appearing to investor as a CPU leader,
BUT:
- they are losing the server to ARM (also thanks to Apple because now many devs use ARM as well)
- AMD is strong on the PC, while Apple (15% market share) is ARM
- They failed to make a dent in the GPU market
So, Intel has got no more area of leadership. No more in manufacturing, no more in chip design. They are riding the inertia wave but will lose it eventually. That's what happens when you let financial people milk the cow. They sure got nice bonuses.
Intel has lost its engineering culture and one day it will have to pay the ultimate price for letting it happen. I don't think that day is in 2026 but it's in the near future.
What no one is talking about so far is how Intel used to be a strong engineering culture but then turned into an incestious den of bean counting MBAs executing HBS management best practices to maximize shareholder value.
Intel just doesn't pay their engineers enough, so most don't care. Just like most of all the large companies - to management, engineers are line cooks flipping burgers at McDonalds who just happen to have master's degrees.
Intel's decline is organizational - it allowed bean counting and management rituals to acquire too much influence over engineering judgment. Horrible punishment lies ahead - we need to track people in management who will now start to jump ship and take their style to other unsuspecting companies.
As a result of all this nonsense, it lost significant engineering talent to competing chip companies: Jim Keller went to Tenstorrent, lead GPU architect David Blythe joined AMD, and Xeon architect Sailesh Kottapalli moved to Qualcomm after 28 years at Intel. These are substantial transfer of expertise, whatever each person’s individual reasons for leaving.
In April 2025, Lip-Bu Tan, lamented the company was "too slow, too complex and too set in our ways". He pointed to teams buried under at least eight organizational layers, managers measured by their headcount, and excessive meetings and administrative work.
The financial priorities shifted: Intel spent $14.2 billion on share buybacks in 2020, the same year it disclosed delays to its 7nm CPU roadmap.
Now they pay the price as they confront the reality of an organization overloaded with TPS reports. The death will be slow and gradual, bleeding out slowly but surely - halal style.
> Intel just doesn't pay their engineers enough, so most don't car
As someone who considered a job at Intel about 10 years ago (including having to submit to a somewhat humiliating panel-style interview) what made me instantly decide that I didn't want a job there was seeing how their office in my area (PNW) was a 1990s cube-farm.
I appreciate that Intel's workplace was (and still is?) egalitarian because _everyone_ has a cube, but today it's just so soul-destroying to lay eyes on.
So I agree they have a very unappealing culture, but it isn't as simple as paying people more (unless it's to pay for an interior designer and carpenters to overhaul their office...).
All this is hogwash. While a massive drop, Intel is still sitting higher than at any point in its history prior to April of this year (except for two very brief dotcom era spikes).
Everyone seems to forget that stocks are supposed to reflect real value. This is now just a correction of insanely inflated value since April.
The big question I have, why isn't Nvidia's stock falling quickly ? Nvidia's GPUs are the most in demand chip for AI. Seems Nvidia stock is also falling, but not as much. I would think it would fall almost as quickly as Intel.
Apple Silicon launched in Mac, the first couple iterations worked/sold great. By the launch of M3 market realized it wasn't a fluke and that x86 was dead but still fundamental due to deployment at the time
Flash forward a couple more years to now it's all about efficient model training which sucks on generic CPUs so everyone is buying and designing other chips
Two big consumer pivots over 4-5 years and boom ...they're IBM and handed lifelines to shore up chip manufacturing in the US for strategic reasons but Intel essentially manufactures rotary phones right now. Maybe the fab biz will get modern designs right. We'll see
Modern Intel chips have no issues trading blows with Apple Silicon.
Their fabs are the weakest part of their business (I wonder why once AMD spun off GlobalFoundries so they could focus on the core product, they suddenly started doing well) Once they started making chips on TSMC's processes, wow, all of a sudden, theyre in the same league as Apple Silicon.
Actually, Intel's fab's are becoming their crown jewel. The whole "5 nodes in 4 years," where they tried to catch up with TSMC pretty much worked, which is why the stock originally rocketed up by 5x a few months ago. They aren't far behind TSMC now.
But, they still don't have many external customers for the fabs. Intels fab revenu is something like a tenth of TSMC's. Although, it'll probably grow year by year if they continue to match the capabilities of TSMC's chip processes.
Maybe no issues "trading blows" in a single reductive compute per second measure
But Intel chips use more electricity to do so. At data center scale that is not something shrugged off like homelab nerds shrug off the extra $50/month or whatever on their power bill.
> At data center scale that is not something shrugged off
Sure it is. At datacenter scale, there are precisely zero HPC vendors that have invested in Apple Silicon as an alternative to Ampere or Grace CPUs. Same goes for datacenters seeking to replace their Intel CPUs. Chips like the M-series are explicitly nonviable for Xeon-scale use cases.
Pre-AI-boom, Intel was a failing chipmaker. The situation was bad in all respects. Processor design fell behind AMD. Fabs fell behind TSMC/Samsung/etc. Culture was broken. Massive braindrain.
Stock was down three-fold between its peak around 2019 and its bottom in 2024/2025. Indeed, it was down three-fold in 2024/2025 from its 2000 dot-com peak.
Basically, imploding company, on its way for collapse.
With AI boom, there was more demand for ICs than production capacity. It almost didn't matter how bad your chips were -- someone would buy them, and at a healthy markup. This placed Intel in a very strong position to recover.
That recovered some value -- going above their previous high, but much less than 25 years of S&P500 growth. However, it's worth remembering the peak of $120 was less than double it's dot-com peak 25 years prior.
If AI boom doesn't materialize, Intel may, again, be on a path to death.
If it does materialize, but like the dot-com boom with a few winners and many losers, Intel will likely be one of the losers.
Ergo, falling value.
NVidia, in contrast, looks a lot more like the Amazon of the dot-com bust.
> Nvidia is essentially scheduled to collapse with the rise of 1-bit NNs
This assumes the shape of demand for computational intelligence which we don't know the answer to. Maybe 1-bit NNs do everything we want to do with LLMs. Maybe it means we span tens of thousands of them to do sundry tasks every day.
From what I read, Intel's recent chip production strategy was a miss, in that they focused on chips for laptops and not for the chips for AI data centers.
More specifically, they focused on making laptop chips like Panther Lake (Intel's latest and greatest) and they meant to make a lot of their money here, and the data center chips weren't focused on as much (I think these would be something like the Xeon 6, but not sure, but I read that they also could have boosted production of older data center chips). But, as it turns out, laptop sales are down because of the demand for DRAM is sky high from the AI data center build out, and not as many people are willing to buy a super expensive laptop. If they had forecasted more correctly, they would have focused more on making data center chips.
Also, their forward guidance for 2027 is lower than expected too, because it will take awhile to shift their production towards building more data center chips, which they are in the middle of doing.
But, you may want to check other sources because have only been somewhat loosely following what's happening with Intel.
There was talk about a few things I can only see driving the drops:
1. Datacenter projects run by mining companies and now their loans may be frozen so construction may not finish
2. Prices of everything are putting crunches on Enterprise - I've seen it in a few places I talk to - they aren't buying laptops and servers in 2027 if they dont have to
3. Consumers aren't buying hardware because they cant afford the hardware and may not have free cash anyway
Intel GPUs are pretty worthless right now for inference, let alone training. Which isn't to say that there aren't people getting value out of them, but from a dollars/wattage/sanity to performance, there's no point to buying anything but Nvidia for most people and businesses. I don't want this to be the case, but that's just how it is currently.
> Intel GPUs are pretty worthless right now for inference, let alone training.
Why? Is it hardware limitations or deficient software stack?
In any case, as nvidia is ignoring the gaming market, AMD and Intel both have a vacuum to fill, but I don't see them doing it.
Intel, especially, should have rushed out gaming cards as soon as nvidia shortages were predictable (2023, at least).
The problem I have is not that an old GPU can't be used for gaming (it can), it's that I am forced to upgrade from a perfectly working 660ti that once played far cry 3, 4 and 5 (and every other game I threw at it) because my kernel doesn't have support anymore (older drivers don't work on a newer kernel).
A new GPU with the power of a decade-old GPU but all the latest software support would be great. Right now, if I want to see certain web-pages (WebGL), I have to buy a new GPU, but there isn't any low-priced GPUs anymore.
> A new GPU with the power of a decade-old GPU [...]
Asus tried, with GDDR5 versions of the GT710 circa 2021 in a very sensible fanless, "bus-powered", single slot design; alas being an older design did not help much with stability with Nouveau drivers, though on the Windows side it did 10 as well as XP which wasn't a bad deal for spending a week digitizing a bunch of tapes with a good old BT868 capture card!
Bonus point for proper VGA and DVI connectors too, just one weird omission - a half-height card only supplied with a full height bracket?
Define low price, because looking at sold listings on ebay, you can get a used RTX 3070 for around $250, which is as capable as any 10-year old 8 GB card, and certainly more capable than a 660 Ti.
Still not great given that I paid about the same for a new-in-unopened-box RTX 3070 a couple years ago, but price increases no lower-end cards without enough VRAM for AI at least haven't skyrocketed like the top end of the market.
Memory bandwidth is really low on most of the cards - even if you hyper-optimized the software stack, can't get around that. Compute isn't great either.
I think the cards are probably fine for gaming though. I haven't used these cards, just the numbers I've seen floating around are pretty underwhelming.
I understand nothing but I want to join the conversation.
It seems to me that nvidia bubble is still to burst.
There is a trust me bro circle where Nvidia somehow sold GPU to itself so it can host someone else's models.
Maybe three years ago or a little more they announced they plan to move away from consumer end and focus on cloud. Back then it did not make much sense because everybody though "how the f Nvidia will manage clouds like AWS?" And their business model seems to me that it is a shared risk model where Nvidia don't "own" the cloud but pay for its GPU to have that market share.
I think it would make much sense if the thin layer those, how did the greedy musk said, neocloud/cloudfronts or whatever, were not so brittle due to the lack of market demand.
I have the impression they had a gold strategy for them but for some reason they rushed it too much and now they broke the market before they could profit from it.
I can imagine that if they didn't hoard their own resources to create scarcity artificiality, they would possibly have a stronger position in the market.
I can only think they did this because (A) they know the current government will bail them out and (B) someone was worried that China could hoard those GPUs first.
But as I said, I don't understand much of the topic, but it seems to me they are try to get as much money as soon as possible and that looks scam-ish to me. They all put investment rounds too close to each other, started creating concerning stories and "rogue" AIs at the same time. Maybe I'm being too paranoid, but so far those guys have been pulling some hat tricks and I think I know who will pay the bill
Edit:
Also I think the big ones artificially produced better numbers by doing massive layoff rounds. Depending on how those happen, it produces almost an immediate loss that can be smoothed, and then a peak on profit, and then we will see if their numbers keep up 2 or 3 quarter after that.
Maybe I have trust issues, but man, this does smell weird.
Nvidia is still the only game in town for training at scale, and the fastest for inference (plus, at scale, the cheapest for inference, as hard as that sounds to believe)
NVidia had $96B in revenue and $60B of profit in Q2 2026, both of which doubled or more from Q2 2025.
Intel in Q3 2026 had $16.5B in revenue and $3.3B of profit, and $13.7B and $4.4B in Q3 2025.
NVidia is doing much better than Intel, people are selling bonds and junk bonds to buy billions of dollars of NVidia cards that NVidia is making 75% gross margins on. They’re making the kind of profits that would make a drug dealer blush.
I used Q3 earnings for Intel because Nvidia hasn’t reported their Q3 earnings yet and Intel’s Q2 earnings showed losses in both 2026 and 2025.
That's just one small event along the way, one that occurred many years after Intel started slipping enough for long enough that an iPhone was more powerful than an Intel laptop and after Intel's fabs failed to produce a useful new generation many generations in a row and after Intel acquired many companies just to spin down their products and after...
Sure, the Core 2 series ultimately, after a long gap, put them back on the rails at least, but Intel missed big iron and panicked.
Everything else since has been about desperately squeezing x86 into every niche, even when it probably shouldn’t be. That the Core 2 series gained an Apple-shaped halo is lucky for them, but the reality is that they have been on the back foot at some level since the failure of IA-64.
They needed to get themselves out of the hole by using AMD’s architecture, and they have been a polar bear on a large but shrinking iceberg ever since.
The problem is doubling down on a single technology. They dropped the ball on GPU and storage, imagine that. It probably makes sense from the bean counter but they are not exploring new areas and diversifying. Now that people dont particularly care for x86, they are screwed. Good riddance.
The weird bit is they picked up the ball for graphics again and ran with it for a while, but fell down and broke their leg and sold the team to nvidia now. Right when their product line is probably placed the best - medium end good, priced GPUs for gaming, they are done with that segment.
I notice modern intel chips are still named after Skylake. It's as if that's when they decided to stop innovating.
They used to use completely new names for new designs and then variants of that name for variants of that design. As in Sandy Bridge and then Ivy Bridge. Haswell, then Broadwell. Skylake, then Kaby Lake. Then Coffee Lake. Then Cannon Lake. 10 years later now they're still doing Lakes. It might not have much relation to the technical design but it gives the impression they gave up on new things.
Sometimes naming is just naming. No further depth or symbolism.
Skylake is when things started to go south, outwardly facing. But it was even long before that. The rot happened in the foundry side and it grew for a very long time, silently, because of how little competition existed.
Not really. As far as I can tell the reason Intel routed seems to be because of an explosion in one of their fabs making Xeons which reduced production, and because no one buys new desktops and servers anymore because of the cost of RAM and storage. Given intel isn't big on AI chips, they are a casualty of the AI bubble.
Huh, I'm used to "stock collapses" headlines being a 2% daily fluctuation. Actually down 50% over the past month. But then again, up 50% over the past year. Sure is great when stocks of companies that are foundationally important to the world economy are being traded like meme stocks.
Considering they were $17/sh in Nov 2024 and $36/sh in Nov 2025, today's price of $67.50 seems like a huge return in just two years.
For sure, it has been an amazing ride for those using the stock market as a casino.
That's kinda the point; something as important as this shouldn't be a casino.
My interpretation is that the stock market is just reflecting the rising value of power/influence assets relative to currency, which is to say, the falling value of currency relative to power/influence (which stocks are). Stocks aren't going up because the companies are that much better, they're going up because the macroeconomy is that much more fucked.
I submit exhibit 1: the US monetary supply. [1] We're 'printing' money like there's no tomorrow. Up ~6% in a single year, well over a trillion dollars. That's obviously going to make an economy look increasingly nonsensical.
I increasingly get the same feeling I did as back in the early 2000s when there were endless 'house flipping' shows on TV where somebody would go buy a house on an insta-improved loan, add some granite counter tops and mop the floor, then resell it within a couple of weeks for $20k profit and repeat. Not sure how people didn't see that was basically 'Bubble - The TV Show!'
[1] - https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2SL
I don't think this chain of arguments holds with Intel.
Fwiw, I bought 100 shares when they were 19€/share and sold 80 when they reached 100 this summer, so I followed it's development somewhat.
The low was itself after it's share dropped by like 25+%. That's what made me buy them - I thought "no way is the USA government going to let them go insolvent, their losses are gonna get socialized for sure". One year later Trump announced a large injection into Intel, causing the stock price to overshoot my expectation massively.
This fall is just it's share going closer to a more realistic valuation after Trump blew it up, I think it's gonna settle around 40 in a year or so
I find it endlessly amusing that America is emulating China's state capitalism now. If you can't beat them join them!
How would you differentiate between currency influence and power influence?
Power is being able to get people to do things you want them to do. It's become clear that you can do that a lot better with stocks than within currency, although you can also do it with a huge amount of currency.
I think it works like this: If it's going to rain, the value of an umbrella is $50, if not, it is 0.
Since you don't know if it's going to rain or not, you are going to value it based on how likely each of these events are. Now the weather report came out, and there's not going to be any rain.
The stock market has lots of guards against volatility, but the AI story bypasses all of them - they're saying that AI is the only thing that is going to matter economically, and AI value is exponential - meaning past performance can be discounted, since almost all value resides in the future.
This means that all companies valuations have been reduced to a single dimension - how much companies can contribute to AI, this increases volatility, since now their value is highly correllated with AI
This is an ideal, but in reality, there are insiders that know when a storm will come, but delay the warning long enough to buy all umbrellas cheap, so the rest of the fools that thought the market was being fair are caught paying $100 or more for each.
When we come back out of the analogy, what does "delay the warning" mean in stock market terms?
Usually insiders just trade early (and push the market closer to the correct number).
Intel has been the one tech stock most connected to reality. They had good plans and multiple admins trying to bring chips back to the US so they mooned, then they disappointed so they crashed. They're way closer to the phases of the moon than a casino.
My long-term opinion is that the stock market is more like a milking-machine.
What do you think a casino is?
In a casino the thing getting milked is the gamblers. In the stock market the thing getting milked is is mostly the customers/employees/taxpayers.
How are customers/employees/taxpayers "milked" by the stock market?
Customers because a product they use from a company won't work because...?
Employees because they not only work at the company (I'm assuming they're paid for their labor), but also can buy stock in it?
Taxpayers because of bailouts?
The stock market is basically a system for abstracting ownership away from human beings.
When you have a small business, or even a large business that has a single owner, that person has to care about things like their own reputation and might sometimes have preferences for things other than maximizing returns. There is a significant difference in behavior between a profitable company that makes money by providing something people want and a company that makes slightly more money by turning the screws at every opportunity.
And typical funds only care about number go up. Even the ones that nominally exclude "bad" companies/industries have their rules, but then hold shares in Comcast rather than Exxon and still expect Comcast to turn the screws. Whereas to do the real thing, you would need funds with missions to do things like specifically fund companies who are new entrants to concentrated markets to increase the amount of competition. Which to most funds is a conflict of interest, because if the fund has that industry as a target then it already owns shares in the companies the new entrant would be competing with. Conversely, mergers they're all for, because they own shares in all three companies in that industry, so causing three to become two is higher margins for everybody.
So it produces market concentration and drives obsession with quarterly profits, harming customers and employees. The consequently larger companies then buy off the government to get subsidies and insist they're too big to fail whenever they screw up, use the nature of multinational conglomerates to arbitrage tax rates and shift tax incidence to purely domestic companies and workers, etc. All of which the funds like because they make number go up.
It's basically a paperclip optimizer which is trying to accumulate money rather than paperclips.
> What do you think a casino is?
One difference: the longer your money is in a casino, the more likely you are to lose it; while the longer your money is in the stock market (especially in a total market index fund), the more likely you are to win:
* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2023/05/the-stock-market-is...
After five years, you're up 90% of the time. Buy and hold for fifteen years, and you're up 100% of the time.
In a casino the house generally wins eventually, in the stock market you do.
Isn't that the place where if I win loads of money, they give me lots of free stuff and invite me back? The same place where if I lose loads of money, they give me lots of free stuff and invite me back?
Casinos are awesome! So welcoming. :) (/s)
What should the stock market be?
I understand that at a lofty, ethical plane, it's a reflection of value, of growth and progress and confidence in all of that.
But in practice, it's not even gambling. It's humanity's hope bastardised by HFT and recurring insider trading. It's confidence for all the wrong reasons, institutional HODL.
It's a mugs' game.
The stock market should be a mechanism for allocation of wealth that helps the country and the economy. What people have done over the last 50 years is called "a race to the bottom", where everyone puts personal wealth gain over social behavior and teamwork like what made america great in the first place. The moral collapse of the US lead the way to the collapse of it's power.
> It's a mugs' game.
Over the long term it’s the investment class most likely to grow capital.
Occasionally there are long periods where returns are low (or even negative), but in terms of risk it’s the least risky place to put your money compared to all the alternatives (if properly diversified).
(Not financial advice, just my rule-of-thumb understanding)
> Occasionally there are long periods where returns are low (or even negative), but in terms of risk it’s the least risky place to put your money compared to all the alternatives (if properly diversified).
This is a very US-centric viewpoint, my recollection is that the FTSE didn't beat inflation for like a 20 year period.
That being said, index funds focused on equity are definitely a good way of getting reasonable returns over time (as long as you don't retire into a massive crash).
The stock market should reflect reality, and sometimes reality is volatile.
Perhaps it should do that, but it really doesn't, and can never do so in anything like its current form.
It reflects people's perception of reality.
Yes, and that's as close as we can get.
How exactly would you design a meter of actual reality, in the sense of where capital value is going to go in [delta-time]?
It's how everything always works. If you perceive that you have cancer, based on doctors' gathered and interpreted data, you will act on that perception.
What affect on day to day operations of Intel does speculation on already sold stocks have?
When has the stock market not been a casino?
Yup we live inside an ever growing noise factory thanks to modern news/social media attention harvesting dynamics. All sides are using it on autopilot.
The systems are optimized for pumping more and more bits out. Not to measure/reduce noise and increase signal.
Individually its easier to tune it out.
Intel was at 15 bucks for multiple years post its peaks.
The people doing most of the buying of most stocks are able to understand what is 'tik tok' and what is real.
The bulk of the buying is done by people who use modelling to derive the valuation, not vibes.
Because Intel is a household names, it's subject to vibes, but it's mostly math.
Underlying swings is usually some kind of new data point that, because there is so much growth involved, implies greater swings in valuation. So the impact of the news is amplified.
Do they all use the same models? How is it that they all arrive on such a large discrepancy with one small, new data point?
Because of the opaque nature of the inputs - and the leverage behind it.
Nobody knows what demand is going to be for AI in a few years, and that's causing this wild volatility.
It doesn't matter how well you understand the supply chain - that helps.
In many cases, it's literally trying to predict a herd: if the herd steers away from AI based on bad news about it not creating ROI, if the media sours, CEO's pullback, that could cause a slowdown in growth and therefore a crash.
Everything is highly leveraged.
An opaque input on Verizon forecasting model would not result in such a wild variation, they have more predictable operations.
I'm not so much surprised about the volatility as I am about all fund houses arriving at the same variation. I would've expected different models to arrive at different predictions and thus smooth out potential big jumps. So I'm finding it hard to understand how every model predicted 25% down instantaneously and simulatneously.
I don't know much about forecasting models and all, are you saying opaque forecasting is some kinda standardized technique and anybody doing opaque forecasting with the same data will likely end up with similar predictions?
They don't arrive at the same valuation. If they did there wouldn't be so much volatility.
They arrive at different conclusions - then they go and buy and sell and their analysts separately report different 'targets' and then other investors do the same.
Then the market has to clear and find a new equilibrium.
During these time, people start top panic and do 'herd stuff' which gives everyone the jitters.
The 'herd' is always 'more correct' than any analyst.
It's like predicting how many people can walk through a tight walkway - if people start to panic, all predictions are off.
But if the bulk of trades is being done by institutions, is the herd enough to move the price this much and this quickly?
On this note it would actually be interesting to see percentage split of purchases/sales between retail and institutions during that 5 minute window. Anywhere such data would be available?
You are getting to the question of all questions that makes this impossible.
There are very different kinds of herds.
You have institutional investors with varying kinds of rules, covenants, leverage. They might be required to have certain kind of balanced portfolio, reflecting certain kinds of risk. They might be required to value companies certain way depending on their bond ratings even if they are not buying bonds. So they will be 'forced' into making certain kinds of moves which may not be specifically oriented around valuation.
Some hedge funds might be more levered, and might have to sell to cover that leverage.
Then you have a lot of family offices - professionals but they don't have access to all the 'inner goings on and research' - they are more risk averse and have their eyes on the main players.
You have massive sovereign wealth funds - some professionally managed like Noway, some on a whim and sometimes politically, sometimes 'on the whim of a guy' like Softbank. Recently someone said that Masayoshi is like a 'riverboat gambler' and I'm inclined to agree.
And retail investors who, in some cases, act like a cultish movement.
We can absolutely have a situations where very smart people using very smart math have a price, but maybe there is a lot more leverage in the system than we thought, and some funds are forced to sell to cover themselves. So - will this spook the herd? If 'everyone else runs' then you want to be the first to run. Obviously. But your 'running early' will help induce the movement.
I guess I should have used the 'Poker' Analogy - you can do the math on the cards that you have, what is on the table, and some knowledge about what other players are. But in the end, so much will depend on what other actors do, and they all have differing levels of risk tolerance, information, leverage, specific conditions and covenants.
When there is leverage in that, you get the big swings.
Usually crashes only happen when there is 'hidden information' that is truly bad, and it happens suddenly. Like Bear Stearns collapse, or 1929 mania etc. otherwise bubbles can 'unwind without the crash' kind of thing.
Anyone remember when a college student invested $700,000 of his grandmother's inheritance into Intel back in August 2024? He was a huge meme at the time; I bet he was singing a different tune a few weeks back!
I don't remember that at all so I have no idea what kinds of memes this spurred, but I can look at the price history:
It was ~$22 back in August of '24. It is ~$66 today in November of '26. That's ~3x in a little over two years; that's fairly excellent.
If he had a magic looking glass and sold at the recent-ish July peak of ~$120, then that'd have been even better. But it's still a very good (potential) return if he still holds it today.
Assume people did not peer pressure him into cutting loss.
That explains why I keep seeing memes of a grandma watching from the heavens on /r/wallstreetbets - it must be based on this guy
I'm not sure it's quite like a meme stock, it's dropping because their earnings were below what was expected.
I agree with Intel, who claims that this time it is not their fault.
Their sales of CPUs for personal computers dropped because the huge prices of memories discouraged everybody to make upgrades.
On the other hand, they sold every server CPU that they could produce, despite the fact that the AMD server CPUs are much better, but AMD also could not produce enough of them, so both AMD and Intel sold every server CPU that they could produce.
So their earnings in personal computers dropped, but their earnings in server CPUs have risen like never before, bringing a profit instead of the losses of the previous years (when they had to accept great discounts when selling server CPUs, to prevent their customers to buy better AMD server CPUs).
He's referring to the magnitude of the drop. Stocks don't generally drop 50% after an earnings miss. Rapid swongs of 50% are like a penny stock, or a meme stock.
It kinda rose like a meme stock though after drumpf took a stake in it.
It is still at a forward P/E of 31, on par with AMD's 32 and far above Nvidia's 13.
The other two don't actually make chips though, so there's that.
Market consensus is that Nvidia don’t have any real products or customers.
You forgot the /s marker.
Somehow everyone seems to be deadly serious on this, even when literally all available evidence points to the contrary.
I’m fully expecting Nvidia to see a P/E of under 10 within a year.
What evidence?
The AI boom is overstated but that is not the same as nvidia not having a business.
Do you have a short position in based on that, or are you just talk?
Nah I’ve a pretty sizeable long position that I’ve pretty much just sat on for a decade - I expect serious compression and then serious backlash over the next year though, as I don’t think their sales are going to slow down as the market seems to assume - we are still just in the foothills, the Newcomen engine. We ain’t seen nothing yet, and Nvidia is positioned to own a serious fraction of the future global economy.
> fully expecting Nvidia to see a P/E of under 10 within a year.
> Nvidia is positioned to own a serious fraction of the future global economy.
=> just how bad are you expecting global earnings to be?
Nvidia will have a forward PE of below 5 by this time next year, because just like cigarettes, compute is a dying industry.
Ironic perhaps that Phillip Morris stock is achieving all-time highs?
Im still bullish on them at this price though. The terafab (already under construction) collab with Elon and 14A being the most powerful chip when they get it right has a lot of potential.
I'm still salty at them for fumbling Optane, Gaudi, Altera and the Xeon Phi. the company seems like it's full of talented engineers working under terrible leadership.
No. I worked on p1274 and p1276. They didnt take years to hit profitability because of leadership. There was a decade of brain drain and we just could not overcome the technical challenges. But that is heresy to ears of techies. The fact that something is just too hard for the talent at hand is just never offered up. Intel engineers, to put to bluntly: suck. (Me included. I was a senior principal.) There just isn’t enough talent there because they don’t pay enough. I took voluntary retirement and went to work for a smaller instrument maker. I’m way happier.
I hear you about the heresy, but are you sure you aren't being too hard on yourself? mismanagement can turn brilliant, passionate people into aimless zombies through demotivation and throwing you at problems that don't fit you.
also, my old boss thought Larabee was cool as hell when he got to play with it at MSR.
The "Larrabee New Instructions" were an instruction set much better designed than any other instruction set designed at Intel, presumably because for this they had brought in some people from outside Intel, with great experience in writing low-level optimized programs.
The hardware of the first Larrabee implementations was bad, being designed by some third-tier team in older technologies, without the resources used by the A-team that designed the Sandy Bridge CPU and its successors.
Nonetheless, after a couple of rebrandings the "Larrabee New Instructions" have become "AVX-512", and more recently "AVX10", and they are now the best part of the Intel-AMD instruction set.
Intel has tried to reserve the better instruction set for big spenders, but fortunately AMD has forced them to unify again their ISA, so starting next year, when Intel should launch the "Nova Lake" CPUs, Intel will have for the first time really competitive CPUs for personal computers, since the launch of AMD Zen 2 (mid 2019, so about 8 years before the launch of Intel Nova Lake; Zen 2 was when AMD switched to TSMC and they also doubled the computational throughput of their desktop CPUs in comparison with the best Intel desktop CPUs).
Maybe this is a layperson’s misunderstanding but after seeing Panther Lake hit the consumer scene I have a hard time believing Intel has a talent problem.
I’d even say what Intel is doing with Arc graphics is incredibly impressive. Coming out of nowhere to legitimately compete with a decent set of AMD/Nvidia consumer and workstation graphics cards is no small feat.
Panther Lake is very nice, but they did not sell much of it, in part because of the huge increase in memory price, but also because Panther Lake is much more expensive than the Arrow Lake H that it replaces, even twice more expensive for the variants with good GPU.
The great increase in price of Panther Lake is obfuscated by the fact that some part numbers that look like replacements for the corresponding part numbers of Arrow Lake H, and which do not have much higher prices, in reality are not replacements because they have much worse specs, e.g. a much smaller GPU, so for a real upgrade you must go to a higher part number, with a much steeper price increase.
I am among those who wanted to buy a Panther Lake based mini-PC, but I dropped my plans after analyzing the new prices, even those of the barebone systems, which have not been affected by the memory crysis.
The GPU of Panther Lake continues to be made by TSMC, in about the same technology as for the previous Intel CPUs. Because the greatest increases in Panther Lake prices are in the models with big GPUs, I assume that TSMC has increased the prices that it demands from Intel, due to the shortage of production capacity caused by the demands for AI datacenters, so it is likely that Panther Lake is also an indirect victim of the AI companies.
I really hope that Intel will continue to design ARC GPUs with good FP64 performance, because they are the only GPU vendor with good FP64 throughput, which has even increased in the Battlemage generation, while all the other GPU vendors attempt to reduce more and more all the "professional" features of their "consumer" GPUs, in order to reserve them for overpriced "datacenter" GPUs, which are not affordable for small businesses or for individuals.
I don’t see how it’s a problem that TSMC fabs the GPU, it’s not like Qualcomm, ANd, or Apple have their own fabs. Apple product pricing has increased recently, too. The whole industry is struggling with consumer sales, not just Intel.
ex-Intel engineer here.
> Intel engineers, to put to bluntly: suck.
It hurts, but it is true.
> I took voluntary retirement and went to work for a smaller instrument maker. I’m way happier.
I was not so lucky. I would have loved the voluntary separation package. They did get around to doing straight large layoffs one year. My manager got laid off, I was not so lucky. I wanted the layoff package. I told him I'd happily trade places with him. He tried, but was denied. I ended up leaving anyway. Now, like you, working for a small company and much much happier.
me and a quarter of my company are looking up the barrel of a voluntary separation package. but I just moved to a team full of brilliant people working on a project that's a zen garden of algorithm design, so I won't go gently into that dark night.
I replied to another Intel engineer saying something similar: after seeing Panther Lake I just can’t believe that Intel has an engineering problem.
Intel engineers absolutely do not suck.
Even at small companies, there can be huge variance in capabilities across teams.
"Employee experience" varies, too. I've even heard from people who are very happy in some corner of Intel.
> They didnt take years to hit profitability because of leadership.
Oh, it wasn't leadership?
> There just isn’t enough talent there because they don’t pay enough.
Ah, so it was leadership.
> The fact that something is just too hard for the talent at hand is just never offered up.
Those of us who've worked at less illustrious companies are all too familiar with that. It's definitely unpopular to mention, but it drives a lot of consulting sales.
The list of shit that Intel was within the ballpark of the right tech or 5 years mistimed from having a huge hit is ridiculous. Fuckers don't have good management, but also must have terrible luck to keep _just_ missing the mark?
It's a little odd they are completely missing the ddr5 gold rush when they are sitting on fabs.
Fabricating memory requires different techniques than logic, and it would take Intel several years to develop a commercially useful DRAM process.
Memory fabs are quite different from logic chip fabs.
Panther Lake shows they’ve still “got it.”
Intel ARC is not only impressive just for the mere feat of “almost catching up” this quickly, but Intel absolutely can be an AI GPU supplier of note.
I don’t claim to fully understand the business especially on the enterprise side but I don’t think it’s the sort of company to count out.
How are they doing fab wise ? I was a serious investor at around 20 dollars before Trump came in and messed timeline. Foundry is an incredibly hard business and idiots bought in just because of Trump, China and AI. I’m wondering if foundry made tangible progress in the last 1.5 years?
Intel bring the knowledge but doesn't operate and it's not the only partners in talk. They are not tied into the production at any step beyond the blueprints.
Knowing them they'll have all this stuff online just as the AI bubble pops. Basically the same thing they did when they belatedly tried to get into mobile chips
Pet peeve: when the news reports in absolute points. "S&P down 125 points!" OK, now I have to do (trivial, but some) math to size it up. Oh, that's 1.3% drop? OK, now I get the magnitude.
Tomorrow, they'll report the Dow is up 1572.
Intel isn't important though.
It's always crazy running into people that are somehow unaware that Wintel has achieved worldwide domination of IT infrastructure (by number of users). This site is like a sealed terrarium of people using macOS on Apple ARM hardware blissfully unaware of the infinite black pit outside the glass.
And yet Intel is the one taking a dump here, because it has no moat. People use Wintel because people use Wintel, the same way people bought Gros Michel bananas because people bought Gros Michel bananas. When they went away, people bought something else.
Stock is still up 53% YTD. Even if they are experiencing headwinds they won’t be allowed to fail. You’re inside the terrarium.
Intel is incredibly important for American sovereignty and that's why they are semi-nationalized. They are a Boeing now.
A country must feed itself, power itself, and in 2026 it must be able to manufacture its own chips (from ore, to refining, to the foundry).
There isn't a single country in the world that can make advanced chips on its own. It takes machines, raw materials an chemicals from over a dozen different countries.
You're absolutely right! And that is why the last couple of years has been fascinating to watch from a geopolitical and trade standpoint.
Watching China push its weight around earlier in the year with REM and REE was crazy. The US, and the rest of the world for that matter, were brought to our knees. Germany's auto industry and weeks of chips left, the US started shipping F35's to allies _without_ radar. Truly astounding trade power to see.
Made it very clear to every nation that you must have a sovereign story to tell about chip manufacturing.
> F35's to allies _without_ radar.
Alarm bell here: are you sure it's legal for the F35s to contain Chinese parts?
It was lack of certain REM that meant we couldn't manufacture the necessary elements of some parts of the F35's radar stack.
Everyone always forgets ASML which suits the Netherlands just fine.
But there will come a day when that country needs to choose between China and the US.
> A country must feed itself, power itself, and in 2026 it must be able to manufacture its own chips (from ore, to refining, to the foundry)
This is only possible if you (a) fudge the definitions of "everything" a bit and (b) are one of the largest countries in the world. This is only ever going to be possible for US and China. And even then the US really is the "lucky country" with which natural resources it has ended up holding within its borders.
ASML: Am I joking to you?
Any company with advanced fabs is important now. We've got shortages of CPUs, GPUs, RAM, etc. Many of these shortages will persist till 2030.
While Intel had bad sales of CPUs for personal computers, due to the memory crysis, they have sold every server CPU they could make, despite the fact that their server CPUs are much inferior in comparison with the AMD server CPUs.
The reason is that AMD could not make enough server CPUs to satisfy the demand for datacenters, due to limited production capacity at TSMC, so Intel, who makes server CPUs in their own fabs, could also sell everything they got.
So as you say, even the older fabs of Intel, which use the somewhat obsolete "Intel 3" CMOS manufacturing process, with which the old Intel Granite Rapids server CPUs are made, have been an important asset in these circumstances.
It only runs, what, 90% of PCs, laptops, and servers in the world?
Maybe a decade ago, but they have lost market share every year since and currently sits around 60% and it still decreasing.
Still, a lot of that lost share went to AMD and that is ultimately a safe thing for Intel compared to losing share to alternative CPU platforms. More than just safe, mutually beneficial for both companies.
Sure, losing Apple was a huge deal, but ultimately Apple still only has ~20% of the consumer PC market and far less in enterprise, and even less than that in more niche applications since their form factors are so limited, and 0% marketshare in data centers.
I’m not sure how hard Intel is trying to get into the enterprise AI data center scene but Intel ARC cards are definitely floating around in the local LLM scene for their stellar value and I’d be surprised if Intel doesn’t see a massive opportunity to take advantage in that area. They are one of three companies who have reasonably modern GPU designs.
Intel losing market share to AMD or anybody else is not beneficial for them.
When Intel loses marketshare to AMD it’s infinitely better than losing it to Qualcomm or some other platform.
Only Intel and AMD make x86 chips.
If Intel loses marketshare to AMD that means they can eventually take it back.
It's still not beneficial to them to lose market share.
Which wasn’t what I was saying.
>More than just safe, mutually beneficial for both companies.
If you pick out one sentence and strip out the rest of the context then all you’re doing is removing meaning from what I was actually saying.
The competitive pressure of AMD versus Intel is mutually beneficial, as long as they don’t totally crush each other into bankruptcy, their small leapfrogs of each other’s x86 technology keeps x86 relevant and dominant.
The entire consumer laptop market is about four data centers
Which one would the world miss more if disappeared overnight?
The average millennial and younger don't use a non work computer, and haven't had one for 10 years.
Not sure I would put the age cap at millennials, they very much had PCs and laptops at home, uni etc and lived before smartphones were a thing.
Key word there is had, while the comment you're replying to is speaking as to today minus ten years roughly.
And yeah, as a millennial I know lots of people who had a shared desktop at home, probably had a laptop in college, used a work laptop, and hasn't had a personal computing device outside an iPad and iPhone for a decade or more. Outside of those who play PC games or other niche hobbies it's getting more and more rare, at least for the people I know.
This is often said, but incorrect. 81% of households have a desktop/laptop. [1] And the breakdown is basically a proxy for wealth. Only 56% of households with earnings of less $25,000 have a desktop/laptop whereas it's 96% for $150k+. For millennials (approximately - age range 35-44) the rate is 87%.
[1] - https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/computer...
Depends which four data centers. AWS North Virginia would be missed more than all the world's laptops.
Not by me; I couldn’t tell AWS NV was even missing without my laptop.
You'd open your phone and nothing would work, not even the connection to the cellular network since your phone company has management components running on AWS.
You might have that problem, but us-east-1 going dark is unlikely to impact my Australian carrier enough to knock cellular service out. But granted, I might notice something is up if I tried to use my phone for much. If us-east-1 vanished at the right time of day I might notice on my phone first, sure.
> You'd open your phone and nothing would work, not even the connection to the cellular network since your phone company has management components running on AWS.
I'm pretty confident, sitting here on a different continent, that I wouldn't have that problem at all.
I think parent is trying to say that the number of services that rely themselves on AWS or some of their internal services is enormous and potentially impacts many.
All laptops vs 4 (presumably most impactful) data centers?
I would expect that "all laptops dematerialize" would be worse.
Banks don't run on laptops, so probably that one
Nah they've been "out of fashion" for 5+ years, and in that time AMD took their datacenter crown, which was also encroached on by various ARM hyperscaler systems.
PCs are like 5% of computing devices. Very important for business offices but not outside of that niche. And mass amounts of servers can be adapted to whatever is cheapest. Google wouldn't insist on AMD64 - they'd port to ARM if ARM was cheaper. And if you do want AMD64, AMD currently makes better AMD64 chips.
> Very important for business offices but not outside of that niche.
you miss at least several other niches
Yep, like technicians. Especially technicians that work on, well, everything. Every industrial machine, robot, PLC, industrial vehicle, mining equipment, power plant, etc etc.
A fraction of the entire world's servers are running Xeon and it is definitely important.
And keep in mind that Intel literally still holds the rights to issue x86 licenses.
id argue leading edge fab and packaging capacity is importantish
I think they should be unlisted and come back if they can profit $1 for two quarters in a row.
FYI there is a reason for that.
Stocks are valued as the sum total of all the profits they ever make (net present value of future earnings).
So even at $1 profit/year - technically worth infinity.
But due to 'time value of money and risk' (aka some risk free discount rate you can put your money elsewhere at get the same return for zero risk, like your bank account), then the infinite sum of those $1/year becomes some finite sum.
The problem wit this math is when profits grow perpetually higher than the cost of borrowing - the net present value goes to infinity.
A P/E ratio = 1/(cost of capital - growth rate). Assuming no dividends.
An investor with 8% cost of capital, a company growing at 3% per year woudl have a P/E of 20.
At 7% growth the value is p/e 100x ...
Any growth over the 'cost of capital' and the P/E goes to infinity because the infinite sum of all future cash flows does not converge.
What this means is that the valuation math breaks down when there are gigantic swings of in growth at rates of even like 30% more for any extended period; it's extremely hard to value.
Verizon is valued as it is because they have an operational lock on a system; they will never grow that much but their returns are predictable. You can spreadsheet their valuation.
All this AI stuff is 'inherently wild' because growth is high, but opaque. Yes, there is a lot of hyperbole and speculation but this is very different than Space X which is a 'Musk Meme' stock, upheld be retail investors.
Edit: this is the most rudimentary articulation of how stocks are valued. It's not made up hunches, and companies that invest a lot in these things have a lot of numeric justification they have to use to make the assessment - and NPV is at the core of it. That 'math' is the first order concept that underlies valuation and it's the hyperbolic nature of growth beyond cost of capital that makes the it come undone which is the mechanical basis for the wild swings. It's what happens to valuation when you make small adjustments in only a few parts of the model.
Intel, like Boeing cannot fail. If you believe they can, you better start searching for a bunker.
Advanced chip manufacturing is so incredibly hard. The finance bozos are clueless, again.
There will be a company using Intel's fabs to make chips 5, 10 or 20 years from now. Because it is in the national interest of US to make sure that happens.
It is not in the national interest to make sure that the Intel common stock remains valued above 0. Plenty of companies that are of national interest were saved directly from bankruptcy, by nationalizing them in a way that wipes out the common stock.
The US government owns the stock.
> US government owns the stock
Depending on how this was done and for what quid pro quo, this could wind up being a liability for Intel. (It also trashes its image abroad.)
The lack of self awareness of HN posters thinking that these 'dumb finance people' can't understand how 'chips are made'.
Good gosh. Goldman probably has 50-100 people, inc. maybe 20 Engineers just on that alone, full time.
And yes, Intel can fail 100%. They can absolutely go into receivership and/or be broken up and bought for pennies by other entities.
It would be a strategic dismantling, obviously the government won't allow certain things to happen, but they could 100% allow investors to be wiped out.
Boeing is a bit different as there are no substitutes, but it could go into receivership. Some parts of Boeing will 'always exist' but the corporate entity can fail.
>> Intel, like Boeing cannot fail. If you believe they can, you better start searching for a bunker.
>> Advanced chip manufacturing is so incredibly hard. The finance bozos are clueless, again.
> The lack of self awareness of HN posters thinking that these 'dumb finance people' can't understand how 'chips are made'.
Finance people are even dumber. However that can just mean "they will happily welcome next 2k or 2008 crash". Dumb or evil - do not realy matter for most of computer/phone users...
> Goldman probably has 50-100 people, inc. maybe 20 Engineers just on that alone, full time.
So what ? Goldman people are Goldman peoples and not some active government or good fairies - not their responsibility to save US, without a hefty profit that is.
And "finance peoples" are responsible for a lot of things... Example: it was I WW or II WW they caused ? SO plain DUMB ! Lehman bros was financial peoples too...
> And yes, Intel can fail 100%. They can absolutely go into receivership and/or be broken up and bought for pennies by other entities.
Possible by law. But it would mean that US (or US owning peoples) wants to dismantle their schame - IBM at the bottom, wintel in the middle and Apple for dumb peoples with creative skills.
Also Intel trying to do something with photonics what looks like future. But it's possible that that know-how will be extracted from company, some new entity will be created and shareholders will be left with Intel corpse.
So yes, Intel is like Boening and can't fail for some time. And no reason for Intel falling yet, they have better stuff that AMD which always mess something.
So dumb HN peoples are quite good at seeing reality, just not so machiavellic like financial peoples that plain choose to do dumb and evil things. Modulo CEOs beliving in llms...
Explain why GameStop ever had the same market cap as Intel and ExxonMobil. We probably missed the memo that the smart finance bros got.
GameStop was a true meme stock - a highly concentrated populist effort to move the stock.
This is where 'herd' controls the price, and nobody can predict anything.
Smaller company, smaller float - it can be manipulated by enough retail investors.
Wow you actually identify with the label “HN posters”
That‘s hn for you. Bubble of engineers smart everyone else stupid & overhead
Goldman “engineers” are English majors who did a six week visual studio training course in 2006. Can’t tell you the difference between RAM, CPU, and GPU.
Source: I know several of them.
English Majors are not Engineers. Analysts, yes. They are not stupid.
Dunno what to tell you but the dude I’m thinking of is a department lead, and I remember helping him stuff his head with an MCSE 20 years back, and it was excruciating.
He wasn’t stupid. He also wasn’t a technologist.
English Majors are not Engineers, that's just what it is.
A Dept Head of Research for silicon/fabs etc - absolutely may not be an Engineer, and their ability to do MCSE is maybe distressing but not really that important. And they can manage Analysts who are actually Engineers - that is fine. At least nominally.
> Intel, like Boeing cannot fail.
Failure here is getting restructured and people losing money in the stock market, which I guess is so detached from the actual companies and reality that it might as well be a polymarket bet (I mean overall stock market and not intel specifically).
The stock can and did fell to under 20. Yes, US government will not allow it to fail, but that does not mean shareholders will profit from it.
A lot of retail investors lose the shirts off their backs holding Intel stock well before Intel every approaches anything close to "failure". Intel stock could drop 90% and the machines will still be running, because stock valuations which aren't tied to fundamentals on the way up are also not tied to fundamentals on the way down.
"Failure" here can be something like the stock going to near 0 and then the govt hands Intel fabs to some other rich company that it likes, for example SpaceX at a criminally low rate
Do you think that would happen under Dems and Khan being reinstated as the FTC chair?
I think this is a geopolitical question beyond any cabinet or chair. In general, I think it would surprise people, but a Democratic cabinet would have to do many of the same geopolitical choices as Trump has done.
If you read Chokepoints by Fishman, it's for example clear that US had to do something with Iran soon, because all of the economical sanctional options were squeezed to the max, there was no offramp for that country.
Is it? Obama era actions against Iran were pulled back by the following administration and unfortunately the world will never know if Harris could have been goaded into bombing Iran the same way the current President was. Hillary Clinton, while working for the state department has stories about being told that jets were hot on the runway and the US needed to jump in as well.
> a Democratic cabinet would have to do many of the same geopolitical choices as Trump has done. , it's for example clear that US had to do something with Iran soon, because all of the economical sanctional options were squeezed to the max, there was no offramp for that country.
That is just not true. No, US did not had to start a war with Iran. There was zero reason for that, rationally. It was against all the recommendations. And especially, it did not had to waste its assets in such ridiculous way while gaining nothing. Fishman may agree with Trump or support Netanyahu or whatever, but US did not had to do it.
It also did not had to threaten Greenland. It did not had to ally itself with Putin. It did not had to try to destroy NATO. It did not had to start trade wars. It did not had to mock and insult foreign leaders. It did not had to support Orban or Bolsnaro. It did not had to murder fishermen on boats.
Going back in history, US did not had to tear down nuclear agreement with Iran either. Democratic president made it, Republican destroyed it. Claiming that Democrats would do the same choice is absurd.
In the worst case when the free market deems Intel worthless, the government will nationalize Intel at a cheap nominal price. Shareholders are wiped out anyways.
The question is, would it outgrow the inflation rate.
Intel should just spin off its fabs. You can't expect competitors to use your fabs.
Of course Intel can fail. If revenue is down, they have to reduce investment in future nodes, making them even more uncompetitive in the future, reducing revenue even more, etc.
>you better start searching for a bunker.
Been looking for one the last 20 years.
>The finance bozos are clueless, again.
You're much too generous. They are so far beyond merely clueless... these are the bumblefucks that will tip off the end of the world.
Intel is particular: they managed to keep appearing to investor as a CPU leader,
BUT:
- they are losing the server to ARM (also thanks to Apple because now many devs use ARM as well)
- AMD is strong on the PC, while Apple (15% market share) is ARM
- They failed to make a dent in the GPU market
So, Intel has got no more area of leadership. No more in manufacturing, no more in chip design. They are riding the inertia wave but will lose it eventually. That's what happens when you let financial people milk the cow. They sure got nice bonuses.
Farewell...
they had stellar switching fabric. they fired most of them.
I really want to see how all the people freaking out at a 1.5% market "rout" will react when an actual correction happens.
Where are you seeing 1.5%? I see 8% in the last 24 hours, 35% in the last week, and 49% in the last month. You don't think this qualifies as a "rout"?
I assume the parent meant the broad indices.
Intel has lost its engineering culture and one day it will have to pay the ultimate price for letting it happen. I don't think that day is in 2026 but it's in the near future.
What no one is talking about so far is how Intel used to be a strong engineering culture but then turned into an incestious den of bean counting MBAs executing HBS management best practices to maximize shareholder value.
Intel just doesn't pay their engineers enough, so most don't care. Just like most of all the large companies - to management, engineers are line cooks flipping burgers at McDonalds who just happen to have master's degrees.
Intel's decline is organizational - it allowed bean counting and management rituals to acquire too much influence over engineering judgment. Horrible punishment lies ahead - we need to track people in management who will now start to jump ship and take their style to other unsuspecting companies.
As a result of all this nonsense, it lost significant engineering talent to competing chip companies: Jim Keller went to Tenstorrent, lead GPU architect David Blythe joined AMD, and Xeon architect Sailesh Kottapalli moved to Qualcomm after 28 years at Intel. These are substantial transfer of expertise, whatever each person’s individual reasons for leaving.
In April 2025, Lip-Bu Tan, lamented the company was "too slow, too complex and too set in our ways". He pointed to teams buried under at least eight organizational layers, managers measured by their headcount, and excessive meetings and administrative work.
The financial priorities shifted: Intel spent $14.2 billion on share buybacks in 2020, the same year it disclosed delays to its 7nm CPU roadmap.
Now they pay the price as they confront the reality of an organization overloaded with TPS reports. The death will be slow and gradual, bleeding out slowly but surely - halal style.
> Intel just doesn't pay their engineers enough, so most don't car
As someone who considered a job at Intel about 10 years ago (including having to submit to a somewhat humiliating panel-style interview) what made me instantly decide that I didn't want a job there was seeing how their office in my area (PNW) was a 1990s cube-farm.
I appreciate that Intel's workplace was (and still is?) egalitarian because _everyone_ has a cube, but today it's just so soul-destroying to lay eyes on.
So I agree they have a very unappealing culture, but it isn't as simple as paying people more (unless it's to pay for an interior designer and carpenters to overhaul their office...).
I'd take a cube farm over an open office plan every day of the week.
I've never had a cube.
I dream of having a cube.
Temporary IMHO. This is a particularly volatile time with earnings and midterms colliding.
All this is hogwash. While a massive drop, Intel is still sitting higher than at any point in its history prior to April of this year (except for two very brief dotcom era spikes).
Everyone seems to forget that stocks are supposed to reflect real value. This is now just a correction of insanely inflated value since April.
The big question I have, why isn't Nvidia's stock falling quickly ? Nvidia's GPUs are the most in demand chip for AI. Seems Nvidia stock is also falling, but not as much. I would think it would fall almost as quickly as Intel.
I wonder if something else is happening to Intel
Nvidia Stock:
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NVDA/
Intel Stock:
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/INTC/
Apple Silicon launched in Mac, the first couple iterations worked/sold great. By the launch of M3 market realized it wasn't a fluke and that x86 was dead but still fundamental due to deployment at the time
Flash forward a couple more years to now it's all about efficient model training which sucks on generic CPUs so everyone is buying and designing other chips
Two big consumer pivots over 4-5 years and boom ...they're IBM and handed lifelines to shore up chip manufacturing in the US for strategic reasons but Intel essentially manufactures rotary phones right now. Maybe the fab biz will get modern designs right. We'll see
Modern Intel chips have no issues trading blows with Apple Silicon.
Their fabs are the weakest part of their business (I wonder why once AMD spun off GlobalFoundries so they could focus on the core product, they suddenly started doing well) Once they started making chips on TSMC's processes, wow, all of a sudden, theyre in the same league as Apple Silicon.
Actually, Intel's fab's are becoming their crown jewel. The whole "5 nodes in 4 years," where they tried to catch up with TSMC pretty much worked, which is why the stock originally rocketed up by 5x a few months ago. They aren't far behind TSMC now.
But, they still don't have many external customers for the fabs. Intels fab revenu is something like a tenth of TSMC's. Although, it'll probably grow year by year if they continue to match the capabilities of TSMC's chip processes.
Maybe no issues "trading blows" in a single reductive compute per second measure
But Intel chips use more electricity to do so. At data center scale that is not something shrugged off like homelab nerds shrug off the extra $50/month or whatever on their power bill.
> At data center scale that is not something shrugged off
Sure it is. At datacenter scale, there are precisely zero HPC vendors that have invested in Apple Silicon as an alternative to Ampere or Grace CPUs. Same goes for datacenters seeking to replace their Intel CPUs. Chips like the M-series are explicitly nonviable for Xeon-scale use cases.
We are not discussing the same things and I will leave it at that.
Feel free to write a full response when you get the time.
Intel should have been split in two many years ago. The fab side and the chip design services side. Together they are dragging each other down.
Aren't they separate ?
Pre-AI-boom, Intel was a failing chipmaker. The situation was bad in all respects. Processor design fell behind AMD. Fabs fell behind TSMC/Samsung/etc. Culture was broken. Massive braindrain.
Stock was down three-fold between its peak around 2019 and its bottom in 2024/2025. Indeed, it was down three-fold in 2024/2025 from its 2000 dot-com peak.
Basically, imploding company, on its way for collapse.
With AI boom, there was more demand for ICs than production capacity. It almost didn't matter how bad your chips were -- someone would buy them, and at a healthy markup. This placed Intel in a very strong position to recover.
That recovered some value -- going above their previous high, but much less than 25 years of S&P500 growth. However, it's worth remembering the peak of $120 was less than double it's dot-com peak 25 years prior.
If AI boom doesn't materialize, Intel may, again, be on a path to death.
If it does materialize, but like the dot-com boom with a few winners and many losers, Intel will likely be one of the losers.
Ergo, falling value.
NVidia, in contrast, looks a lot more like the Amazon of the dot-com bust.
Nvidia is essentially scheduled to collapse with the rise of 1-bit NNs.
> Nvidia is essentially scheduled to collapse with the rise of 1-bit NNs
This assumes the shape of demand for computational intelligence which we don't know the answer to. Maybe 1-bit NNs do everything we want to do with LLMs. Maybe it means we span tens of thousands of them to do sundry tasks every day.
Confusingly, the thesis of both bulls and bears of the ai market is that AI will continue to get better and cheaper...
I don't disagree with that. 1-bit NNs will make nvidia the steam car of this century.
From what I read, Intel's recent chip production strategy was a miss, in that they focused on chips for laptops and not for the chips for AI data centers.
More specifically, they focused on making laptop chips like Panther Lake (Intel's latest and greatest) and they meant to make a lot of their money here, and the data center chips weren't focused on as much (I think these would be something like the Xeon 6, but not sure, but I read that they also could have boosted production of older data center chips). But, as it turns out, laptop sales are down because of the demand for DRAM is sky high from the AI data center build out, and not as many people are willing to buy a super expensive laptop. If they had forecasted more correctly, they would have focused more on making data center chips.
Also, their forward guidance for 2027 is lower than expected too, because it will take awhile to shift their production towards building more data center chips, which they are in the middle of doing.
But, you may want to check other sources because have only been somewhat loosely following what's happening with Intel.
A better comparison is probably AMD, since they also make server CPUs.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMD/
I figured the current owners of INTC stock are betting on the success of their fab business.. I think that's still to play out.
There was talk about a few things I can only see driving the drops: 1. Datacenter projects run by mining companies and now their loans may be frozen so construction may not finish 2. Prices of everything are putting crunches on Enterprise - I've seen it in a few places I talk to - they aren't buying laptops and servers in 2027 if they dont have to 3. Consumers aren't buying hardware because they cant afford the hardware and may not have free cash anyway
Intel GPUs are pretty worthless right now for inference, let alone training. Which isn't to say that there aren't people getting value out of them, but from a dollars/wattage/sanity to performance, there's no point to buying anything but Nvidia for most people and businesses. I don't want this to be the case, but that's just how it is currently.
> Intel GPUs are pretty worthless right now for inference, let alone training.
Why? Is it hardware limitations or deficient software stack?
In any case, as nvidia is ignoring the gaming market, AMD and Intel both have a vacuum to fill, but I don't see them doing it.
Intel, especially, should have rushed out gaming cards as soon as nvidia shortages were predictable (2023, at least).
The problem I have is not that an old GPU can't be used for gaming (it can), it's that I am forced to upgrade from a perfectly working 660ti that once played far cry 3, 4 and 5 (and every other game I threw at it) because my kernel doesn't have support anymore (older drivers don't work on a newer kernel).
A new GPU with the power of a decade-old GPU but all the latest software support would be great. Right now, if I want to see certain web-pages (WebGL), I have to buy a new GPU, but there isn't any low-priced GPUs anymore.
> A new GPU with the power of a decade-old GPU [...]
Asus tried, with GDDR5 versions of the GT710 circa 2021 in a very sensible fanless, "bus-powered", single slot design; alas being an older design did not help much with stability with Nouveau drivers, though on the Windows side it did 10 as well as XP which wasn't a bad deal for spending a week digitizing a bunch of tapes with a good old BT868 capture card!
Bonus point for proper VGA and DVI connectors too, just one weird omission - a half-height card only supplied with a full height bracket?
Define low price, because looking at sold listings on ebay, you can get a used RTX 3070 for around $250, which is as capable as any 10-year old 8 GB card, and certainly more capable than a 660 Ti.
Still not great given that I paid about the same for a new-in-unopened-box RTX 3070 a couple years ago, but price increases no lower-end cards without enough VRAM for AI at least haven't skyrocketed like the top end of the market.
Memory bandwidth is really low on most of the cards - even if you hyper-optimized the software stack, can't get around that. Compute isn't great either.
I think the cards are probably fine for gaming though. I haven't used these cards, just the numbers I've seen floating around are pretty underwhelming.
Because people are buying Nvidia products way more than Intel products, one would think. Nvidia owns the whole AI movement. Intel doesn't.
I understand nothing but I want to join the conversation.
It seems to me that nvidia bubble is still to burst. There is a trust me bro circle where Nvidia somehow sold GPU to itself so it can host someone else's models. Maybe three years ago or a little more they announced they plan to move away from consumer end and focus on cloud. Back then it did not make much sense because everybody though "how the f Nvidia will manage clouds like AWS?" And their business model seems to me that it is a shared risk model where Nvidia don't "own" the cloud but pay for its GPU to have that market share. I think it would make much sense if the thin layer those, how did the greedy musk said, neocloud/cloudfronts or whatever, were not so brittle due to the lack of market demand.
I have the impression they had a gold strategy for them but for some reason they rushed it too much and now they broke the market before they could profit from it.
I can imagine that if they didn't hoard their own resources to create scarcity artificiality, they would possibly have a stronger position in the market. I can only think they did this because (A) they know the current government will bail them out and (B) someone was worried that China could hoard those GPUs first.
But as I said, I don't understand much of the topic, but it seems to me they are try to get as much money as soon as possible and that looks scam-ish to me. They all put investment rounds too close to each other, started creating concerning stories and "rogue" AIs at the same time. Maybe I'm being too paranoid, but so far those guys have been pulling some hat tricks and I think I know who will pay the bill
Edit: Also I think the big ones artificially produced better numbers by doing massive layoff rounds. Depending on how those happen, it produces almost an immediate loss that can be smoothed, and then a peak on profit, and then we will see if their numbers keep up 2 or 3 quarter after that. Maybe I have trust issues, but man, this does smell weird.
> But as I said, I don't understand much of the topic
Would it not make more sense to ask questions in this case?
the markets that Intel focuses on have larger/easier freedom of choice for the consumers, for one.
things are changing but there is a sort of "no one ever got fired for using nvidia for inference." thing going on.
Nvidia is still the only game in town for training at scale, and the fastest for inference (plus, at scale, the cheapest for inference, as hard as that sounds to believe)
I think both Google and AMD both prove this is not true anymore.
To use Google chips you have to be Google, and AMD continues snatching defeat from the jaws of victory with almost every executive decision.
No. This is also not true anymore. In fact they are even letting other cloud providers buy them like Oracle.
https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/ai-world-oracle-bri...
Anthropic and OpenAI both use large numbers of Google Tensor chips.
Unless your town is in China
NVidia had $96B in revenue and $60B of profit in Q2 2026, both of which doubled or more from Q2 2025.
Intel in Q3 2026 had $16.5B in revenue and $3.3B of profit, and $13.7B and $4.4B in Q3 2025.
NVidia is doing much better than Intel, people are selling bonds and junk bonds to buy billions of dollars of NVidia cards that NVidia is making 75% gross margins on. They’re making the kind of profits that would make a drug dealer blush.
I used Q3 earnings for Intel because Nvidia hasn’t reported their Q3 earnings yet and Intel’s Q2 earnings showed losses in both 2026 and 2025.
The hardware company wit software margins.
The genesis of this is when Apple moved from Intel to their own chips.
That's just one small event along the way, one that occurred many years after Intel started slipping enough for long enough that an iPhone was more powerful than an Intel laptop and after Intel's fabs failed to produce a useful new generation many generations in a row and after Intel acquired many companies just to spin down their products and after...
This started at Skylake.
Intel’s problems started with Itanium.
Sure, the Core 2 series ultimately, after a long gap, put them back on the rails at least, but Intel missed big iron and panicked.
Everything else since has been about desperately squeezing x86 into every niche, even when it probably shouldn’t be. That the Core 2 series gained an Apple-shaped halo is lucky for them, but the reality is that they have been on the back foot at some level since the failure of IA-64.
They needed to get themselves out of the hole by using AMD’s architecture, and they have been a polar bear on a large but shrinking iceberg ever since.
The problem is doubling down on a single technology. They dropped the ball on GPU and storage, imagine that. It probably makes sense from the bean counter but they are not exploring new areas and diversifying. Now that people dont particularly care for x86, they are screwed. Good riddance.
The weird bit is they picked up the ball for graphics again and ran with it for a while, but fell down and broke their leg and sold the team to nvidia now. Right when their product line is probably placed the best - medium end good, priced GPUs for gaming, they are done with that segment.
Intel had an ARM business twice, too. (StrongARM then XScale).
Sold it twice.
I notice modern intel chips are still named after Skylake. It's as if that's when they decided to stop innovating.
They used to use completely new names for new designs and then variants of that name for variants of that design. As in Sandy Bridge and then Ivy Bridge. Haswell, then Broadwell. Skylake, then Kaby Lake. Then Coffee Lake. Then Cannon Lake. 10 years later now they're still doing Lakes. It might not have much relation to the technical design but it gives the impression they gave up on new things.
AMD names their server CPUs after Italian cities.
Sometimes naming is just naming. No further depth or symbolism.
Skylake is when things started to go south, outwardly facing. But it was even long before that. The rot happened in the foundry side and it grew for a very long time, silently, because of how little competition existed.
Everything thereafter was pain.
it is pre-election correction to lesson the shock when the current administration gets its correction at the election poles
Intel is so strategic company that I don't think US government will let it go down.
even after this Intel is still up 65% YTD, so the only investors losing are the ones who piled in now
I guess Trump is going to have to stop bragging now about the US government buying Intel stock.
Definitely, because his shtick falls apart without his legendary consistency and accountability.
bruh. cmon.
Black Friday this week!
The A.I. Bubble has finally burst. That's all folks!!
Billions of $ in GPUs are flooding the market and hopefully DRAM will soon become cheap again and we can get on with our lives.
Not really. As far as I can tell the reason Intel routed seems to be because of an explosion in one of their fabs making Xeons which reduced production, and because no one buys new desktops and servers anymore because of the cost of RAM and storage. Given intel isn't big on AI chips, they are a casualty of the AI bubble.
Link ?
Their newest workstation chips (Xeon 600) are awesome. But limited supply.
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp-5...
> of an explosion in one of their fabs making Xeons
I guess this is related to Israel, isn't it? Meaning a fab they had installed there. Or maybe I'm thinking of the wrong Intel property blowing up.
Local model utopia!
Intel is a cursed company