Surely 100% tariffs on chips will boost national production, right?
Which is great for TSMC opening new fabs in the US too lol
The threatened 100% semiconductor tariff is for companies not doing any production within the US. So it would mostly serve to cement the market position of large players such as TSMC, Intel, TI, et al.
I need to ask; why is Intel letting these people go, apparently shutting down Linux support?
To expand on what others said, there has been tons of corporate dysfunction at Intel.
Some hardware efforts have gone pretty well, and had decent long-term trajectories but were sabotaged by direction changes or early cuts from up high. There seems to be some corporate "game of thrones" going on between branches too, and a lot of redundancy on the software dev side.
AMD has a similar issue actually, and it's starting to bite, especially on the GPU side.
Sounds a bit like what happened at Nokia ~15 years ago.
Intel is really struggling right now.
They haven't been able to compete in the CPU market for quite a while and their GPUs are also not really taking off.
As a result, they have to let people go and outsource more and more of their manufacturing to TSMC, which only deepens the hole they have dug for themselves.
They are on their sixth consecutive quarterly net loss and things are only getting worse if they don't have a new architecture (that can compete) ready soon.
Them shutting down their Linux support is just the result of years and years of mismanagement at Intel.
Thanks.
They haven’t been able to compete in the CPU market for quite a while and their GPUs are also not really taking off.
I did not know that. My image of Intel sems to be as outdated as the hardware I use.
GPUs are also not really taking off.
Arc Battlemage was great, albeit late. Not cutting the big die and sticking with it one more generation, they would have been golden.
Falcon shores seems like a management disaster, yeah...
On the CPU side, they still sell a ton of laptop CPUs, and some efforts like the small-core server CPUs are competitive.
Intel was not toast, they just need to stop the corporate dysfunction and stick with some efforts. But it seems they can't even manage that.
Bad management, bad luck, and usual market stuff. They're going to do anything to cut costs.
Their R&D for new fab work is falling behind competitors (Technically better doesn't matter if nobody is buying it), they've had a bunch of bad CPU releases with hardware failures, and they've got next to no market presence with GPUs which are currently making money hand over fist (Mostly for dumb AI reasons, which is going to bite Nvidia hard when the bubble pops, because their new datacenter hardware is hyper tuned for LLMs at the expense of general compute, unlike AMD).
their new datacenter hardware is hyper tuned for LLMs at the expense of general compute, unlike AMD
This is not true. The AMD MI300X/MI325X are, if anything, even more tuned for AI. They're missing ROPs when Nvidia's datacenter GPUs (last I checked) still have them.
...And honestly the demand for datacenter GPUs outside of AI is pretty small, anyway.
Also, CUDA has always been and will be the dominant compute API.
I'm not trying to shill Nvidia here. Screw them. The MI cards are better hardware anyway, just with a worse and (ironically) more AI specialized software stack that has utterly sabotaged them.
Thanks.
they’ve got next to no market presence with GPUs which are currently making money hand over fist
Oh, actual graphic cards? Yeah, Intel was never good there. Fuck both the AI and cryptocurrency hype.
The funny thing is that for the longest time Intel actually had the majority share of GPUs, just by counting the ones embedded in motherboards of laptops and the like. No idea if that's still the case, or if Nvidia or AMD has been eating into it with their new models (e.g. what powers the Steam Deck)
They've tried to break into the discrete market a few times, most recently with their Arc cards, but the way they approach things is just so odd. It's like they assume the first attempt will be a smash hit and dominate, and when it doesn't they just flounder? The Arc cards launched to a lot of fanfare and then there was just silence and delays from Intel.
USA should just nationalize Intel, if it's actually as important to national security as they say. Left to their own devices they will self destruct
The ideal state is some kind of bastardized hybrid, federally funded and guided but still private.
This is how TSMC rose.
It's also kinda how Samsung Foundry exists, with how Samsung is so giant and tied to SK politics that's it blurs the line with the govt.
Trump is going in the opposite direction unfortunately, regulating the shit out of them in terms of policy (tariffs, politics), yet yanking grants and "freeing" the government of them.
Considering how the US government is currently burning its agencies to the ground, I’m pretty sure that would be even worse.
Should but the US won't because that's a good idea. Instead they will just let the company crash and sell the fabs to AMD creating an effective complete monopoly.
Too much enterprise hardware depends on these for them to go orphaned for very long
Fuck.
Is this really that bad news for Intel Linux support?
Thank god Intel let go of all them middle managers Amirite?
This is really bad. At the very least I hope they open source some stuff, because I suspect a lot of communities that would volunteer to support something so critical.
This is about Linux kernel driver maintainership... It's all open source.
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