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   Technology StocksIntel Corporation (INTC)


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To: FJB who wrote (186870)2/4/2023 10:48:39 PM
From: Harvey Allen
   of 186892
 
I give up. seekingalpha.com
No thank you @ 30. Hell yes @ 15-20

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From: Sr K2/23/2023 6:36:09 AM
   of 186892
 
Chip Makers Turn Cutthroat in Fight for Share of Federal Money

Semiconductor companies, which united to get the CHIPS Act approved, have set off a lobbying frenzy as they argue for more cash than their competitors.

Give this article


Chips at Intel’s plant in Chandler, Ariz. The CHIPS Act is allocating $39 billion in grants for new or expanded U.S. factories.Credit...Philip Cheung for The New York Times

By Ana Swanson and Don Clark

Ana Swanson covers trade and Washington’s turn toward industrial policy. Don Clark has reported on the chips industry for more than 30 years.

Feb. 23, 2023, 5:00 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON — In early January, a New York public relations firm sent an email warning about what it characterized as a threat to the federal government’s program to revitalize the U.S. semiconductor industry.

The message, received by The New York Times, accused Intel, the Silicon Valley chip titan, of angling to win subsidies under the CHIPS and Science Act for new factories in Ohio and Arizona that would sit empty. Intel had said in a recent earnings call that it would build out its facilities with the expensive machinery needed to make semiconductors when demand for its chips increased.

The question, the email said, was whether officials would give funding to companies that outfitted their factories from the jump “or if they will give the majority of CHIPS funding to companies like Intel.”

The firm declined to name its client. But it has done work in the past for Advanced Micro Devices, Intel’s longtime rival, which has raised similar concerns about whether federal funding should go to companies that plan to build empty shells. A spokesman for AMD said it had not reviewed the email or approved the public relations firm’s efforts to lobby for or against any specific company receiving funding.

“We fully support the CHIPS and Science Act and the efforts of the Biden administration to boost domestic semiconductor research and manufacturing,” the spokesman said.

Rival semiconductor suppliers and their customers pulled together last year as they lobbied Congress to help shore up U.S. chip manufacturing and reduce vulnerabilities in the crucial supply chain. The push led lawmakers to approve the CHIPS Act, including $52 billion in subsidies to companies and research institutions as well as $24 billion or more in tax credits — one of the biggest infusions into a single industry in decades.

Exc.

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From: Jaroslav Berezin3/1/2023 6:47:10 AM
1 Recommendation   of 186892
 
INTC one of underestimated shares on Stock Market. It must equals NVDA. I would buy these shares while price is more wonderful.

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From: greg s3/24/2023 8:12:05 PM
4 Recommendations   of 186892
 
Gordon Moore, Intel Co-Founder, Dies at 94

finance.yahoo.com

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From: IcYYachtY4/14/2023 6:58:50 PM
   of 186892
 
Intel is bound to increase in value over the next 24 to 48 months; US gov funding and adoption of EUV manufacturing will increase its long term revenue stream.. INTC is a value buy

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To: IcYYachtY who wrote (186876)4/14/2023 7:25:53 PM
From: Glenn Petersen
2 Recommendations   of 186892
 
\Can Intel become the chip champion the US needs?

Once the leading player in the semiconductor industry, the company is attempting to pull off one of tech’s most complex turnrounds

Richard Waters in San Francisco
40 MINUTES AGO
Financial Times

It was nearly a decade ago when Intel, then the undisputed leader in global semiconductor manufacturing, made a fateful decision.

A new technology, extreme lithography, was offering a way to pack more computing power on to the silicon wafers from which tiny chips, essential for widely used products like smartphones and PCs, are cut.

Using light to etch complicated integrated circuits, EUV promised an unparalleled degree of miniaturisation, but Intel executives believed it would take years for the method to become practical. Instead, they stuck with older manufacturing techniques for their next generation of chips.

This turned out to be a historic mistake, one with consequences that are being felt at a time when the US has put advanced chipmaking at the centre of its national industrial policy.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, which adopted EUV in 2019, has leapfrogged Intel to become the world’s most advanced chip manufacturer, closely followed by Samsung. Along with other slips, the judgment call has left Intel — and the US — scrambling to catch up.

“Hindsight is 20/20,” says Ann Kelleher, head of technology development at Intel and the executive charged with restoring the US chipmaker’s manufacturing processes. “It’s very easy to look back and say, ‘If something different was done?.?.?.’”

Intel is today at another crucial juncture. If, as planned, the company finally produces chips made with EUV in large volume later this year, it will be an important step on the road back. Nowhere will progress be watched more anxiously than in Washington, where the Biden administration is facing an imminent decision about how much financial backing to throw behind the company.

Last year’s US Chips Act committed $52bn in direct subsidies to support semiconductor manufacturing and boost research and development, along with an estimated $24bn worth of tax credits over the next eight years. The law was designed to reverse a slide that has taken the US share of chip production to 12 per cent, from 37 per cent in 1990.

The centrepiece of that plan is to bring leading-edge manufacturing back to the US. For better or worse, that leaves Washington with little choice but to bet heavily on Intel, despite it being the laggard in one of the tech world’s most important races.

Yet falling behind in advanced chip production is not the only problem hanging over Intel. Big shifts in its customers’ needs — such as the rise of artificial intelligence — are threatening to sideline its traditional PC and server chips. Its attempt to go into direct competition with TSMC by becoming a so-called chip foundry, manufacturing chips on behalf of other companies, represents the biggest change to its business since it abandoned its original memory chips for processors nearly 40 years ago.

To make things even harder, a yawning financial hole has opened up under the company at just the moment it is trying to make up for years of under-investment with a surge in capital spending. The depth of the reversal, which the company says is caused by a temporary inventory correction, shocked Wall Street in January, when Intel warned its revenue would tumble 40 per cent in the first three months of this year.

The setbacks mean that a central piece of US industrial policy is now riding on one of the most difficult and complex tech turnrounds ever attempted. As the US Department of Commerce begins to weigh how to distribute the Chips Act subsidies, deciding how fiercely to back Intel will be a central question.



“It’s a very hard problem, people are underestimating the degree of difficulty,” says Willy Shih, a professor at Harvard Business School. Even if subsidies help to make up for some of the higher construction costs in the US, Intel’s plants will still face much higher operating costs than its Asian rivals, he adds. At the same time, rival chip subsidies in other countries also mean that even if the US halts the relative decline of its chip manufacturing base, it will struggle to win back global share.

The extent of Intel’s woes has spooked investors. Despite rebounding 22 per cent this year, its stock price has halved in the past two years. In the same period, the Philadelphia semiconductor index, a measure of the broader health of the industry, has only fallen 2 per cent.

“They’re in a tough spot,” says Stacy Rasgon, a chip analyst at Bernstein Research. “The best you can say is that the worst news is already out.”

Engineering complacency

Intel’s failure to keep its lead in manufacturing technology has been at the centre of its problems. For half a century after its co-founder Gordon Moore famously predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors on a chip would rise exponentially, Intel maintained a roughly two-year advantage over rivals.

After 2014, things started to go awry. The planned “shrink” to chips with features only 10 nanometres wide was thrown off course by the complex manufacturing steps put in place to get round the lack of EUV. Further delays mean its upcoming “node”, using a 7nm process that has been renamed Intel 4, will be roughly five years late — assuming the company succeeds in getting it into production later this year.

In less than a decade, Intel has slipped from being one generation ahead of its rivals in the latest chip technology to being one generation behind. Comparable chips from TSMC, using a process known as 5nm (confusingly, the actual sizes have diverged from the naming systems used to identify them) went into volume production in 2020. As a result, the latest products from rivals AMD and Nvidia — companies that design chips and outsource them to TSMC to be manufactured — have achieved higher levels of performance and eaten into Intel’s market.

According to Kelleher, the Irish-born former head of manufacturing who was put in charge of Intel’s technology development more than two years ago, turning Intel around will require nothing less than a cultural transformation. One of her first steps was to take on the “not invented here” mentality at a company where success had bred an insular approach to engineering.

“Because we were in a leadership position, we weren’t as open to the industry,” she says. “We don’t need to invent everything going forward ourselves.” In one big break with the past, Kelleher brought Intel’s chip design processes in line with industry standards, enabling it to use the same design automation technology from outside suppliers as other chip producers.

To make Intel less dependent on the kind of risky leaps that hurt its move to 10nm, Kelleher adopted what she calls an “incremental and modular” approach. That means some parts of each chip platform can be reused in later releases, or brought forward and tested alongside current technologies, such as PowerVia. This method of powering a chip from the back of the wafer to free up space for logic circuits on the front is designed for future releases but has been packaged with other components on a trial basis.



Kelleher, head of technology development at Intel, says turning the group around will require nothing less than a cultural transformation © Intel Corporation
---------------------

Along with PowerVia, Intel is also gambling on its first new transistor architecture since 2011, called “gate all around”, designed to reduce the leakage of electricity as transistors move towards sub-nanometre scales to regain its edge. “Both of those innovations are essential to us getting back to leadership,” says Kelleher.

With other manufacturers also planning to adopt new transistor architecture, this presents an opportunity to shake up industry leadership, says Shih, as companies vie to be first to perfect the technology. However, there is not yet a sign that this will play to Intel’s advantage.

Intel is counting on the changes Kelleher is making to race through five new process “nodes” in only four years, something the company says will enable it to regain a manufacturing lead by 2025. “Overall, we’re doing very well,” says Kelleher after two years in.

With one release completed and four still to come in quick succession, followed by the need to scale up production and embed the new technologies in future generations of products, most of the hard work lies ahead. According to Rasgon at Bernstein, it will take another five years to tell whether Intel can become globally competitive again.

Regaining lost ground

To support its new chip designs, Intel has announced a spate of giant new manufacturing plants, known as fabs, with the economies of scale needed to justify the capital-intensive processes.

There are two fabs planned outside Phoenix, two more in Ohio and a new €17bn mega plant in Germany that represents the country’s biggest investment since the second world war.

The cost for the first phases of these developments has already reached around $60bn, and the German governmen t is pushing Intel to expand its plans in exchange for the higher subsidies the company is seeking.

Under the Chips Act, Intel could receive up to $12bn to support its new US facilities, with extra subsidies for an advanced chip packaging plant in New Mexico and further tax credits.

Throwing so much support behind the company, however, may not be the quickest way for the US to become self-sufficient in chipmaking. In a report two years ago, Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET) estimated that around 55 per cent of the advanced chips consumed in the US were made in TSMC’s fabs, with a further 25 per cent coming from Intel and the rest from Samsung.


President Joe Biden at a ceremony for the new Intel semiconductor plant in Ohio last year © Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
---------------------

The most effective use of the Chips Act subsidies geared to advanced chipmaking, according to CSET, would be to apportion them based on market shares, in effect leaving Intel with only half the money it is seeking.

However, Intel’s greater willingness to pour money into new US manufacturing has put it in pole position to receive a much bigger share. Last year, TSMC expanded its plans for a new fab under construction in Arizona, but output would be “a drop in the bucket” compared with the giant fabs the company runs in Taiwan, says Shih.

That has left Intel as the US standard-bearer in chip manufacturing “on a de facto basis”, says Chuck Wessner, a senior adviser to the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “It’s not a government policy,” he adds, but the company’s eagerness to invest significantly in the US makes it the only realistic option.

This message is one Intel itself has been driving home in Washington. The main goals set by the commerce department — to boost domestic chipmaking in order to increase economic and national security — leaves the country with no choice but to back Intel as “America’s champion, which has been investing heavily for decades,” says Al Thompson, the company’s head of US government relations.

Yet even if Intel succeeds in its manufacturing plans, there is no guarantee it will have enough business to fill its giant new fabs, or to operate them profitably.

Sales of PCs — still Intel’s main market — have fallen back after a pandemic-era boom, and many Wall Street analysts believe the company’s predictions about the market in the long term are unrealistic. To make matters worse, Apple recently dropped Intel in its Macs in favour of its own silicon chip designs, while AMD has taken advantage of TSMC’s superior manufacturing to claim an estimated 35 per cent of the PC market.

“Thirty per cent of their [PC] market has vanished,” Rasgon says of Intel, once synonymous with the PC industry. But now, even some of its biggest customers seem ready to move on.

“I think it’s important for Intel to succeed, and they’ve been a great partner,” says Michael Dell, chief executive of Dell Technologies. “But if they don’t succeed, we’ll use something else.” That could include new chip designs not based on the core chip architecture found in Intel’s main products, he adds. “Competition’s a good thing.”

Meanwhile, in servers, Intel processors face a barrage of competition, as cloud computing giants such as Google and Amazon have turned to designing their own chips. The data-intensive work of training AI systems has also boosted demand for different classes of chips. Wall Street’s belief that Nvidia will be the main winner from the AI race has lifted its shares by 90 per cent this year and added $360bn to its value — or more than two and a half times Intel’s entire market capitalisation.

One response from Intel has been to diversify into new chip architectures to compete. Another has been to open up its manufacturing to other chip companies, in the hopes of bringing in enough outside business to support the huge investments it needs to make.



Intel’s Pat Gelsinger in a lab coat at the company’s headquarters in Santa Clara, California. To support its new chip designs, Intel has announced a spate of giant new manufacturing plants © David Paul Morris/Bloomberg
----------------------------

Potential customers for this new chip foundry business have cautiously welcomed the move. Cristiano Amon, chief executive of mobile chip company Qualcomm, says it will be “a good thing” for the US if Intel succeeds, and that it will give Qualcomm another choice of manufacturer to turn to. Whether or not the Intel plan will work, says Amon, is “a tricky question to answer”, adding: “We haven’t committed a product yet.”

For Intel, competing with TSMC will mean learning a new way of doing business, including persuading customers that Intel will not put its own interests first if capacity is ever in short supply. It will also mean matching a fearsomely efficient rival, despite facing a likely cost disadvantage from being based in the US.

Intel has said that from early next year it will report the results of its manufacturing operations separately — even though, for now, the only customer will be Intel itself. The company’s executives hope the division will instil greater discipline throughout the company, forcing its manufacturing arm to show it can stand on its own feet, while its chip design business has to match the best of the “fabless” companies, such as Nvidia.

One day, they concede, that could even lead to a full break-up of the company — something some investors pressed for when Pat Gelsinger returned to head Intel in 2021. But it is likely to take years for Intel to win over enough big customers willing to bet on its advanced new fabs, making such a break a distant prospect.

For politicians in Washington, where reducing the country’s dependence on foreign-made chips has become an urgent matter, such long timescales will be a challenge.

“It took Intel 10 years to lose its lead, and the US giving up its chip manufacturing has taken 30 years,” says Shih at Harvard Business School. “Don’t expect results by the next election cycle.”

Additional reporting by Anna Gross

Can Intel become the chip champion the US needs? | Financial Times (archive.ph)

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To: Harvey Allen who wrote (186872)4/23/2023 3:47:31 PM
From: Harvey Allen
   of 186892
 
Arm, a British chip designer owned by Japan’s SoftBank, said it was building a prototype of an advanced semiconductor, reported the Financial Times. The company usually sells designs to manufacturers, but could be seeking to compete with them. It is planning to list on the Nasdaq exchange later this year.


https://www.economist.com/the-world-in-brief

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From: FJB6/29/2023 8:16:26 AM
1 Recommendation   of 186892
 

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From: Glenn Petersen12/3/2023 6:39:30 AM
   of 186892
 
Is This the End of ‘Intel Inside’?

Newcomers pose numerous challenges to decades of ‘Wintel’ chip dominance.

By Christopher Mims
Wall Street Journal
Dec. 1, 2023 9:00 pm ET

It might not look like it yet, but Intel is in a fight for its life.

The stakes for its employees and investors are high, and are likely to turn on some fierce battles for market share that will play out in 2024 and beyond.

For the everyday consumer, what’s at stake is mostly nostalgia. One day, the little “Intel Inside” sticker that’s been on PCs since 1991 could cease to exist.

Instead of an Intel chip, these computers could have processors from an array of manufacturers, principally
Qualcomm, but also possibly Nvidia, AMD, and lesser-known companies like Santa Clara, Calif.-based Amlogic and Taiwan-based MediaTek
.
What’s happening now is a tipping point decades in the making. Ever since a little chip-design company called ARM built the mobile processor for Apple’s first Newton personal digital assistant, which came out in 1993, it’s been gaining steam, primarily in the mobile-phone business. By the time Intel sought to enter the mobile-processor business in 2011, it was too late.

Apple was the first company to bet that ARM-based processors—thought by many to be useful only in phones—could be the brains of even the most powerful desktop computers. This gave Apple a huge head start over Intel, and the rest of the industry, in designing chips that prioritized power-sipping performance in a world where that’s become the primary limiting factor in the performance of all devices, not just phones.

Now, Google, Qualcomm, Amazon, Apple and others can use ARM’s blueprints to custom-design the chips that power everything from phones and notebooks to cloud servers. These chips are then typically produced by Samsung or Taiwan-based TSMC, which focus on making chips for other companies.

The threats to Intel are so numerous that it’s worth summing them up: The Mac and Google’s Chromebooks are already eating the market share of Windows-based, Intel-powered devices. As for Windows-based devices, all signs point to their increasingly being based on non-Intel processors. Finally, Windows is likely to run on the cloud in the future, where it will also run on non-Intel chips.

Apple has moved almost entirely away from Intel’s chips, which it used for over a decade for all of its desktop and notebook computers. At the same time, its overall market share for desktops and notebooks has climbed from around 12% of devices in the U.S. in 2013 to nearly one in three today, according to Statcounter.

These days, it’s not just Apple moving away from Intel’s chips. Microsoft is accelerating its yearslong effort to make Windows run on ARM-based processors, so that the entire PC ecosystem isn’t doomed by Intel’s failure to keep up with Apple and TSMC. Google’s Chrome OS, which works with either Intel or ARM-based chips, is also an emerging threat to Microsoft.

This means the threat to Intel comes from a whole ecosystem of companies with deep pockets and sizable profit margins, each trying to take their piece of the company’s market share. In many ways, it really is Intel versus the world—and “the world” includes nearly every tech giant you can name.

It wasn’t always this way. For decades, Intel enjoyed PC market dominance with its ride-or-die partner, Microsoft, through their “Wintel” duopoly.

It’s ironic, then, that Microsoft is one of the companies leading the charge away from Intel’s chips.

This estrangement is taking several forms, which shows how seriously Microsoft is taking this shift away from Intel. Microsoft declined to comment for this column.

Microsoft is working to make Windows and the rest of its software accessible in the cloud, which can save money for customers because it lets them use computers that are much cheaper and simpler than conventional PCs. It also means that ARM-based devices can be put on workers’ desks in place of more powerful, Intel-powered ones. And the version of Windows that workers are accessing remotely, in the cloud, can run on ARM-based chips in the data center too.

In mid-November, Microsoft unveiled its first ARM-based custom chips. One of them, called Cobalt, is intended to live in data centers and could power such cloud-based Windows experiences. Qualcomm also has forthcoming ARM-based chips for notebook computers.

These efforts are getting a boost from Amazon, which recently unveiled a small cube-shaped PC-like device that can stream Windows and applications from the cloud—like Netflix, but for software instead of entertainment. It’s a repurposed Fire TV Cube streaming device, costs $200, and is powered by an ARM-based chip from Amlogic.

Qualcomm also has forthcoming ARM-based chips for notebook computers, but these are intended not merely to connect these devices to the cloud. Rather, they’ll directly replace Intel’s processors, handling heavy workloads within the device itself. At the same time, they’re intended to go head-to-head with Apple’s best chips. Key to their adoption: Microsoft is putting a huge amount of effort into making Windows run on these processors, while encouraging developers of apps to do the same.

I asked Dan Rogers, vice president of silicon performance at Intel, if all of this is keeping him up at night. He declined to comment on Intel’s past, but he did say that since Pat Gelsinger, who had spent the first 30 years of his career at Intel, returned to the company as CEO in 2021, “I believe we are unleashed and focused, and our drive in the PC has in a way never been more intense.”

Intel plans a new generation of chips in what Rogers calls the “thin and light” category of notebooks, where Apple has been beating the pants off Intel-powered Windows devices.

In terms of advanced chip-manufacturing technology, Intel has promised to catch up with its primary competitor, Taiwan-based TSMC, by 2025.

The consumer-electronics business is full of reversals, and Intel is still a strong competitor, so none of this is predestined.

Geopolitical factors, for one, have the potential to change the entire chip industry virtually overnight. Intel could suddenly become the only game in town for the most advanced kind of chip manufacturing, if American tech companies lose access to TSMC’s factories on account of China’s aggression toward Taiwan, says Patrick Moorhead, a former executive at Intel competitor AMD, and now head of tech analyst firm Moor Insights & Strategy.

When it comes to Intel, he adds, “Never count these guys out.”

For more WSJ Technology analysis, reviews, advice and headlines, sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Write to Christopher Mims at christopher.mims@wsj.com

Is This the End of ‘Intel Inside’? - WSJ

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From: Sr K12/4/2023 3:05:10 PM
   of 186892
 
Intel Wins U.S. Appeal to Overturn $2.2 Billion VLSI Patent Verdict

The ruling vacates the roughly $2.2 billion awarded to VLSI by a jury in 2021
By
Will Feuer
Dec. 4, 2023 1:08 pm ET

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A U.S. appeals court vacated a patent-infringement verdict won by VLSI Technology. PHOTO: DADO RUVIC/REUTERS
A U.S. appeals court has sided with Intel, vacating a roughly $2.2 billion patent-infringement verdict won by VLSI Technology, which argues that some technology in Intel’s microprocessors infringe on VLSI’s patents.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit affirmed a jury’s verdict that Intel infringed on one of VLSI’s patents and reversed the verdict that Intel infringed on another of the company’s patents. The Federal Circuit sent the case back for further proceedings to determine how much Intel owes in damages.

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