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A little more on Accenture. Accenture is a public company (stock symbol ACN), so its results are published. Their gross margin is about 33%, and their net margin is about 17%. They have 791,000 employees (!). I'd buy a ticket to a presentation that explains how Accenture is going to save...
A perspective from a former Intel marketing person who I knew and respected, and I agree with her position.
https://www.techarena.ai/content/intels-ai-marketing-move-sign-of-the-times-or-ceo-sideshow
LLMs are being used for thousands of non-critical tasks, sometimes nefarious tasks (fakes of all sorts), so for more informal cases (and I consider coding assistants and stuff like that to increase productivity informal) there is a huge demand for Nvidia's products based on what many millions of...
It depends on the company. Some BoDs are mostly for show to approve the agenda of someone who is probably the CEO and BoD chair. But that's not how the Intel BoD worked in my experience. There are many issues that come before the BoD. Numerous email threads flying around. Lots of...
Excuse me? Tan was a member of the Intel Board of Directors. That is "working there". Tan also had a similar history at Cadence, where he was only on the BoD before becoming CEO. I wouldn't let Rogoway write for our homeowners' association newsletter.
Nonetheless, I think outsourcing...
How could you possibly know that?
In their respective groups, yes. A vision for the company... the CEO owns it.
Agreed.
I don't agree. Anyone without a concise vision for what Intel should become shouldn't have taken the job, and shouldn't have been offered it.
Cutting headcount is not a...
I was simply trying to help people understand the finance and accounting of RSUs and options. I'm not an advocate of additional grants to remaining employees. I'm on the same page as @kevin01 in this thread. The employees I know want to hear a product leadership plan, and most of what they've...
Stock grants are non-cash compensation, so Intel does not spend money to grant them. The "cost" of RSUs is dilution of shareholder equity of the existing shares. This is one reason why companies which grant RSUs (or options) do share buybacks, to reduce dilution, which can ultimately lower...
I largely agree, but on most clients there are numerous background processes and threads running which are doing relatively intense functions at random times, and I think they're better served, and the foreground apps are better served, by multiple cores. For example, synchronizing shared photo...
I misread IDC's numbers. Senility must be getting worse. The 11 million units was a quarterly number. 2025 annual projection for desktop + laptop gaming is about 45 million units, but they'll still need to find OEMs willing to build and distribute PCs and laptops with these CPUs. I'm still a...
The only "high volume" application I can think of which is so dependent on single threaded performance is PC gaming. IDC says the unit volume in 2024 was about 11 million units. A lot of that market will be x86 dependent, at least for the foreseeable future. This doesn't look promising as a...
You're testing an old man's memory, but it was Sandy Bridge client CPU development, 2009 or so, when the graphics processor was integrated into the CPU die. Suddenly performance was acceptable to anyone but high-end gamers.
I think it was due to Gelsinger. I can't say for sure, because I...
18A status isn't my primary concern, it's the rest of the readiness factors that I wonder more about. The PDKs, IP availability, tools support, how efficient and easy to use is the MPW process, turn-around times, the customer IP trust policies... TSMC has been tuning these factors for a long...
Perhaps I'm being unrealistic, but I expected Intel Foundry to make faster progress than they appear to be making. Or perhaps there is more actual progress towards being a TSMC competitor than I'm seeing. I just don't have a good feeling about what I'm seeing and hearing. I hope I'm wrong...
I knew PSO pretty well. I had a few one-on-ones with him. I know he knew that there were different usage models for smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktop PCs. Paul was mostly about finances and markets, but he didn't think smartphones or tablets would replace PC laptops, and of course he...
Kevin, I seem to almost always agree with you, but not on these two points.
The Apple chip decision was not the Innovator's Dilemma at work, it's that the proposition made no financial sense for Intel. Like it or not, Intel is a high-cost producer with fabs in high-cost geos. If I were PSO I...
The iPhone decision was most about the necessary CAPEX for the fabs, magnified by Job's low unit price demand. Even in retrospect, fabricating A-series chips never looked like a winning plan for Intel. Intel had the wrong cost structure for anything but high-margin (to Intel) chips.
The lack...
I doubt your family business was a public company audited by an accounting firm like Ernst & Young. :) For public companies (those selling shares to the public), financial games like you describe would not be sanctioned by the auditor.
There is a difference between product-level gross...
