Apollo eyes $5 billion investment in Intel, Bloomberg News reports
- Thread starter Daniel Nenni
- Start date
I don't think the market reacts purely based on current financials. Rather, it reacts to prospects and future financials. 2025 is a very telling year for Intel: how do 18A products perform (compared to N3P, for example)? What is the yield of 18A? Does it ramp well? Can Intel start to gain back market share after a few competitive products (LNL, ARL, GNR)?
It is interesting to look at AMD's stock price history. AMD's stock price dropped to $1.61 in July 2015, but quickly rose up from there, reaching $5 in March 2016. Zen 1 had a preview event in June 2016 and was launched in March 2017.
What happened? I didn't research enough to say for sure. But in Sept 2015, Zen's team leader said, "This is the first time in a very long time that we engineers have been given the total freedom to build a processor from scratch and do the best we can do. It is a multi-year project with a really large team. It's like a marathon effort with some sprints in the middle. The team is working very hard, but they can see the finish line. I guarantee that it will deliver a huge improvement in performance and power consumption over the previous generation."
Technology and Product first, $$s will follow.
MKWVentures
Moderator
I am not sure how much will change by 2026. maybe good signals.... but I think we need to see revenue and Cost reduction before anything gets better.
MKWVentures
Moderator
You got it. those make short term look good, long term look worse. If Foundry takes off, Intel reduced costs a ton, its all good. If not, it all starts to look like a balloon payment.
IMO By 2027 Intel need to :
Reduce costs by 10B per year on todays business.
Regain market share in DC and add in GPU
Ramp foundry to $4+ billion per year (Makes them the #6 wafer foundry in the world)
fill fabs co-owned by JV partners to avoid clauses being triggered
Otherwise the spreadsheets for the company look shaky.... plug in your numbers and see what you get.
hist78
Well-known member
Don't forget the huge money Intel needs to spend in order to match the Chips Act grants. Intel awarded $11.5 billion plus some tax credit and low interest loans based on Intel's $100 billion capital expansion commitments. If Intel can't reach the milestones government set, the grant money will come late, partially, or not to come at all.
AMD Zen had been decided upon long before Lisa Su became CEO.
Jim Keller was there to help stitch the basic design together. But he was neither the chief designer nor was he in the team until the end of the project and tapeout.
Jim was a popular choice for the team as a design lead, he was one of the writers of the original x86-64 specification, was well liked. Lisa was not the CEO back then and had nothing to do with the decision to bring him back in from Apple.
Zen was a Hail Mary pass by AMD and thankfully it worked.
But many things were done to keep AMD afloat financially until the design was finished. One being the console deals with Sony and Microsoft using the already existing Jaguar core that had originally been designed for laptops. You also had the deal with the Chinese to make Hygon and other such deals. It was really difficult for AMD but thankfully they pulled it off.
Last but not least it required difficult negotiations with Intel to change AMD's x86 license to allow outsourcing chip manufacture to TSMC. The original license between both companies did not even allow AMD to manufacture any amount of x86 chips using external fabs.
Jim Keller was there to help stitch the basic design together. But he was neither the chief designer nor was he in the team until the end of the project and tapeout.
Jim was a popular choice for the team as a design lead, he was one of the writers of the original x86-64 specification, was well liked. Lisa was not the CEO back then and had nothing to do with the decision to bring him back in from Apple.
Zen was a Hail Mary pass by AMD and thankfully it worked.
But many things were done to keep AMD afloat financially until the design was finished. One being the console deals with Sony and Microsoft using the already existing Jaguar core that had originally been designed for laptops. You also had the deal with the Chinese to make Hygon and other such deals. It was really difficult for AMD but thankfully they pulled it off.
Last but not least it required difficult negotiations with Intel to change AMD's x86 license to allow outsourcing chip manufacture to TSMC. The original license between both companies did not even allow AMD to manufacture any amount of x86 chips using external fabs.
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