If The Rate Of Change On The Outside Exceeds The Rate Of Change On The Inside, One Can See The End -- Expanded Version -- December 5, 2024

Locator: 44498INTEL.

Link to The Wall Street Journal. 

From the linked article:

Chips are the engines of modern life. They are the indispensable pieces of technology behind our phones, computers, televisions and cars—and cyber espionage and advanced weapons. In recent years, they have become the workhorses making artificial intelligence even smarter. And the pandemic-era chip shortage made it painfully apparent just how much we have come to rely on tiny, ridiculously intricate slabs of silicon.    

All of which could have been quite lucrative for Intel. But the company had fallen behind in the race to make the best-performing chips with billions of microscopic transistors, ceding the cutting edge to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, or TSMC, and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics. 

Gelsinger was hired with a clear mandate: Catch up. 

The strategy that he articulated to restore Intel’s swagger ran utterly counter to the direction the industry had taken over the previous several decades. In that time, the chip business had evolved and basically split in two. Most chip companies have come to specialize in either designing chips (like Nvidia) or making chips (like TSMC). Because those businesses are radically different, only a handful of large chip companies still do both—like Intel.