The Intel Execution in [2024]

Again, Intel "admits" this only for CPUs which are showing issues when doing regular workloads. Not ALL 13/14th series (or 65W+, or whatever).
No, that's narrow and simplstic perspective.

Rather from intel's pov, for this particular case, it's a reasonable aproach to take. It only "admits" to the damage that's observable somehow, because that's the only simple criteria that distinguishes between damaged processors and the fully functioning ones.

Namely, if there are failures, this implies processor is damaged. That does not mean ( at all ! ) that there are no other damaged processors as you stubbornly claim. ( Absence of evidence, does not mean proof of absence ! )

But, this approach only caches a subset of the damaged processors as very likely Intel does not want to deal with false positives at all. (and communication with customers needs to be very clear and simple)

If you were Intel, how would * you * deal with false positives?
 
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You got a bunch of conjecture from those who don't understand what "damage" means. Reality is - no one can answer that question for you, only time.
You got a bunch of explanations from people about how they are using language, versus you stubbornly sticking to your own definition without any references or explanations whatsoever. "I say damage is this so everyone better us it how I use it." And this ongoing debate is still stupidly stuck on that word because you can't let it go.
 
MOD: The word "damage" is such an impasse in this discussion, I hereby ban it for the purposes of discussing Intel 13/14th gen processors on the matter of chip failure (for the reasonable future to when this current episode comes to a close).

Alternatives you can use

Degradation
Wear and tear
Defect
Error
Fault
Failure

Feel free to use other alternatives with more exacting meaning to communicate which part of the manufacture > failure journey you are focussing on.

When quoting a source using the word 'damage', please quote verbatim but then add your interpretation as word or phrase on what their use of 'damage' means.

eg. "Manufacturing defects or errors in microcode lead to higher voltages and accelerated silicon degradation producing physical faults on the chip that can lead to failure."

...the D word doesn't feature at all and everyone can discuss which part of that is impacting the chip failures.
 
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I have no idea why they were paying a dividend anyway. If they'd chosen an honest CEO, instead of one willing to frantically run around in circles to turn things around while telling stockholders what they wanted to hear at the same time instead of the truth, Intel would at the very least have lower expectations to fulfill and more money with which to do so.

Ohwell, stockholders will stockholder. I.E. tends towards running a profitable company into the ground by choosing the belief that competition will never exist again for the company so might as well put a CEO in place that promises to crank profit margins as high as possible rather than one that knows how to deliver what the company actually sells.

Then when things start to fall apart they can't have been wrong, sunk cost fallacy says so, better get a CEO that will make everything better while still paying them tons of money at the same time. Or as a youtuber I watch put it recently "I'm doing boy math!"
 
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Long term crap shoot predictions aside that tweek might overselling (hohoho) the impact of the news on the price movement for today? The entire market and segment has been under downward pressure. Intel seems to be down 5.50% today and 7.48% over the last 5 days. But for context AMD is down 8.26% and 5.22% respectively. Nvidia 6.67% and 5.94%. NASDAQ Composite is down 2.30% and 0.8%. They are down another 5.52% after market, but AMD is down 0.97% and Nvidia 2.01%. That being said tomorrow might be more telling.

Cutting dividends though, and hopefully stock buybacks, is better news in terms of any long term recovery. In terms of employee cuts Intel does have a lot of sales staff given their volume and relations over the years that could likely be leaned out given their change in market situation. The other thing to note is that the speculation around Intel has for some time now been that a lot of the existing insitution is contributing to the problems at Intel and hindering any turn around, if that is the case you likely would need to do some signficant house cleaning before any real turnaround.
 

Extended Warranty Support

Intel is committed to making sure all customers who have or are currently experiencing instability symptoms on their 13th and/or 14th Gen desktop processors are supported in the exchange process. We stand behind our products, and in the coming days we will be sharing more details on two-year extended warranty support for our boxed Intel Core 13th and 14th Gen desktop processors.

In the meantime, if you are currently or previously experienced instability symptoms on your Intel Core 13th/14th Gen desktop system:

  • For users who purchased systems from OEM/System Integrators – please reach out to your system manufacturer’s support team for further assistance.
  • For users who purchased a boxed CPU – please reach out to ~Intel Customer Support~ for further assistance.
At the same time, we apologize for the delay in communications as this has been a challenging issue to unravel and definitively root cause.

Oxidation Issue

The Via Oxidation issue currently reported in the press is a minor one that was addressed with manufacturing improvements and screens in early 2023.

The issue was identified in late 2022, and with the manufacturing improvements and additional screens implemented Intel was able to confirm full removal of impacted processors in our supply chain by early 2024. However, on-shelf inventory may have persisted into early 2024 as a result.

Minor manufacturing issues are an inescapable fact with all silicon products. Intel continuously works with customers to troubleshoot and remediate product failure reports and provides public communications on product issues when the customer risk exceeds Intel quality control thresholds.


  • Lex H, Intel Community Manger & Tech Evangelist.
 
Long term crap shoot predictions aside that tweek might overselling (hohoho) the impact of the news on the price movement for today? The entire market and segment has been under downward pressure. Intel seems to be down 5.50% today and 7.48% over the last 5 days. But for context AMD is down 8.26% and 5.22% respectively. Nvidia 6.67% and 5.94%. NASDAQ Composite is down 2.30% and 0.8%. They are down another 5.52% after market, but AMD is down 0.97% and Nvidia 2.01%. That being said tomorrow might be more telling.

If one looks at the impact of the earnings, since it's after market close so the only thing we have is extended tradings (after hours), which was down nearly 19% yesterday.
Of course, after hours tradings have lower volume so it could exaggerate the effect, but it does not look good.
 
The issue was identified in late 2022, and with the manufacturing improvements and additional screens implemented Intel was able to confirm full removal of impacted processors in our supply chain by early 2024. However, on-shelf inventory may have persisted into early 2024 as a result.
Wouldn't they have known exactly what CPUs currently in the supply chain would have been affected by serial number? They pull ones that hadn't reached retailers yet, but those that were ready to be sold or already sold? Fuck it, let's see if we can get away with it?
 
Intel missed earnings, cutting 20K jobs, stock collapses.


Intel’s revenue declined 1% year over year in the fiscal second quarter, which ended on June 29, according to a statement. The company had a $1.61 billion net loss.


Not a great outlook for the coming quarter as well. Client is up but apparently they have yield issues with Meteor Lake so margins were bad. Altera significantly down, DCAI is down slightly, while all their competitors are up. AMD is for the first time higher than Intel in Datacenter + FPGA revenue. And if AMD's Datacenter growth continues, they will overtake DCAI next quarter. Nvidia is on another plane so there's no comparison.

If 18A fails to deliver, it might just be the death of Intel.
 
I'm not surprised margins for Meteor Lake would be bad regardless. I've previously talked about how expensive Intel's 'chiplet' approach is here. Yes, they get a bit of savings from older processes on a couple tiles, but it's gonna be outweighed by the overall larger amount of silicon needed, along with the more advanced packaging required to put it all together. And it's not like they're taking great advantage of the chiplet strategy to build scalable products with plenty of reuse of each die, either. It's just some fancy technology for technology's sake, without any great upside. I guess it could be argued it's just them getting their foot in the door for a new paradigm, but I still just dont understand the strategy of all having all these many different dies, when they're not gonna be able to reuse hardly any of them.

Lunar Lake is at least a bit more sensible here, being a far more dedicated sort of processor and limited in chiplets.

Also, what's happening with Intel 3? That was also supposed to be a big customer node. Have they built up some proper scale for it by now? Why didn't Intel utilize it for consumer parts themselves, since it would should have been a slam dunk way to improve their offerings rather than trying to jump straight to an immature 20A node?

Everything is just feeling like a rush job at Intel, and obviously it was gonna take some time for 'the plan' to start reaping any big rewards from it, but I was surely expecting them to at least start righting the ship by now. And seeing Arrow Lake's rumored performance, it's looking like it'll be a disaster, and another expensive one given its Meteor Lake-like chiplet strategy, but this time with even more expensive processes. I can only hope those rumors are very wrong. Lunar Lake seems like their only real hope right now on the consumer side of things.
 
I'm not surprised margins for Meteor Lake would be bad regardless. I've previously talked about how expensive Intel's 'chiplet' approach is here. Yes, they get a bit of savings from older processes on a couple tiles, but it's gonna be outweighed by the overall larger amount of silicon needed, along with the more advanced packaging required to put it all together. And it's not like they're taking great advantage of the chiplet strategy to build scalable products with plenty of reuse of each die, either. It's just some fancy technology for technology's sake, without any great upside. I guess it could be argued it's just them getting their foot in the door for a new paradigm, but I still just dont understand the strategy of all having all these many different dies, when they're not gonna be able to reuse hardly any of them.

Lunar Lake is at least a bit more sensible here, being a far more dedicated sort of processor and limited in chiplets.

Also, what's happening with Intel 3? That was also supposed to be a big customer node. Have they built up some proper scale for it by now? Why didn't Intel utilize it for consumer parts themselves, since it would should have been a slam dunk way to improve their offerings rather than trying to jump straight to an immature 20A node?

Everything is just feeling like a rush job at Intel, and obviously it was gonna take some time for 'the plan' to start reaping any big rewards from it, but I was surely expecting them to at least start righting the ship by now. And seeing Arrow Lake's rumored performance, it's looking like it'll be a disaster, and another expensive one given its Meteor Lake-like chiplet strategy, but this time with even more expensive processes. I can only hope those rumors are very wrong. Lunar Lake seems like their only real hope right now on the consumer side of things.
Yep I think the Meteor Lake chiplet approach dosen't make sense, whatever savings they get from slightly older nodes is probably offset by the additional cost of packaging, not to mention additional manufacturing time. And there is a slight power penalty for chip to chip communication as well. Ponte Vecchio also seemed like it was overly complicated and likely lost a lot of money. The other bit Intel mentioned is they ramped production for Meteor Lake in Ireland which has a higher cost base for them.

Lunar Lake is definitely more sensible, albeit all TSMC so lost revenue for Intel foundry (though probably better for them given the huge negative margin they're operating on). Panther Lake is seemingly similar to Lunar Lake, both it and the next gen server product, Clearwater Forest have taped out on 18A and will ramp next year. Until AMD moves to 3nm with Zen 6 in 2026 (Turin Dense is 3nm I know but it's relatively small volume) it would likely give Intel the process lead for the first time since 2019 and they need to capitalize on it.

Intel 3 is basically on par with TSMC 5nm I think. At least performance wise, it's still down on density. They're using Intel 3 for server basically, which need more mature nodes and are ramping production of server products. For client they decided to move to 20A as I think Intel 3 wouldn't have been competitive with TSMC 3nm.

It seems like they've just been resting on their laurels for too long and the competition has not only caught up but surpassed them on all fronts. There is not a single segment where Intel is the performance leader right now. They've only managed to sell as much as they have in the last few years because of their entrenchment in the corporate laptop & data center for decades and their manufacturing capacity. But TSMC now is so large that they can offer AMD more than enough capacity to take market share from Intel, which has been happening. AMD surpassed 25% Datacenter CPU market share recently and I forsee them taking ~40% by 2025. Intel is 3-4 years behind on AI GPUs and with the Falcon Shores debacle, dosen't seem like they're ever going to catch up. AMD was focusing more on higher margin server but now they're attacking client more as well.

It's a hard road ahead for Intel, not even taking into account the issues with the Raptor Lake CPUs which will likely cost them a fair bit of money and some reputation loss as well.
 
Not a great outlook for the coming quarter as well. Client is up but apparently they have yield issues with Meteor Lake so margins were bad. Altera significantly down, DCAI is down slightly, while all their competitors are up. AMD is for the first time higher than Intel in Datacenter + FPGA revenue. And if AMD's Datacenter growth continues, they will overtake DCAI next quarter. Nvidia is on another plane so there's no comparison.

If 18A fails to deliver, it might just be the death of Intel.
What do you mean? They still have ARC and battlemage is coming!

digisan runs away quickly!
 
Yikes. Major news outlets like www.tomshardware.com are picking this story up and it's not a good look.
One anecdote does not make a long term trend, but I wonder if this is what Steve from GN was talking about when he said Intel's being extremely slimy.
If this is their customer support team's marching orders, they're going to turn people off from their products for a decade or more.


I don't understand how a modern Intel CPU could be "remarked" as CPUID should tell you which model it is.
 
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