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Comment by DiabloD3 | Hacker News Reader

Intel isn't important though.

Intel is incredibly important for American sovereignty and that's why they are semi-nationalized. They are a Boeing now.

A country must feed itself, power itself, and in 2026 it must be able to manufacture its own chips (from ore, to refining, to the foundry).

There isn't a single country in the world that can make advanced chips on its own. It takes machines, raw materials an chemicals from over a dozen different countries.

You're absolutely right! And that is why the last couple of years has been fascinating to watch from a geopolitical and trade standpoint.

Watching China push its weight around earlier in the year with REM and REE was crazy. The US, and the rest of the world for that matter, were brought to our knees. Germany's auto industry and weeks of chips left, the US started shipping F35's to allies _without_ radar. Truly astounding trade power to see.

Made it very clear to every nation that you must have a sovereign story to tell about chip manufacturing.

> F35's to allies _without_ radar.

Alarm bell here: are you sure it's legal for the F35s to contain Chinese parts?

It was lack of certain REM that meant we couldn't manufacture the necessary elements of some parts of the F35's radar stack.

Everyone always forgets ASML which suits the Netherlands just fine.

But there will come a day when that country needs to choose between China and the US.

ASML: Am I joking to you?

> A country must feed itself, power itself, and in 2026 it must be able to manufacture its own chips (from ore, to refining, to the foundry)

This is only possible if you (a) fudge the definitions of "everything" a bit and (b) are one of the largest countries in the world. This is only ever going to be possible for US and China. And even then the US really is the "lucky country" with which natural resources it has ended up holding within its borders.

Any company with advanced fabs is important now. We've got shortages of CPUs, GPUs, RAM, etc. Many of these shortages will persist till 2030.

While Intel had bad sales of CPUs for personal computers, due to the memory crysis, they have sold every server CPU they could make, despite the fact that their server CPUs are much inferior in comparison with the AMD server CPUs.

The reason is that AMD could not make enough server CPUs to satisfy the demand for datacenters, due to limited production capacity at TSMC, so Intel, who makes server CPUs in their own fabs, could also sell everything they got.

So as you say, even the older fabs of Intel, which use the somewhat obsolete "Intel 3" CMOS manufacturing process, with which the old Intel Granite Rapids server CPUs are made, have been an important asset in these circumstances.

A fraction of the entire world's servers are running Xeon and it is definitely important.

And keep in mind that Intel literally still holds the rights to issue x86 licenses.

id argue leading edge fab and packaging capacity is importantish

It's always crazy running into people that are somehow unaware that Wintel has achieved worldwide domination of IT infrastructure (by number of users). This site is like a sealed terrarium of people using macOS on Apple ARM hardware blissfully unaware of the infinite black pit outside the glass.

And yet Intel is the one taking a dump here, because it has no moat. People use Wintel because people use Wintel, the same way people bought Gros Michel bananas because people bought Gros Michel bananas. When they went away, people bought something else.

Stock is still up 53% YTD. Even if they are experiencing headwinds they won’t be allowed to fail. You’re inside the terrarium.

It only runs, what, 90% of PCs, laptops, and servers in the world?

Maybe a decade ago, but they have lost market share every year since and currently sits around 60% and it still decreasing.

Still, a lot of that lost share went to AMD and that is ultimately a safe thing for Intel compared to losing share to alternative CPU platforms. More than just safe, mutually beneficial for both companies.

Sure, losing Apple was a huge deal, but ultimately Apple still only has ~20% of the consumer PC market and far less in enterprise, and even less than that in more niche applications since their form factors are so limited, and 0% marketshare in data centers.

I’m not sure how hard Intel is trying to get into the enterprise AI data center scene but Intel ARC cards are definitely floating around in the local LLM scene for their stellar value and I’d be surprised if Intel doesn’t see a massive opportunity to take advantage in that area. They are one of three companies who have reasonably modern GPU designs.

Intel losing market share to AMD or anybody else is not beneficial for them.

When Intel loses marketshare to AMD it’s infinitely better than losing it to Qualcomm or some other platform.

Only Intel and AMD make x86 chips.

If Intel loses marketshare to AMD that means they can eventually take it back.

It's still not beneficial to them to lose market share.

Which wasn’t what I was saying.

>More than just safe, mutually beneficial for both companies.

If you pick out one sentence and strip out the rest of the context then all you’re doing is removing meaning from what I was actually saying.

The competitive pressure of AMD versus Intel is mutually beneficial, as long as they don’t totally crush each other into bankruptcy, their small leapfrogs of each other’s x86 technology keeps x86 relevant and dominant.

PCs are like 5% of computing devices. Very important for business offices but not outside of that niche. And mass amounts of servers can be adapted to whatever is cheapest. Google wouldn't insist on AMD64 - they'd port to ARM if ARM was cheaper. And if you do want AMD64, AMD currently makes better AMD64 chips.

> Very important for business offices but not outside of that niche.

you miss at least several other niches

Yep, like technicians. Especially technicians that work on, well, everything. Every industrial machine, robot, PLC, industrial vehicle, mining equipment, power plant, etc etc.

Nah they've been "out of fashion" for 5+ years, and in that time AMD took their datacenter crown, which was also encroached on by various ARM hyperscaler systems.

The entire consumer laptop market is about four data centers

Which one would the world miss more if disappeared overnight?

Banks don't run on laptops, so probably that one

Depends which four data centers. AWS North Virginia would be missed more than all the world's laptops.

All laptops vs 4 (presumably most impactful) data centers?

I would expect that "all laptops dematerialize" would be worse.

Not by me; I couldn’t tell AWS NV was even missing without my laptop.

You'd open your phone and nothing would work, not even the connection to the cellular network since your phone company has management components running on AWS.

You might have that problem, but us-east-1 going dark is unlikely to impact my Australian carrier enough to knock cellular service out. But granted, I might notice something is up if I tried to use my phone for much. If us-east-1 vanished at the right time of day I might notice on my phone first, sure.

> You'd open your phone and nothing would work, not even the connection to the cellular network since your phone company has management components running on AWS.

I'm pretty confident, sitting here on a different continent, that I wouldn't have that problem at all.

I think parent is trying to say that the number of services that rely themselves on AWS or some of their internal services is enormous and potentially impacts many.

The average millennial and younger don't use a non work computer, and haven't had one for 10 years.

Not sure I would put the age cap at millennials, they very much had PCs and laptops at home, uni etc and lived before smartphones were a thing.

Key word there is had, while the comment you're replying to is speaking as to today minus ten years roughly.

And yeah, as a millennial I know lots of people who had a shared desktop at home, probably had a laptop in college, used a work laptop, and hasn't had a personal computing device outside an iPad and iPhone for a decade or more. Outside of those who play PC games or other niche hobbies it's getting more and more rare, at least for the people I know.

This is often said, but incorrect. 81% of households have a desktop/laptop. [1] And the breakdown is basically a proxy for wealth. Only 56% of households with earnings of less $25,000 have a desktop/laptop whereas it's 96% for $150k+. For millennials (approximately - age range 35-44) the rate is 87%.

[1] - https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/computer...

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