Huh, I'm used to "stock collapses" headlines being a 2% daily fluctuation. Actually down 50% over the past month. But then again, up 50% over the past year. Sure is great when stocks of companies that are foundationally important to the world economy are being traded like meme stocks.
My interpretation is that the stock market is just reflecting the rising value of power/influence assets relative to currency, which is to say, the falling value of currency relative to power/influence (which stocks are). Stocks aren't going up because the companies are that much better, they're going up because the macroeconomy is that much more fucked.
Power is being able to get people to do things you want them to do. It's become clear that you can do that a lot better with stocks than within currency, although you can also do it with a huge amount of currency.
Isn't that the place where if I win loads of money, they give me lots of free stuff and invite me back? The same place where if I lose loads of money, they give me lots of free stuff and invite me back?
Yup we live inside an ever growing noise factory thanks to modern news/social media attention harvesting dynamics. All sides are using it on autopilot.
The systems are optimized for pumping more and more bits out. Not to measure/reduce noise and increase signal.
Individually its easier to tune it out.
Intel was at 15 bucks for multiple years post its peaks.
The people doing most of the buying of most stocks are able to understand what is 'tik tok' and what is real.
The bulk of the buying is done by people who use modelling to derive the valuation, not vibes.
Because Intel is a household names, it's subject to vibes, but it's mostly math.
Underlying swings is usually some kind of new data point that, because there is so much growth involved, implies greater swings in valuation. So the impact of the news is amplified.
Anyone remember when a college student invested $700,000 of his grandmother's inheritance into Intel back in August 2024? He was a huge meme at the time; I bet he was singing a different tune a few weeks back!
I don't remember that at all so I have no idea what kinds of memes this spurred, but I can look at the price history:
It was ~$22 back in August of '24. It is ~$66 today in November of '26. That's ~3x in a little over two years; that's fairly excellent.
If he had a magic looking glass and sold at the recent-ish July peak of ~$120, then that'd have been even better. But it's still a very good (potential) return if he still holds it today.
Im still bullish on them at this price though. The terafab (already under construction) collab with Elon and 14A being the most powerful chip when they get it right has a lot of potential.
I'm still salty at them for fumbling Optane, Gaudi, Altera and the Xeon Phi. the company seems like it's full of talented engineers working under terrible leadership.
No. I worked on p1274 and p1276. They didnt take years to hit profitability because of leadership. There was a decade of brain drain and we just could not overcome the technical challenges. But that is heresy to ears of techies. The fact that something is just too hard for the talent at hand is just never offered up. Intel engineers, to put to bluntly: suck. (Me included. I was a senior principal.) There just isn’t enough talent there because they don’t pay enough. I took voluntary retirement and went to work for a smaller instrument maker. I’m way happier.
Maybe this is a layperson’s misunderstanding but after seeing Panther Lake hit the consumer scene I have a hard time believing Intel has a talent problem.
I’d even say what Intel is doing with Arc graphics is incredibly impressive. Coming out of nowhere to legitimately compete with a decent set of AMD/Nvidia consumer and workstation graphics cards is no small feat.
I hear you about the heresy, but are you sure you aren't being too hard on yourself? mismanagement can turn brilliant, passionate people into aimless zombies through demotivation and throwing you at problems that don't fit you.
also, my old boss thought Larabee was cool as hell when he got to play with it at MSR.
> I took voluntary retirement and went to work for a smaller instrument maker. I’m way happier.
I was not so lucky. I would have loved the voluntary separation package. They did get around to doing straight large layoffs one year. My manager got laid off, I was not so lucky. I wanted the layoff package. I told him I'd happily trade places with him. He tried, but was denied. I ended up leaving anyway. Now, like you, working for a small company and much much happier.
me and a quarter of my company are looking up the barrel of a voluntary separation package. but I just moved to a team full of brilliant people working on a project that's a zen garden of algorithm design, so I won't go gently into that dark night.
The list of shit that Intel was within the ballpark of the right tech or 5 years mistimed from having a huge hit is ridiculous. Fuckers don't have good management, but also must have terrible luck to keep _just_ missing the mark?
Intel bring the knowledge but doesn't operate and it's not the only partners in talk. They are not tied into the production at any step beyond the blueprints.
Knowing them they'll have all this stuff online just as the AI bubble pops. Basically the same thing they did when they belatedly tried to get into mobile chips
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
Stocks are valued as the sum total of all the profits they ever make (net present value of future earnings).
So even at $1 profit/year - technically worth infinity.
But due to 'time value of money and risk' (aka some risk free discount rate you can put your money elsewhere at get the same return for zero risk, like your bank account), then the infinite sum of those $1/year becomes some finite sum.
The problem wit this math is when profits grow perpetually higher than the cost of borrowing - the net present value goes to infinity.
A P/E ratio = 1/(cost of capital - growth rate). Assuming no dividends.
An investor with 8% cost of capital, a company growing at 3% per year woudl have a P/E of 20.
At 7% growth the value is p/e 100x ...
Any growth over the 'cost of capital' and the P/E goes to infinity because the infinite sum of all future cash flows does not converge.
What this means is that the valuation math breaks down when there are gigantic swings of in growth at rates of even like 30% more for any extended period; it's extremely hard to value.
Verizon is valued as it is because they have an operational lock on a system; they will never grow that much but their returns are predictable. You can spreadsheet their valuation.
All this AI stuff is 'inherently wild' because growth is high, but opaque. Yes, there is a lot of hyperbole and speculation but this is very different than Space X which is a 'Musk Meme' stock, upheld be retail investors.
Edit: this is the most rudimentary articulation of how stocks are valued. It's not made up hunches, and companies that invest a lot in these things have a lot of numeric justification they have to use to make the assessment - and NPV is at the core of it. That 'math' is the first order concept that underlies valuation and it's the hyperbolic nature of growth beyond cost of capital that makes the it come undone which is the mechanical basis for the wild swings. It's what happens to valuation when you make small adjustments in only a few parts of the model.
There will be a company using Intel's fabs to make chips 5, 10 or 20 years from now. Because it is in the national interest of US to make sure that happens.
It is not in the national interest to make sure that the Intel common stock remains valued above 0. Plenty of companies that are of national interest were saved directly from bankruptcy, by nationalizing them in a way that wipes out the common stock.
The lack of self awareness of HN posters thinking that these 'dumb finance people' can't understand how 'chips are made'.
Good gosh. Goldman probably has 50-100 people, inc. maybe 20 Engineers just on that alone, full time.
And yes, Intel can fail 100%. They can absolutely go into receivership and/or be broken up and bought for pennies by other entities.
It would be a strategic dismantling, obviously the government won't allow certain things to happen, but they could 100% allow investors to be wiped out.
Boeing is a bit different as there are no substitutes, but it could go into receivership. Some parts of Boeing will 'always exist' but the corporate entity can fail.
Failure here is getting restructured and people losing money in the stock market, which I guess is so detached from the actual companies and reality that it might as well be a polymarket bet (I mean overall stock market and not intel specifically).
"Failure" here can be something like the stock going to near 0 and then the govt hands Intel fabs to some other rich company that it likes, for example SpaceX at a criminally low rate
A lot of retail investors lose the shirts off their backs holding Intel stock well before Intel every approaches anything close to "failure". Intel stock could drop 90% and the machines will still be running, because stock valuations which aren't tied to fundamentals on the way up are also not tied to fundamentals on the way down.
In the worst case when the free market deems Intel worthless, the government will nationalize Intel at a cheap nominal price. Shareholders are wiped out anyways.
Of course Intel can fail. If revenue is down, they have to reduce investment in future nodes, making them even more uncompetitive in the future, reducing revenue even more, etc.
That's just one small event along the way, one that occurred many years after Intel started slipping enough for long enough that an iPhone was more powerful than an Intel laptop and after Intel's fabs failed to produce a useful new generation many generations in a row and after Intel acquired many companies just to spin down their products and after...
Sure, the Core 2 series ultimately, after a long gap, put them back on the rails at least, but Intel missed big iron and panicked.
Everything else since has been about desperately squeezing x86 into every niche, even when it probably shouldn’t be. That the Core 2 series gained an Apple-shaped halo is lucky for them, but the reality is that they have been on the back foot at some level since the failure of IA-64.
They needed to get themselves out of the hole by using AMD’s architecture, and they have been a polar bear on a large but shrinking iceberg ever since.
The problem is doubling down on a single technology. They dropped the ball on GPU and storage, imagine that. It probably makes sense from the bean counter but they are not exploring new areas and diversifying. Now that people dont particularly care for x86, they are screwed. Good riddance.
The weird bit is they picked up the ball for graphics again and ran with it for a while, but fell down and broke their leg and sold the team to nvidia now. Right when their product line is probably placed the best - medium end good, priced GPUs for gaming, they are done with that segment.
I notice modern intel chips are still named after Skylake. It's as if that's when they decided to stop innovating.
They used to use completely new names for new designs and then variants of that name for variants of that design. As in Sandy Bridge and then Ivy Bridge. Haswell, then Broadwell. Skylake, then Kaby Lake. Then Coffee Lake. Then Cannon Lake. 10 years later now they're still doing Lakes. It might not have much relation to the technical design but it gives the impression they gave up on new things.
Sometimes naming is just naming. No further depth or symbolism.
Skylake is when things started to go south, outwardly facing. But it was even long before that. The rot happened in the foundry side and it grew for a very long time, silently, because of how little competition existed.
The big question I have, why isn't Nvidia's stock falling quickly ? Nvidia's GPUs are the most in demand chip for AI. Seems Nvidia stock is also falling, but not as much. I would think it would fall almost as quickly as Intel.
Pre-AI-boom, Intel was a failing chipmaker. The situation was bad in all respects. Processor design fell behind AMD. Fabs fell behind TSMC/Samsung/etc. Culture was broken. Massive braindrain.
Stock was down three-fold between its peak around 2019 and its bottom in 2024/2025. Indeed, it was down three-fold in 2024/2025 from its 2000 dot-com peak.
Basically, imploding company, on its way for collapse.
With AI boom, there was more demand for ICs than production capacity. It almost didn't matter how bad your chips were -- someone would buy them, and at a healthy markup. This placed Intel in a very strong position to recover.
That recovered some value -- going above their previous high, but much less than 25 years of S&P500 growth. However, it's worth remembering the peak of $120 was less than double it's dot-com peak 25 years prior.
If AI boom doesn't materialize, Intel may, again, be on a path to death.
If it does materialize, but like the dot-com boom with a few winners and many losers, Intel will likely be one of the losers.
Ergo, falling value.
NVidia, in contrast, looks a lot more like the Amazon of the dot-com bust.
From what I read, Intel's recent chip production strategy was a miss, in that they focused on chips for laptops and not for the chips for AI data centers.
More specifically, they focused on making laptop chips like Panther Lake (Intel's latest and greatest) and they meant to make a lot of their money here, and the data center chips weren't focused on as much (I think these would be something like the Xeon 6, but not sure, but I read that they also could have boosted production of older data center chips). But, as it turns out, laptop sales are down because of the demand for DRAM is sky high from the AI data center build out, and not as many people are willing to buy a super expensive laptop. If they had forecasted more correctly, they would have focused more on making data center chips.
Also, their forward guidance for 2027 is lower than expected too, because it will take awhile to shift their production towards building more data center chips, which they are in the middle of doing.
But, you may want to check other sources because have only been somewhat loosely following what's happening with Intel.
Apple Silicon launched in Mac, the first couple iterations worked/sold great. By the launch of M3 market realized it wasn't a fluke and that x86 was dead but still fundamental due to deployment at the time
Flash forward a couple more years to now it's all about efficient model training which sucks on generic CPUs so everyone is buying and designing other chips
Two big consumer pivots over 4-5 years and boom ...they're IBM and handed lifelines to shore up chip manufacturing in the US for strategic reasons but Intel essentially manufactures rotary phones right now. Maybe the fab biz will get modern designs right. We'll see
Modern Intel chips have no issues trading blows with Apple Silicon.
Their fabs are the weakest part of their business (I wonder why once AMD spun off GlobalFoundries so they could focus on the core product, they suddenly started doing well) Once they started making chips on TSMC's processes, wow, all of a sudden, theyre in the same league as Apple Silicon.
Actually, Intel's fab's are becoming their crown jewel. The whole "5 nodes in 4 years," where they tried to catch up with TSMC pretty much worked, which is why the stock originally rocketed up by 5x a few months ago. They aren't far behind TSMC now.
But, they still don't have many external customers for the fabs. Intels fab revenu is something like a tenth of TSMC's. Although, it'll probably grow year by year if they continue to match the capabilities of TSMC's chip processes.
There was talk about a few things I can only see driving the drops:
1. Datacenter projects run by mining companies and now their loans may be frozen so construction may not finish
2. Prices of everything are putting crunches on Enterprise - I've seen it in a few places I talk to - they aren't buying laptops and servers in 2027 if they dont have to
3. Consumers aren't buying hardware because they cant afford the hardware and may not have free cash anyway
I understand nothing but I want to join the conversation.
It seems to me that nvidia bubble is still to burst.
There is a trust me bro circle where Nvidia somehow sold GPU to itself so it can host someone else's models.
Maybe three years ago or a little more they announced they plan to move away from consumer end and focus on cloud. Back then it did not make much sense because everybody though "how the f Nvidia will manage clouds like AWS?" And their business model seems to me that it is a shared risk model where Nvidia don't "own" the cloud but pay for its GPU to have that market share.
I think it would make much sense if the thin layer those, how did the greedy musk said, neocloud/cloudfronts or whatever, were not so brittle due to the lack of market demand.
I have the impression they had a gold strategy for them but for some reason they rushed it too much and now they broke the market before they could profit from it.
I can imagine that if they didn't hoard their own resources to create scarcity artificiality, they would possibly have a stronger position in the market.
I can only think they did this because (A) they know the current government will bail them out and (B) someone was worried that China could hoard those GPUs first.
But as I said, I don't understand much of the topic, but it seems to me they are try to get as much money as soon as possible and that looks scam-ish to me. They all put investment rounds too close to each other, started creating concerning stories and "rogue" AIs at the same time. Maybe I'm being too paranoid, but so far those guys have been pulling some hat tricks and I think I know who will pay the bill
Edit:
Also I think the big ones artificially produced better numbers by doing massive layoff rounds. Depending on how those happen, it produces almost an immediate loss that can be smoothed, and then a peak on profit, and then we will see if their numbers keep up 2 or 3 quarter after that.
Maybe I have trust issues, but man, this does smell weird.
Intel GPUs are pretty worthless right now for inference, let alone training. Which isn't to say that there aren't people getting value out of them, but from a dollars/wattage/sanity to performance, there's no point to buying anything but Nvidia for most people and businesses. I don't want this to be the case, but that's just how it is currently.
> Intel GPUs are pretty worthless right now for inference, let alone training.
Why? Is it hardware limitations or deficient software stack?
In any case, as nvidia is ignoring the gaming market, AMD and Intel both have a vacuum to fill, but I don't see them doing it.
Intel, especially, should have rushed out gaming cards as soon as nvidia shortages were predictable (2023, at least).
The problem I have is not that an old GPU can't be used for gaming (it can), it's that I am forced to upgrade from a perfectly working 660ti that once played far cry 3, 4 and 5 (and every other game I threw at it) because my kernel doesn't have support anymore (older drivers don't work on a newer kernel).
A new GPU with the power of a decade-old GPU but all the latest software support would be great. Right now, if I want to see certain web-pages (WebGL), I have to buy a new GPU, but there isn't any low-priced GPUs anymore.
Nvidia is still the only game in town for training at scale, and the fastest for inference (plus, at scale, the cheapest for inference, as hard as that sounds to believe)
NVidia had $96B in revenue and $60B of profit in Q2 2026, both of which doubled or more from Q2 2025.
Intel in Q3 2026 had $16.5B in revenue and $3.3B of profit, and $13.7B and $4.4B in Q3 2025.
NVidia is doing much better than Intel, people are selling bonds and junk bonds to buy billions of dollars of NVidia cards that NVidia is making 75% gross margins on. They’re making the kind of profits that would make a drug dealer blush.
I used Q3 earnings for Intel because Nvidia hasn’t reported their Q3 earnings yet and Intel’s Q2 earnings showed losses in both 2026 and 2025.
That's kinda the point; something as important as this shouldn't be a casino.
Casinos are awesome! So welcoming. :) (/s)
The systems are optimized for pumping more and more bits out. Not to measure/reduce noise and increase signal.
Individually its easier to tune it out.
Intel was at 15 bucks for multiple years post its peaks.
The bulk of the buying is done by people who use modelling to derive the valuation, not vibes.
Because Intel is a household names, it's subject to vibes, but it's mostly math.
Underlying swings is usually some kind of new data point that, because there is so much growth involved, implies greater swings in valuation. So the impact of the news is amplified.
It was ~$22 back in August of '24. It is ~$66 today in November of '26. That's ~3x in a little over two years; that's fairly excellent.
If he had a magic looking glass and sold at the recent-ish July peak of ~$120, then that'd have been even better. But it's still a very good (potential) return if he still holds it today.
I’d even say what Intel is doing with Arc graphics is incredibly impressive. Coming out of nowhere to legitimately compete with a decent set of AMD/Nvidia consumer and workstation graphics cards is no small feat.
also, my old boss thought Larabee was cool as hell when he got to play with it at MSR.
> Intel engineers, to put to bluntly: suck.
It hurts, but it is true.
> I took voluntary retirement and went to work for a smaller instrument maker. I’m way happier.
I was not so lucky. I would have loved the voluntary separation package. They did get around to doing straight large layoffs one year. My manager got laid off, I was not so lucky. I wanted the layoff package. I told him I'd happily trade places with him. He tried, but was denied. I ended up leaving anyway. Now, like you, working for a small company and much much happier.
Intel engineers absolutely do not suck.
Oh, it wasn't leadership?
> There just isn’t enough talent there because they don’t pay enough.
Ah, so it was leadership.
Intel ARC is not only impressive just for the mere feat of “almost catching up” this quickly, but Intel absolutely can be an AI GPU supplier of note.
I don’t claim to fully understand the business especially on the enterprise side but I don’t think it’s the sort of company to count out.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I'm pretty confident, sitting here on a different continent, that I wouldn't have that problem at all.
I would expect that "all laptops dematerialize" would be worse.
you miss at least several other niches
And keep in mind that Intel literally still holds the rights to issue x86 licenses.
Stocks are valued as the sum total of all the profits they ever make (net present value of future earnings).
So even at $1 profit/year - technically worth infinity.
But due to 'time value of money and risk' (aka some risk free discount rate you can put your money elsewhere at get the same return for zero risk, like your bank account), then the infinite sum of those $1/year becomes some finite sum.
The problem wit this math is when profits grow perpetually higher than the cost of borrowing - the net present value goes to infinity.
A P/E ratio = 1/(cost of capital - growth rate). Assuming no dividends.
An investor with 8% cost of capital, a company growing at 3% per year woudl have a P/E of 20.
At 7% growth the value is p/e 100x ...
Any growth over the 'cost of capital' and the P/E goes to infinity because the infinite sum of all future cash flows does not converge.
What this means is that the valuation math breaks down when there are gigantic swings of in growth at rates of even like 30% more for any extended period; it's extremely hard to value.
Verizon is valued as it is because they have an operational lock on a system; they will never grow that much but their returns are predictable. You can spreadsheet their valuation.
All this AI stuff is 'inherently wild' because growth is high, but opaque. Yes, there is a lot of hyperbole and speculation but this is very different than Space X which is a 'Musk Meme' stock, upheld be retail investors.
Edit: this is the most rudimentary articulation of how stocks are valued. It's not made up hunches, and companies that invest a lot in these things have a lot of numeric justification they have to use to make the assessment - and NPV is at the core of it. That 'math' is the first order concept that underlies valuation and it's the hyperbolic nature of growth beyond cost of capital that makes the it come undone which is the mechanical basis for the wild swings. It's what happens to valuation when you make small adjustments in only a few parts of the model.
Advanced chip manufacturing is so incredibly hard. The finance bozos are clueless, again.
It is not in the national interest to make sure that the Intel common stock remains valued above 0. Plenty of companies that are of national interest were saved directly from bankruptcy, by nationalizing them in a way that wipes out the common stock.
Depending on how this was done and for what quid pro quo, this could wind up being a liability for Intel. (It also trashes its image abroad.)
Good gosh. Goldman probably has 50-100 people, inc. maybe 20 Engineers just on that alone, full time.
And yes, Intel can fail 100%. They can absolutely go into receivership and/or be broken up and bought for pennies by other entities.
It would be a strategic dismantling, obviously the government won't allow certain things to happen, but they could 100% allow investors to be wiped out.
Boeing is a bit different as there are no substitutes, but it could go into receivership. Some parts of Boeing will 'always exist' but the corporate entity can fail.
Failure here is getting restructured and people losing money in the stock market, which I guess is so detached from the actual companies and reality that it might as well be a polymarket bet (I mean overall stock market and not intel specifically).
Sure, the Core 2 series ultimately, after a long gap, put them back on the rails at least, but Intel missed big iron and panicked.
Everything else since has been about desperately squeezing x86 into every niche, even when it probably shouldn’t be. That the Core 2 series gained an Apple-shaped halo is lucky for them, but the reality is that they have been on the back foot at some level since the failure of IA-64.
They needed to get themselves out of the hole by using AMD’s architecture, and they have been a polar bear on a large but shrinking iceberg ever since.
They used to use completely new names for new designs and then variants of that name for variants of that design. As in Sandy Bridge and then Ivy Bridge. Haswell, then Broadwell. Skylake, then Kaby Lake. Then Coffee Lake. Then Cannon Lake. 10 years later now they're still doing Lakes. It might not have much relation to the technical design but it gives the impression they gave up on new things.
Sometimes naming is just naming. No further depth or symbolism.
Skylake is when things started to go south, outwardly facing. But it was even long before that. The rot happened in the foundry side and it grew for a very long time, silently, because of how little competition existed.
Everything thereafter was pain.
Billions of $ in GPUs are flooding the market and hopefully DRAM will soon become cheap again and we can get on with our lives.
I wonder if something else is happening to Intel
Nvidia Stock:
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NVDA/
Intel Stock:
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/INTC/
Stock was down three-fold between its peak around 2019 and its bottom in 2024/2025. Indeed, it was down three-fold in 2024/2025 from its 2000 dot-com peak.
Basically, imploding company, on its way for collapse.
With AI boom, there was more demand for ICs than production capacity. It almost didn't matter how bad your chips were -- someone would buy them, and at a healthy markup. This placed Intel in a very strong position to recover.
That recovered some value -- going above their previous high, but much less than 25 years of S&P500 growth. However, it's worth remembering the peak of $120 was less than double it's dot-com peak 25 years prior.
If AI boom doesn't materialize, Intel may, again, be on a path to death.
If it does materialize, but like the dot-com boom with a few winners and many losers, Intel will likely be one of the losers.
Ergo, falling value.
NVidia, in contrast, looks a lot more like the Amazon of the dot-com bust.
More specifically, they focused on making laptop chips like Panther Lake (Intel's latest and greatest) and they meant to make a lot of their money here, and the data center chips weren't focused on as much (I think these would be something like the Xeon 6, but not sure, but I read that they also could have boosted production of older data center chips). But, as it turns out, laptop sales are down because of the demand for DRAM is sky high from the AI data center build out, and not as many people are willing to buy a super expensive laptop. If they had forecasted more correctly, they would have focused more on making data center chips.
Also, their forward guidance for 2027 is lower than expected too, because it will take awhile to shift their production towards building more data center chips, which they are in the middle of doing.
But, you may want to check other sources because have only been somewhat loosely following what's happening with Intel.
Flash forward a couple more years to now it's all about efficient model training which sucks on generic CPUs so everyone is buying and designing other chips
Two big consumer pivots over 4-5 years and boom ...they're IBM and handed lifelines to shore up chip manufacturing in the US for strategic reasons but Intel essentially manufactures rotary phones right now. Maybe the fab biz will get modern designs right. We'll see
Their fabs are the weakest part of their business (I wonder why once AMD spun off GlobalFoundries so they could focus on the core product, they suddenly started doing well) Once they started making chips on TSMC's processes, wow, all of a sudden, theyre in the same league as Apple Silicon.
But, they still don't have many external customers for the fabs. Intels fab revenu is something like a tenth of TSMC's. Although, it'll probably grow year by year if they continue to match the capabilities of TSMC's chip processes.
https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMD/
I figured the current owners of INTC stock are betting on the success of their fab business.. I think that's still to play out.
It seems to me that nvidia bubble is still to burst. There is a trust me bro circle where Nvidia somehow sold GPU to itself so it can host someone else's models. Maybe three years ago or a little more they announced they plan to move away from consumer end and focus on cloud. Back then it did not make much sense because everybody though "how the f Nvidia will manage clouds like AWS?" And their business model seems to me that it is a shared risk model where Nvidia don't "own" the cloud but pay for its GPU to have that market share. I think it would make much sense if the thin layer those, how did the greedy musk said, neocloud/cloudfronts or whatever, were not so brittle due to the lack of market demand.
I have the impression they had a gold strategy for them but for some reason they rushed it too much and now they broke the market before they could profit from it.
I can imagine that if they didn't hoard their own resources to create scarcity artificiality, they would possibly have a stronger position in the market. I can only think they did this because (A) they know the current government will bail them out and (B) someone was worried that China could hoard those GPUs first.
But as I said, I don't understand much of the topic, but it seems to me they are try to get as much money as soon as possible and that looks scam-ish to me. They all put investment rounds too close to each other, started creating concerning stories and "rogue" AIs at the same time. Maybe I'm being too paranoid, but so far those guys have been pulling some hat tricks and I think I know who will pay the bill
Edit: Also I think the big ones artificially produced better numbers by doing massive layoff rounds. Depending on how those happen, it produces almost an immediate loss that can be smoothed, and then a peak on profit, and then we will see if their numbers keep up 2 or 3 quarter after that. Maybe I have trust issues, but man, this does smell weird.
Why? Is it hardware limitations or deficient software stack?
In any case, as nvidia is ignoring the gaming market, AMD and Intel both have a vacuum to fill, but I don't see them doing it.
Intel, especially, should have rushed out gaming cards as soon as nvidia shortages were predictable (2023, at least).
The problem I have is not that an old GPU can't be used for gaming (it can), it's that I am forced to upgrade from a perfectly working 660ti that once played far cry 3, 4 and 5 (and every other game I threw at it) because my kernel doesn't have support anymore (older drivers don't work on a newer kernel).
A new GPU with the power of a decade-old GPU but all the latest software support would be great. Right now, if I want to see certain web-pages (WebGL), I have to buy a new GPU, but there isn't any low-priced GPUs anymore.
things are changing but there is a sort of "no one ever got fired for using nvidia for inference." thing going on.
https://www.oracle.com/news/announcement/ai-world-oracle-bri...
Intel in Q3 2026 had $16.5B in revenue and $3.3B of profit, and $13.7B and $4.4B in Q3 2025.
NVidia is doing much better than Intel, people are selling bonds and junk bonds to buy billions of dollars of NVidia cards that NVidia is making 75% gross margins on. They’re making the kind of profits that would make a drug dealer blush.
I used Q3 earnings for Intel because Nvidia hasn’t reported their Q3 earnings yet and Intel’s Q2 earnings showed losses in both 2026 and 2025.