“In March 2025, Intel appointed Lip-Bu Tan as its new CEO,” Cotton wrote in the letter. “Mr. Tan reportedly controls dozens of Chinese companies and has a stake in hundreds of Chinese advanced-manufacturing and chip firms. At least eight of these companies reportedly have ties to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.”
everfrustrated · 4h ago
If true, questions should also be raised about the Board who must have signed off on any conflicts of interest.
tlogan · 3h ago
> If true …
I don’t know about his investments, but one fact is clear: he was CEO of Cadence Design Systems, which has just pleaded guilty to federal charges for exporting technology to China. That alone should make him ineligible to lead a company with major government contracts.
If he resigns (and he will), the board should go with him.
everfrustrated · 2h ago
If Tan resigns I suspect only way Pat would come back is with an entirely new board, so either way it's likely the board is done.
7speter · 1h ago
How effective would Gelsinger be at returning after the then previous CEO took the company in a totally different path and practically trashed Gelsinger’s original plan?
addaon · 58m ago
> How effective would Gelsinger be
Effective at what? Intel’s done, it’s on the Boeing trajectory, it’s just about grabbing what you can as the ship goes down.
rootjknak · 1h ago
Intel board members:
Frank Yeary, managing member Darwin capital advisors
James Goetz, partner Sequoia Capital
Andrea Goldsmith, dean of engineering Princeton University
Alyssa Henry, former square CEO
Eric Meurice, former CEO ASML
Barbara Novick, cofounder BlackRock
Steve Sanghi, CEO microchip
Gregory Smith, former CFO Boeing company
Stacy Smith, chair of Autodesk
Dion Weisler, former CEO HP
There are a lot of people that should not be on the board of a semiconductor company.
versteegen · 39m ago
"Should not be" is too harsh, you should have diversity on a board, not only people from that single industry, but maybe you mean "too many". Presumably the investor-appointees have broad experience with many other companies. The type of people who should know how to hire a CEO.
spwa4 · 16m ago
> Presumably the investor-appointees have broad experience with many other companies
Investors have experience "managing" money to themselves. What is controversial about this? It's like saying pilots have experience flying planes. These investors have a lot experience financializing everything about a company.
We know where that leads, and it's not to success ... well, except for the investors with inside information that get out at the right time.
snapetom · 2h ago
The Board is a disgrace. For all his fault, Gelsinger had Intel at least on a path back, yes, it's going to take a lot of money because the past two decades have been missed opportunities.
And not only did the Board not do their proper due diligence on Tan, but just let him toss Gelsinger's plan out? Shareholders should sue every one of them.
dangus · 3h ago
If I was an Intel shareholder I would be livid.
Can you imagine the look you'd get if it was 1998 and you told me that AMD would have over twice the market capitalization of Intel in the next few decades? In 1998 Intel was 50x larger by market cap than AMD.
It is a company that has been catastrophically mismanaged.
Mars008 · 2h ago
I wonder if Six Sigmas has something to do with it...
ekianjo · 53m ago
they became a bit too 'lean'
hedgehog · 2h ago
Livid about the problem or livid that they're talking about axing the first CEO in decades that might have a shot at fixing the problems?
jordanb · 1h ago
Fixing how? His first major act is to fire 20% of employees, refocus on old technology (smt) and deprioritize next gen (14a) process development. This is tantamount to surrendering as a leading foundry.
hedgehog · 1h ago
Fixing the willful ignorance that the market structure today is very different from 20 years ago. Process leadership and volume leadership are tightly coupled, and no integrated chip company will again have volume leadership. Intel's historical margin power built on a combination of monopoly on performance (in some markets) and superior economies of scale, that's not coming back. The question is not whether they can get fabs up and going with process nodes competitive with TSMC, the question is whether doing it actually leads to any kind of success given the costs involved. The key question is what the basis is for competition going forward, and what Intel's strengths are in that context.
To paraphrase, Intel has to go of the notion that for Intel to win AMD and TSMC have to lose. The strategy that follows from that might involve some painful choices.
cyberax · 43m ago
> Fixing the willful ignorance that the market structure today is very different from 20 years ago
Indeed. And his first action was to diss their own AI efforts. Because AI is just some niche area that they can ignore.
Just as Battlemage GPUs were getting decent reviews and sold above the MSRP.
brahhd · 48m ago
He came in and trashed everyone's effort then fired them
It played out so smoothly over 3 months it seemed scripted from the start
That's not going to inspire people to step up.
Everything is legal for sure, lawyers were paid to agree. But it feels 100% like an orchestrated short of Intel. A GameStop situation.
I am fucking tired of 60+ year olds setting everyone else up for failure. They've been in charge as the problems came about. They're the problem then.
Boomers and GenX need to get out of the way or get stomped by youth.
dismalaf · 34m ago
You got this wrong. He's de-prioritizing 18a in order to leapfrog to 14a.
threatripper · 3h ago
Nobody really knows if 18a is a failure or if it was turned into one by deliberate mismanagement. It feels like when Microsoft took over Nokia.
tiahura · 3h ago
This is entirely on the board. They didn’t know / They didn’t clear first with govt. Either way it’s grossly negligent.
woooooo · 47m ago
"Controls dozens of companies" is a pretty strong allegation without naming a single one.
"Has a stake in hundreds" is true of anyone who owns a global index fund.
tlogan · 3h ago
The key question is this: how did the board of directors hire him knowing he had been subpoenaed to testify regarding Cadence Design Systems, and that the company has now agreed to plead guilty.
Intel was (and arguably still is) too large relative to its current technical capabilities. Yet even in this current “bad chips” era, Intel is only, at worst, about 10% behind in gaming performance (largely due to cache disparity) and is on par or better in most other workloads. From the K10 era until Zen 3, AMD processors were objectively worse (sometimes comically so) and AMD still managed to survive.
Intel’s mobile CPUs remain extremely competitive. Their integrated GPUs are the fastest in the x86 space. And their SoC+platform features: video decode/encode, NPUs, power management, wifi, and so on are the best in class for x86 CPUs; they are usually a solid second place or better regardless of architecture.
Subjectively, the most interesting “mainstream” laptops on the market are still, and historically have been, Intel-based. I understand that in an era where the M4 Max, Snapdragon 8 Elite, and Strix Halo each serve as best-in-class in different segments, “mainstream appeal” no longer equates to market dominance. And that is bad news for an Intel that historically just make a few CPUs (the rest being market segmented down versions of those chips), but still, to suggest they will disappear overnight seems... odd.
os2warpman · 2h ago
> Yet even in this current “bad chips” era, Intel is only, at worst, about 10% behind in gaming performance (largely due to cache disparity)
Gaming is irrelevant.
For AMD, gaming (both console and PC combined) is less revenue than embedded-- things like those routers you can get off of aliexpress and Synology NASes.
Enterprise, cloud, and AI are the only things that matter, and even enterprise is falling off.
Back in 2020 with the second wave of AMD EPYC Rome, after I had gotten a couple of R7525s in hand and put them through their paces I started saying that you are professionally negligent if you, as a technology professional, recommend an Intel solution unless you have some very specific use cases (AVX512/Optane-optimized options). In 2022 everyone started agreeing with me.
Now you are professionally negligent if you recommend Intel at all.
Enterprise cares about speed, cloud cares about clients per socket, and AI cares about bandwidth. Intel is not competitive in any of those.
Even in the consumer space, for running bullshit workloads like Copilot on a laptop the difference is negligible. Intel is ahead, by about 10%-- at ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY WATTS (if the OEM even allows it) while you trade that 10% for 75W on AMD.
No human being on earth cares that the scan to identify if there's a cute dog in the photo they just saved to disk takes .255 or .277 seconds. They do care about battery life.
And gaming isn't just irrelevant due to revenue, once you look at margins you start realizing that AMD could never again spend a single cent on marketing X3D chips to gamers and instead redirect that money to target other sectors and they would probably be better off for it.
Look at Nvidia. Gaming went from their cash crop to burdensome baggage in just a couple of years. Gaming went to less than 9% of revenue from like, 80%. They don't care about people buying an RTX card and having to deal with OEMs and distributors and retailers and marketing and RMAs and driver patches at whatever piss-poor margin it is due to everyone taking their cut when enterprise clients are putting in POs directly to them for tens of thousands of Data Center cards at a time at high margins-- and they didn't have to spend barely anything on marketing.
The very last thing, after figuring out absolutely everything else, that Intel should care about is what their chips are benchmarking at in the latest video game.
johnnyanmac · 38m ago
Gaming is still a multi billion dollar industry, and touches into all the other aspects you mentioned as well. Losing out to AMD for Xbox/Playstation was definitely a costly loss.
>Look at Nvidia. Gaming went from their cash crop to burdensome baggage in just a couple of years.
Yes, marking up your consumer hardware by 4-5x to appeal to crypto miners surely does have an effect on your market. Arguably, AI saved them from a crash due to their over investment on Crypto/NFTs. It's not like gaming demand diminished this decade.
Gaming isn't THE way out. But it's one avenue to consider. It does seem like companies c. 2025 prefer to fall into the AI bubble, though.
lovich · 1h ago
I’ve found that a lot of my friends who are into pc gaming still haven’t grokked that ever since the crypto boom, much less the ai boom, that they are the old toys that no one wants to play with anymore.
I had a friend who legitimately could not understand why Nvidia didn’t care about their reputation in the gaming market souring even after I showed him the numbers on how much nvidia is selling to corporations now.
I don’t know if it was an inability to deal with the numbers or if it’s just culture shock at going from being a valued client to as you said “baggage”, but it was a surprising number of people in that camp
johnnyanmac · 34m ago
Well this all did happen in the blink of an eye. 2022, Gaming was one of the only things booming after a global shutdown. 2023, investors all at once jumped ship to chase AI. That can be rather shocking even for tech, since people don't tend to upgrade their GPU's every year.
As a parallel, imagine hearing that the IPhone 13 was the biggest selling device in history. Then suddenly the IPhone 14 is $4000 and mostly sold to enterprise. It doesn't make any logical sense without following the money. Even then it may not make much sense.
michaelt · 57m ago
I mean, for a long time the situation was reversed.
Huge gaming demand and easy retail availability of nvidia's cards was providing economies of scale. If a few professors were buying the GeForce 8800 to look at this new 'CUDA' thing that was mostly a marketing thing.
Around the same time there were also one or two Playstation 3 clusters - but a year or two later Sony removed support for that. HPC being inconsequential, and a distraction from their core business, presumably.
It's only in recent years the stuff that used to be marketing decoration has become reality.
michaelt · 1h ago
I kinda see what you mean.
Steam [1] tells me gamers use Intel by 59:41
Price-performance scatter plots [2] say although Intel isn't battling AMD for the >$1000 threadripper territory, they have some competitive products in the sub-$500 price band.
And while Intel missed out on the smartphone market, I've heard people comparing their N100 CPUs favourable to the latest Raspberry Pi hardware.
Sure, Intel has had major troubles with their next process node. And one of the best performing laptops is ARM-based. But Intel are nowhere near defeated.
"in the x86 space", otherwise you would have to acknowledge that M4 far outpaces any intel iGPU.
tgma · 2h ago
> Intel was (and arguably still is) too large relative to its current technical capabilities. Yet even in this current “bad chips” era, Intel is only, at worst, about 10% behind in gaming performance (largely due to cache disparity) and is on par or better in most other workloads. From the K10 era until Zen 3, AMD processors were objectively worse (sometimes comically so) and AMD still managed to survive.
The current “bad chips that are only 10% behind” are fabbed by TSMC, not Intel.
chrsw · 3h ago
"last CEO" is hyperbole. But despite the competitiveness of some of their latest offerings, their trajectory is beyond concerning.
threatripper · 3h ago
In the past AMD needed to survive for antitrust reasons. Now x86 is losing in relevance now as alternatives are established. Nobody needs to keep intel alive.
deaddodo · 2h ago
AMD also received many Hail Marys as a result of Intel’s anticompetitive behavior. Directly via payouts Intel and partners had to make, and indirectly via companies being more willing to work with them for their GPU expertise and better (out of desperation) licensing/purchase agreements.
Intel can’t rely on the same. They haven’t been directly impacted by another larger company, they rely too much on a single technology that’s slowly fading from the spotlight, and they can’t compete against AMD on price.
Maybe if they ended up in a small and lean desperation position they could pivot and survive, but their current business model is a losing eventuality.
dismalaf · 43m ago
Intel has 75% of the desktop/server chip market. They'll survive.
sugarpimpdorsey · 3h ago
Well that was a whole lot of words that conveyed basically no information.
A sort of corporate communications-whitewashed version of the My Cousin Vinny "Everything that guy just said is bullshit. Thank you."
braum · 59m ago
up for My Cousin Vinny reference!
jjcm · 6h ago
It's honestly wild that a sitting US president is calling out specific company CEOs. The fact that it was done in a tweet-esque post is even more concerning. I'd expect that something like this would have been accompanied by a proper investigation and writeup stating the administration's perspective on why, but instead it's just "he's highly CONFLICTED".
I don't debate his history at Cadence Design is concerning from a national security point of view, but the approach the administration took really shows how we're in a different era of politics.
munificent · 1h ago
Must have been great to be buddies with Trump and get the heads up so you could short Intel right before his tweet.
smsm42 · 1h ago
> It's honestly wild that a sitting US president is calling out specific company CEOs
Not an apt comparison. GM needed $50 billion in government funds just to stay alive.
brahhd · 2m ago
All of tech is propped up by the government.
GenX and Millennials watched too many "Sprite; you do you" commercials and grew up believing in their autonomy and freedom.
But American government was always at the wheel, via regulation, law, and drinks in DC off the clock.
It's all PR to say our system free market and the like. Intel wouldn't exist without falling in line over the decades.
kzs0 · 1h ago
Wasn’t that in conjunction with the us govt essentially taking over gm though?
tptacek · 6h ago
Eh. Without getting anywhere near the merits of this particular fracas, the federal government has gotten deeply involved in critiquing the management of companies like Lockheed and Boeing, both for national security reasons and because of the importance of those companies to the economy. Easy to see Intel fitting into that mold in 2025.
rco8786 · 6h ago
I don’t recall a sitting President publicly calling for the CEO of either of those companies to resign.
Please let’s not sanewash what is happening right now.
joules77 · 5h ago
Look up the Teddy Roosevelt era. Before his election and after he leaves.
morkalork · 5h ago
Lockheed's CEO Carl Kotchian resigned after political pressure but he brought it on himself.
These are news reports after the fact. It's not normal for a president to go on twitter and publicly deride someone into resigning.
bgwalter · 3h ago
The CEO will likely be fine, Trump also announces movements of nuclear submarines on Truth Social.
I'd be more concerned about non-public dealings that Trump might have learned from Roy Cohn, but these are probably off limits for discussion here. In general, what is on Truth Social does not matter.
tptacek · 6h ago
The norm that’s been transgressed here is getting more and more specific, isn’t it?
rco8786 · 6h ago
> a sitting President publicly calling for the CEO of either of those companies to resign.
That was my original "norm" I stated. What has gotten more specific about that?
magicmicah85 · 5h ago
Publicly or privately, why is one fine and the other not?
rco8786 · 5h ago
I'll answer this in earnest, assuming you're asking in good faith.
The president commands an enormous amount of power, and has an army of people who will do his bidding and simply adopt his opinions on any number of subjects. Shouting out to millions of his followers to state that the CEO of a private company is "CONFLICTED" and must resign is, by any definition, propaganda. Propaganda that changes the minds of the citizens of the country, riles up the base, and does nothing productive except to stoke anger and fear.
Working privately with this CEO, having a professional discussion with him, investigating the facts, determining that the best course of action for national security would be for him to step down, and maybe even putting some political pressure on that person to do so, and then publicly announcing the facts of what happened, is responsible governance.
It's genuinely an enormous difference.
magicmicah85 · 5h ago
I am asking in good faith and I understand why there would be a preference towards private versus public. It sounds like Trump does not care to attempt a private conversation as he wants Tan out. The Cadence settlement is likely the only public info we have about Tan's conflicts, the government has more info and they aren't going to spend time working through private channels, though it sounds like Tan is trying that now.
lovich · 1h ago
I’m struggling to believe you are asking in good faith. He answered your question and your immediate response is to try and defend what the president did in terms of violating norms.
It seems like youve had an agenda since before you asked the question
scarface_74 · 5h ago
The other hopefully happens after the President and his advisors talk behind the scenes. This isn’t a Republican vs Democrat thing. Republican presidents never did this before.
And that happened as part of the government bailing GM out.
tzs · 2h ago
I'd hardly call the GM situation comparable. In that case GM was asking the government for $16.6 billion (on top of $9.4 billion they had received under Bush).
Asking a company that wants a nearly $17 billion bailout to make some changes is not at all unreasonable or unusual.
As far as I know Intel is not asking the government for anything special, so having the government commenting on their internal organization is unusual.
tptacek · 52m ago
Presumably all the teeth in the USG demands are about USG contracts.
sjsdaiuasgdia · 6h ago
The GM CEO had presided over a time when GM got into such bad shape they needed a government bailout, and had to come back asking for even more government money.
The Wells Fargo CEO presided over a major scandal involving customers being signed up for services they never agreed to.
What has the Intel CEO presided over during his short tenure that measures up to those?
tptacek · 5h ago
Vastly increased attention on semiconductor companies as national security assets coupled with fairly extensive business relationships with companies controlled by America's chief geopolitical rival.
sjsdaiuasgdia · 5h ago
Oh, so not the same kind of thing at all then...
tptacek · 5h ago
You'll notice that none of the examples on this thread are the same things.
sjsdaiuasgdia · 5h ago
Yeah, it seems like a lot of hot air to prop up a false equivalency.
tptacek · 5h ago
I suggest not asking questions you don't want the answers to.
antonvs · 3h ago
People are interested in valid answers, not gaslighting.
sjsdaiuasgdia · 5h ago
I suggest not normalizing Trump's behaviors by creating false equivalencies.
tptacek · 5h ago
I'm interested in what's actually happening, not how it feeds the narrative about Trump. We saw the same thing yesterday with a dozen people on HN het up about how the Library of Congress Annotated Constitution had removed Habeas from its online copy of the Constitution (along with the Navy, letters of marque and reprisal, and the No Favored Ports clause) and people said the same thing there: stop claiming this was just a website fuckup and normalizing Trump!
sjsdaiuasgdia · 5h ago
Yes, what actually happened is important.
In that Constitution story, a government website that has the Constitution's text was updated in a peculiar way. It could be interpreted as having been related to habeas corpus rights, as that was in the middle of the removal. It could also be interpreted as unintentional, as the deletion started in the middle of Article I Section 8. You'd think a targeted deletion wouldn't include so much unrelated text. Then again, you could say that it's just an incompetently done targeted deletion. It's debatable! Maybe it was intentional and maybe the order came from the top. Or maybe it was just a run of the mill tech SNAFU.
In this situation, Trump, on Trump's social media platform, posted that he wants this CEO to resign. That's not debatable, it's verifiable fact. It happened. We know the man at the top is saying this.
So yeah, stop with the false equivalencies and pay attention to what's actually happening.
tptacek · 5h ago
Just so we're clear that you apparently still think it's possible that an order came down from the top to delete Congress's authorization to form a Navy from the Library of Congress's online annotated Constitution, which isn't even in the first SERP for me on Google for "online constitution", but I guess you've gotta start somewhere.
sjsdaiuasgdia · 1h ago
I described the situation you referenced to show why it is not the same as this situation. I did not declare ownership of a position.
Personally I'd say it's 99.99% in favor of run of the mill SNAFU. The 0.01% is mostly an allowance for the tendency of authoritarian systems to occasionally act in incredibly clumsy and incompetent ways. I feel this may be a factor of personal loyalty and ideological alignment receiving more consideration than competence in hiring and advancement decisions within authoritarian systems.
CamperBob2 · 3h ago
Dude, he altered a weather map with a Sharpie on live TV.
tptacek · 3h ago
The theory behind this Constitution thing is as if, after altering the weather map, the weather changed.
CamperBob2 · 2h ago
Well, it would have if he had been allowed to use nuclear weapons on the hurricane instead of just a Sharpie.
fzeroracer · 4h ago
C'mon, surely you should know better by now to not give the current admin literally any iota of doubt. They've been frequently and outright violating individuals habeas corpus rights, it should come as no surprise that people would see this as the next step. They're the most powerful people in the world.
tptacek · 3h ago
It's exactly because I think this is the most dangerous President in American history that I find these kinds of claims so risible and worth knocking down.
fzeroracer · 2h ago
And in doing so you are inadvertently providing cover for their actions. The constitution fuck up was likely a mistake, but at the same time you should be reacting like the way others did because it sends a clear, strong message that people are watching.
And in this scenario your counterargument is so incredibly weak that you're not knocking down anyone's claims, you're just weakening your own position.
tptacek · 1h ago
Ridiculous. The LOC thing doesn't even make sense as a movie plot. I'm not going to pretend it does just so I can keep the same polarity as you. It probably just doesn't make sense for us to keep talking about this.
tgma · 2h ago
This administration (and the previous one) have been paying billions of dollars to chip companies to make fabs in the United States.
Trump in particular is essentially trying to make sure Intel lives despite market forces. It is effectively a quasi-nationalized entity akin to major military-industrial complex entities.
Given that, we are not talking about a random private entity. A US President making such statement about Intel is entirely justified.
fundad · 5h ago
They may have dropped the name China Initiative but all this tough talk on China (and immigration) primes the public to believe the worst.
Meh, Trump wants someone as loyal and willing to spy on us as he thinks this guy was for China. I love how the right detests regulation but is okay with arbitrarily monkeying directly in the management of a company like this with no rules around it. No company is safe under this guy.
dkenyser · 6h ago
Correction: The right detests regulation on the things they like at that given moment.
If it doesn't affect them directly, or they can't perceive how it will affect them directly, they simply do not care.
goatlover · 5h ago
The MAGA right has demonstrated they have no principles other than whatever Trump wants at that given moment. We'll see whether the Epstein files is truly an exception to that.
togetheragainor · 2h ago
It can be very difficult for some people to separate their personal feelings about Trump from whether he’s on the right side of an issue.
> [T]he NSA doesn't need a warrant for foreign targets.
That is correct. IIRC, FISA made that the law of the land since like the 1970s. However, Congress felt the need to provide retroactive immunity to the telcos who assisted in the FISA-violating wiretaps that the NSA demanded of them around the turn of the century. See Title II on printed page 32 of this [0] for more information, and check out newspaper coverage about the "FISA Amendments Act of 2008" around July, 2008.
This grant of retroactive immunity was particularly outrageous because it mooted in-progress civil suits against those telcos, which is not something that's supposed to be done at scale... especially for civil liberties violations.
That's a really odd thing to do if no law was violated, don't you think?
What are the odds this ends with Intel getting nationalized? I think it's really looking kind of non-zero now.
emchammer · 6h ago
Thank god Apple has been putting their eggs in their home-woven ARM basket. Now I just wish that they had a CEO who was above golden-trophy ass-kissing.
dylan604 · 4h ago
Does it being "designed in California" but "made in Taiwan" really make a difference? If Taiwan was to be invaded and TSMC follows through with their threat of destroying all of the fabs, Apple's home-woven basket wouldn't be worth much at all
seszett · 3h ago
If the US or the Netherlands were being invaded that world also wreak havoc, but how is that related to the links between China and Intel's CEO?
dylan604 · 3h ago
Invading the US or Netherlands would not impact chip production. How are you not able to grasp that?
nerdsniper · 3h ago
Besides missing the point, this is a bad argument.
ASML manufactures the machines that TSMC uses to produce chips - they have an even more critical and irreplaceable role in chip production than Taiwan does. ASML is headquartered in Veldhoven, NL. That would absolutely affect chip production - no new nodes, no replacement parts. There are other critical technologies for semiconductor manufacturing made in USA as well.
selimthegrim · 2h ago
They are partially made in San Diego.
tengwar2 · 6h ago
Partly home-made. Arm Holdings is British-based, but owned by Softbank Group (Japanese).
gdiamos · 5h ago
Arm makes a specification and standard (the ARM ISA).
Apple licenses that and develops their own chip, which is then manufactured by TSMC.
So I guess if Intel dies the US will still have a few good CPU design firms, but no manufacturing
Also note that Foxconn (China) assembles the iPhones
ARM also produces core reference implementations. Most ARM licensees’ licenses only allow them to use those in a slightly modified form.
What you’re talking about is an ARM IP license, which allow the company to build their own implementation of the standard. Only a few companies have those and, of those, even fewer actually use it. Apple is one of those that does.
OrvalWintermute · 4h ago
Japan is our ally.
linuxhansl · 4h ago
Not much longer if we continue as we do.
blooalien · 4h ago
We still have allies?
pphysch · 3h ago
More importantly, we militarily occupy Japan.
landl0rd · 5h ago
Apple still holds the license to the arm arches/designs they've used. There's enough customization applied that I'd guess Apple could function absent ARM, even if it's not the ideal scenario for them.
Plus Britain and Japan are both somewhere between close allies and client states. Nobody cares if we license from them.
extraduder_ire · 3h ago
Apple is also not a regular ARM licensee. They have a special deal because they were a very early investor when they wanted a chip to power the Newton back in the day.
deaddodo · 2h ago
No they don’t. I mean, that is why they have that license (though PA Semi, the company they absorbed that develops their cores, also brought one along with them); but it’s not a special or unique license. Nvidia, Qualcomm, AMD, etc all have the same license.
Apple is near unique only in that they’ve pretty much never used reference implementations (since the PA Semi acquisition, at least) from ARM and stick to their pure bespoke microarchitectures. But they’re not the only company that could.
hinkley · 5h ago
Amd64 has other vendors.
scarface_74 · 5h ago
I hate everything that Cook is doing to kiss up to Trump and he did something similar during the first administration by letting Trump brag about final assembly of low selling Mac Pros was happening in the US.
But this is the country that the US wants (said as a born and bred US citizen) these are the results of it. Every CEO is kissing Trumps ass because that’s the only way you get ahead in the US now.
The media, the other two branches, colleges, tech companies etc have all bent a knee and bribed the President in one way or the other.
dylan604 · 4h ago
The fact he allowed Tim Apple to just hang out there was telling
crinkly · 2h ago
I think Tim is only kissing ass because the desk trinket is cheap and the investment will take time to materialise, probably after this presidency. And Apple will be around longer than trump will be alive.
I’m sure it’s killing him as much as us.
hn_throwaway_99 · 6h ago
It doesn't need to get officially nationalized. Trump is already using tariffs to essentially direct large businesses. It's already been reported that Trump is requiring TSMC to take a 49% stake in Intel for tariff relief.
Dr4kn · 3h ago
Why would TSMC do this? Companies want the best chips and they can only get them from TSMC. If there isn't an alternative and building the necessary infrastructure in the US takes too long the Tarif is useless.
catigula · 1h ago
ChatGPT vibes in the statement lmao
sashank_1509 · 2h ago
So now being a bad CEO who is not of European ethnicity, will have the sitting president insinuate you not so subtly for treason. Wild. A cursory Wikipedia search confirms Tan was born in Malaysia, has lived in US for 40+ years in California, and is a practicing Christian.
travem · 1h ago
The context in the related AP article shows that they were CEO of Cadence during the time when that company violated export control rules by selling certain technology to Chinese organizations linked to the Chinese military.
> According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Cadence, in July, agreed to plead guilty to resolve charges that it violated export controls rules to sell hardware and software to China’s National University of Defense Technology, which is linked to the Chinese military. Tan was the CEO of Cadence when the company violated the rules between 2015 and 2021.
It's a pretty open secret that a lot of defectors to China have had Chinese ancestry. A lot.
The same also goes for European ethnicities like Jewish defectors to Israel, it's not really a European v. non-European thing.
dismalaf · 18m ago
Jews aren't ethnically European and plenty of white Americans have sold state secrets.
catigula · 5m ago
Ashkenazi Jews are ethnically European and plenty of people driving motorcycles have lived but there is a statistical connection between driving motorcycles and dying.
smsm42 · 1h ago
It's sad that people read the headlines and immediately start screaming "racism!". I don't know if Lip-Bu Tan has done anything wrong or not, but at least there's enough evidence to suggest a massive conflict of interest and particularly the Cadence affair stinks really bad. Maybe it turns out somehow Lip-Bu Tan is completely unconnected to any of this, but claiming this all just because he's "not of European ethnicity" is complete bullshit. It's not his ethnicity, it's his actions and connections.
selimthegrim · 1h ago
What does being Christian have to do with anything?
horns4lyfe · 1h ago
Just read the article a little bit, jfc
rwmj · 7h ago
Does he write this ridiculous verbiage himself or does he have a team of people who "hone" it to this point? This could have been a four sentence email.
rco8786 · 6h ago
He’s the CEO of a multi billion dollar company of course he has a comms team.
gjvc · 5h ago
who buys intel instead of AMD at this point?
ac29 · 2h ago
A lot of people?
Intel, even in its current weakened state, did nearly double the revenue of AMD last quarter.
KronisLV · 2h ago
My current GPU is an Intel Arc B580 and before then it was the A580. They aren't perfect but now that they're coming down to MSRP, they're pretty good budget friendly options.
I would have also unironically gotten a Core Ultra CPU if the pricing was actually... well, not insane for the value (or lack thereof) that they have. A 245K would still be an improvement over my current 5800X, though I have no idea what they were thinking of with that pricing - if their CPU prices were as competitive as their GPU prices (vendors ignoring MSRP be damned), that sidegrade release might have not been as horrible. They're still modern CPUs that work pretty well.
Though when I buy Intel, it's mostly so I don't give even more money to Nvidia and support competition in the market (otherwise my build would be all AMD).
jaian · 2h ago
I do. AMD has done me dirty many times in the past so I will continue buying Intel for the foreseeable future. The only thing that matters to me is single core performance and when you compare Intel and AMD in that regard they are similarly priced anyway.
extraduder_ire · 3h ago
It can't be AMD, two separate companies need to exist for dual-sourcing reasons. Market cap is $86.5B ATM, so there's quite a few who could afford them.
aryonoco · 43m ago
I just did because of Quick Sync. Plenty of software has support for Quick Sync, the two I use are Plex and Immich. The AMD equivalent, VCN, has never had anywhere near the same level of software support.
bornfreddy · 4h ago
Swing traders. Also those who think China-Taiwan conflict is imminent.
nodesocket · 3h ago
I own both, though admittedly Intel has not panned out so far.
dluan · 2h ago
happy b580 user here
getnormality · 6h ago
Lots of en dashes.
arduanika · 51m ago
Yup.
I'd bet 98% odds that Intel CEO and/or his comms team drafted this using an LLM trained on a competitor's chips.
Bearish. As if we even needed to know, at this point.
xdennis · 6h ago
They looked too short to be em dashes and too long to be en dashes. Sure enough, they're neither.
They're minus signs. The AI is evolving.
sgerenser · 1h ago
Nope they’re en dashes. Minus signs aren’t longer than en dashes anyway.
hinkley · 5h ago
Sigh. Guess I’m going back to using way too many commas and living in fear of misusing semicolons.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
number6 · 5h ago
I love semicolons and dashes. AI won't take them from me!
threatripper · 3h ago
Must be a force of habit.
michaelteter · 6h ago
“The administration” does not deal in facts. It only works with themes and phrases that (fail to) give the small, unrecognized boy a sense of value.
If ever there were a case for the cost of lack of therapy, we are now witnessing it on a global, possibly catastrophic scale.
Just imagine if Hitler had been placed in charge of a superpower with our resources…
To be clear, we should not ignore the absolute reality that China and other powers are using every means available to influence global reality. But that is unrelated to the absurdity which we are now subject to.
The invisibility of Bush is the strongest indication that “the party of Reagan” is completely baffled and hiding from the monster that they and Rupert Murdoch created.
hinkley · 5h ago
Therapists don’t know how to fix narcissists. And narcissists don’t want to be fixed.
dlyco · 3h ago
First, you need to know the emotional bond between Chinese Malaysians and the Chinese Communist Party, before you can say his actions are not suspicious.
acheong08 · 2h ago
That is just factually incorrect. Most Chinese Malaysians are either Cantonese or Hokkien, with closer ties to Taiwan and Hong Kong than the mainland. A lot of the older folk don't even speak Mandarin. Keep in mind the CCP wasn't even in power when most migrated here.
dluan · 2h ago
literally it doesnt matter you'll always be Chinese to them.
wewewedxfgdf · 3h ago
The biggest problem with Lip Bu Tan is he has given up on competing with Nvidia.
What's the point of being Intel CEO if you give up?
FTA:
“In March 2025, Intel appointed Lip-Bu Tan as its new CEO,” Cotton wrote in the letter. “Mr. Tan reportedly controls dozens of Chinese companies and has a stake in hundreds of Chinese advanced-manufacturing and chip firms. At least eight of these companies reportedly have ties to the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.”
I don’t know about his investments, but one fact is clear: he was CEO of Cadence Design Systems, which has just pleaded guilty to federal charges for exporting technology to China. That alone should make him ineligible to lead a company with major government contracts.
If he resigns (and he will), the board should go with him.
Effective at what? Intel’s done, it’s on the Boeing trajectory, it’s just about grabbing what you can as the ship goes down.
Frank Yeary, managing member Darwin capital advisors
James Goetz, partner Sequoia Capital
Andrea Goldsmith, dean of engineering Princeton University
Alyssa Henry, former square CEO
Eric Meurice, former CEO ASML
Barbara Novick, cofounder BlackRock
Steve Sanghi, CEO microchip
Gregory Smith, former CFO Boeing company
Stacy Smith, chair of Autodesk
Dion Weisler, former CEO HP
There are a lot of people that should not be on the board of a semiconductor company.
Investors have experience "managing" money to themselves. What is controversial about this? It's like saying pilots have experience flying planes. These investors have a lot experience financializing everything about a company.
We know where that leads, and it's not to success ... well, except for the investors with inside information that get out at the right time.
And not only did the Board not do their proper due diligence on Tan, but just let him toss Gelsinger's plan out? Shareholders should sue every one of them.
Can you imagine the look you'd get if it was 1998 and you told me that AMD would have over twice the market capitalization of Intel in the next few decades? In 1998 Intel was 50x larger by market cap than AMD.
It is a company that has been catastrophically mismanaged.
To paraphrase, Intel has to go of the notion that for Intel to win AMD and TSMC have to lose. The strategy that follows from that might involve some painful choices.
Indeed. And his first action was to diss their own AI efforts. Because AI is just some niche area that they can ignore.
Just as Battlemage GPUs were getting decent reviews and sold above the MSRP.
It played out so smoothly over 3 months it seemed scripted from the start
That's not going to inspire people to step up.
Everything is legal for sure, lawyers were paid to agree. But it feels 100% like an orchestrated short of Intel. A GameStop situation.
I am fucking tired of 60+ year olds setting everyone else up for failure. They've been in charge as the problems came about. They're the problem then.
Boomers and GenX need to get out of the way or get stomped by youth.
"Has a stake in hundreds" is true of anyone who owns a global index fund.
Intel was (and arguably still is) too large relative to its current technical capabilities. Yet even in this current “bad chips” era, Intel is only, at worst, about 10% behind in gaming performance (largely due to cache disparity) and is on par or better in most other workloads. From the K10 era until Zen 3, AMD processors were objectively worse (sometimes comically so) and AMD still managed to survive.
Intel’s mobile CPUs remain extremely competitive. Their integrated GPUs are the fastest in the x86 space. And their SoC+platform features: video decode/encode, NPUs, power management, wifi, and so on are the best in class for x86 CPUs; they are usually a solid second place or better regardless of architecture.
Subjectively, the most interesting “mainstream” laptops on the market are still, and historically have been, Intel-based. I understand that in an era where the M4 Max, Snapdragon 8 Elite, and Strix Halo each serve as best-in-class in different segments, “mainstream appeal” no longer equates to market dominance. And that is bad news for an Intel that historically just make a few CPUs (the rest being market segmented down versions of those chips), but still, to suggest they will disappear overnight seems... odd.
Gaming is irrelevant.
For AMD, gaming (both console and PC combined) is less revenue than embedded-- things like those routers you can get off of aliexpress and Synology NASes.
Enterprise, cloud, and AI are the only things that matter, and even enterprise is falling off.
Back in 2020 with the second wave of AMD EPYC Rome, after I had gotten a couple of R7525s in hand and put them through their paces I started saying that you are professionally negligent if you, as a technology professional, recommend an Intel solution unless you have some very specific use cases (AVX512/Optane-optimized options). In 2022 everyone started agreeing with me.
Now you are professionally negligent if you recommend Intel at all.
Enterprise cares about speed, cloud cares about clients per socket, and AI cares about bandwidth. Intel is not competitive in any of those.
Even in the consumer space, for running bullshit workloads like Copilot on a laptop the difference is negligible. Intel is ahead, by about 10%-- at ONE HUNDRED AND SIXTY WATTS (if the OEM even allows it) while you trade that 10% for 75W on AMD.
No human being on earth cares that the scan to identify if there's a cute dog in the photo they just saved to disk takes .255 or .277 seconds. They do care about battery life.
And gaming isn't just irrelevant due to revenue, once you look at margins you start realizing that AMD could never again spend a single cent on marketing X3D chips to gamers and instead redirect that money to target other sectors and they would probably be better off for it.
Look at Nvidia. Gaming went from their cash crop to burdensome baggage in just a couple of years. Gaming went to less than 9% of revenue from like, 80%. They don't care about people buying an RTX card and having to deal with OEMs and distributors and retailers and marketing and RMAs and driver patches at whatever piss-poor margin it is due to everyone taking their cut when enterprise clients are putting in POs directly to them for tens of thousands of Data Center cards at a time at high margins-- and they didn't have to spend barely anything on marketing.
The very last thing, after figuring out absolutely everything else, that Intel should care about is what their chips are benchmarking at in the latest video game.
>Look at Nvidia. Gaming went from their cash crop to burdensome baggage in just a couple of years.
Yes, marking up your consumer hardware by 4-5x to appeal to crypto miners surely does have an effect on your market. Arguably, AI saved them from a crash due to their over investment on Crypto/NFTs. It's not like gaming demand diminished this decade.
Gaming isn't THE way out. But it's one avenue to consider. It does seem like companies c. 2025 prefer to fall into the AI bubble, though.
I had a friend who legitimately could not understand why Nvidia didn’t care about their reputation in the gaming market souring even after I showed him the numbers on how much nvidia is selling to corporations now.
I don’t know if it was an inability to deal with the numbers or if it’s just culture shock at going from being a valued client to as you said “baggage”, but it was a surprising number of people in that camp
As a parallel, imagine hearing that the IPhone 13 was the biggest selling device in history. Then suddenly the IPhone 14 is $4000 and mostly sold to enterprise. It doesn't make any logical sense without following the money. Even then it may not make much sense.
Huge gaming demand and easy retail availability of nvidia's cards was providing economies of scale. If a few professors were buying the GeForce 8800 to look at this new 'CUDA' thing that was mostly a marketing thing.
Around the same time there were also one or two Playstation 3 clusters - but a year or two later Sony removed support for that. HPC being inconsequential, and a distraction from their core business, presumably.
It's only in recent years the stuff that used to be marketing decoration has become reality.
Steam [1] tells me gamers use Intel by 59:41
Price-performance scatter plots [2] say although Intel isn't battling AMD for the >$1000 threadripper territory, they have some competitive products in the sub-$500 price band.
And while Intel missed out on the smartphone market, I've heard people comparing their N100 CPUs favourable to the latest Raspberry Pi hardware.
Sure, Intel has had major troubles with their next process node. And one of the best performing laptops is ARM-based. But Intel are nowhere near defeated.
[1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/ [2] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_available.html#xy_sca...
The current “bad chips that are only 10% behind” are fabbed by TSMC, not Intel.
Intel can’t rely on the same. They haven’t been directly impacted by another larger company, they rely too much on a single technology that’s slowly fading from the spotlight, and they can’t compete against AMD on price.
Maybe if they ended up in a small and lean desperation position they could pivot and survive, but their current business model is a losing eventuality.
A sort of corporate communications-whitewashed version of the My Cousin Vinny "Everything that guy just said is bullshit. Thank you."
I don't debate his history at Cadence Design is concerning from a national security point of view, but the approach the administration took really shows how we're in a different era of politics.
This truly never happened before. Oh wait:
https://www.politico.com/story/2009/03/gm-ceo-resigns-at-oba...
GenX and Millennials watched too many "Sprite; you do you" commercials and grew up believing in their autonomy and freedom.
But American government was always at the wheel, via regulation, law, and drinks in DC off the clock.
It's all PR to say our system free market and the like. Intel wouldn't exist without falling in line over the decades.
Please let’s not sanewash what is happening right now.
https://www.politico.com/story/2009/03/gm-ceo-resigns-at-oba...
Sen. Warren:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/embroiled-scandal-wells...
I'd be more concerned about non-public dealings that Trump might have learned from Roy Cohn, but these are probably off limits for discussion here. In general, what is on Truth Social does not matter.
That was my original "norm" I stated. What has gotten more specific about that?
The president commands an enormous amount of power, and has an army of people who will do his bidding and simply adopt his opinions on any number of subjects. Shouting out to millions of his followers to state that the CEO of a private company is "CONFLICTED" and must resign is, by any definition, propaganda. Propaganda that changes the minds of the citizens of the country, riles up the base, and does nothing productive except to stoke anger and fear.
Working privately with this CEO, having a professional discussion with him, investigating the facts, determining that the best course of action for national security would be for him to step down, and maybe even putting some political pressure on that person to do so, and then publicly announcing the facts of what happened, is responsible governance.
It's genuinely an enormous difference.
It seems like youve had an agenda since before you asked the question
And that happened as part of the government bailing GM out.
Asking a company that wants a nearly $17 billion bailout to make some changes is not at all unreasonable or unusual.
As far as I know Intel is not asking the government for anything special, so having the government commenting on their internal organization is unusual.
The Wells Fargo CEO presided over a major scandal involving customers being signed up for services they never agreed to.
What has the Intel CEO presided over during his short tenure that measures up to those?
In that Constitution story, a government website that has the Constitution's text was updated in a peculiar way. It could be interpreted as having been related to habeas corpus rights, as that was in the middle of the removal. It could also be interpreted as unintentional, as the deletion started in the middle of Article I Section 8. You'd think a targeted deletion wouldn't include so much unrelated text. Then again, you could say that it's just an incompetently done targeted deletion. It's debatable! Maybe it was intentional and maybe the order came from the top. Or maybe it was just a run of the mill tech SNAFU.
In this situation, Trump, on Trump's social media platform, posted that he wants this CEO to resign. That's not debatable, it's verifiable fact. It happened. We know the man at the top is saying this.
So yeah, stop with the false equivalencies and pay attention to what's actually happening.
Personally I'd say it's 99.99% in favor of run of the mill SNAFU. The 0.01% is mostly an allowance for the tendency of authoritarian systems to occasionally act in incredibly clumsy and incompetent ways. I feel this may be a factor of personal loyalty and ideological alignment receiving more consideration than competence in hiring and advancement decisions within authoritarian systems.
And in this scenario your counterargument is so incredibly weak that you're not knocking down anyone's claims, you're just weakening your own position.
Trump in particular is essentially trying to make sure Intel lives despite market forces. It is effectively a quasi-nationalized entity akin to major military-industrial complex entities.
Given that, we are not talking about a random private entity. A US President making such statement about Intel is entirely justified.
https://apnews.com/article/business-china-asia-beijing-race-...
If it doesn't affect them directly, or they can't perceive how it will affect them directly, they simply do not care.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/qwest-ceo-nsa-punished...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6033113
Not a sitting president and the NSA doesn't need a warrant for foreign targets.
That is correct. IIRC, FISA made that the law of the land since like the 1970s. However, Congress felt the need to provide retroactive immunity to the telcos who assisted in the FISA-violating wiretaps that the NSA demanded of them around the turn of the century. See Title II on printed page 32 of this [0] for more information, and check out newspaper coverage about the "FISA Amendments Act of 2008" around July, 2008.
This grant of retroactive immunity was particularly outrageous because it mooted in-progress civil suits against those telcos, which is not something that's supposed to be done at scale... especially for civil liberties violations.
That's a really odd thing to do if no law was violated, don't you think?
[0] <https://web.archive.org/web/20101207052813/http://frwebgate....>, found via following the chain of [1] -> [2] (because THOMAS is down today) -> [3]
[1] the July 9th, 2008 entry here: <https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/timeline>
[2] <https://web.archive.org/web/20101209001911/http://thomas.loc...>
[3] The PDF here of version 4 of the bill, because archive.org doesn't have the text version archived. <https://web.archive.org/web/20101207012221/http://thomas.loc...>
ASML manufactures the machines that TSMC uses to produce chips - they have an even more critical and irreplaceable role in chip production than Taiwan does. ASML is headquartered in Veldhoven, NL. That would absolutely affect chip production - no new nodes, no replacement parts. There are other critical technologies for semiconductor manufacturing made in USA as well.
Apple licenses that and develops their own chip, which is then manufactured by TSMC.
So I guess if Intel dies the US will still have a few good CPU design firms, but no manufacturing
Also note that Foxconn (China) assembles the iPhones
Eg https://www.businessinsider.com/apple-iphone-factory-foxconn...
What you’re talking about is an ARM IP license, which allow the company to build their own implementation of the standard. Only a few companies have those and, of those, even fewer actually use it. Apple is one of those that does.
Plus Britain and Japan are both somewhere between close allies and client states. Nobody cares if we license from them.
Apple is near unique only in that they’ve pretty much never used reference implementations (since the PA Semi acquisition, at least) from ARM and stick to their pure bespoke microarchitectures. But they’re not the only company that could.
But this is the country that the US wants (said as a born and bred US citizen) these are the results of it. Every CEO is kissing Trumps ass because that’s the only way you get ahead in the US now.
The media, the other two branches, colleges, tech companies etc have all bent a knee and bribed the President in one way or the other.
I’m sure it’s killing him as much as us.
> According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Cadence, in July, agreed to plead guilty to resolve charges that it violated export controls rules to sell hardware and software to China’s National University of Defense Technology, which is linked to the Chinese military. Tan was the CEO of Cadence when the company violated the rules between 2015 and 2021.
https://apnews.com/article/intel-trump-cotton-yeary-tan-2061...
The same also goes for European ethnicities like Jewish defectors to Israel, it's not really a European v. non-European thing.
Intel, even in its current weakened state, did nearly double the revenue of AMD last quarter.
I would have also unironically gotten a Core Ultra CPU if the pricing was actually... well, not insane for the value (or lack thereof) that they have. A 245K would still be an improvement over my current 5800X, though I have no idea what they were thinking of with that pricing - if their CPU prices were as competitive as their GPU prices (vendors ignoring MSRP be damned), that sidegrade release might have not been as horrible. They're still modern CPUs that work pretty well.
Though when I buy Intel, it's mostly so I don't give even more money to Nvidia and support competition in the market (otherwise my build would be all AMD).
I'd bet 98% odds that Intel CEO and/or his comms team drafted this using an LLM trained on a competitor's chips.
Bearish. As if we even needed to know, at this point.
They're minus signs. The AI is evolving.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
If ever there were a case for the cost of lack of therapy, we are now witnessing it on a global, possibly catastrophic scale.
Just imagine if Hitler had been placed in charge of a superpower with our resources…
To be clear, we should not ignore the absolute reality that China and other powers are using every means available to influence global reality. But that is unrelated to the absurdity which we are now subject to.
The invisibility of Bush is the strongest indication that “the party of Reagan” is completely baffled and hiding from the monster that they and Rupert Murdoch created.
What's the point of being Intel CEO if you give up?
He should resign.