Pro-conservative discussions
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There are certainly aspects of a planned economy, which I think is a more accurate way of describing it without calling it socialist.
Protectionism and government ownership of strategic economic assets all make sense, and they are certainly not capitalist in nature.
I support these policies, by the way. They seem necessary.
I also wish that the left was more open to the fact that right wing populism should be cooperated with on some fiscal issues, if only in a limited capacity.
Planned economies are not efficient. The problem is using money to prop up a failing company. Why does a failing company get propped up while others who have better products get less help? This is anti-meritocratic, and would be considered corrupt, as we see it in other economies. Intel is not strategic, it is a failing company with inferior products with NVIDIA, and AMD gaining market share. TSMC is a Taiwanese company, not a Chinese company. Taiwan is not a rival, and certainly not a peer competitor. If anything, Taiwan has been instrumental in the US economy, which is why Biden passed economic incentives to onshore TSMC production in Arizona. Capitalism is the survival of the fittest, the prosperity of the best. Propping up Intel is neither strategic nor economically sound. It seems that Trump is responding by his nationalistic impulses than thinking things through.
I think this is all really complicated, though. We have to also consider that most countries practice protectionism and have subsidies and other benefits given to their companies to try to enable them to gain some kind of competitive edge. This is not only because they want to profit from the hard cash inflow of successful industry and major commercial endeavors, but also simply because of the fact that they benefit very much from having greater amounts of their people employed.
One of the ironies about this, too, is how a lot of formerly Communist/Socialist states benefited immensely from their period under a planned economy by having a centralized force bring in the industry and infrastructure necessary to have a superior private market.
I am not saying Capitalism is wrong, per se, I think their descriptions of the free market are generally good... I am just saying that socialism actually also makes a lot of sense for the developing world and for nations that do not have the edge to be competitive internationally.
That's why you see it everywhere and there really is no such thing as a 'free market,' and so designing your economy around a free market is just shooting yourself in the foot.
State corporations exist in Western countries, and Western governments do focus stimulus on industry-wide sectors of the economy, and subsidize research of novel technologies, but that is different from owning a stake in a private company, and dictating what it should do. Donald Trump knows nothing about semiconductors, or computers. There is a reason why market economies are more efficient, because the bureaucrats back off knowing they have no expertise in anything. Donald Trump has the instincts of a dictator of a planned economy, in that he wants to force things, instead of conceding to reality. This is why planned economies are very inefficient or how planned regimes created famine, because they wanted to force the economy into something it is not.
I’m glad we’re nationalizing companies that would benefit from competition and privatizing those that can’t.
Intel is losing to competition. Other companies produce better chips.
Intels problems are self defeating inflicted. That’s why Intel keeps losing
Intel has a good process and good-enough packaging tech. They have good IP to combine.
They have all the pieces they need to be alright if they can just stop the internal corporate Game of Thrones, and stop footgunning themselves.
I’m no expert, but it seems like their fab and design have lagged.
Yes, they have. They are late.
But 18A and 14A are still fine, considering the capacity shortages everyone’s facing.
In terms of designs, Arc is good, the small cores are good, the big cores are… not as good, but fine as long as they aren’t clocked to the moon. They canceled a lot of stuff like Gaudi and Xe HPC, but that’s water under the bridge now.
Drivers are getting there. The compute stack is still a fragmented mess but consolidating some.
I think rapidly “server” is becoming GPU and “user” is becoming power-efficient (but still fast) Arm chips.
I wouldn’t want to go down with the Xeon and desktop/laptop ship.
I know how critical I sound and there’s a case for Intel to make sensitive (read: defense) chips domestically, but they need a good kick in the pants, not sweetheart deals.
On the contrary, I think inference is going on-device more in the future, but ‘users’ will still need decent CPUs and GPUs. Intel is well set up for this: they have good CPU, GPU, and NPU IP.
Intel can go ARM if they want, no problem, just like AMD can (and almost tried). They could theoretically preserve most of their core design and still switch ISA.
Servers will still need CPUs for a long time.
As for GPU compute, we are both in a bubble, and at several forks in the road:
Is bitnet ML going to take off? If it does, that shifts the advantage to almost cyptominer-like ASICs, as expensive matrix multiplication no longer matters for inference.
Otherwise, what about NPUs? Huawei is already using them, and even training good production models with them. Intel can try their hand at this game again if loads start shifting away from CUDA.
Otherwise, they still have a decent shot at the CUDA ecosystem via ZLUDA and their own frameworks. Training and research will probably forever be Nvidia (and some niches like Cerebra’s), but still.
Maybe I’ve been in a silo but I’ve never heard “intel” and “npu” in the same breath.
Because it's only used for crappy copilot stuff right now, heh.
But technically the Gaudi 2 processors they bought and developed are server 'NPUs'. Last I heard, they're putting them on ice, but they may have integrated the tech into laptop processors anyway, and could scale it back up if Huawei's NPUs take off.
We aren’t. They bought shares in the company with chip money. This isn’t nationalizing a company. Obama did the same thing with bailout money. It’s how we secure the loan.