They're throwing money away. Actually, I would be glad if this money was entirely used for research, because Intel and other US companies badly need it. But they will waste it on plants that are already outdated in the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is Intel giving this money to investors directly or indirectly in the form of stock buy backs. And nothing of this would be necessary if Intel had invested their profits in research, instead of sending money to investors to keep the stock price high and, consequently, their executive compensation.
That's actually pretty cool. Chip companies can't complain that Chinese companies are ramping up faster just because of their subsidies anymore. This should level the playing field, hopefully?
The x86 companies (and/intel) do better with competition.<p>I’ve had my last laptops (work/home) with amd and it’s much better battery life and performance then my (9th? Gen) intel notebook with nvidia (the battery life was Terrible but it could game). I think Apple puts a lot of pressure on too, which helps.<p>I guess intels “ultra” notebook parts are better.<p>There is some x86 advisory group now to keep the instruction set in sync between the 2 companies. Linux is involved and is Linus so it should be at least a little fun.
People are comparing intel vs AMD here, but in this context -- AMD doesn't actually <i>make</i> the chips do they? They've designed the chips and other companies such as TSMC make the chips.<p>A chip plant / "fab" is the thing that makes the chips, and the point of the chips act is to bring some of that manufacturing back to north america in case we end up in or watching a big fat war in asia that may impact TSMC or samsung's capacity to make chips.<p>Efficient is a synonym of "brittle" and some important things are better if they're inefficient and robust.
I’m a fairly traditional libertarian but I’ve softened a bit on my definition of “essential industries”. If other countries make essential goods we need, and they become hostile to us or get conquered politically by those hostile to us, in a war we would be in a lot of trouble. We saw a bit of this during COVID when we couldn’t even make basic products.<p>No matter the subsidies they will still lose if their products suck. But we need some minimum ability to build things here if it all goes to hell.
Wonder what the economic benefit of giving away 20K median priced homes would be for the economy versus giving Intel's stockholders an incentive to build the bare minimum in the US.
X86 throws away half its computing power on antivirus bloatware. And what other performance is left is hidden behind opaque instruction caching and look ahead. If they had actually given the end user access to speed, they might have chased speed themselves. As it was, the end user gave up on getting performance out of x86.
I'm just happy as part of this deal they must keep their fab. I believe Intel will be in a good position in the future, we will have a need for a domestic fab! And they are perhaps now going to rock the graphics card scene with their launch of Battlemage gpus!
Sometimes I think they should have just offered this money as startup capital to new ventures. What's the advantage of Intel here versus just going with Intel engineers?
I would prefer some other competitor enters the market. Oh wait Intel killed them before they could be rivals like AMD.<p>- VIA<p>- IBM<p>- Cyrix<p>I mean IBM is around but I doubt they'll touch x86 ever again.
From 2005 to 2020 Intel spent $108B on stock buybacks. 7.2B per year. They also just fired 15,000 workers.<p>Now, we're rewarding them with 7.9B of our taxpayer dollars.<p>This is just disgusting. I'm a liberal, but how are people surprised that Trump won?
This is so disappointing.<p>It reinforces the adge that capitalism is about private profits and socialised losses.<p>Capitalism is about letting failed companies fail. Not propping the up with tax payer money.
This is why Trump wants to repeal the chip act. A company like Intel should not survive in the free market, and now will be propped up by the government while remaining inefficient.