this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2025
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If Broadcom takes over Intel, get ready for a wild ride and don't expect any kind of innovation ever again. If there ever was a backdoor in Intel CPUs, expect it to be opened up and used for licensing extortion. (That seems far fetched until you realize how fucking shady Broadcom is.)
While I shifted to the AMD bandwagon a while ago, I really wanted Intel's GPUs to develop more over the next decade and split the market up a bit more. Sigh.
I'm in the industry but don't know much about broadcom. What makes you say that?
It's just how their past takeovers went. Like Symantec oder VMware.
Broadcom is a scavenger predator
The scavenger predator formerly known as Avago Technologies Limited currently wears Broadcom as a skinsuit to disguise hostile takeovers as normal tech mergers.
came to the comments to say this 100%
Ugh, Broadcom buying Intel would be terrible.
It would be the signal that Intel is on life support, and the world can move to ARM or RISC V
the world can ~~move to~~ start to crawl towards ARM or RISC V
There is also AMD and they are doing pretty well. I wouldn't write off x86 just yet. But less competition is never a good thing, and Broadcom buying another company has never resulted in anything good, as far as I can tell. For anyone except Broadcom themselves.
The cross licensing deal between AMD & Intel collapses if one gets bought out. Here is an old article that's probably still accurate that describes it. (Has some great quotes that have not aged well....)
If that's still true, a buyout might end up killing x86/x64 in favour of arm etc.
I also don't think trump would agree without relocating TSMCs HQ to the US or something. Competition is good anyway, we really don't want to be in a situation where there is only one fab company with anywhere near too tech.
ITT people are rightly pointing out that Broadcom would suck, but TSMC would also be a disaster. The world’s most critical fabs would be owned by one Taiwanese company, and building a competitor would be damn near impossible.
Chips from AMD, Intel, Apple, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Broadcom, etc would all come from one company. Yikes.
Probably just investor activists floating the idea to test the water. They've been wanting to sell Intel for parts since the bad quarter and Pat (former CEO) being evicted is part of this plan.
IMHO, the old CEO kind of got a raw deal. He was right. To save intel, they need invest in fabs, not grow for a bit, and eventually separate the manufacturing and design businesses into two separate, unrelated companies. But investors want growth and money now, they don’t want to play the role of venture capital for a legacy company that needs to transform.
TSMC was able to advance its fabs because they have high volume from everyone that isn’t Intel. Intel’s fabs primarily make Intel stuff because they can’t get other clients. Other clients don’t manufacture with Intel because Intel’s design department can copy their homework. Intel needs to invest heavily into fabs, then split in two. If that doesn’t happen, chip manufacturing in the US is toast.