Intel Weighed $20 Billion Nvidia Takeover in 2005 (nytimes.com) 29
Intel considered acquiring graphics chip maker Nvidia for up to $20 billion in 2005, a move that could have reshaped the AI industry, according to The New York Times. Then-CEO Paul Otellini pitched the acquisition to Intel's board, recognizing the potential of graphics processors for data center computing. The board rejected the proposal, citing Intel's poor track record with acquisitions and the deal's unprecedented size, the report added. Today, Nvidia dominates the AI chip market with a $3 trillion valuation, while Intel struggles with declining revenue and recent layoffs of 16,000 workers.
At least their board is insightful (Score:5, Insightful)
If Intel had bought Nvidia they would have tanked both companies.
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Sure, this would have been about having an even tighter duopoly over core computer components.
"Intel integrated graphics" wasn't a gamer upsell, and Intel knew it.
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Not necessarily. The fact is, though, in 2005, nobody was doing AI with NVidia chips.
Doesn’t matter. The CEO at the time, saw something there. Something investible.
Now I hope that CEO is retired at home reading this mornings Slashdot post, and having one hell of a laugh. It’s a shame he passed before that happened.
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Comptuer Vision was being done on the GPU back then. The OpenCV library has been around for 20+ years, and it was always the dream to offload some of it from CPU to other hardware like a DSP, GPGPU, or FPGA.
But yeah, CV with Deep Learning to identify the kind of object instead of simply the boundry of an object, didn't show up until around 2012 or so. Some of them accelerated with GPUs shortly after their introduction.
Someone at Intel would have had to predict the path for technology 5-10 years into the fut
Re: At least their board is insightful (Score:2)
Not a whole lot of things beside graphics were done on GPUs in 2005. This was 2 years before CUDA released. So that's still the cg era when getting any kind of gpgpu computation was an amazing feat.
Though I suppose you could possibly do convolutions and color histogram with cleverly designed shaders.
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It was nascent. We were looking into it on the R&D side but it took years to productize. Lots and lots of demos back in the day, and a lot of hand waiving on what parts of CV we could accelerate.
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Sure, AI helped NVidia become a behemoth, but NVidia was no slouch before AI. They had top-notch graphics cards and for the most part won that race against AMD. Then came Bitcoin mining, and finally AI. But I think the point GP is making is valid because of the mindset at Intel. Remember this? [slashdot.org] His main complaint was that the workforce was bloated and had a risk-averse culture. NVidia took many risks to get to where it's been. That's why not only would Intel have folded, it would have taken NVidia dow
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And if I had just... (Score:4, Informative)
Bought pre-iPhone Apple stock or mined a bunch of Bitcoin in the early 2000's....
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Re:And if I had just... (Score:5, Interesting)
Bought pre-iPhone Apple stock or mined a bunch of Bitcoin in the early 2000's....
Umm... bitcoin didn't exist in the early 2000's. I believe it came into existence around 2008/2009.
I actually mined Bitcoin, I think I had something like 1.2 BTC back in 2011, then I lost the wallet. It was worth next to nothing at the time. Now it's enough to buy a nice car.
But the better analogy would have been to talk about BlockBuster not buying Netflix back in the day...
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Umm... bitcoin didn't exist in the early 2000's. I believe it came into existence around 2008/2009.
I actually mined Bitcoin, I think I had something like 1.2 BTC back in 2011, then I lost the wallet. It was worth next to nothing at the time. Now it's enough to buy a nice car.
We're still in the early 2000s, we've only progressed about 2.4 % of the way to 3000. If you want to say "the 00s" then say "the 00s".
I also mined Bitcoin -- 350 BTC on a CPU, and sold it all for less than 10 cents apiece. Good times!
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We're still in the early 2000s, we've only progressed about 2.4 % of the way to 3000. If you want to say "the 00s" then say "the 00s".
I also mined Bitcoin -- 350 BTC on a CPU, and sold it all for less than 10 cents apiece. Good times!
I'll take your trolling and troll back as follows:
When someone says early 2000s they mean the 00s. I have never seen your version, though you may be technically correct (the best kind of correct), I don't believe you are contextually correct. If we take your interpretation, put into context of the original sentence it was used in, it makes no sense. In context, it's clear the author was referring to decade that was from 2000 to 2009.
But that's okay, you sold 350 BTC for $35, the universe has punished yo
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Well... Blockbuster and Intel both had very profitable business models that would have concentrated the lion's share of resources, so there's a reasonable probability that the acquired companies could't have developed in the same way we see them now.
It is extremely hard for established companies to pivot towards innovative business models. And by innovative I don't mean "let's turn this product into a service and charge a monthly fee", but creating/developing markets that didn't exist before.
NVIDIA went to AI because of AMD (Score:5, Informative)
NVIDIA has a history of doing something different every time there is competition. When it was raster performance in games, NVIDIA was in the lead, then AMD showed signs of being competitive, so NVIDIA made ray tracing the focus, then, AMD started to show some competence with ray tracing, so NVIDIA switched direction to AI. If MI350 or 400 turns out to be competitive when it comes to AI performance, NVIDIA will switch directions again.
The Intel board was correct, Intel buys companies like Altera, but then doesn't know what to do with the purchase.
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NVIDIA has a history of doing something different every time there is competition. When it was raster performance in games, NVIDIA was in the lead, then AMD showed signs of being competitive, so NVIDIA made ray tracing the focus, then, AMD started to show some competence with ray tracing, so NVIDIA switched direction to AI. If MI350 or 400 turns out to be competitive when it comes to AI performance, NVIDIA will switch directions again.
Interesting. At first this sounds like someone who can't handle competition, but it also shows the company has a lot of extra cash to throw into R&D. Then again, it sounds like they lack focus — I'd rather invest in a company that does one thing well and continues to do so in the future.
This also reminds me of an earlier post [slashdot.org] on the different strategies of Nvidia vs. AMD. I think it partly explains why hobbyists prefer AMD: they get more raw compute per dollar, and they aren't afraid to get the
Intel is a real "passion fingers" company (Score:3)
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An interesting counterfactual (Score:5, Insightful)
It certainly would *not* be the case that everything else would played out the same - NVidia's increasing dominance in GPUs, then becoming the de-facto for machine learning (CUDA's first stable release wasn't until 2007), then the bedrock of current AI stuff, leading to a $3T market cap - but just with Intel as the owner. Mergers and Acquisitions simply don't work that way.
Poison pill (Score:2)
The rumor at the time was that the requirement is that the CEO of NV becomes the CEO of the merged companies, and Intel wasn't going to do that (who would!).
Lazy Board (Score:2)
> The board rejected the proposal, citing Intel's poor track record with acquisitions
Others have already commented on how nVidia would not be where it is today as part of Intel, but this Board admission is somewhat stunning.
They were dissing their management's skill without doing something about it.
It was only a skunkworks at Intel Israel that dug them out of their P4 Hell with an efficient die-shrink PIII (Core/Core2).
A situation like that is where the Board has a legal responsibility to do something.
No
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It was nothing particular about Intel.
Most companies mismanage mergers and acquisitions.
They have a poor track record everywhere.
It's generally better to grow organically.
Smarter move (Score:2)
Instead of acquiring it, the board members (probably) invested in NVIDIA as individuals.
Tables turned (Score:3)
How long until nVidia weighs taking over Intel?
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