I’d be surprised if any company of any kind ever made a failure rate public willingly.
Take AMD for instance with their segfault-bug. AMD didn't really downplayed that, like Intel has ever done! Even though it really mostly affected Linux.
AMD quite immediately acknowledged the bug, expressively mentioned possible affected batches (Ryzen 1xxx, produced before week 33 in 2017; Intel refuses to acknowledge the actual batches being affected by via-oxidation ever since!), tried to retrieve affected batches back from the channel
and offered to
freely send in a replacement-SKU. They even did so later on and send out free Upgrade-CPUs for when people got a board with older incompatible BIOS, to return the CPU afterwards. Intel never did any of that AFAIK.
Yet it were the media-outlets, which blew the issue totally out of proportion (same as the RX480 wattage-issue) and deliberately harmed the products reputation, when similar things happened before and virtually no-one cared. Media's picturing was outright defamatory, as AMD acknowledged the segfault-bug and replaced given SKUs free of charge.
Might not go that far though but the bad news just keeps coming for Intel.
I know, might come across as mean, but nothing what comes for Intel
isn't well deserved.
Intel now only has to endure exactly that, what they lashed out to consumers and their business-customers already for years to decades.
Though it's literally deserved. Because since decades, the Intel board has worked really,
really hard to antagonize pretty much everybody in the industry and reach that 'goal' to anger pretty much everyone and most of their customers, right?
Not only that, pretty much no other company has been playing this dirty and been so blatantly corrupt in their doings as Intel has been ever since, even GM or GE in their darkest days or Boeing, not even Broadcom hasn't been nearly as cut-throat (and they really try hard on this now). Others are mainly greedy, yet Intel has always been deliberately sh!tty and wilfully wicked, even if they had no need for it.
It's like as if they really just
love being arseholes and have a really hard time getting their act together for being at leat nice once a year (to stop bullying the little sister and smack their little brother just for fun). They're often outright
malicious while others are just merely mischievous. Even Apple can be quite arrogant and spiteful at times, but even they just
know when it's enough and they may anger unnecessarily and start to wreck havoc. Yet Intel worked really hard to be that way from the beginning.
It's just like people sometimes remember being effed over and over again, until blatant hate amounts to rage, deservedly so.
Since whenever Intel has done something awful, they
always made it worse through their actions immediately after and lately literally p!ssed off millions of their own customers by again secretly hiding defects again and shoved broken products into the shelves as if nothing happened.
Never mind being single-handedly responsible for the industry's single-biggest security-flaws they also tried to haven been swept under the rug for the better part of a year. They really have no-one but themselves to blame.
Also, that German
schadenfreude is
not to wish ill intent onto someone but the exact contrary:
Schadenfreude is the mere glee over
someone else who has been really awful for a long time and somehow always got away with it – until he finally gets his karma. Schadenfreude is merely joy of justice being finally served towards the
right (or rather bad) one.
Also, if anyone has damaged their reputation, it weren't their nay-sayers but
Intel in and of itself first and foremost.
The laugh is always on the loser.
Since Intel has torpedoed their own credibility for decades in finest salami tactics by always admitting bit by bit to what was already known and undisputable anyway and especially when it comes to nodes, processes, yields and general Chip'nStuff in the Foundry-site of things, they've basically tarnished their own trustworthiness with every statement of theirs – Always backpedaling, declare old road-maps as obsolete and issue new changed ones and shifting the goals, twisting words and refuting 'bad rumours' within hours on Twitter (only to later reveal, that these were in fact accurate, by the time these were made) and constantly re-issue new plans all of a sudden, as soon as something was about to be due, and their never-ending delays en masse, of course.
You can only fool for so long, until all believability is lost and people start making their own assumptions – If the former then plausibility-based thought-of future happenings even begin to render more likely to be true in the end, you're basically finished …
Talking about dangerously lethal cuts and self-inflicted wounds being tried to stop from bleeding with vigorously salted patches, while 'em trying to heal … and then wonder why it takes so long and the debt holders alongside the official bailiffs are come knocking.
You really just can't make up their stupid, they have to constantly display it instead.
That being said, there
had to be a blatant sudden fall-out some day in the future to begin with from day one … Since they never ever came clean.
Intel's management wilfully passed up every chance for the truth, deliberately rejected every given opportunity to acknowledge delaying defects and refused to straighten things out with their investors and the public about their manufacturing-issues and publicly confess and acknowledge their former shady secrets for years to come.
They never wanted to put their cards on the table, despite being caught with their trousers down more than once. People called their bluff since years.
Now the sheriffs arrived, try to calm the enraged crowd and forces Intel at gunpoint to clear their pockets and leave them with their pockets turned inside out for good …
Let's hope the criminals get thrown into jail for more than a few nights.
All I can say is bad decisions usually have bad consequences.
It's not only that
bad decisions have
bad consequences –
Every decision has consequences after all, and you can't run away from it.
Take their handling of the shortage
before the bug, which Intel's board used to enrich themselves with when everyone had to buy Intel's CPUs due their HT and cluster-F of security-flaws. It's purely outraging, how utterly disgusting Intel handled all this and even increased their price-tags for the given SKUs in high demand partially by 2× when everyone was in short of CPUs and demand was sky-high, instead of giving at least rebates for the eff-ups Intel caused them in the first place.
Let's
not forget how shady Intel played them and what their fall-out was at hyperscalers and the enterprise in general over Intel's Meltdown, Spectre, Foreshadow and alike and when their broken Hyper-Threading additionally resulted in the installed computing-power to be basically halved overnight!
What did Intel do? Intel didn't cut price-tags, at least not immediately –
They did the exact opposite! Intel
increased their price-tags for some huge short-term profits, only to kill their own customer-base in the long run. These operators and hyperscalers and the business operating these CPUs on any larger scale, had to basically order the same amount of CPUs again (after HT had to be deactivated from one day to the other, due to excessive security-threats, especially on anything virtualized).
That's the worst part, Intel didn't even really
cut prices or slash their bill as a short-term solution – Intel was even stupid enough to
increase their Xeon price-tags IIRC by like 2-3× for Cooper/Ice/Cascade Lake, when the self-inflicted shortages in 2018-2019 hit and enterprise needed to double down on Intel cores for their security-flaws, broken HT (making it necessary to buy the same amount of compute-power, broken HT halved the cores overnight) and whatnot.
They where too sure their standing weren't really affected by it in the long run and that their brand would be still strong at enterprise customers, since
“Nobody got fired for buying IBM Intel!”, right? Intel as always was so sure of themselves and just thought that a few rebates here and there would make it – That their OEMs would do the rest, all the while listening to “With a little help from my friends” …
Yet later on, when pretty much no-one was buying Intel-stuff anymore and was replacing Intel's Xeons with AMD's Epyc,
then they slashed price-tags suddenly by a lot on top off huge rebates, since they just
had to by then, to even merely compete. Though the damage was already done at customers …
Stupid enough, Intel declared the utter revenue-increases during the shortages as
a new base-line and was propagating it as
the 'new normal', with their insanely profitable shortages even before the bug hit (which Intel somehow couldn't really participate from …). It was so daft and dangerous for Intel to even state that, it backfired hard – The shortage and bug only saved them time.
Well, turned out all the Big Business remembered and took whatever toll and shouldered however costs, to make darn sure, that they're never again in a position to be so painstakingly exploited by a single monopoly-holding company. That company was Intel. Since it p!ssed of a lot of their (enterprise-) customers, who made sure, that they won't ever be any dependent on Intel in the first place – Hence the following run on everything ARM.
Now, these companies are never again even consider Intel as a viable option in the first place. Not because x86 is bad (or AMD64/x86_64 for that matter), but they're basically done with being robbed by Intel for decades … Now Intel has lost each and everyone of them as a client, forever. As these former Intel-customers would rather take Amazon's AWS, AMD's Epyc or Ampere's Altra/Max or anything else (or even develop their own silicon), than ever again take anything Intel.
Yet
now they're 'somehow' in trouble with profit-declines in datacenter, which where more than once +99%↓. As if no-one could've seen the results of it…
Now they're 'suddenly' in trouble … Among else, since they couldn't resist to eff it all up, by
getting greedy at the single-worst time in their history and even milked their crying customers after having their Intel-labeled stuff basically go haywire overnight. Yet instead of at least showing some gratitude and humbleness for NOT being replaced by competitors at customers after their countless eff-ups, they f—ed customers over even
harder.
So here they are, having major revenue-declines, profit outright collapsing in datacenter and being tight on money.
Luckily, no-one on God's green earth saw that coming from aeons away, how
that could possibly happen to blow up in their face!
