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Intel Fights for Its Future

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Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#41

Post by DocTomoe »

ternaryoperator wrote: post #4

This article makes it seem that being a major player in mobile is the only way Intel could survive. Mobile is a decelerating market, while cloud and servers, where Intel has a huge lead is an expanding market and profitable. In 2017, Intel's revenue hit an all-time high, as it did the year before, and its stock is an all time high. This is not a company "fighting for its future."

They also do not have a product for the server market.

Yes, they have server-oriented processor families. No, after the storm that has been Meltdown/Spectre, none of these processor families are still considered "safe enough", even firmware-related fixes won't cut it there because the profitibality of a data center is calculated with TFLOPS/m^2 in mind.

Even if profitiability was not an issue (=> government), they won't quite cut it, because you really do not want a system that has this big of an vulnerability just sitting around your high-security/high-impact infrastructure. I do know government agencies in my country who - ever since the Meltdown/Spectre information broke - banned the purchase of Intel processors "until further notice".

Intel is in dire straits, and they should be worried.

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#42

Post by hkmurakami »

IshKebab wrote: post #38
aleem wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The headline is definitely sensationalist but there are threats and missed opportunities on Intel's horizon and past. The lure of mobile is the upgrade cycle as those are much shorter. The same, short upgrade cycles were a boon for intel in the hey day of desktops/laptops. The bigger threat the article fails to focus on is ARM. Singularity for apps has always hinged on write-once-run-everywhere. Intel hasn't been abl…

Yeah but the upgrade cycle won't stay short for long, just like it hasn't for desktops. Give it 10 years and people will be keeping their phones until they break. Also anyone can make an ARM CPU so the margins are thin, whereas with x86 CPUs Intel will basically only ever have one competitor - AMD. They want to find another monopoly.

Even today I see an increasing number of friends moving from 2 years cycles to 3 year cycles.

The "killer app" for smartphone refresh rates staying low are (1) battery degradation and (2) forced OS updates for app updates, which in turn slows the phone down to compel an update[1].

[1] I'm actually curious if OS updates slow down older phones these days. This was the case 5 years ago but perhaps things have changed/

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#43

Post by Someone »

oblio wrote: post #35
hawkice wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, that is the response to all 'Why is X acquiring Y?' questions, and it's a terrible answer. M&A is hard to do right -- most fail, and a staggering percent have all the surplus delivered to the seller instead of the buyer. See: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-cor... The real answer would speak to why (Intel thinks) this deal is not like the average, unsuccessful deal, and specifical…

It was just a joke, based on the usual wooden speak of these announcements. I don't know which acquisition is better. I do think that Intel should probably enter the ARM, somehow, just to hedge their bets.

Again (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XScale)? They gave up on that to focus on low power x86 CPUs.

Intel has an architectural license for 32-bit ARM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arm_Holdings#Arm_architectural...), so they could design their own micro-architecture whenever they want to. I don’t know whether they have one for 64-bit ARM, but they have money, so I expect it wouldn’t be difficult to get one.

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#44

Post by imtringued »

melling wrote: post #34
ttul wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. I must say I chuckled a bit when I saw the headline. Intel is still churning out 63% gross margins. On semiconductors. That is exceptional. Intel is not fighting for its life by any stretch of the imagination.

Intel is fine as long as ARM doesn’t compete in their core markets. Then it’s a sudden and violent change. I guess you don’t see ARM attaining parity with x86?

Apple is the only manufacturer that actually produces competitive processors. Qualcomm is lagging behind x86 by at least a factor 2 compared to laptop chips and by factor 6 compared to desktop chips.

On top of that the arm laptops that have been announced were significantly more expensive than an equivalent x86 laptop and the x86 emulation isn't good enough to count on it.

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#45

Post by imtringued »

kev009 wrote: post #12

They are also showing signs of fatigue in the data center space which carries high margins. The underhanded I/O game they are playing is both alienating customers and providing a big opportunity for AMD, IBM, and Arm.

AMD already pushed ARM out of the server market. Low cost, high performance, high IO and x86 compatibility. ARM's only advantage compared to AMD is low standby power consumption.

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#47

Post by bsder »

DocTomoe wrote: post #41
ternaryoperator wrote: post #4

This article makes it seem that being a major player in mobile is the only way Intel could survive. Mobile is a decelerating market, while cloud and servers, where Intel has a huge lead is an expanding market and profitable. In 2017, Intel's revenue hit an all-time high, as it did the year before, and its stock is an all time high. This is not a company "fighting for its future."

They also do not have a product for the server market. Yes, they have server-oriented processor families. No, after the storm that has been Meltdown/Spectre, none of these processor families are still considered "safe enough", even firmware-related fixes won't cut it there because the profitibality of a data center is calculated with TFLOPS/m^2 in mind. Even if profitiability was not an issue (=> government), they wo…

> They also do not have a product for the server market.

And it doesn't matter because NOBODY ELSE DOES EITHER.

Intel is so much bigger than everybody else in the space in terms of volumes, that even if they vaporized tomorrow, it would take a couple years for everybody else to plug the hole.

Intel has quite a lot of runway to fix things.

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#48

Post by pjmlp »

IshKebab wrote: post #38
aleem wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The headline is definitely sensationalist but there are threats and missed opportunities on Intel's horizon and past. The lure of mobile is the upgrade cycle as those are much shorter. The same, short upgrade cycles were a boon for intel in the hey day of desktops/laptops. The bigger threat the article fails to focus on is ARM. Singularity for apps has always hinged on write-once-run-everywhere. Intel hasn't been abl…

Yeah but the upgrade cycle won't stay short for long, just like it hasn't for desktops. Give it 10 years and people will be keeping their phones until they break. Also anyone can make an ARM CPU so the margins are thin, whereas with x86 CPUs Intel will basically only ever have one competitor - AMD. They want to find another monopoly.

In Europe, where most of us use pre-pay without major subsidies, everyone uses them until they break or get stolen.

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#49

Post by baybal2 »

tanilama wrote: post #28
baybal2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except they wouldn't. It took Apple a decade to up their silicon to a level where it is now. For most of that time, their activity was a money sink for them. And even today, even with some of the best talent in IC design one can get in USA (PA Semi and its veteran designers from HP, Sun, Freescale, and whatever else was remaining of American semi industry), their chips are still half outsourced, 70% external IP if yo…

I won't be so certain. An ASIC/FPGA chip that accelerates specific Database operation is already a reality. The problem is the cost effect ratio. BTW, cloud provider already making tons of customized hardware themselves. And talking like Amazon/Google/Microsoft only have talents for web programming is short sighted and simply not sure. https://datacenterfrontier.com/amazon-building-custom-asic-c...

>And talking like Amazon/Google/Microsoft only have talents for web programming is short sighted and simply not sure.

Well, I am saying that they do obviously spend an ennormous effort trying to do so. To better formulate what I said, the fact that they did acquire some hardware/semi expertise in house, does not mean that this expertise drives them as a company.

If tomorrow 2 engineers, one from semi side, and one fromwebdev, will knock at the door of CEO with "I found a way to do things A and B 250 times better, but you have to scrap half of your business plan," a webdev will be heard, and semi guys not.

Btw, the chip Amazon showed, was from a company they acquired solely for that - to not to pay an arm and a leg for high end switching chips.

And about OEM servers - it is surprising that big dotcoms are late comers to the party, and were relying on off the shelf brand hardware to the very last moment.

Big hosting providers from outside of dotcom ecosystems were relying on direct OEM orders and custom built DCs for more than a decade. I do remember selling Atom based single board computers stuffed into U1s and Intel core 2 duo systems with soldered on memory and cpus to budget web hosting guys back when I worked as a trainee in a trade company back in 2007-2009.

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#50

Post by joeblau »

> By declining Steve Jobs’ proposal to make the original iPhone CPU in 2005, Intel missed a huge opportunity.

I'm really intrigued by stories of missed opportunities. Certain companies have all of the power then make a minor miscalculation on the future of technology. Does anyone have similar personal experiences that echo this type of missed opportunity deal?

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