Intel Fights for Its Future

Yes And I guess only time will tell. If we travel back in time, and told Paul Otellini that Apple is going to make 100 to 200M chip a year with Intel, going for prices less then $30 per unit. Would Otellini have said yes? For some reason I doubt it. When there was no transformation of Smartphone to the industry, and saw importance of PC shrinks in his own eyes.

Purely looking at those numbers. For the same amount of transistor @$30, Intel were selling those at anywhere between $80 to $300. Not to mention Intel has to invest in Fabs just for Apple as 100 - 200M is no small numbers.

Intel cares about its margin, and its profitability. Sometimes we argue we should do things at lower margin to avoid the risk of being wiped out. Sometimes vice versa.

I am not entirely sure what Intel's exec were thinking, they were possibly driven out of Apple and Mobile decision because of fear of shareholders protest at lowering margins, and driven back to Mobile precisely because of shareholders.

And not only is Intel late to Mobile. They were late to GPU as well, and GPGPU in general. We are now looking at 2020 before an dGPU from Intel is out.

Basically Intel hasn't been innovating for a few years. And may be they haven't been to war for a long time. They loses the sense of danger. May be they were typical Silicon Valley's optimist where everything is going to be fine.

Which strangely is different to Andy Grove, only paranoid survives.

But then I dont see x86 ever lose out in PC or Datacenter Market. Right now the biggest threat is AMD, and that is not an existential threat.

I also dont see how Broadcom and Qualcomm merge would be an existential threat to Intel. Apple might not use Intel's modem, but that is not exactly a problem. Intel needed some customers to use its product so it could at least cover the R&D cost of modem, which is getting insanely complicated. And Mobile Network has already reached an inflection point where Modem aren't going to get the rapid development and improvement as we had in the last 10 years.

With iPhone, we manage to move from End of 2G to 3G to 4G and now to 5G. All within 10 years. We have reached a stage where Top Speed no longer sales. Market wants more data, or higher capacity rather then unattainable top 1Gbps speed. We have Massive MIMO and LAA, and in the next 5 years we will see anywhere from 4x to 20x capacity improvement, along with better reception. All these improvement are now bottlenecked by Carrier upgrading their sites, assuming we have a steady rate of mobile phones upgrade.

Intel has a clear market of 1.5 Billion PC to upgrade to, while not everyone will be upgrading their PC with Modem. It is by no means a small market. And Apple has their own W2 with 802.11n and Bluetooth 4.1. It is only a matter of time before they have their own 802.11ac and Bluetooth 5, as well as possible 802.11ax. All these are currently coming from Broadcom. I am much more worried about Broadcom then Intel.

I've been doing a variant of the 3 year cycle: buy a year old model (e.g. I bought an S7 just after the S8 came out), and then keep it for 2 years (it's even possible I'll be able to keep this one longer. It's not feeling slow yet).

Advantage is that you buy for half the price of a new flagship.

I am surprised at the under-reporting of this issue. We are literally on the brink of a serious chip technology stagnation which could cause a dead stop to moore's law and very few people are concerned.

The Intel CPUs were performance-competitive with the SD8xx chips at the time but most of the newer zenfones use slower SD6xx chips.

My experience with the Zenfone 2 was not very positive though. It seems to have been more Asus's fault than Intel's, but also Intel could have done a better job with their kernel. Yes the CPU was fast relative to its price (because Intel was dumping them) but almost everything else about it was not very good. Battery life was poor, seemingly because Intel never got core parking to work in their Android kernel (I also owned a Lenovo Atom tablet which had the exact same problem so I'm going to blame Intel here). Most apps ran pretty fast but anything with ARM binaries ran very slowly in emulation or in a few cases didn't work at all. ASUS's Android skin was terrible and had an obscene amount of preinstalled bloatware. There were loads of bugs, and installing updates was always a guessing game of whether it improved things or made it even worse. Sometimes GPS wouldn't work. The Marshmallow update was both extremely late and extremely buggy. The plastic back started developing cracks after about a year without ever dropping it.

The ability to run windows software in either Wine or a VM was a rather cool-but-useless novelty.

Has Intel experienced some kind of strategic brain drain in the past 5 years? I remember a professor telling me in the late 90's about how RISC wasn't going to dominate the future, because Intel had a roadmap going well into the 2000's specifying how they were going to stay ahead. Now, it looks like AMD has the strategic upper hand.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucMQermB9wQ