Intel Fights for Its Future

Intel has reasons to be worried. They missed several buses, trains and ships and other opportunities. Servers still appear to be secure but with threats from ARM solutions, and AMD.

Windows 7 and Windows 10 have been pretty efficient operating systems. That's great for Microsoft but not Intel. With identical system requirements, it means there's very little reason for most people to upgrade hardware. Me, a supposed high-end PC user am still running a 3rd generation Core i5 processor with no urgent need for upgrading in the near future. Graphics cards are still a once every 2-3 year upgrade for PC games.

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."

I think this article misses the point: Intel has nothing to gain by entering the commodity smartphone processor market. The margins are slim, and therefore doesn't make good use of Intel's advantage in semiconductor fabrication.

Serial performance is important in processors, and as long as Intel is king in this area, they will have a home in server racks and workstations. I keep hearing about how cheap arrays of ARM processors will take over the world, but I'll believe the easy parallel programming unicorn has arrived when I see it. It seems more likely to me that when this is the case, a move to GPUs, FPGAs, or custom accelerator card would make more sense.

agree, even if they sold nothing atall in the smart phone market, all the smart phones of the world still need servers to service the users needs.. and they practically all run on intel or ibm cpus.

In the short run, you are correct. However, by looking at history, it seems that the high-end chip manufacturers always end up being replaced by the low-end manufacturers, as the focus on cheap, small, low-power designs end up providing various strategic advantages (and raw revenue for product development). That's how Intel replaced the various RISC manufacturers in the 90s.

Of course, the field is young enough that this has only happened two or three times, so it may just be a coincidence. Still, I like the thought of ARM chips replacing Intel in ten years, and twenty years later ARM being replaced by whoever currently makes the chips for those musical greeting cards.