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Intel Fights for Its Future

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11–20 of 198 posts

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#11
post #6

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…

So why are they considering acquiring Broadcom?

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#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.

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#13

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 h…

I can't speak for Win10, but back in the 7 days, you'd be batty to buy an AMD PC. They had a high flake value and I'm not really sure if the average PC user ever changed their mind on that.

It seems to me that most people would do a bit of research, see that Intel is still destroying AMD on speed tests, or they go to Best Buy and see a load of Intel stickers. The sales person will rightly or wrongly tell the customer that Intel is better, and so on.

The main point is that mot people are not power users or knowledgeable about computers. That's why you can read reviews online about how Dell is horrible because "it catches viruses."

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#14

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."

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.

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#16
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.

>The underhanded I/O game they are playing

Can you please elaborate on this?

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#17
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.

>The underhanded I/O game they are playing Can you please elaborate on this?

They are extremely stingy on the PCIe lane counts to limit the usefulness of GPU coprocessors. They've also pretty much ignored PCIe v4.

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#18

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."

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 able to compete with ARM lately and it seems that ARM is moving into Intel's turf. A few months back Microsoft launched windows 10 on ARM -- that's an inflection point. Apple relatively recent iPad Pro also continues to blur the lines along with other initiatives around app continuity (Mac/iOS) or the Nintendo Switch's hardware continuity that offers a glimpse into what the same thing could look like for mobile in general.

It's not for Intel's lack of trying either. It's just that ARM got off to a good start while Intel failed to make in-roads with Atom and whatever else.

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#19
post #6

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…

So why are they considering acquiring Broadcom?

To leverage their synergies.

Re: Intel Fights for Its Future

#20

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."

But as cloud service provider grow stronger, they will begin to make their own chips, like TPU. That is a much bigger threat to Intel. Essentially, as Moore's law is effectively put into an end, people will seek to make their own customized chips, CPU will be marginalized as time goes by.
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