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Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

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Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#111
post #50

I find it kind of amazing that Intel haven't found a way to profit during the global chip shortage. Look at food and energy over the past year or so: supermarket and oil & gas companies are posting record profits. They are riding the wave of price rises and supply constraints. What's different about CPUs?

They missed the boat on 2 biggest growth areas: ARM (mobile) & GPU (gaming, crypto, AI), and screwed up x86 (AMD made some better chips / Apple walked away).

Screwing 1 of those up is a problem, screwing up all 3 simultaneously is near-bankrupting.

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#112
post #2

hard to feel sorry for Intel here they're still tied to Windows which is increasingly weaker and more rotted over time, losing market share every year for a decade (Microsoft doesn't even seem to care afaict) the Apple M1 laptop is an incredible value, offers 10x the performance the average person will need, with good battery life, a better OS/ecosystem...and its priced right! Intel needs to seriously look at Linux..…

> losing market share every year for a decade (Microsoft doesn't even seem to care afaict) Of course they care. Windows, at one point, had 95% market share. Do you believe that to be sustainable? Do we want that? No, in both cases. They are still dominant in desktop computing. > offers 10x the performance the average person will need Why is buying something 10x more powerful than you'd need at 2x the price "good valu…

> You should have a look at Windows' desktop market share and get back to us. They still own the space.

Who buys desktops anymore? Sure, it’s a market, but not the one it used to be.

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#113
post #16

Only the paranoid survive [1] I don't think Intel passed Andy Grove's wisdom to the organization. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove

It seems they may be at an inflection point where they should move away from x86 and create the next big thing. Pretty much what Grove describes in his book.

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 5 years Because Apple will forcibly kill it after that with incompatible software updates. Windows machines keep going until they physically break. But what everyone here is missing is that the consumer desktop/laptop market is dying itself. Soon it will only be for enterprise uses and gaming. Most people do all their computing through a phone or tablet. I know people who don't own a laptop.

I'm not sure "forcibly kill" is the adjective/verb I would have used. I have plenty of older Macs still running older versions of Mac OS. In some ways I kind of prefer them (because I still like the older Mac OSes). Maybe this is more of an indictment rather than a defense of Apple, but one machine I keep on an OS that's over 5 years old because it has the one version of Apple's Photos that didn't yet screw up the re…

*adverb/verb

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#116
Intel and Google share surprisingly similar problems: an almost pathological inability to grow lines of business with new products because they kill them off too early. In Intel's case, it's even worse, they kill them off right before the market would have made them successful. They should own the "things with semiconductors" market, but instead financially engineered their way to focus only on higher profit core chip business which was good for the short term but has proved to be a festering cancer over the long.

Because of this approach they divested out of the memory business -- which has kept them out of the growing solid state business, screwed around with Optane, lost their modem business, have lost the GPU business at least once (who knows if they'll keep doing the ARC GPUs so maybe it'll increment up again), ARM chips, and numerous other bits and pieces over the years. Now they're losing their core business too and have nothing else to really grow and focus on.

Each of these is a multi-billion dollar market with core providers who dominate the market: Samsung, Broadcom, Nvidia, etc.

Now they're going to start selling off the bones of their business to compete with TSMC, a company with actual focus.

Once that goes away, what? Intel will contract TSMC to make their chips? I can see a financially focused MBA-type executive team seeing that as a way to eliminate expensive Fab R&D, construction and OEM liabilities -- put it on somebody else to deal with that!

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#117
post #2

hard to feel sorry for Intel here they're still tied to Windows which is increasingly weaker and more rotted over time, losing market share every year for a decade (Microsoft doesn't even seem to care afaict) the Apple M1 laptop is an incredible value, offers 10x the performance the average person will need, with good battery life, a better OS/ecosystem...and its priced right! Intel needs to seriously look at Linux..…

> losing market share every year for a decade (Microsoft doesn't even seem to care afaict) Of course they care. Windows, at one point, had 95% market share. Do you believe that to be sustainable? Do we want that? No, in both cases. They are still dominant in desktop computing. > offers 10x the performance the average person will need Why is buying something 10x more powerful than you'd need at 2x the price "good valu…

I think normal people (ie non-developers) are less concerned about the performance, as the battery life and the need to almost never need a fan (and keep it on your lap comfortably).

You can commonly find Macbook Airs at $800, and I doubt many are buying sub-$400 laptops, unless they are going with low-end Chromebooks, in which the Chromebook vs Windows is a reverse spin on whether consumers are overpaying vs what they really need.

Dropping from 95% to 57%, I don't think it's unreasonable that a time will come when Windows no longer has a majority.

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "niche" market is corporate and gouv. These industries won't buy macs as they are too expensive to maintain and to integrate into their existing active directory domains. (With a few exceptions for jobs where the Mac is the optimal device like graphic design) No idea about percentage but windows won't disappear soon from those. The android market share is mainly mobile devices and Microsoft gave that market up a…

(Not sure if your last sentence was a joke meant to undermine your argument preceding it? Maybe by mainframe though you're referring to servers.) I generally agree with your point though but I am seeing that as more and more of office work moves to living within a web browser, it is becoming more hardware agnostic.

Mainframes don't get that much recognition outside of the niche they occupy, but they really aren't going anywhere.

Re: Intel posts largest loss in its history as sales plunge

#119
post #50

I find it kind of amazing that Intel haven't found a way to profit during the global chip shortage. Look at food and energy over the past year or so: supermarket and oil & gas companies are posting record profits. They are riding the wave of price rises and supply constraints. What's different about CPUs?

CPUs are made on cutting-edge processes, the chip shortage was about jellybean or specialty chips made on very different (generally older) processes.
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