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Intel has never been a company focused on chip volume, they chose to exit the DRAM business 20+ years ago. They focus on high end high margin products, which i

Intel has never been a company focused on chip volume, they chose to exit the DRAM business 20+ years ago. They focus on high end high margin products, which is now primarily servers with the contraction of the PC market. This is how they justify greater than $10B yearly expenditures on fabs and R+D. They have maintained, and still do maintain a 2 generation lead on process technology. Alternate architectures are not going to do much to dent the two generation lead in process. IoT and Wearables mean nothing to Intel, there is not enough money there. Mostly a marketing effort to signal to their investors they aren't going to miss the next big opportunity like they did mobile. Of course that ignores the fact that Intel was never going to be much of a player in mobile. All the money in mobile is in the base stations, not in the handsets, and Qualcomm (3rd largest semi conductor company behind Intel and Samsung) completely dominates the IP in that market. What matters there is radio technology, not microprocessors.

roymurdock 10y ago
> IoT and Wearables mean nothing to Intel, there is not enough money there Wearables maybe, as the market is relatively small as form factor-defined markets go, but I wouldn't be so quick to write off IoT, which describes a business model change more than a certain form factor or set of devices. I listened to Murthy Renduchintala, President of the Intel IoTG group, speak at GE Minds+Machines earlier this week. He stressed FPGAs (acquisition of Altera) as well as SDN/NFV as key areas of interest for Intel going forward.
- mattthebaker 10y ago
  This is considering IoT from a semiconductor company's perspective; There will not be much revenue from the chips for this market. How much can they make per smart light bulb? You also have to note that Intel doesn't have semiconductor IP for nearly any radio protocol (BT, BTLE, Zigbee, they have wifi but not low end) necessary to build SoCs to win those markets. IoT will be a big market, but the profits won't be going primarily to the semiconductor companies via chip sales. We won't likely see an "Intel Cloud Platform" or Intel selling IoT deployment services. The FPGA tech is interesting, but mostly irrelevant to IoT. FPGAs can really benefit from Intels leading edge manufacturing, so that is a smart acquisition (even before considering IA integration possibilities). Intel does not have much of a presence in networking, and there are a lot of competitors there who are more invested, and further, design their own silicon (Cisco, Juniper, Huawei, brocade maybe). Maybe if they are able to productize the silicon (as opposed to more exotic materials) optical transceivers they have spent a ton researching they would have something huge here.
ksec 10y ago
And because of that, TSMC grows into the largest Pure Play company with market cap surpass Intel, and TSMC still has room to grow. PC market is shrinking, their Server market is healthy for now but if Zen is anything as decent as rumoured it will give Intel some competition. I dont believe ARM or PowerPC will give much trouble for Intel, at least not in the short run of 3 - 4 years time. Pretty much like Intel dont have much IP in mobile, no one will have the similar Server / Enterprise Grade IP in Storage, PCI-E, Memory, Networking and FPGA as Intel. All these matters a lot more then x86 these days. I am not sure where the 2 Generation lead came from. It is more of a Generation lead. And it is shrinking, mainly due to Intel slowing down and other picking up pace a little. The 10nm from Samsung and TSMC next year wont be anything as good as Intel's 14nm. But their 7nm in 2018 will be better then Intel 14nm+. Of coz Intel will have 10nm by then, but it will be much smaller volume.
nl 10y ago
All the money in mobile is in the base stations, not in the handsets, and Qualcomm (3rd largest semi conductor company behind Intel and Samsung) completely dominates the IP in that market. Citation needed. From the second half of your comment, I think it's possible you are confusing the base band processor[1] with base stations. Qualcomm does have a lot of IP in baseband processors, and has made a lot of money from them. However, baseband processors are on the handset not the base station. It's also incorrect to think that mobile CPUs aren't a large market. They aren't Intel size, but they are quite substantial. The majority of Qualcomm's revenue is from CPU sales[2] (although SoCs like the Snapdragon include the baseband processor on the same chip) [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseband_processor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseband_processor [2] http://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/031116/qualcomms-3-most-profitable-lines-business-qcom.asp http://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/031116/qualcomm...

roymurdock 10y ago

> IoT and Wearables mean nothing to Intel, there is not enough money there Wearables maybe, as the market is relatively small as form factor-defined markets go, but I wouldn't be so quick to write off IoT, which describes a business model change more than a certain form factor or set of devices. I listened to Murthy Renduchintala, President of the Intel IoTG group, speak at GE Minds+Machines earlier this week. He stressed FPGAs (acquisition of Altera) as well as SDN/NFV as key areas of interest for Intel going forward.

mattthebaker 10y ago
This is considering IoT from a semiconductor company's perspective; There will not be much revenue from the chips for this market. How much can they make per smart light bulb? You also have to note that Intel doesn't have semiconductor IP for nearly any radio protocol (BT, BTLE, Zigbee, they have wifi but not low end) necessary to build SoCs to win those markets. IoT will be a big market, but the profits won't be going primarily to the semiconductor companies via chip sales. We won't likely see an "Intel Cloud Platform" or Intel selling IoT deployment services. The FPGA tech is interesting, but mostly irrelevant to IoT. FPGAs can really benefit from Intels leading edge manufacturing, so that is a smart acquisition (even before considering IA integration possibilities). Intel does not have much of a presence in networking, and there are a lot of competitors there who are more invested, and further, design their own silicon (Cisco, Juniper, Huawei, brocade maybe). Maybe if they are able to productize the silicon (as opposed to more exotic materials) optical transceivers they have spent a ton researching they would have something huge here.

ksec 10y ago

And because of that, TSMC grows into the largest Pure Play company with market cap surpass Intel, and TSMC still has room to grow. PC market is shrinking, their Server market is healthy for now but if Zen is anything as decent as rumoured it will give Intel some competition. I dont believe ARM or PowerPC will give much trouble for Intel, at least not in the short run of 3 - 4 years time. Pretty much like Intel dont have much IP in mobile, no one will have the similar Server / Enterprise Grade IP in Storage, PCI-E, Memory, Networking and FPGA as Intel. All these matters a lot more then x86 these days. I am not sure where the 2 Generation lead came from. It is more of a Generation lead. And it is shrinking, mainly due to Intel slowing down and other picking up pace a little. The 10nm from Samsung and TSMC next year wont be anything as good as Intel's 14nm. But their 7nm in 2018 will be better then Intel 14nm+. Of coz Intel will have 10nm by then, but it will be much smaller volume.

nl 10y ago

All the money in mobile is in the base stations, not in the handsets, and Qualcomm (3rd largest semi conductor company behind Intel and Samsung) completely dominates the IP in that market. Citation needed. From the second half of your comment, I think it's possible you are confusing the base band processor[1] with base stations. Qualcomm does have a lot of IP in baseband processors, and has made a lot of money from them. However, baseband processors are on the handset not the base station. It's also incorrect to think that mobile CPUs aren't a large market. They aren't Intel size, but they are quite substantial. The majority of Qualcomm's revenue is from CPU sales[2] (although SoCs like the Snapdragon include the baseband processor on the same chip) [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseband_processor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseband_processor [2] http://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/031116/qualcomms-3-most-profitable-lines-business-qcom.asp http://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/031116/qualcomm...