15 ms·

I'm calling it, Intel is going to be a shadow of it's former self in 5 years. They have had tremendous issues competing in almost anything outside of x86 proces

I'm calling it, Intel is going to be a shadow of it's former self in 5 years. They have had tremendous issues competing in almost anything outside of x86 processors over their entire lifespan. They consistently get outmanuevered in gpus, ssds, low power socs, machine learning, et cetera. The x86 platform that they currently own, is mostly due to intertia and fab facility advantages. AMD, was able to launch a pretty competitive CPU despite massive delays because Intel has barely improved the ipc of their processors over the last 5 years. Meanwhile Apple is betting on iPads being the future computer of the Everyman and they make their own chips. Microsoft recently acknowledged that windows basically has to run on arm for the future proofing of their platform. I guarantee you start seeing more arm based windows computers soon. Intel recently told everyone they're willing to sue for patent money, the last desperate act. Intel better have a leapfrog cpu in the pipeline or it's over.

deepnotderp 9y ago
Absolutely, and now with the twilight phase of Moore's Law, Intel can't run away to its superior process technology to avoid innovation in microarchitecture.
- sqeaky 9y ago
  Moore's law has already ended like 15 times. I will wait to use that in my predictions of the future only have AMD and others have tried and failed.
  - deepnotderp 9y ago
    Not true, Dennard scaling has actually died since around ~40-28nm, which is already causing visible trouble for Intel, especially in the server region.
Twirrim 9y ago
Intel has been "dead" before. AMD has "beaten it" before. AMD knocked it out of the park with x86_64, which allowed a seamless transition to 64bit. Intel ended up having to license x86_64 implementation from AMD. AMD beat Intel with their K6 and similar series of chips where, just like this time around, they were able to get way more performance per tick out of the CPU. Intel was supposedly dead in the water due to their toaster era P4 chips that ran hot as hell, and consumed way more power to get the same job done. AMD started making some serious inroads in the server CPU market with early era Opteron processors. Following that era, out came Centrino era of mobile processors, which took a different approach to the CPU architecture from the P4 and set things up for the Core2Duo etc series of processors and on in to the i7s and the like. I'm highly skeptical that Intel is any more dead now than it was then. It has a track record of going away and completely changing the whole story all over again, and they've got the financial resources to keep on doing so.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  While true, open source, mobile OSes and IoT wave were less relevant when those situations happened. Nowadays it seems they will get cornered on desktop and server CPUs, unless they happen to buy ARM licenses or try to re-invent CPUs with builtin FPGAs.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - Twirrim 9y ago
    Intel already has ARM licenses. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-16/intel-licenses-arm-technology-in-move-to-boost-foundry-business https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-16/intel-lic...
- nolok 9y ago
  False similarity; as the EU case showed that the reason Intel remained on top then was because they pressured everyone, from OEM to hosting providers against going AMD. I doubt they have the clout to pull that one again, especially when you consider how the courts would react to them doing it again.
- c0nfused 9y ago
  Don't forget that whole illegally strong arming manufacturers at the same time centrino came out. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v._Intel_Corp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc.....
- nickpeterson 9y ago
  Also keep in mind, the Pentium M was sort of a random bush project that ended up being at the right time. Basically, it was a revert to the Pentium 3 style of doing things designed by an intel team in Israel to compete in mobile. I'm not convinced Intel is going to be so fortunate again.
  - dkhenry 9y ago
monkmartinez 9y ago
The inertia and fab facility advantages you mention could keep them afloat longer than you might imagine. I agree with many of your points but they, Intel, are not chock full of idiots. There is a lot that can happen in 5 years... I would think very hard about betting significant money against them.
Spooky23 9y ago
I was surprised with SSD. I've done a few large buys and most of the SSDs were Samsung parts. Intel used to always win those with marketing subsidy.
- jandrese 9y ago
  Intel had a superior product with the Gen 1 SSDs, back when the competitors were mostly shipping with buggy controllers that would randomly brick or have hideous performance issues. Intel never followed up on their SSD controllers for the second generation though, and instead just bought the same chips everyone else did, eliminating any advantage in buying the Intel drive. Samsung stovepipes their SSD manufacturing and have managed to put out a superior product.
  - tracker1 9y ago
    My Gen 1 Intel SSD showed up as 8MB one day... while only from my own pov (literally a couple days after the original 1yr warranty), I would disagree with their presumed superiority. For the past few years been mostly Samsung and Corsair drives though.
    - kalleboo 9y ago
      This was back when Intel drives had less than 1% return rate, and where certain OCZ drive models had a staggering 40% return rate. http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/292159-32-return-rate-crazy http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/292159-32-return-rate-craz... OCZ then went bankrupt, which probably helped the whole SSD industry.
      - tracker1 9y ago
        Fair enough... that said, it didn't make me happy to be part of that 1%. Especially with the really short initial warranty period. Of course after I'd trashed it, a few months later there was apparently a flash/fix for the issue. My first drive was too small though (iirc 32-40gb), but man did I get use to mklink commands...
CalChris 9y ago
If Intel is under any mortal threat and it is, it isn't from AMD. It's from ARM.
- nolok 9y ago
  In the case of ARM, it's Intel hurting itself to protect its lower lines margins for a few more years. What AMD is doing now is putting pressure on their higher lines margins. I think they're not under mortal threat and still have plenty of time to react, but now would be a good time to start ...
- tanilama 9y ago
  NVDIA
nolok 9y ago
I'm not so sure about where Intel will be in 5 years, and I agree there are quite a few markets where they seem to be unable to properly compete and even sometime end up creating their own opponent (not letting nVidia enter the x86 market didn't go as well as they could have hoped ...). But the fight against ARM is even worse, it's Intel punching itself in the face. That's what invariably happens to a public company which has complete control on a very high margin market, sees an opponent coming, and figures out a solution to stop that opponent with the downside being a requirement to slash their margins. In a stock market / short term profit economy, for a public company, keeping the margins as high as they can for a few more years always seem to be the choice, even if it always end up pushing them out. And that's why Atom processors remained utterly incapable of competing: if they did become good, then they would eat into the upper Intel lines all the way up to the i3, and that's a lot of short term money lost. So, yeah, if that ends up pushing Intel on the way out, it will be self inflicted damage, not technical incompetence.
- petra 9y ago
  Aren't there financial structures that enable a business to add a low-margin activity while still keeping high-margins ?
  - mixmastamyk 9y ago
    The innovators dilemma recommends spinning out a new business in a new building.
banachtarski 9y ago
Everyone commenting here DOES realize that Intel acquired Altera relatively recently and is intending on releasing a new series of FPGAs and SOC chips correct? (Cyclone, Arria, Stratix lines). I imagine this is more about centralizing efforts on what was previously a major competitor to Xilinx. People that are only aware of the CPU market need not chime in unless they actually have information to add.
- cjhanks 9y ago
  And mobileye, an SOC optimized for low(ish)-power detection and tracking of visual targets.
- baldfat 9y ago
  Now I am laughing at all this speculation and the rage that is happening inside of Intel. I also laugh at all the doom and gloom thrown at Intel when they didn't know what was happening with Intel acquisitions. > People that are only aware of the CPU market need not chime in unless they actually have information to add. I can just add that Intel's documentation in the IoT chips is seriously lacking.
  - banachtarski 9y ago
    > I can just add that Intel's documentation in the IoT chips is seriously lacking. I just find it odd that in the absence of information, commentators feel like they have something to contribute anyways haha
- gogopuppygogo 9y ago
  You DO realize that acquisitions aren't the best indicator. Microsoft famously acquired Danger Mobile and then crushed it destroying the first widely adopted smartphone tech for consumers. If Microsoft could be so short sighted that they ceded their market to Apple and Google I think it's safe to say that Intel is incompetent enough to bungle these acquisitions.
  - banachtarski 9y ago
ShaneCurran 9y ago
I think Intel's approach to competing with the likes of ARM and other "mobile" processor manufacturers is to capitalise on the backend enterprise market. Intel know that if there are x new phones (with third party mobile processors) sold, then phone manufacturers and service providers are going to need to purchase y new server processors (high end Xeons = high margins). This is more or less what has kept them alive within the industry and it should continue at least in to the medium-term. Many of Intel's products, like their modems, have just been ploys to sell more desktops (i.e. sell more desktop processors). They've found that the mobile processor industry is just a race to the bottom so they're sticking to the high-margin desktop and server processor sectors.
velobro 9y ago
This is why Intel is gearing up their legal team to stop Microsoft and other's attempts to virtualize x86 on ARM. They are toast without their CPU business.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
gshayban 9y ago
Future predictions are hard, but it's especially hard to make them with such a large company. I agree with you about some of the missteps, but there are a lot of fundamental improvements happening too. The secure enclave technology (SGX) and its consumers like the Sawtooth blockchain [1] are truly novel. [1] https://intelledger.github.io/introduction.html https://intelledger.github.io/introduction.html
- snuxoll 9y ago
  SGX is an interesting technology from a security perspective, but the use of it for DRM going forward really worries me, I'm tired of not owning my content and hoping companies don't go out of business and money I've spent goes up in smoke.
  - ngneer 9y ago
    Agreed. Thus far it appears that Intel itself has been vacillating with regard to launch enclave policy. As a reminder, all technology can be used for good or evil, whatever your definitions of those may be. The issue is one of control, but you can defer worrying about DRM until trusted I/O gets implemented.
    - snuxoll 9y ago
      SGX already works with the PVAP doesn't it? I can't imagine Netflix would be using SGX-based DRM for 4K content unless it actually provided a real benefit, especially considering without trusted I/O it's much more obvious where to grab decrypted data by looking for SGX-related instructions.
      - future1979 9y ago
        I looked into sgx recently and have a question related to your comment. It seems an enclave doesn't make system calls. I was wondering how any io gets done? You mention untrusted ... is that the only way??? Trust zone seems to do it better then?
3pt14159 9y ago
I think the market basically agrees with you. They have a 3% yield and a P/E that doesn't fit a tech company with real prospects.
mtgx 9y ago
I'm just waiting for the time when we can make jokes and build websites about the "Intel graveyard."
rsync 9y ago
"They consistently get outmanuevered in gpus, ssds, low power socs ..." Aren't Intel SSDs considered the benchmark for all datacenter/server work ? I know we make a point to source Intel SSDs and I don't remember any horror stories like there were with other vendors' SSD parts ...
- wtallis 9y ago
  Intel's problem with SSDs is that their cycles are really long. They come up with a great drive, then let it languish for 2+ years. This is fine in the datacenter market, but it means they're always getting leapfrogged in the faster-paced consumer market. They've tried to compensate by using third-party controllers and even third-party NAND to fill in the gaps, but those efforts have had mixed success.
  - mastazi 9y ago
    While I don't know much about data centre SSDs, I follow the consumer hw market closely, albeit not as a professional (I build gaming PCs for friends, as a hobby) and in the consumer space Intel's NVMe SSDs have been recently outclassed by Samsung's 900 series. At least here in Australia you just get slightly better bang for your buck by going for Samsung. You are correct that Intel's cycles are really long. When their first NVMe drives came out, they were the best in terms of performance per dollar but then Intel remained stagnant and in the meantime Samsung caught up with them.
    - wtallis 9y ago
      Intel's consumer 750 series NVMe SSD was only on top for a short period of time, and only because it was literally the only consumer retail NVMe product when it launched. It was released around April 2015 and was outclassed for real-world performance by the Samsung 950 Pro in October/November 2015. The Samsung 960 series that launched last fall just increased the lead, and Intel has not yet announced a consumer product based on their second-generation NVMe controller that can actually fit on a M.2 card.
      - 9y ago
CamperBob2 9y ago
The x86 platform that they currently own, is mostly due to intertia and fab facility advantages This seems like an accurate statement. Intel basically owns little at this point except their fabs, which themselves are a peculiar variety of very expensive real estate that only becomes less valuable over time. These modules were an unsuccessful attempt at capturing the Raspberry Pi user base. It was a good idea on Intel's part to offer an alternative. The rejection of that alternative is a bigger deal than it sounds like. Those users are largely in high school and college now, but they won't stay there forever.
patrickg_zill 9y ago
A precedent to quote would be Kodak, which for 100 years was very dominant in film/imaging. At one time, they were even the largest maker of lenses in the world, also. So influential that even today, Rochester has smaller optics companies that are world class. Kodak was not stupid - they designed the very first DSLR sensors and still make high quality monochrome and color sensors today. They knew that there would a film/digital transition, even tried to plan for it. However despite all that, the inertia of their business pretty much killed them (along with some dumb ideas, poor middle management).
- wslh 9y ago
  The example of Kodak or any other, once upon a time, successful company can be applied to anyone: from Intel to Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. We can't predict the future but Intel has a competitive advantage in the technology and investment capabilities of more integrated chips while Kodak was completely disrupted by new innovations. Intel has a lot of room to experiment if they are really challenged. I am not bullish on Intel but they remain to have unique offerings.
  - patrickg_zill 9y ago
    Kodak KNEW the digital chips were coming. They even designed the first of them. Same as Intel knows that low-power chips are eating up the bottom, that ARM is strong in this space, etc. But so far Intel hasn't had a good response (same as Kodak) to the new challenger.
    - andreiw 9y ago
      Scaling down is hard. Look at OpenPower. They are feeling the heat from Xeons and know they need to scale and price down, and yet the scale-out Power9 SKU won't be out for what, another year? And how long until actual OCP gear ships, which probably will still cost like a decent Hyundai sedan? Intel had nothing to offer to compete with ARM in mobile space. Largely ignored ARMv8 servers when they were mostly specialized or micro. Now E5-competitive chips are entering the market from multiple competitors, and even mobile SoCs have grown up into laptop chips...
derefr 9y ago
> They consistently get outmanuevered in gpus Do they? It's my impression that Intel's integrated GPU cores are currently best-in-class in performance-per-watt, even compared to the PowerVR cores in Apple's mobile products.
- nickpeterson 9y ago
  I hope that is true for their sake.
zitterbewegung 9y ago
Intel isn't like Sun Microsystems. Their moat is huge and the only real threat is TSMC chips. They are a whole process ahead of TSMC . Also, there is a severe lack of anyone who wants to build a moat. IBM sold off their chip manufacturing to TSMC.
- astrodust 9y ago
  For desktop and server applications they're in a strong position, but for mobile they're getting utterly destroyed. Samsung and TSMC may not have the latest process, but they've got one that's good enough to keep them competitive.
JohnBooty 9y ago
> They consistently get outmanuevered in gpus, ssds, low power socs, machine learning, et cetera. I totally agree with you except for maybe one small thing - if anything I'd say they've outmaneuvered the competition for graphics chips. Their market share for PC graphics hardware is about 70%. By tying the graphics hardware to the CPU, and making it good enough for everybody but hardcore gamers, they've relegated AMD and nVidia to fight over the other 30%. (And I'm honestly shocked that AMD and nVidia have that much of the market. The truckloads and truckloads of PCs bought by corporate buyers generally do not have discrete GPUs...) http://jonpeddie.com/publications/market_watch/ http://jonpeddie.com/publications/market_watch/ Now, you can certainly point out that they have 70% of a declining market. Which is true. And you can also say that Intel has little traction in graphics hardware outside the PC space, which is also true. And that is why I agree with you and your point still stands, so please take my post as a semi-interesting footnote and not an argument.

deepnotderp 9y ago

Absolutely, and now with the twilight phase of Moore's Law, Intel can't run away to its superior process technology to avoid innovation in microarchitecture.

sqeaky 9y ago
Moore's law has already ended like 15 times. I will wait to use that in my predictions of the future only have AMD and others have tried and failed.
- deepnotderp 9y ago
  Not true, Dennard scaling has actually died since around ~40-28nm, which is already causing visible trouble for Intel, especially in the server region.

Twirrim 9y ago

Intel has been "dead" before. AMD has "beaten it" before. AMD knocked it out of the park with x86_64, which allowed a seamless transition to 64bit. Intel ended up having to license x86_64 implementation from AMD. AMD beat Intel with their K6 and similar series of chips where, just like this time around, they were able to get way more performance per tick out of the CPU. Intel was supposedly dead in the water due to their toaster era P4 chips that ran hot as hell, and consumed way more power to get the same job done. AMD started making some serious inroads in the server CPU market with early era Opteron processors. Following that era, out came Centrino era of mobile processors, which took a different approach to the CPU architecture from the P4 and set things up for the Core2Duo etc series of processors and on in to the i7s and the like. I'm highly skeptical that Intel is any more dead now than it was then. It has a track record of going away and completely changing the whole story all over again, and they've got the financial resources to keep on doing so.

pjmlp 9y ago
While true, open source, mobile OSes and IoT wave were less relevant when those situations happened. Nowadays it seems they will get cornered on desktop and server CPUs, unless they happen to buy ARM licenses or try to re-invent CPUs with builtin FPGAs.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- Twirrim 9y ago
  Intel already has ARM licenses. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-16/intel-licenses-arm-technology-in-move-to-boost-foundry-business https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-16/intel-lic...
nolok 9y ago
False similarity; as the EU case showed that the reason Intel remained on top then was because they pressured everyone, from OEM to hosting providers against going AMD. I doubt they have the clout to pull that one again, especially when you consider how the courts would react to them doing it again.
c0nfused 9y ago
Don't forget that whole illegally strong arming manufacturers at the same time centrino came out. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc._v._Intel_Corp https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc.....
nickpeterson 9y ago
Also keep in mind, the Pentium M was sort of a random bush project that ended up being at the right time. Basically, it was a revert to the Pentium 3 style of doing things designed by an intel team in Israel to compete in mobile. I'm not convinced Intel is going to be so fortunate again.
- dkhenry 9y ago

monkmartinez 9y ago

The inertia and fab facility advantages you mention could keep them afloat longer than you might imagine. I agree with many of your points but they, Intel, are not chock full of idiots. There is a lot that can happen in 5 years... I would think very hard about betting significant money against them.

Spooky23 9y ago

I was surprised with SSD. I've done a few large buys and most of the SSDs were Samsung parts. Intel used to always win those with marketing subsidy.

jandrese 9y ago
Intel had a superior product with the Gen 1 SSDs, back when the competitors were mostly shipping with buggy controllers that would randomly brick or have hideous performance issues. Intel never followed up on their SSD controllers for the second generation though, and instead just bought the same chips everyone else did, eliminating any advantage in buying the Intel drive. Samsung stovepipes their SSD manufacturing and have managed to put out a superior product.
- tracker1 9y ago
  My Gen 1 Intel SSD showed up as 8MB one day... while only from my own pov (literally a couple days after the original 1yr warranty), I would disagree with their presumed superiority. For the past few years been mostly Samsung and Corsair drives though.
  - kalleboo 9y ago
    This was back when Intel drives had less than 1% return rate, and where certain OCZ drive models had a staggering 40% return rate. http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/292159-32-return-rate-crazy http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/292159-32-return-rate-craz... OCZ then went bankrupt, which probably helped the whole SSD industry.
    - tracker1 9y ago
      Fair enough... that said, it didn't make me happy to be part of that 1%. Especially with the really short initial warranty period. Of course after I'd trashed it, a few months later there was apparently a flash/fix for the issue. My first drive was too small though (iirc 32-40gb), but man did I get use to mklink commands...

CalChris 9y ago

If Intel is under any mortal threat and it is, it isn't from AMD. It's from ARM.

nolok 9y ago
In the case of ARM, it's Intel hurting itself to protect its lower lines margins for a few more years. What AMD is doing now is putting pressure on their higher lines margins. I think they're not under mortal threat and still have plenty of time to react, but now would be a good time to start ...
tanilama 9y ago
NVDIA

nolok 9y ago

I'm not so sure about where Intel will be in 5 years, and I agree there are quite a few markets where they seem to be unable to properly compete and even sometime end up creating their own opponent (not letting nVidia enter the x86 market didn't go as well as they could have hoped ...). But the fight against ARM is even worse, it's Intel punching itself in the face. That's what invariably happens to a public company which has complete control on a very high margin market, sees an opponent coming, and figures out a solution to stop that opponent with the downside being a requirement to slash their margins. In a stock market / short term profit economy, for a public company, keeping the margins as high as they can for a few more years always seem to be the choice, even if it always end up pushing them out. And that's why Atom processors remained utterly incapable of competing: if they did become good, then they would eat into the upper Intel lines all the way up to the i3, and that's a lot of short term money lost. So, yeah, if that ends up pushing Intel on the way out, it will be self inflicted damage, not technical incompetence.

petra 9y ago
Aren't there financial structures that enable a business to add a low-margin activity while still keeping high-margins ?
- mixmastamyk 9y ago
  The innovators dilemma recommends spinning out a new business in a new building.

banachtarski 9y ago

Everyone commenting here DOES realize that Intel acquired Altera relatively recently and is intending on releasing a new series of FPGAs and SOC chips correct? (Cyclone, Arria, Stratix lines). I imagine this is more about centralizing efforts on what was previously a major competitor to Xilinx. People that are only aware of the CPU market need not chime in unless they actually have information to add.

cjhanks 9y ago
And mobileye, an SOC optimized for low(ish)-power detection and tracking of visual targets.
baldfat 9y ago
Now I am laughing at all this speculation and the rage that is happening inside of Intel. I also laugh at all the doom and gloom thrown at Intel when they didn't know what was happening with Intel acquisitions. > People that are only aware of the CPU market need not chime in unless they actually have information to add. I can just add that Intel's documentation in the IoT chips is seriously lacking.
- banachtarski 9y ago
  > I can just add that Intel's documentation in the IoT chips is seriously lacking. I just find it odd that in the absence of information, commentators feel like they have something to contribute anyways haha
gogopuppygogo 9y ago
You DO realize that acquisitions aren't the best indicator. Microsoft famously acquired Danger Mobile and then crushed it destroying the first widely adopted smartphone tech for consumers. If Microsoft could be so short sighted that they ceded their market to Apple and Google I think it's safe to say that Intel is incompetent enough to bungle these acquisitions.
- banachtarski 9y ago

ShaneCurran 9y ago

I think Intel's approach to competing with the likes of ARM and other "mobile" processor manufacturers is to capitalise on the backend enterprise market. Intel know that if there are x new phones (with third party mobile processors) sold, then phone manufacturers and service providers are going to need to purchase y new server processors (high end Xeons = high margins). This is more or less what has kept them alive within the industry and it should continue at least in to the medium-term. Many of Intel's products, like their modems, have just been ploys to sell more desktops (i.e. sell more desktop processors). They've found that the mobile processor industry is just a race to the bottom so they're sticking to the high-margin desktop and server processor sectors.

velobro 9y ago

This is why Intel is gearing up their legal team to stop Microsoft and other's attempts to virtualize x86 on ARM. They are toast without their CPU business.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

gshayban 9y ago

Future predictions are hard, but it's especially hard to make them with such a large company. I agree with you about some of the missteps, but there are a lot of fundamental improvements happening too. The secure enclave technology (SGX) and its consumers like the Sawtooth blockchain [1] are truly novel. [1] https://intelledger.github.io/introduction.html https://intelledger.github.io/introduction.html

snuxoll 9y ago
SGX is an interesting technology from a security perspective, but the use of it for DRM going forward really worries me, I'm tired of not owning my content and hoping companies don't go out of business and money I've spent goes up in smoke.
- ngneer 9y ago
  Agreed. Thus far it appears that Intel itself has been vacillating with regard to launch enclave policy. As a reminder, all technology can be used for good or evil, whatever your definitions of those may be. The issue is one of control, but you can defer worrying about DRM until trusted I/O gets implemented.
  - snuxoll 9y ago
    SGX already works with the PVAP doesn't it? I can't imagine Netflix would be using SGX-based DRM for 4K content unless it actually provided a real benefit, especially considering without trusted I/O it's much more obvious where to grab decrypted data by looking for SGX-related instructions.
    - future1979 9y ago
      I looked into sgx recently and have a question related to your comment. It seems an enclave doesn't make system calls. I was wondering how any io gets done? You mention untrusted ... is that the only way??? Trust zone seems to do it better then?

3pt14159 9y ago

I think the market basically agrees with you. They have a 3% yield and a P/E that doesn't fit a tech company with real prospects.

mtgx 9y ago

I'm just waiting for the time when we can make jokes and build websites about the "Intel graveyard."

rsync 9y ago

"They consistently get outmanuevered in gpus, ssds, low power socs ..." Aren't Intel SSDs considered the benchmark for all datacenter/server work ? I know we make a point to source Intel SSDs and I don't remember any horror stories like there were with other vendors' SSD parts ...

wtallis 9y ago
Intel's problem with SSDs is that their cycles are really long. They come up with a great drive, then let it languish for 2+ years. This is fine in the datacenter market, but it means they're always getting leapfrogged in the faster-paced consumer market. They've tried to compensate by using third-party controllers and even third-party NAND to fill in the gaps, but those efforts have had mixed success.
- mastazi 9y ago
  While I don't know much about data centre SSDs, I follow the consumer hw market closely, albeit not as a professional (I build gaming PCs for friends, as a hobby) and in the consumer space Intel's NVMe SSDs have been recently outclassed by Samsung's 900 series. At least here in Australia you just get slightly better bang for your buck by going for Samsung. You are correct that Intel's cycles are really long. When their first NVMe drives came out, they were the best in terms of performance per dollar but then Intel remained stagnant and in the meantime Samsung caught up with them.
  - wtallis 9y ago
    Intel's consumer 750 series NVMe SSD was only on top for a short period of time, and only because it was literally the only consumer retail NVMe product when it launched. It was released around April 2015 and was outclassed for real-world performance by the Samsung 950 Pro in October/November 2015. The Samsung 960 series that launched last fall just increased the lead, and Intel has not yet announced a consumer product based on their second-generation NVMe controller that can actually fit on a M.2 card.
    - 9y ago

CamperBob2 9y ago

The x86 platform that they currently own, is mostly due to intertia and fab facility advantages This seems like an accurate statement. Intel basically owns little at this point except their fabs, which themselves are a peculiar variety of very expensive real estate that only becomes less valuable over time. These modules were an unsuccessful attempt at capturing the Raspberry Pi user base. It was a good idea on Intel's part to offer an alternative. The rejection of that alternative is a bigger deal than it sounds like. Those users are largely in high school and college now, but they won't stay there forever.

patrickg_zill 9y ago

A precedent to quote would be Kodak, which for 100 years was very dominant in film/imaging. At one time, they were even the largest maker of lenses in the world, also. So influential that even today, Rochester has smaller optics companies that are world class. Kodak was not stupid - they designed the very first DSLR sensors and still make high quality monochrome and color sensors today. They knew that there would a film/digital transition, even tried to plan for it. However despite all that, the inertia of their business pretty much killed them (along with some dumb ideas, poor middle management).

wslh 9y ago
The example of Kodak or any other, once upon a time, successful company can be applied to anyone: from Intel to Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. We can't predict the future but Intel has a competitive advantage in the technology and investment capabilities of more integrated chips while Kodak was completely disrupted by new innovations. Intel has a lot of room to experiment if they are really challenged. I am not bullish on Intel but they remain to have unique offerings.
- patrickg_zill 9y ago
  Kodak KNEW the digital chips were coming. They even designed the first of them. Same as Intel knows that low-power chips are eating up the bottom, that ARM is strong in this space, etc. But so far Intel hasn't had a good response (same as Kodak) to the new challenger.
  - andreiw 9y ago
    Scaling down is hard. Look at OpenPower. They are feeling the heat from Xeons and know they need to scale and price down, and yet the scale-out Power9 SKU won't be out for what, another year? And how long until actual OCP gear ships, which probably will still cost like a decent Hyundai sedan? Intel had nothing to offer to compete with ARM in mobile space. Largely ignored ARMv8 servers when they were mostly specialized or micro. Now E5-competitive chips are entering the market from multiple competitors, and even mobile SoCs have grown up into laptop chips...

derefr 9y ago

> They consistently get outmanuevered in gpus Do they? It's my impression that Intel's integrated GPU cores are currently best-in-class in performance-per-watt, even compared to the PowerVR cores in Apple's mobile products.

nickpeterson 9y ago
I hope that is true for their sake.

zitterbewegung 9y ago

Intel isn't like Sun Microsystems. Their moat is huge and the only real threat is TSMC chips. They are a whole process ahead of TSMC . Also, there is a severe lack of anyone who wants to build a moat. IBM sold off their chip manufacturing to TSMC.

astrodust 9y ago
For desktop and server applications they're in a strong position, but for mobile they're getting utterly destroyed. Samsung and TSMC may not have the latest process, but they've got one that's good enough to keep them competitive.

JohnBooty 9y ago

> They consistently get outmanuevered in gpus, ssds, low power socs, machine learning, et cetera. I totally agree with you except for maybe one small thing - if anything I'd say they've outmaneuvered the competition for graphics chips. Their market share for PC graphics hardware is about 70%. By tying the graphics hardware to the CPU, and making it good enough for everybody but hardcore gamers, they've relegated AMD and nVidia to fight over the other 30%. (And I'm honestly shocked that AMD and nVidia have that much of the market. The truckloads and truckloads of PCs bought by corporate buyers generally do not have discrete GPUs...) http://jonpeddie.com/publications/market_watch/ http://jonpeddie.com/publications/market_watch/ Now, you can certainly point out that they have 70% of a declining market. Which is true. And you can also say that Intel has little traction in graphics hardware outside the PC space, which is also true. And that is why I agree with you and your point still stands, so please take my post as a semi-interesting footnote and not an argument.