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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, wh

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."

katastic 9y ago
The only thing that sells is scandal.
vectorEQ 9y ago
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.
ttul 9y ago
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.
- geezerjay 9y ago
  My take is that the analysis refers to Intel's long-term prospects, not today's or yesterdays's revenue. These reports serve as a foundation to guide decisions on future long-term investments.
- melling 9y ago
  Intel is fine as long as ARM doesn’t compete in their core markets. Then it’s a sudden and violent change. I guess you don’t see ARM attaining parity with x86?
  - imtringued 9y ago
    Apple is the only manufacturer that actually produces competitive processors. Qualcomm is lagging behind x86 by at least a factor 2 compared to laptop chips and by factor 6 compared to desktop chips. On top of that the arm laptops that have been announced were significantly more expensive than an equivalent x86 laptop and the x86 emulation isn't good enough to count on it.
    - ipsum2 9y ago
      ARM is looking like it'll be a major competitor in the expandin server market, judging by preliminary benchmarks: https://blog.cloudflare.com/arm-takes-wing/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/arm-takes-wing/
    - simonh 9y ago
      Your talking about what’s on the market right now, or coming out based on existing tech. It’s exactly that kind one short term “everything’s fine, we’re doing great as we are” thinking that the OP article is deconstructing. It’s what killed Nokia, Blackberry and Palm, as he pointed out. Chip fabricators like Intel are making investments now that won’t affect the market for 6 years (2014 announcement of expected launch of 450nm tech in 2020). ARM tech is on an intersect trajectory with x86 tech, and it’s only a matter of time before those lines cross. Up until then Intel will do fine. After that, all bets are off. Fortunately for Intel, they’re a couple of steps ahead of you in that at least they now see the problem.
      - deepnotderp 9y ago
        *450mm, not nm. Referring to the wafer size. Not trying to be pedantic, just so that no one gets confused. Jim Keller, who's been on both sides of the table, x86 with AMD and ARM with Apple, expects that a fully developed ARM CPU will be 15-30% more efficient than their x86 counterparts.
    - criddell 9y ago
      > Qualcomm is lagging behind x86 by at least a factor 2 What metric is that? FLOPS / Watt?
- scarface74 9y ago
  RIM was at its most profitable three years after the iPhone came out....
aleem 9y ago
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.
- melling 9y ago
  The picture at the beginning emphasizes ARMs rapid improvements. It only goes out to 2014. It leaves one with the impression that ARM will soon pass Intel in performance. This would suddenly eat into Intel’s profits.
- IshKebab 9y ago
  Yeah but the upgrade cycle won't stay short for long, just like it hasn't for desktops. Give it 10 years and people will be keeping their phones until they break. Also anyone can make an ARM CPU so the margins are thin, whereas with x86 CPUs Intel will basically only ever have one competitor - AMD. They want to find another monopoly.
  - goblins 9y ago
    >Give it 10 years and people will be keeping their phones until they break. That's basically me right now, still have my trusty sgs2 running lineageOS and will continue to have it till it breaks
  - hkmurakami 9y ago
    Even today I see an increasing number of friends moving from 2 years cycles to 3 year cycles. The "killer app" for smartphone refresh rates staying low are (1) battery degradation and (2) forced OS updates for app updates, which in turn slows the phone down to compel an update[1]. [1] I'm actually curious if OS updates slow down older phones these days. This was the case 5 years ago but perhaps things have changed/
tanilama 9y ago
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.
- baybal2 9y ago
  Except they wouldn't. It took Apple a decade to up their silicon to a level where it is now. For most of that time, their activity was a money sink for them. And even today, even with some of the best talent in IC design one can get in USA (PA Semi and its veteran designers from HP, Sun, Freescale, and whatever else was remaining of American semi industry), their chips are still half outsourced, 70% external IP if you remove SRAM from calculations. Apple is company with an own silicon, but it will never be a true microelectronics company. Google's TPUs are another examplary case. Goog did spare no money to get into the market first and secure a tech/platform lockdown. Yet, what took them at least 5 years, and extremely expensive to make reticule limit chips, was bested by a no-name Chinese fabless that blew TPUs out of the water on power/cost/performance ratio. All American dotcoms that are actively trying to get into hardware are oblivious to the fact that there is an inherent difference in between a hardcore engineering company to a company whose topmost technical expertise is underhanded web programming.
  - tanilama 9y ago
    I won't be so certain. An ASIC/FPGA chip that accelerates specific Database operation is already a reality. The problem is the cost effect ratio. BTW, cloud provider already making tons of customized hardware themselves. And talking like Amazon/Google/Microsoft only have talents for web programming is short sighted and simply not sure. https://datacenterfrontier.com/amazon-building-custom-asic-chips-to-accelerate-cloud-networking/ https://datacenterfrontier.com/amazon-building-custom-asic-c...
    - baybal2 9y ago
      >And talking like Amazon/Google/Microsoft only have talents for web programming is short sighted and simply not sure. Well, I am saying that they do obviously spend an ennormous effort trying to do so. To better formulate what I said, the fact that they did acquire some hardware/semi expertise in house, does not mean that this expertise drives them as a company. If tomorrow 2 engineers, one from semi side, and one fromwebdev, will knock at the door of CEO with "I found a way to do things A and B 250 times better, but you have to scrap half of your business plan," a webdev will be heard, and semi guys not. Btw, the chip Amazon showed, was from a company they acquired solely for that - to not to pay an arm and a leg for high end switching chips. And about OEM servers - it is surprising that big dotcoms are late comers to the party, and were relying on off the shelf brand hardware to the very last moment. Big hosting providers from outside of dotcom ecosystems were relying on direct OEM orders and custom built DCs for more than a decade. I do remember selling Atom based single board computers stuffed into U1s and Intel core 2 duo systems with soldered on memory and cpus to budget web hosting guys back when I worked as a trainee in a trade company back in 2007-2009.
sah2ed 9y ago
> Mobile is a decelerating market, while cloud and servers, where Intel has a huge lead is an expanding market and profitable. No, it is not decelerating, it's still growing [0]. Besides, demand from other low-power applications such as IoT will only lead to increased demand for low-power (mobile) chips. > 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." " ... as Microsoft shows, revenue is a lagging indicator in the technology business." -- pg [1] Given enough time, all investments will eventually mature. In other words, revenue is about the past -- reaping the rewards from mature (technology) investments. Growth is about the future -- future returns can only come from nascent (technology) investments. Growth in a new product with lots of potential applications is a much better indicator of a company's potential to continuing earning returns in the future, before that product reaches maturity (and revenue attributable to that product starts to decline). Intel needs a new product category to future-proof its existence. [0] http://www.asymco.com/2018/02/27/the-number/ http://www.asymco.com/2018/02/27/the-number/ [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html EDIT: as pointed out by several commenters below, I incorrectly internalized your use of "decelerate" to mean "decline" but I'll leave my comment as-is.
- ryanwaggoner 9y ago
  Decelerating != declining. The claim is that the growth is slowing, not that it's not growing anymore.
- igravious 9y ago
  You make very good points except I think you are confused by what decelerating means. A market may be growing and at the same time be decelerating, as in it is growing albeit at a slower rate of growth each year or quarter.
- virgilp 9y ago
  That's a misleading chart, since it shows "cummulative sales". Here, complete numbers: http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2018/02/smartphone-stats-full-year-2017-top-10-os-installed-base-and-everything-else-you-ever-wanted.html http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2018/02/smartph... You can see, total market grew by less than 200M as opposed to more than 500M last year. Definitely "decelerating".
DocTomoe 9y ago
They also do not have a product for the server market. Yes, they have server-oriented processor families. No, after the storm that has been Meltdown/Spectre, none of these processor families are still considered "safe enough", even firmware-related fixes won't cut it there because the profitibality of a data center is calculated with TFLOPS/m^2 in mind. Even if profitiability was not an issue (=> government), they won't quite cut it, because you really do not want a system that has this big of an vulnerability just sitting around your high-security/high-impact infrastructure. I do know government agencies in my country who - ever since the Meltdown/Spectre information broke - banned the purchase of Intel processors "until further notice". Intel is in dire straits, and they should be worried.
- bsder 9y ago
  > They also do not have a product for the server market. And it doesn't matter because NOBODY ELSE DOES EITHER. Intel is so much bigger than everybody else in the space in terms of volumes, that even if they vaporized tomorrow, it would take a couple years for everybody else to plug the hole. Intel has quite a lot of runway to fix things.
- vectorEQ 9y ago
  intel is just fine. spectre and meltdown were blown way out of proportion. almost every CPU to date has had similar vectors to exploit them or worse. if intelligence agencies don't know this they have shitty assurance and should get better. most agencies for high integrety systems wont have been using intel/amd as there are cpus out there (ibm for example) which offer much better assurance with regards to memory integrity etc. that being said, government is a tiny market compared to businesses (cloud providers etc. etc.) so really if they all switch to ibm or so intel still wouldn't be in trouble. it would be a tiny bump in the road.
  - a1xndr 9y ago
    I don't see how Spectre and meltdown were blown way out of proportion? Google and Amazon seem to have treated them quite seriously.. Maybe they should have just closed their eyes. The solution to Spectre right now is "Don't do speculative execution". Meltdown exploits a pretty embarrassing bug in the hardware. One has to wonder how it got through all of the testing/review that must happen before a new design is sent off to a fab($$$). Don't forget that there are 30+ class action lawsuits filed against Intel due solely to these bugs.
erikb 9y ago
How big is the server market though and how much is it supposed to grow?
wastedhours 9y ago
Doubling down on market you know well is a lot easier than spotting a new one. Judging by their dabbles in both mobile and IoT hardware they're areas of interest (whether seriously or just scare tactics to show they could move into the area notwithstanding) - but the perception is they missed the boat. What happens if they don't spot the next server/cloud market, like they didn't spot mobile?
scarface74 9y ago
Mobile may be "decelerating", but the replacement cycle is shorter and even the poorest people in the world who will never buy PCs are already buying phones. The market is much bigger. Being in mobile also has the effect of being in IOT.
atomicnumber1 9y ago
Yes. Although, Qualcomm is also investing in cloud and servers market and if they get successful (rather arm in general) could hit intel hard. What are your thoughts on that?
- dkrich 9y ago
  I think the point is that the article is basing the title that "Intel is fighting for its future" on the idea that they might make a bid for Broadcom to survive. The idea that Qualcomm could invest in cloud and servers and maybe, if lots of things happen in Qualcomm's favor, threaten Intel's server business has little to do with that. Wal-Mart is investing heavily in ecommerce which could threaten Amazon if they become successful. It's hardly accurate to say that Amazon is fighting for its survival.
LifeLiverTransp 9y ago
Take mobile devices- add a new type of battery, allowing for true decentralized servers- and intels seemingly value in the serverspace evaporates in a cloud of smoke. Add to that, a new generation of envelop layer in the making (Augmented Reality) - that will replace desktops and workstations, and intels huge castle seems truely build upon sand. In addition they also failed on the other big market- massive parallelization (Neuronal Nets, Cryptocurrencys, etc.) - it just seems that intel lost its ability to innovate quite a while ago- and was just kept upright by its ability to monopolize markets. Im sure steam-engine companys had great share-value, until the day they had not.
ksec 9y ago
Yes And I guess only time will tell. If we travel back in time, and told Paul Otellini that Apple is going to make 100 to 200M chip a year with Intel, going for prices less then $30 per unit. Would Otellini have said yes? For some reason I doubt it. When there was no transformation of Smartphone to the industry, and saw importance of PC shrinks in his own eyes. Purely looking at those numbers. For the same amount of transistor @$30, Intel were selling those at anywhere between $80 to $300. Not to mention Intel has to invest in Fabs just for Apple as 100 - 200M is no small numbers. Intel cares about its margin, and its profitability. Sometimes we argue we should do things at lower margin to avoid the risk of being wiped out. Sometimes vice versa. I am not entirely sure what Intel's exec were thinking, they were possibly driven out of Apple and Mobile decision because of fear of shareholders protest at lowering margins, and driven back to Mobile precisely because of shareholders. And not only is Intel late to Mobile. They were late to GPU as well, and GPGPU in general. We are now looking at 2020 before an dGPU from Intel is out. Basically Intel hasn't been innovating for a few years. And may be they haven't been to war for a long time. They loses the sense of danger. May be they were typical Silicon Valley's optimist where everything is going to be fine. Which strangely is different to Andy Grove, only paranoid survives. But then I dont see x86 ever lose out in PC or Datacenter Market. Right now the biggest threat is AMD, and that is not an existential threat. I also dont see how Broadcom and Qualcomm merge would be an existential threat to Intel. Apple might not use Intel's modem, but that is not exactly a problem. Intel needed some customers to use its product so it could at least cover the R&D cost of modem, which is getting insanely complicated. And Mobile Network has already reached an inflection point where Modem aren't going to get the rapid development and improvement as we had in the last 10 years. With iPhone, we manage to move from End of 2G to 3G to 4G and now to 5G. All within 10 years. We have reached a stage where Top Speed no longer sales. Market wants more data, or higher capacity rather then unattainable top 1Gbps speed. We have Massive MIMO and LAA, and in the next 5 years we will see anywhere from 4x to 20x capacity improvement, along with better reception. All these improvement are now bottlenecked by Carrier upgrading their sites, assuming we have a steady rate of mobile phones upgrade. Intel has a clear market of 1.5 Billion PC to upgrade to, while not everyone will be upgrading their PC with Modem. It is by no means a small market. And Apple has their own W2 with 802.11n and Bluetooth 4.1. It is only a matter of time before they have their own 802.11ac and Bluetooth 5, as well as possible 802.11ax. All these are currently coming from Broadcom. I am much more worried about Broadcom then Intel.

katastic 9y ago

The only thing that sells is scandal.

vectorEQ 9y ago

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.

ttul 9y ago

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.

geezerjay 9y ago
My take is that the analysis refers to Intel's long-term prospects, not today's or yesterdays's revenue. These reports serve as a foundation to guide decisions on future long-term investments.
melling 9y ago
Intel is fine as long as ARM doesn’t compete in their core markets. Then it’s a sudden and violent change. I guess you don’t see ARM attaining parity with x86?
- imtringued 9y ago
  Apple is the only manufacturer that actually produces competitive processors. Qualcomm is lagging behind x86 by at least a factor 2 compared to laptop chips and by factor 6 compared to desktop chips. On top of that the arm laptops that have been announced were significantly more expensive than an equivalent x86 laptop and the x86 emulation isn't good enough to count on it.
  - ipsum2 9y ago
    ARM is looking like it'll be a major competitor in the expandin server market, judging by preliminary benchmarks: https://blog.cloudflare.com/arm-takes-wing/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/arm-takes-wing/
  - simonh 9y ago
    Your talking about what’s on the market right now, or coming out based on existing tech. It’s exactly that kind one short term “everything’s fine, we’re doing great as we are” thinking that the OP article is deconstructing. It’s what killed Nokia, Blackberry and Palm, as he pointed out. Chip fabricators like Intel are making investments now that won’t affect the market for 6 years (2014 announcement of expected launch of 450nm tech in 2020). ARM tech is on an intersect trajectory with x86 tech, and it’s only a matter of time before those lines cross. Up until then Intel will do fine. After that, all bets are off. Fortunately for Intel, they’re a couple of steps ahead of you in that at least they now see the problem.
    - deepnotderp 9y ago
      *450mm, not nm. Referring to the wafer size. Not trying to be pedantic, just so that no one gets confused. Jim Keller, who's been on both sides of the table, x86 with AMD and ARM with Apple, expects that a fully developed ARM CPU will be 15-30% more efficient than their x86 counterparts.
  - criddell 9y ago
    > Qualcomm is lagging behind x86 by at least a factor 2 What metric is that? FLOPS / Watt?
scarface74 9y ago
RIM was at its most profitable three years after the iPhone came out....

aleem 9y ago

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.

melling 9y ago
The picture at the beginning emphasizes ARMs rapid improvements. It only goes out to 2014. It leaves one with the impression that ARM will soon pass Intel in performance. This would suddenly eat into Intel’s profits.
IshKebab 9y ago
Yeah but the upgrade cycle won't stay short for long, just like it hasn't for desktops. Give it 10 years and people will be keeping their phones until they break. Also anyone can make an ARM CPU so the margins are thin, whereas with x86 CPUs Intel will basically only ever have one competitor - AMD. They want to find another monopoly.
- goblins 9y ago
  >Give it 10 years and people will be keeping their phones until they break. That's basically me right now, still have my trusty sgs2 running lineageOS and will continue to have it till it breaks
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  Even today I see an increasing number of friends moving from 2 years cycles to 3 year cycles. The "killer app" for smartphone refresh rates staying low are (1) battery degradation and (2) forced OS updates for app updates, which in turn slows the phone down to compel an update[1]. [1] I'm actually curious if OS updates slow down older phones these days. This was the case 5 years ago but perhaps things have changed/

tanilama 9y ago

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.

baybal2 9y ago
Except they wouldn't. It took Apple a decade to up their silicon to a level where it is now. For most of that time, their activity was a money sink for them. And even today, even with some of the best talent in IC design one can get in USA (PA Semi and its veteran designers from HP, Sun, Freescale, and whatever else was remaining of American semi industry), their chips are still half outsourced, 70% external IP if you remove SRAM from calculations. Apple is company with an own silicon, but it will never be a true microelectronics company. Google's TPUs are another examplary case. Goog did spare no money to get into the market first and secure a tech/platform lockdown. Yet, what took them at least 5 years, and extremely expensive to make reticule limit chips, was bested by a no-name Chinese fabless that blew TPUs out of the water on power/cost/performance ratio. All American dotcoms that are actively trying to get into hardware are oblivious to the fact that there is an inherent difference in between a hardcore engineering company to a company whose topmost technical expertise is underhanded web programming.
- tanilama 9y ago
  I won't be so certain. An ASIC/FPGA chip that accelerates specific Database operation is already a reality. The problem is the cost effect ratio. BTW, cloud provider already making tons of customized hardware themselves. And talking like Amazon/Google/Microsoft only have talents for web programming is short sighted and simply not sure. https://datacenterfrontier.com/amazon-building-custom-asic-chips-to-accelerate-cloud-networking/ https://datacenterfrontier.com/amazon-building-custom-asic-c...
  - baybal2 9y ago
    >And talking like Amazon/Google/Microsoft only have talents for web programming is short sighted and simply not sure. Well, I am saying that they do obviously spend an ennormous effort trying to do so. To better formulate what I said, the fact that they did acquire some hardware/semi expertise in house, does not mean that this expertise drives them as a company. If tomorrow 2 engineers, one from semi side, and one fromwebdev, will knock at the door of CEO with "I found a way to do things A and B 250 times better, but you have to scrap half of your business plan," a webdev will be heard, and semi guys not. Btw, the chip Amazon showed, was from a company they acquired solely for that - to not to pay an arm and a leg for high end switching chips. And about OEM servers - it is surprising that big dotcoms are late comers to the party, and were relying on off the shelf brand hardware to the very last moment. Big hosting providers from outside of dotcom ecosystems were relying on direct OEM orders and custom built DCs for more than a decade. I do remember selling Atom based single board computers stuffed into U1s and Intel core 2 duo systems with soldered on memory and cpus to budget web hosting guys back when I worked as a trainee in a trade company back in 2007-2009.

sah2ed 9y ago

> Mobile is a decelerating market, while cloud and servers, where Intel has a huge lead is an expanding market and profitable. No, it is not decelerating, it's still growing [0]. Besides, demand from other low-power applications such as IoT will only lead to increased demand for low-power (mobile) chips. > 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." " ... as Microsoft shows, revenue is a lagging indicator in the technology business." -- pg [1] Given enough time, all investments will eventually mature. In other words, revenue is about the past -- reaping the rewards from mature (technology) investments. Growth is about the future -- future returns can only come from nascent (technology) investments. Growth in a new product with lots of potential applications is a much better indicator of a company's potential to continuing earning returns in the future, before that product reaches maturity (and revenue attributable to that product starts to decline). Intel needs a new product category to future-proof its existence. [0] http://www.asymco.com/2018/02/27/the-number/ http://www.asymco.com/2018/02/27/the-number/ [1] http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html http://www.paulgraham.com/ambitious.html EDIT: as pointed out by several commenters below, I incorrectly internalized your use of "decelerate" to mean "decline" but I'll leave my comment as-is.

ryanwaggoner 9y ago
Decelerating != declining. The claim is that the growth is slowing, not that it's not growing anymore.
igravious 9y ago
You make very good points except I think you are confused by what decelerating means. A market may be growing and at the same time be decelerating, as in it is growing albeit at a slower rate of growth each year or quarter.
virgilp 9y ago
That's a misleading chart, since it shows "cummulative sales". Here, complete numbers: http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2018/02/smartphone-stats-full-year-2017-top-10-os-installed-base-and-everything-else-you-ever-wanted.html http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2018/02/smartph... You can see, total market grew by less than 200M as opposed to more than 500M last year. Definitely "decelerating".

DocTomoe 9y ago

They also do not have a product for the server market. Yes, they have server-oriented processor families. No, after the storm that has been Meltdown/Spectre, none of these processor families are still considered "safe enough", even firmware-related fixes won't cut it there because the profitibality of a data center is calculated with TFLOPS/m^2 in mind. Even if profitiability was not an issue (=> government), they won't quite cut it, because you really do not want a system that has this big of an vulnerability just sitting around your high-security/high-impact infrastructure. I do know government agencies in my country who - ever since the Meltdown/Spectre information broke - banned the purchase of Intel processors "until further notice". Intel is in dire straits, and they should be worried.

bsder 9y ago
> They also do not have a product for the server market. And it doesn't matter because NOBODY ELSE DOES EITHER. Intel is so much bigger than everybody else in the space in terms of volumes, that even if they vaporized tomorrow, it would take a couple years for everybody else to plug the hole. Intel has quite a lot of runway to fix things.
vectorEQ 9y ago
intel is just fine. spectre and meltdown were blown way out of proportion. almost every CPU to date has had similar vectors to exploit them or worse. if intelligence agencies don't know this they have shitty assurance and should get better. most agencies for high integrety systems wont have been using intel/amd as there are cpus out there (ibm for example) which offer much better assurance with regards to memory integrity etc. that being said, government is a tiny market compared to businesses (cloud providers etc. etc.) so really if they all switch to ibm or so intel still wouldn't be in trouble. it would be a tiny bump in the road.
- a1xndr 9y ago
  I don't see how Spectre and meltdown were blown way out of proportion? Google and Amazon seem to have treated them quite seriously.. Maybe they should have just closed their eyes. The solution to Spectre right now is "Don't do speculative execution". Meltdown exploits a pretty embarrassing bug in the hardware. One has to wonder how it got through all of the testing/review that must happen before a new design is sent off to a fab($$$). Don't forget that there are 30+ class action lawsuits filed against Intel due solely to these bugs.

erikb 9y ago

How big is the server market though and how much is it supposed to grow?

wastedhours 9y ago

Doubling down on market you know well is a lot easier than spotting a new one. Judging by their dabbles in both mobile and IoT hardware they're areas of interest (whether seriously or just scare tactics to show they could move into the area notwithstanding) - but the perception is they missed the boat. What happens if they don't spot the next server/cloud market, like they didn't spot mobile?

scarface74 9y ago

Mobile may be "decelerating", but the replacement cycle is shorter and even the poorest people in the world who will never buy PCs are already buying phones. The market is much bigger. Being in mobile also has the effect of being in IOT.

atomicnumber1 9y ago

Yes. Although, Qualcomm is also investing in cloud and servers market and if they get successful (rather arm in general) could hit intel hard. What are your thoughts on that?

dkrich 9y ago
I think the point is that the article is basing the title that "Intel is fighting for its future" on the idea that they might make a bid for Broadcom to survive. The idea that Qualcomm could invest in cloud and servers and maybe, if lots of things happen in Qualcomm's favor, threaten Intel's server business has little to do with that. Wal-Mart is investing heavily in ecommerce which could threaten Amazon if they become successful. It's hardly accurate to say that Amazon is fighting for its survival.

LifeLiverTransp 9y ago

Take mobile devices- add a new type of battery, allowing for true decentralized servers- and intels seemingly value in the serverspace evaporates in a cloud of smoke. Add to that, a new generation of envelop layer in the making (Augmented Reality) - that will replace desktops and workstations, and intels huge castle seems truely build upon sand. In addition they also failed on the other big market- massive parallelization (Neuronal Nets, Cryptocurrencys, etc.) - it just seems that intel lost its ability to innovate quite a while ago- and was just kept upright by its ability to monopolize markets. Im sure steam-engine companys had great share-value, until the day they had not.

ksec 9y ago

Yes And I guess only time will tell. If we travel back in time, and told Paul Otellini that Apple is going to make 100 to 200M chip a year with Intel, going for prices less then $30 per unit. Would Otellini have said yes? For some reason I doubt it. When there was no transformation of Smartphone to the industry, and saw importance of PC shrinks in his own eyes. Purely looking at those numbers. For the same amount of transistor @$30, Intel were selling those at anywhere between $80 to $300. Not to mention Intel has to invest in Fabs just for Apple as 100 - 200M is no small numbers. Intel cares about its margin, and its profitability. Sometimes we argue we should do things at lower margin to avoid the risk of being wiped out. Sometimes vice versa. I am not entirely sure what Intel's exec were thinking, they were possibly driven out of Apple and Mobile decision because of fear of shareholders protest at lowering margins, and driven back to Mobile precisely because of shareholders. And not only is Intel late to Mobile. They were late to GPU as well, and GPGPU in general. We are now looking at 2020 before an dGPU from Intel is out. Basically Intel hasn't been innovating for a few years. And may be they haven't been to war for a long time. They loses the sense of danger. May be they were typical Silicon Valley's optimist where everything is going to be fine. Which strangely is different to Andy Grove, only paranoid survives. But then I dont see x86 ever lose out in PC or Datacenter Market. Right now the biggest threat is AMD, and that is not an existential threat. I also dont see how Broadcom and Qualcomm merge would be an existential threat to Intel. Apple might not use Intel's modem, but that is not exactly a problem. Intel needed some customers to use its product so it could at least cover the R&D cost of modem, which is getting insanely complicated. And Mobile Network has already reached an inflection point where Modem aren't going to get the rapid development and improvement as we had in the last 10 years. With iPhone, we manage to move from End of 2G to 3G to 4G and now to 5G. All within 10 years. We have reached a stage where Top Speed no longer sales. Market wants more data, or higher capacity rather then unattainable top 1Gbps speed. We have Massive MIMO and LAA, and in the next 5 years we will see anywhere from 4x to 20x capacity improvement, along with better reception. All these improvement are now bottlenecked by Carrier upgrading their sites, assuming we have a steady rate of mobile phones upgrade. Intel has a clear market of 1.5 Billion PC to upgrade to, while not everyone will be upgrading their PC with Modem. It is by no means a small market. And Apple has their own W2 with 802.11n and Bluetooth 4.1. It is only a matter of time before they have their own 802.11ac and Bluetooth 5, as well as possible 802.11ax. All these are currently coming from Broadcom. I am much more worried about Broadcom then Intel.