Completely agree. Had a friend start a career at Intel, moved to Apple because he saw it coming. In case anyone isn't totally clear on why Intel is in such tro

Completely agree. Had a friend start a career at Intel, moved to Apple because he saw it coming. In case anyone isn't totally clear on why Intel is in such trouble: they made a lot of money selling high-end CPUs for desktops, and even higher-margin parts to datacenter operators. On the PC front, when I was in high school (late 90s/early 2000s) it was common to have the computers on a "3 year replacement cycle" where they'd replace 1/3 or 1/4 of the computers every single year. Compare that to today where "2009 era" iMacs (!!) are floating around, ready for purchase at 200-300 dollars. There's no growth here. On the mobile side, Intel had the chance to make chips for Apple but said no. They couldn't make the numbers work volume-wise. It's an interesting story, read it if you haven't. Then comes datacenters. High-performance, high-power has been an Intel stronghold for 10-20 years but the whole industry is consolidating into AWS/Amazon/Azure who will probably make their own CPUs at some point, if not their entire own PCs. Either way this is bad for Intel: they face either someone who doesn't want their product, or a much larger buyer with much more purchasing leverage than a corporate IT department buying in small quantities. Same deal with storage -- the larger operators aren't paying the crazy EMC/NetApp margins those guys could cram down corporate IT's throats. Amazon has already announced plans to make ARM EC2 instances for reasons of both power and not paying Intel's crazy margins. The thing Intel still does have is world-leading fab capabilities. I remember back in the 90s Intel always outperfomred AMD by running at much higher clockspeeds, and they could do it because of their superior process technology. But that allowed AMD to run laps around them in microarchitecture, which is showing with Ryzen. I don't see Intel becoming a contract manufacturer soon but I'm sure they've discussed it internally.