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Everyone mentions Intel high margins on servers and somehow does not consider if Apple wants these margins too. > Guys, do you really not understand why x86 to

Everyone mentions Intel high margins on servers and somehow does not consider if Apple wants these margins too. > Guys, do you really not understand why x86 took over the server market? > It wasn’t just all price. It was literally this “develop at home” issue. Thousands of small companies ended up having random small internal workloads where it was easy to just get a random whitebox PC and run some silly small thing on it yourself. Then as the workload expanded, it became a “real server”. And then once that thing expanded, suddenly it made a whole lot of sense to let somebody else manage the hardware and hosting, and the cloud took over.

wbl 6y ago
Apple backed away from the server market years ago despite having a quite nice web solution.
mshook 6y ago
It was also because Intel was like this giant steamroller you couldn't compete with because it was also selling desktop CPUs. Sure they have lower margins on desktop but these brings sh!t tons of cash, cash you will then use for research and to develop your next desktop and server CPUs. If I believe this page [1], consumer CPUs brought almost $10 billions in 2019... In comparison, server CPUs generated $7 billions of revenues... And these days, Intel has like >90% of that market. Other players (Sun, HP, IBM, Digital, ...) were playing in a walled garden and couldn't really compete on any of that (except pricing because their stuff was crazy expensive). So not only they were sharing the server market with Intel but Intel was most likely earning more than the sum of it all from their desktop CPUs... More money, more research, more progress shared between the consumer and server CPUs: rinse and repeat and eventually you will catch up. And also, they could sell their server CPUs for a lot less than their "boutique" competitors. You just can't compete with a player which has almost unlimited funds and executes well... [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/23/intel-intc-earnings-q4-2019.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/23/intel-intc-earnings-q4-2019....

wbl 6y ago

Apple backed away from the server market years ago despite having a quite nice web solution.

mshook 6y ago

It was also because Intel was like this giant steamroller you couldn't compete with because it was also selling desktop CPUs. Sure they have lower margins on desktop but these brings sh!t tons of cash, cash you will then use for research and to develop your next desktop and server CPUs. If I believe this page [1], consumer CPUs brought almost $10 billions in 2019... In comparison, server CPUs generated $7 billions of revenues... And these days, Intel has like >90% of that market. Other players (Sun, HP, IBM, Digital, ...) were playing in a walled garden and couldn't really compete on any of that (except pricing because their stuff was crazy expensive). So not only they were sharing the server market with Intel but Intel was most likely earning more than the sum of it all from their desktop CPUs... More money, more research, more progress shared between the consumer and server CPUs: rinse and repeat and eventually you will catch up. And also, they could sell their server CPUs for a lot less than their "boutique" competitors. You just can't compete with a player which has almost unlimited funds and executes well... [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/23/intel-intc-earnings-q4-2019.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/01/23/intel-intc-earnings-q4-2019....