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Is there an electric generator evolution scenario here Intel should be watching for? Back in the day before the electric grid really caught on, hydro- and coal

Is there an electric generator evolution scenario here Intel should be watching for? Back in the day before the electric grid really caught on, hydro- and coal-powered electric generators could be found in businesses large and small that had needs that went well beyond the limited voltage and amperage requirements of the meager electrified buildings at the time. It made sense for a business to have its own power plant engineering department to just feed and maintain the beasties if the productivity from thirsty electrically-powered machines far outweighed the enormous cost of an in-house power plant, consumables and staffing. As the grid evolved though, this need went away, and only really heavy industry these days exceed the delivery capabilities of the grid will run their own on-site power plant (more often they just try to "peer" co-locate next to a "real" power plant, kind of like HFT's with exchanges). Power plant manufacturing is now a heavily-specialized industry with margins much lower than Intel has become accustomed to. Could the "grid" of the Net, cloud and mobile devices evolve to the point where the existing PC and server markets retreats in relative scale into "heavy industrial" applications like cloud infrastructure, and shift out Intel's cash flow from under them? Under such a scenario, the PC and server markets don't shrink as much as grow dramatically slower on a relative basis to B2C-grade gear and infrastructure that explodes in growth comparatively. Intel will still be plenty profitable if well-run, and still be mighty, but won't grab all the headlines, and evolve into a GE-like "mainstream" business.

webmaven 6y ago
> Could the "grid" of the Net, cloud and mobile devices evolve to the point where the existing PC and server markets retreats in relative scale into "heavy industrial" applications like cloud infrastructure, and shift out Intel's cash flow from under them? It could, but the extractable rents of centralized data (eg. the Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits) will continue to push against this for a while yet. Arguably, the hardware and connectivity we have now is already more than capable of dispensing with data centralization for most use-cases, relegating the cloud to niches like commodity backup-and-restore services, and premium on-demand compute capacity analogous to the use-cases for supercomputers (of which AI/ML is a growing subset). We're already hitting use-cases and scenarios where centralized synchronization is becoming a hindrance that imposes additional costs, but the loss of control of a locus for extracting attractive profit margins implied by alternative software architectures generally limit investment.
wmf 6y ago
Could the "grid" of the Net, cloud and mobile devices evolve to the point where the existing PC and server markets retreats in relative scale into "heavy industrial" applications like cloud infrastructure, and shift out Intel's cash flow from under them? Absolutely. Many analysts are predicting that the future is mostly public cloud (heavily ARM) accessed from mobile devices (100% ARM) so they're imploring Intel to get back into mobile before it's too late.

webmaven 6y ago

> Could the "grid" of the Net, cloud and mobile devices evolve to the point where the existing PC and server markets retreats in relative scale into "heavy industrial" applications like cloud infrastructure, and shift out Intel's cash flow from under them? It could, but the extractable rents of centralized data (eg. the Law of Conservation of Attractive Profits) will continue to push against this for a while yet. Arguably, the hardware and connectivity we have now is already more than capable of dispensing with data centralization for most use-cases, relegating the cloud to niches like commodity backup-and-restore services, and premium on-demand compute capacity analogous to the use-cases for supercomputers (of which AI/ML is a growing subset). We're already hitting use-cases and scenarios where centralized synchronization is becoming a hindrance that imposes additional costs, but the loss of control of a locus for extracting attractive profit margins implied by alternative software architectures generally limit investment.

wmf 6y ago

Could the "grid" of the Net, cloud and mobile devices evolve to the point where the existing PC and server markets retreats in relative scale into "heavy industrial" applications like cloud infrastructure, and shift out Intel's cash flow from under them? Absolutely. Many analysts are predicting that the future is mostly public cloud (heavily ARM) accessed from mobile devices (100% ARM) so they're imploring Intel to get back into mobile before it's too late.