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Where does Intel realistically go from here?
by dharma1 6y ago
Where does Intel realistically go from here?
- warkdarrior 6y ago* Open their fabs to everyone, and * Offer co-design services to Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Google
- darig 6y agoTheir competitors fabs are already open, and better. Every design Intel has ever done has had significant flaws. The basis of their last 20 years of chips was taken from AMD, then they put their own stink on it and made the worlds' computers vulnerable in many ways.
- mhh__ 6y agoWeather the storm for the next few years and then keep going? Consider that Zen took about 5 years to do, when AMD were in a much weaker position than Intel are now. Intel's process problems are harder to deal with but they're not insurmountable as long as they get ahead for the next generation (Which they definitely have the cash to do). Intel aren't anywhere near as doomed as commenters would have you believe on here or Reddit. Ultimately this is down to whether their leadership keep their heads up or are cynical.
- testfoobar 6y agoApple M1 isn't just a shot across Intel's bow. It is giant crater in the middle of their product portfolio. AWS, Azure and Google Compute are absolutely going to pursue their own equivalents. Microsoft x86s deep enterprise legacy is going to take time to be replaced. But product replacement cycles are pretty short. Microsoft could easily move a lot of their customers to ARM if they wanted to. If I were Andy Grove, I would have bought a controlling interest in Microsoft years ago. But that is water under the bridge.
- discodave 6y agoAWS is already on generation 2 of their equivalent: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/
- klelatti 6y ago"Weather the storm" implies that there is some short / medium term disruption and if they just work a bit harder then they will recover (most of their) their previous competitive position. Trouble is AMD and TSMC aren't going away or stop competing and at the moment there is no evidence that Intel are going to 'fix' their process issues. Plus,as you know, they have a serious strategic challenge to their business in the rise of firms like Apple and AWS developing their own Arm SoCs.
- mhh__ 6y agoIntel will probably never have a run like they did last this last decade, but they can still carve a huge chunk of what will always be a huge market. Also, one thing worth saying is that if ARM really takes a proper share of the market it will obviously make x86 less popular - this works in both ways because it also clears the way for Intel to try other things of their own (This is highly speculative obviously, but it's impossible). The canary for Arm is if it's in the hands of developers (and not just M1).
- adrr 6y agoI don't know much about chip architecture but could they buy a an existing RISC architecture like PowerPC and use that as a competitor to ARM? Allow licensing of PowerPC for SOC and provide the fab as well.
- colinmhayes 6y agoSpend 50 billion trying to get their fab up to TSMC level, probably contract out this fab like TSMC does, and license x86 so that google and amazon hopefully don't migrate the cloud to ARM.
- klelatti 6y agoLicensing x86 destroys their (remaining) margins and probably wouldn't stop AWS etc going ARM anyway (they are already).