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I see Intel not being dominant, having to take a back seat, shrinking a bit. But dying?? Nup, I'm not seeing this at all. I mean AMD for years survived in a

• icedchai 6y ago
  Indeed, a similar situation happened in the mid 2000's before Intel moved to the Core architecture. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this happened again.
  • chrisseaton 6y ago
    I’m almost positive Intel have tech ready to deploy to be on top again. They will have been developing it... but not needed to use it until they came under competition pressure.
    • monocasa 6y ago
      Jim Keller's apparent rage quit has me questioning that. I was bullish on Intel until quite recently. I was able to convince myself that they were taking the L on 10nm to focus completely on a full, true EUV transition, in order to be at the top of the game just everyone else was hitting that wall in order to dominate again. That turned out to be overly optimistic.
      • sunstone 6y ago
        Yes I agree. Jim Keller was the canary in the coal mine. When he left without finishing his assignment, after a decades long reputation for excellence at multiple companies, that was a clear signal to sell your Intel stock. Intel could be the new Northern Telecom (though I felt the same way about Microsoft ten years ago and ... it didn't turn out as expected)
        • cameldrv 6y ago
          I agree. From an investment perspective though, there is enormous potential in Mobileye. They're way off in Israel, so they don't get the attention of the valley SDC companies, but they are way ahead of many, many others.
          • sunstone 6y ago
            If so I believe this would be the second time that Israel has saved Intel's bacon. The first time being a microprocessor replacement for the power hungry Pentium III in the early 2000's.
    • imtringued 6y ago
      They can do it but will they? Intel isn't known for being a well managed company internally.
      • galaxyLogic 6y ago
        But there's the new CEO. Only the CEO can improve the overall management of the company
  • thisisnico 6y ago
    The Core Architecture in the mid 2000's was such an incredible shot back to the top. I remember seeing the benchmarks absolutely dominate AMD on every level, power, performance, TDP, Cost, etc. etc. This is almost immediately after Athlon 64 and the Athlon 64X2 started to gain market share, spanking Intel's Pentium 4 at the time. IIRC Intel ended up dropping the Prescott architecture, moving to the Pentium M architecture for development of the Core CPU's. Moving away from chasing max frequencies, and instead looking at IPC. Then Nehalem Dropped, (The first Core i CPU's) making the gap even larger. Q6600, Quad Core, Low power, decent cost. That was the CPU to have at the time. I miss the days reading about all of this.
    • ReptileMan 6y ago
      And you could overclock them almost 50% and at factory speeds they didn't need a fan, just a heatsink. Those were the days.
    • nwmcsween 6y ago
      This just puts into perspective how stagnate cpus have been, ~14 years and we are just starting to move to more than 4 core processors on prosumer systems.
      • thisisnico 6y ago
        Sad really. I was so passionate about hardware then. I lost interest because the innovation just dropped off a cliff. We were nearly exponential before the Core i series. Interestingly during that period Servers have had many-core CPU's. It just seems that Intel hasn't had a reason to push the envelope on the consumer side.
        • wbl 6y ago
          Pour one out for Denard scaling.
      • kilburn 6y ago
        To be fair, the move started a while back (arguably in 2017 with the introduction of the Ryzen CPUs). For instance, Steam's hardware report indicates that 1/3 of their install base already has 6 cores or more [1]. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/cpus/ https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/cpus/
  • ardy42 6y ago
    > Indeed, a similar situation happened in the mid 2000's before Intel moved to the Core architecture. I wouldn't be surprised if something like this happened again. Though that may have been a bit easier for them to solve, because the main thing they had to do was scrap NetBurst (Pentium 4) and return to a derivative their old architecture (which they were still using for the notebook market).
    • raverbashing 6y ago
      Correct, they only had to quit being led by their own marketing BS about "higher clock rates are faster"
  • AmVess 6y ago
    Intel has been bleeding engineers to other firms for a while now, and new talent has been skipping them altogether. These are not good developments for a company that depends on brain power to make their products.
    • gtirloni 6y ago
      > new talent has been skipping them altogether I'd be interested in hearing more about this. Are new graduates actually not applying?
    • icedchai 6y ago
      Intel is an enormous company with over 100,000 employees and an enormous stockpile of cash. I think they'll be okay.
      • bcrl 6y ago
        The Titanic was a state of the art ship. It still sunk.
• dylan604 6y ago
  But not being hyperbolic doesn't drive clicks. Sort of like all of the headlines about Musk no longer being the richest man because the stock prices fell. Whoopee friggin boohoo. He still has more money than >99% of all humans on the planet. In sports it's fun to say that 2nd place is just the first loser, but that's all in jest and friendly banter. When making things like this overly dramatic, it serves nobody except those trying to short the stock.
  • yboris 6y ago
    Side note: we, here on HN, all likely have more money than 99% of all humans on this planet [0] (the link is about income; wealth is even more unequally distributed). Earning more than $60k/year puts you in the 1% already. [1] [0] https://income-inequality.info/ https://income-inequality.info/ [1] https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i https://howrichami.givingwhatwecan.org/how-rich-am-i
    • perl4ever 6y ago
      Some people on HN in fact have salaries under $60K. Not everyone here is an American or works in the private sector, either. I would be fairly surprised if $60K is top 1%, even if you have the entire world population in the denominator. But when I checked your link, it's not using the entire population for the denominator, (which is correct, IMO) so I don't think it's even close. In the US, there are about 110M fulltime wage earners, (out of 330M population) with median being ~$50K and top quartile ~$80K. My very rough estimate based on that might be 45M people >$60K. That is a lot more than 110/330 * 1% * 7.8B = 26M before adding in Europe (lower wages but twice the population) or anywhere else. Source: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/wkyeng.pdf
      • yboris 6y ago
        Thanks for specifying the numbers and the underlying assumptions! Median in the US is not clear to me - I saw a figure of 60K and 35K within 2 minutes of searching. I think wage earning gets divided across family size, so those 45M people in your calculation, after dividing by family size, would have a much smaller income.
• karmasimida 6y ago
  > might even take back dominance (in a 2-3 years) Well, they won't even have that EUV capacity in 2-3 years. ASML is almost fully booked at this point. The way the industry is moving to custom chips won't wait for Intel. And realistically, the trend is already there, next stage of cloud evolution would be application specific chips for cloud native services, like storage/DB/ML, etc. There is zero chance it would scale back. And I am not sure why everyone here is taking 'dying' so literally. Losing influence is another form of dying. It will take a long time for a company to cease to exist after it becomes irrelevant.
• dcminter 6y ago
  Side note, you probably mean "lag behind" rather than "lack behind", i.e. a time delay rather than an omission.
• Torkel 6y ago
  Fast forward a few years. Look at the time it takes to design chips. Look at where the market and tech is going (M1 and AMD especially). Compare with RIM and Nokia. There is a "roadrunner" effect where a colossal company will continue for a few years on pure momentum. There are so many things speaking against Intel. And the facts you bring up as speaking for Intel seams more like short term momentum to me. I would guess at the following conversation in 5-10 years: - "How did Intel die?" - "Well, first slowly. Then quickly."
  • totalZero 6y ago
    Semiconductor demand is so high right now that any company that makes processors is going to print money in the short term. It's a "right place, right time" situation. Intel's long-term problem is loss of market share, but if you're going to lose market share, you're more likely to survive if it happens when the whole market is growing. There's not much that a company so heavily invested in x86 can do in the face of Apple Silicon, aside from executing well on 7nm and bringing it to market ahead of schedule. I don't see much of a similarity between Intel CPUs and Blackberry phones, considering that many flagship notebooks (even Apple's) have Intel inside. I for one am heralding the new era of voracious semiconductor demand, and am rooting for Intel to get its game face on and turn things around before the opportunity passes.
  • incrudible 6y ago
    The idea here must be that somehow Apple or AMD have figured out the magic sauce to making faster processors, while Intel of all companies is oblivious to it and won't be able to catch up. In reality, there is nothing that Apple or AMD are doing that Intel could not also do, isn't already doing, or isn't in a hurry to also do. Consider that at 14nm+++++, Intel still manages to outpace AMD with its 7nm CPUs and latest architecture. AMD competes mainly on price, which is not a great position to be in. Intel's profit margins are massively better. It's possible that x86 will become less relevant in the future, but in that case Intel will still be one of the be best chip designers in the industry. They will once again produce ARM chips, perhaps borrow one or two insights from Apple's architecture. They will continue to outsource manufacturing to other fabs, perhaps even become fabless.
• jjice 6y ago
  > I mean AMD for years survived in a situation much worse then Intel currently is. Yeah, a lot of people seem to ignore the fact that AMD was not killing it in the CPU market for a while a few years back. I wouldn't be surprised if Intel makes a comeback eventually. It's not a huge deal to me who's in the lead at any given time, I'm more interested in competitive CPUs. I'm most interested in the future of x86 as a whole. It's definitely got a while left, but I wonder how much market share will start to be taken by ARM (and hopefully RISCV).
• CountSessine 6y ago
  Intel is not just about CPU's. Intel is ABSOLUTELY just about CPUs. I can’t think of a single thing that they produce that I would ever pay them money for other than CPUs, especially if they aren’t relevant in the CPU world anymore. Intel has tried to get into so many other markets over the years, but the company’s culture and the nature of their high margin, high R&D business made it impossible to compete in those other markets. Intel's productions nodes might be behind TSMC's but they are still quite valuable, not all chips need 5nm processes. Heck we could say most chips don't need it. That’s a very different market with very different margins. If they shrank so much that they became like Maxim or something, then that’s really not much different than going out of business altogether.
• perfopt 6y ago
  Intel is certainly not dying. They are taking hits. But unlike AMD, Intel has a LOT of enemies over the years. Most large OEMs have been bullied and pushed around by Intel in the past. So I expect there will not be much good will to help a struggling Intel.