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Here's my worry with Intel - even if they get their fab to be competitive, they're still working against a market that's changing against them. The big players

by jjcm 5y ago

Here's my worry with Intel - even if they get their fab to be competitive, they're still working against a market that's changing against them. The big players are all working on their own chips now and are pursuing SoC designs, rather than independent processors, and ARM seems to be the future trend. Amazon has their own chips for their servers, Microsoft announced they're working on their own chips, Google just released their first consumer chip this week, and the M1 is crushing the competition. I just don't see Intel succeeding with all of these things stacked against them. I hope they prove me wrong as more competition in the space is always good, but as it stands I'm not optimistic for their future.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago
Intel is an ARM licensee, and has made and can make their own ARM architecture based chips, if that's what the market wants.
- NonEUCitizen 5y ago
  They sold XScale to Marvell many years ago.
fspeech 5y ago
There is no fab capacity to replace Intel, regardless of the relative performance of in house chip designs. In addition Intel itself is reserving capacity on TSMC's most advanced node.
- khyryk 5y ago
  Yeah, this is a big factor. Everyone and their dog wants to design their own chips and fab them at TSMC, but it's simply not going to happen.
dehrmann 5y ago
They're all working on their own chips because there isn't a viable server ARM chip. I suspect they'd happily buy something like an M1 off-the-self it if existed. Even if the demand for SoCs goes up, Intel could play that market, too. And they have fabs that could compete with TSMC. The questions are mainly can they ramp up fab tech, ramp up CPU tech, and are they open to more custom hardware.
- lowbloodsugar 5y ago
  > They're all working on their own chips because there isn't a viable server ARM chip. AWS Graviton 2 ARM instances offer better performance/price than their intel instances. Does that qualify as viable? Or do you mean AWS has to make their own because there isn't one "off the shelf"?
  - dehrmann 5y ago
    > Or do you mean AWS has to make their own because there isn't one "off the shelf"? This was what I meant. In this case, AWS is selling general-purpose compute, so there's minimal iDevice full stack synergy, and they're just looking for performance, power use, and total cost.
- klelatti 5y ago
  You do know that AWS Graviton is based on Arm Neoverse cores which is absolutely a viable Arm server core.
megameter 5y ago
As long as Intel is taking huge risks, they can also look for a blue ocean market. The common factor among all of these customers is that they are centralizing and privatizing their compute - therefore, rather than playing sycophant to the current market leaders, disrupt them. Go out swinging. Intel has a long history of selling complete platforms, and they had a major role in disrupting computing in the microcomputer era; unlikely as it may seem right now, they have the power to turn the cloud story upside down and support repairability, client compute and decentralized systems through a radical new platform, with their new process nodes used as a hook. They may need to go lobby their case with governments to get some rule-making in place that drives a wedge in the existing monopolies, but they have the pockets to make a run at that, too, and it's a slam-dunk PR win to be seen protecting end users. Their endgame would be to once again sit at the top of the market, holding most of the customers, but it would be a very different market, and reflective of the kinds of broad transformations that are now happening to industry and supply chains across the global economy.
- pm90 5y ago
  It seems like they would have to do a lot of things just right to succeed in that very specific scenario. In other words, highly unlikely that it will work. Intel is unfortunately another IBM/HP at this point. They will likely continue to exist in some form but their glory days are behind them.

by jjcm 5y ago

cmrdporcupine 5y ago

Intel is an ARM licensee, and has made and can make their own ARM architecture based chips, if that's what the market wants.

NonEUCitizen 5y ago
They sold XScale to Marvell many years ago.

fspeech 5y ago

There is no fab capacity to replace Intel, regardless of the relative performance of in house chip designs. In addition Intel itself is reserving capacity on TSMC's most advanced node.

khyryk 5y ago
Yeah, this is a big factor. Everyone and their dog wants to design their own chips and fab them at TSMC, but it's simply not going to happen.

dehrmann 5y ago

They're all working on their own chips because there isn't a viable server ARM chip. I suspect they'd happily buy something like an M1 off-the-self it if existed. Even if the demand for SoCs goes up, Intel could play that market, too. And they have fabs that could compete with TSMC. The questions are mainly can they ramp up fab tech, ramp up CPU tech, and are they open to more custom hardware.

lowbloodsugar 5y ago
> They're all working on their own chips because there isn't a viable server ARM chip. AWS Graviton 2 ARM instances offer better performance/price than their intel instances. Does that qualify as viable? Or do you mean AWS has to make their own because there isn't one "off the shelf"?
- dehrmann 5y ago
  > Or do you mean AWS has to make their own because there isn't one "off the shelf"? This was what I meant. In this case, AWS is selling general-purpose compute, so there's minimal iDevice full stack synergy, and they're just looking for performance, power use, and total cost.
klelatti 5y ago
You do know that AWS Graviton is based on Arm Neoverse cores which is absolutely a viable Arm server core.

megameter 5y ago

As long as Intel is taking huge risks, they can also look for a blue ocean market. The common factor among all of these customers is that they are centralizing and privatizing their compute - therefore, rather than playing sycophant to the current market leaders, disrupt them. Go out swinging. Intel has a long history of selling complete platforms, and they had a major role in disrupting computing in the microcomputer era; unlikely as it may seem right now, they have the power to turn the cloud story upside down and support repairability, client compute and decentralized systems through a radical new platform, with their new process nodes used as a hook. They may need to go lobby their case with governments to get some rule-making in place that drives a wedge in the existing monopolies, but they have the pockets to make a run at that, too, and it's a slam-dunk PR win to be seen protecting end users. Their endgame would be to once again sit at the top of the market, holding most of the customers, but it would be a very different market, and reflective of the kinds of broad transformations that are now happening to industry and supply chains across the global economy.

pm90 5y ago
It seems like they would have to do a lot of things just right to succeed in that very specific scenario. In other words, highly unlikely that it will work. Intel is unfortunately another IBM/HP at this point. They will likely continue to exist in some form but their glory days are behind them.