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Everyone acts as though Intel should have seen everything coming. Where was AMD? Was AMD really competitive before Ryzen? Nope. Core 2 series blew them out of

Everyone acts as though Intel should have seen everything coming. Where was AMD? Was AMD really competitive before Ryzen? Nope. Core 2 series blew them out of the water. Was ARM really competitive until recently? Nope. Intel crushed them. The problem for Intel is the inertia of laziness due to a lack of competition. I wouldn’t count them out just yet, however. The company’s first true swing at modern GPU was actually good for a first attempt. Their recent CPUs while not quite as good as Ryzen aren’t exactly uncompetitive. Their foundry business faltered because they were trying a few things never before and not because they were incompetent. Also, 20A and 18A are coming along. I am not an Intel fan at all. I run AMD and ARM. My dislike isn’t technological though, it’s just that I hate their underhanded business practices.

nine_k 3y ago
ARM has been really competitive since, well, 2007, when the first iPhone hit the market, and when Android followed in 2008. That is, last 15 years or so. Not noticing a hugely growing segment that was bringing insane reams of cash to Apple, and Qualcomm, Samsung and others involved is not something I could call astute. Pretty certainly, Intel is improving, and of course should not be written off. But they did get themselves into a hole to dig out from, and not just because the 5nm process was really hard to get working.
- vineyardmike 3y ago
  > Not noticing a hugely growing segment that was bringing insane reams of cash to Apple, and Qualcomm, Samsung and others involved is not something I could call astute. And it's not like they didn't notice either. Apple literally asked intel to supply the chips for the first iPhone, but the intel CEO at the time "didn't see it". https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/16/4337954/intel-could-have-been-inside-the-original-iphone-says-outgoing-ceo https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/16/4337954/intel-could-have-...
  - eslaught 3y ago
    I agree mobile was a miss but the linked article actually quotes Intel's former COE making a pretty good argument why they missed: > "The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do... At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought." In that circumstance, I think most people would have made the same decision.
    - epistasis 3y ago
      Kind of speaks to how Intel was not competitive in the space at all. If it was truly that the marginal cost per part was higher than the requested price, either Apple was asking for the impossible and settled for a worse deal with an ARM chip, or Intel did not have similar capabilities.
    - isignal 3y ago
      Intel also had a later chance when Apple tried to get off the Qualcomm percent per handset model. This was far after the original iPhone. Apple also got sued for allegedly sharing proprietary Qualcomm trade secrets with Intel. And Intel still couldn’t pull it off despite all these tailwinds.
    - GeekyBear 3y ago
      "We couldn't figure out how much a chip design would cost to make" is pretty damning, in my book.
    - katbyte 3y ago
      I’m not so sure, he made a choice purely on “will it make money now” not “well let’s take a chance and see if this pays of big and if not we’ll loose a little money” It’s not like they couldn’t afford it and taking chances is important
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
  - distances 3y ago
    That was very luck for Apple though. Nokia made deals with Intel to provide the CPU for upcoming phone models, and had to scramble to redesign them when it became clear Intel was unable to deliver.
    - finaard 3y ago
      Not quite true - the intel projects were at a pretty early stage when Elop took over, and the whole Microsoft thing happened - and the projects got canned as part of the cleanup and moving to Windows for the phones. The CPUs were indeed horrible, and would've caused a lot of pain if the projects had actually continued. (source: I was working on the software side for the early Nokia intel prototypes)
      - distances 3y ago
        Thanks for the insights. N9 was originally rumored to use Intel, and it was speculated so [1] still half a year before the release. Was that then also switched by Elop as part of the whole lineup change, or were these rumors unfounded in the first place? [1] https://www.gottabemobile.com/meego-powered-nokia-n9-to-launch-with-intel-atom-cpu-at-mwc/ https://www.gottabemobile.com/meego-powered-nokia-n9-to-laun...
        finaard 3y ago
        Pretty much all rumors at that time were very entertainingly wrong. I think at the time that article got published we didn't even have the intel devboards distributed (that is a screen and macroboards, way before it starts looking like a phone). We did have some intel handsets from a 3rd party for meego work, but that was pretty much just proof of concept - nobody ever really bothered looking into trying to get the modem working, for example. What became the N9 was all the time planned as an arm based device - exact name and specs changed a few times, but it still pretty much was developed as a maemo device, just using the meego name for branding, plus having some of the APIs (mainly, qt mobility and QML) compatible with what was scheduled to become meego. The QML stuff was a late addition there - originally it was supposed to launch with MTF, and the device was a wild mix of both when it launched, with QML having noticeable issues in many areas. Development on what was supposed to be proper meego (the cooperation with intel) happened with only a very small team (which I was part of) at that time, and was starting to slowly ramp up - but massive developer effort from Nokia to actually make a "true" meego phone would've started somewhere mid-11.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  > ARM has been really competitive since And a few years prior to that Intel made the most competitive ARM chips (StrongARM). Chances are that an Intel chip would have powered the iPhone had they not scrapped their ARM division due to “reasons”
  - bux93 3y ago
    Intel had purchased/gotten StrongARM from DEC. DEC had started developing ARM chips as they concluded it was a bad idea to try and scale down their alpha chips to be more energy efficient. Then, after the success of these ARM chips in the blackberry and most of the palm PDAs as well as MP3 players and HTC smartphones, Intel sells it off, so it could focus on trying to make its big chips more energy efficient, making the mistake DEC avoided. iPhone was a defining moment, but at the time it was completely obvious that smartphones would be a thing, it's just that people thought that the breakthrough product would come from Nokia or Sony-Ericsson (who were using ARM SoCs from TI and Quallcomm respectively). Selling off the ARM division would not have been my priority? So it's a string of unforced errors. Nevertheless, Intel remains an ARM licensee, they didn't give that up when selling StrongARM, so it seems some people still saw the future..
    - matwood 3y ago
      Sounds like the classic Innovators Dilemma. There wasn't a lot of margin in the ARM chips so Intel doubled down on their high margin server and desktop chips. ARM took over the low end in portable devices and is now challenging in the datacenter.
    - jcheng 3y ago
      > DEC had started developing ARM chips as they concluded it was a bad idea to try and scale down their alpha chips to be more energy efficient. I thought this was interesting enough to track down more of the backstory here, and found this fascinating article: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2018/06/102717165-05-01-acc.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... Page 60, hard breaks added for readability: Baum: Apple owned a big chunk of it, but when Apple was really having hard times, they sold off their chunk at quite a profit, but they sold off the chunk. And then-- oh, while Newton was going on, some people from DEC came to visit, and they said, “Hey, we were looking at doing a low power Alpha and decided that just couldn’t be done, and then looked at the ARM. We think we can make an ARM which is really low power, really high performance, really tiny, and cheap, and we can do it in a year. Would you use that in your Newton?” Cause, you know, we were using ARMs in the Newton, and we all kind of went, “Phhht, yeah. You can’t do it, but, yeah, if you could we’d use it.” That was the basis of StrongARM, which became a very successful business for DEC. And then DEC sued Intel. Well, I worked on the StrongARM 1500, which was a very interesting product. It was an ARM and a DSP kind of highly combined. It was supposed to be like video processing using set top boxes, and things like that. And then we finished that project and our group in Palo Alto, we were just gonna start an Alpha project. And just then it was announced that DEC was-- no. No. Intel, at that time, Intel, DEC sued Intel for patent violations, didn’t go to them and say, “Hey, pay up or stop using it.” They just sued them. Intel was completely taken by surprise. There was a settlement. The settlement was you have to buy our Microelectronics Division and pay us a whole pile of money, and everything will go away. So they sold the Microelectronics Division, which we were part of, except for the Alpha Design Group, 'cause they didn’t think that they could sell that to Intel and have the SEC approve, 'cause the two can conflict. So I went away on vacation not knowing whether I would be coming back and working for Intel, or coming back working for DEC. And it turned out they decided to keep the Alpha Design Group, so I was still working for DEC. Except the reason for the lawsuit was Compaq wanted to buy DEC, but didn’t want to buy ‘em with this Fab and Microelectronics Division. So by doing this, they got rid of the Microelectronics Division, and now they could sell themselves to Compaq.
- ako 3y ago
  Apple has been working with Arm since 1987, when work on the Apple Newton started: https://www.cpushack.com/2010/10/26/how-the-newton-and-arm-saved-apple-from-death/ https://www.cpushack.com/2010/10/26/how-the-newton-and-arm-s...
1123581321 3y ago
Intel’s problem was the cultural and structural issues in their organization, plus their decision to bet on strong OEM partner relationships to beat competition. This weakness would prevent them from being ready for any serious threat and is what they should’ve seen coming.
duped 3y ago
> Was ARM really competitive until recently? Nope. Intel crushed them. Intel never "crushed" ARM. Intel completely failed to develop a mobile processor and ARM has a massive marketshare there. ARM has always beaten the crap out of Intel at performance per watt, which turned out to be extremely important both in mobile and data center scale.
- hollerith 3y ago
  I got curious about how ARM is doing in the data center and found this: >Arm now claims to hold a 10.1% share of the cloud computing market, although that's primarily due to Amazon and its increasing use of homegrown Arm chips. According to TrendForce, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was using its custom Graviton chips in 15% of all server deployments in 2021. https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/09/23/arm-holdings-data-center-dreams-will-need-to-overc/ https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/09/23/arm-holdings-data-...
  - chasil 3y ago
    The Amazon Graviton started by using stock ARM A72 cores.
  - geerlingguy 3y ago
    Oracle, and even Microsoft, have decently large arm64 deployments now too (compared to nothing).
  - dijit 3y ago
    ARM would be even more popular in the datacenter if getting access to Ampere CPUs was possible. I can get a top of the line Xeon Gold basically next day with a incredibly high quality out of band management from a reputable server provider. (HP, Dell). Ampere? Give it 6 months, €5,000 and maybe you can get one, from Gigabyte. Not known for server quality. (yes, I'm salty, I have 4 of these CPUs and it took a really long time to get them while costing just as much as AMD EPYC Milan's).
    - otabdeveloper4 3y ago
makeitdouble 3y ago
> Where was AMD? Trying to breathe as Intel was pushing their head under water. We saw AMD come back after their lawsuit against Intel got through and Intel had to stop paying everyone to not use AMD.
- mjevans 3y ago
  Kind of, but not really in laptops :( they're doing great on handhelds though.
  - makeitdouble 3y ago
    I think they're doing better (disclaimer: writing this from a Ryzen laptop) and their latest chip has better thermals and consumption, with a decent reputation compared to 10 years ago for instance. But yes, it's a long road ahead.
Dalewyn 3y ago
> Core 2 series blew them out of the water. And Sandy Bridge all but assured AMD wouldn't be relevant for the better part of a decade. It's easy to forget just how fast Sandy Bridge was when it came out; over 12 years later and it can still hold its own as far as raw performance is concerned.
chasil 3y ago
Intel's flaw was trying to push DUV to 10nm (otherwise known as Intel 7). Had Intel adopted the molten tin of EUV, the cycle of failure would have been curtailed. Hats off to SMIC for the DUV 7nm which they produced so quickly. They likely saw quite a bit of failed effort. And before we discount ARM, we should remember that Acorn produced a 32-bit CPU with a 25k transistor count. The 80386 was years later, with 275k transistors. Intel should have bought Acorn, not Olivetti. That's a lot of mistakes, not even counting Itanium.
- BirAdam 3y ago
  Acorn’s original ARM chip was impressive but it didn’t really capture much market share. The first ARM CPU competed against the 286, and did win. The 386 was a big deal though. First, software was very expensive at the time, and the 386 allowed people to keep their investments. Second, it really was a powerful chip. It allowed 11mips vs ARM3’s 13, but the 486 achieved 54mips. ARM6 only hit 28mips. It’s worth noting that the 386 also used 32bit memory addressing and a 32 bit bus while ARM was 26bit addressing with a 16 bit bus.
  - chasil 3y ago
    At the same time, it had unquestioned performance dominance until ARM made the decision for embedded. ARM would have been much more influential under Intel, rather than pursuing the i960 or the iAPX 432. Just imagine Intel ARM Archimedes. It would have crushed the IBM PS/2. Whoops. Seriously, even DEC was smart enough. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM
- kens 3y ago
  > Acorn produced a 32-bit CPU with a 25k transistor count. The 80386 was years later, with 275k transistors Coincidentally, ARM1 and 80386 were both introduced in 1985. I'm a big fan of the ARM1 but I should point out that the 386 is at a different level, designed for multitasking operating systems and including a memory management unit for paging.
- ffgjgf1 3y ago
  > Intel should have bought Acorn, not Olivetti. Intel had StrongARM though. IIRC they made best ARM cpus in the early 2000s and were designing their own cores. Then Intel decided to get rid of it because obviously they were just wasting money and could design a better x86 mobile chip…
mdasen 3y ago
The curse of having weak enemies is that you become complacent. You're right: AMD wasn't competitive for an incredibly long time and ARM wasn't really meaningful for a long time. That's the perfect situation for some MBAs to come into. You start thinking that you're wasting money on R&D. Why create something 30% better this year when 10% better will cost a lot less and your competitors are so far behind that it doesn't matter? It's not that Intel should have seen AMD coming or should have seen ARM coming. It's that Intel should have understood that just because you have weak enemies today doesn't mean that you have an unassailable castle. Intel should have been smart enough to understand that backing off of R&D would mean giving up the moat they'd created. Even if it looked like no one was coming for their crown at the moment, you need to understand that disinvestment doesn't get rewarded over the long-run. Intel should have understood that trying to be cheap about R&D and extract as much money from customers wasn't a long-term strategy. It wasn't the strategy that built them into the dominant Intel we knew. It wouldn't keep them as that dominant Intel.
- throwup238 3y ago
  > It's that Intel should have understood that just because you have weak enemies today doesn't mean that you have an unassailable castle. Their third employee that later went on to become their third CEO and guide Intel from the memory to processor transition literally coined the term and wrote a book called "Only the Paranoid Survive" [1]. It's inexcusable that management degraded that much. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Only_the_Paranoid_Survive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Only_the_Paranoid...
  - _the_inflator 3y ago
    Yes, I agree. However, I don’t necessarily see this book title as an imperative to innovate. Patent trolling can also be a way to deal with competitors. After all, Apple and ARM came from the idea to have better end user products around softer factors than shear CPU power. Since Intel‘s products aren’t highly integrated Phones nor assembled computer, Intel had no stake directly. It is complex.
    - 3y ago
AtlasBarfed 3y ago
If you're process nodes are going wayyyy over schedule, it shouldn't take much intelligence to realize that TSMC is catching up FAST. You should probably have some intel (haha) on ARM and AMD chips. They didn't care. Why? It's monopoly business tactics, except they didn't realize they weren't Microsoft. It's not like this was overnight. Intel should have watched AMD like a hawk after that slimeball Ruiz was deposed and a real CEO put in charge. And the Mac chips have been out, what, two years now, and the Apple processors on the iPhones at least 10? Come on. This is apocalyptic scale incompetence.
- edgyquant 3y ago
  Microsoft also got its lunch ate during this time by mobile. They have a new CEO who’s had to work hard to reshape the place as a services company.
scrubs 3y ago
Well, yes. Look at Japan generally and Toyota specifically. In Japan the best award you can get for having an outstanding company in terms of profit, topline, quality, free-cash, people, and all the good measures is the Deming Award. Deming was our guy (an American) but we Americans in management didn't take him seriously enough. The Japanese to their credit did ... ran with it and made it into their own thing in a good way. The Japanese took 30% of the US auto market in our own backyard. Customers knew Hondas, Toyotas cost more but were worth every dollar. They resold better too. (Yes some noise about direct government investment in Japanese companies by the government was a factor too, but not the chief factor in the long run). We Americans got it "explained to us." We thought we were handling it. Nah, it was BS. But we eventually got our act together. Our Deming award is the Malcolm Baldridge award. Today, unfortunately the Japanese economy isn't rocking like it was the 80s and early 90s. And Toyota isn't the towering example of quality it once was. I think -- if my facts are correct --- they went too McDonalds and got caught up in lowering price in their materials, and supply chain with bad effects net overall. So things ebb and flow. The key thing: is management through action or inaction allowing stupid inbred company culture to make crappy products? Do they know their customers etc etc. Hell, mistakes even screw-ups are not life ending for companies the size of Intel. But recurring stupidity is. A lot of the times the good guys allow themselves to rot from the inside out. So when is enough enough already?
chx 3y ago
> Where was AMD? Crushed by Intel's illegal anticompetitive antics?
treffer 3y ago
The problem is this... The money cow is datacenters, and especially top of the line products where there is no competition. Then fastest single core and multi core x86 cpus that money can buy will go to databases and similar vertically scaled systems. That's where you can put up the most extreme margins. It's "winner takes all the margins". Beeing somewhat competitive, but mostly a bit worse is the worst business position. Also... I put money on AMD when they were taking over the crown. Thank you for this wakeup call, I'll watch closely if Intel can deliver on this and take it back. I'll habe to adjust accordingly.
klelatti 3y ago
> Nope. Intel crushed them. The problem is that Intel has had a defensive strategy for a long time. Yes, they crushed many attempts to breach the x86 moat but failed completely and then gave up attempts to reach beyond that moat. Mobile, foundry, GPUs etc have all seen half-hearted or doomed attempts (plus some bizarre attempts to diversify - McAfee!). I think that, as Ben essentially says, they put too much faith in never-ending process leadership and the ongoing supremacy of x86. And when that came to an end the moat was dry.
- baq 3y ago
  On the contrary, they tried to pivot so many times and enter different markets, they bought countless small companies, some big, nothing seemed to stick except the core CPU and datacenter businesses. IIRC mobileye is one somewhat successful venture.
  - klelatti 3y ago
    Except they weren't real pivots. Mobile / GPU were x86 centric, foundry half hearted without buying into what needed to be done. Buying a company is the easy bit.
- bonton89 3y ago
  Part of the problem is Intel is addicted to huge margins. Maybe of the areas they have tried to enter are almost commodity products in comparison so it would take some strong leadership to convince everyone to back off those margins for the sake of diversification. They should have been worried about their process leadership for a long time. IIRC even the vaunted 14nm that they ended up living on for so long was pretty late. That would have had me making backup plans for 10nm but it looked more like leadership just went back to the denial well for years instead. It seemed like they didn't start backport designs until after Zen1 launched to me.
  - klelatti 3y ago
    100%! Also in a way reversing what Moore/Grove did when they abandoned commodity memories. Such a hard thing to do.
jldugger 3y ago
> Was ARM really competitive until recently? The writing was on the wall 6 years ago; Intel was not doing well in mobile and it was only a matter of time until that tech improved. Same as Intel unseating the datacenter chips before it. Ryzen I will give you is a surprise, but in a healthy competive market, "the competition outengineered us this time" _should_ be a potential outcome. IMO the interesting question is basically whether Intel could have done anything differently. Clay Christianson's sustaining vs disrupting innovation model is well known in industry, and ARM slowly moving up the value chain is obvious in that framework. Stratechery says they should have opened up their fabs to competitors, but how does that work?
- p_l 3y ago
  Previously, wverytine competition managed to out engineer intel, they crushed them either by having spare process advantage they could use to brute force performance... Or lock competition out of markets by blocking large swathes of them through illegal deals.
ActionHank 3y ago
They should have known it was coming because of how many people they were losing to AMD, but there is a blindness in big corps when management decide they are the domain experts and the workers are replaceable.
epolanski 3y ago
> Was AMD really competitive before Ryzen? No, but ARM should've rung many bells. Intel poured tons of billions in mobile. Didn't understood the future from smartphones to servers was about power efficiency and scale. Eventually their lack of power efficiency made them lose ground in all their core business. I hope they will get this back and not just by competing on manufacturing but architecture too.
vdaea 3y ago
Intel's recent CPUs are not as good as Ryzen? That hasn't been correct for a few years now.
djmips 3y ago
Only the Paranoid Survive
Aaronstotle 3y ago
AMD had Jim Keller join them, that should have been a wake up call for Intel.

nine_k 3y ago

ARM has been really competitive since, well, 2007, when the first iPhone hit the market, and when Android followed in 2008. That is, last 15 years or so. Not noticing a hugely growing segment that was bringing insane reams of cash to Apple, and Qualcomm, Samsung and others involved is not something I could call astute. Pretty certainly, Intel is improving, and of course should not be written off. But they did get themselves into a hole to dig out from, and not just because the 5nm process was really hard to get working.

vineyardmike 3y ago
> Not noticing a hugely growing segment that was bringing insane reams of cash to Apple, and Qualcomm, Samsung and others involved is not something I could call astute. And it's not like they didn't notice either. Apple literally asked intel to supply the chips for the first iPhone, but the intel CEO at the time "didn't see it". https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/16/4337954/intel-could-have-been-inside-the-original-iphone-says-outgoing-ceo https://www.theverge.com/2013/5/16/4337954/intel-could-have-...
- eslaught 3y ago
  I agree mobile was a miss but the linked article actually quotes Intel's former COE making a pretty good argument why they missed: > "The thing you have to remember is that this was before the iPhone was introduced and no one knew what the iPhone would do... At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought." In that circumstance, I think most people would have made the same decision.
  - epistasis 3y ago
    Kind of speaks to how Intel was not competitive in the space at all. If it was truly that the marginal cost per part was higher than the requested price, either Apple was asking for the impossible and settled for a worse deal with an ARM chip, or Intel did not have similar capabilities.
  - isignal 3y ago
    Intel also had a later chance when Apple tried to get off the Qualcomm percent per handset model. This was far after the original iPhone. Apple also got sued for allegedly sharing proprietary Qualcomm trade secrets with Intel. And Intel still couldn’t pull it off despite all these tailwinds.
  - GeekyBear 3y ago
    "We couldn't figure out how much a chip design would cost to make" is pretty damning, in my book.
  - katbyte 3y ago
    I’m not so sure, he made a choice purely on “will it make money now” not “well let’s take a chance and see if this pays of big and if not we’ll loose a little money” It’s not like they couldn’t afford it and taking chances is important
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- distances 3y ago
  That was very luck for Apple though. Nokia made deals with Intel to provide the CPU for upcoming phone models, and had to scramble to redesign them when it became clear Intel was unable to deliver.
  - finaard 3y ago
    Not quite true - the intel projects were at a pretty early stage when Elop took over, and the whole Microsoft thing happened - and the projects got canned as part of the cleanup and moving to Windows for the phones. The CPUs were indeed horrible, and would've caused a lot of pain if the projects had actually continued. (source: I was working on the software side for the early Nokia intel prototypes)
    - distances 3y ago
      Thanks for the insights. N9 was originally rumored to use Intel, and it was speculated so [1] still half a year before the release. Was that then also switched by Elop as part of the whole lineup change, or were these rumors unfounded in the first place? [1] https://www.gottabemobile.com/meego-powered-nokia-n9-to-launch-with-intel-atom-cpu-at-mwc/ https://www.gottabemobile.com/meego-powered-nokia-n9-to-laun...
      - finaard 3y ago
        Pretty much all rumors at that time were very entertainingly wrong. I think at the time that article got published we didn't even have the intel devboards distributed (that is a screen and macroboards, way before it starts looking like a phone). We did have some intel handsets from a 3rd party for meego work, but that was pretty much just proof of concept - nobody ever really bothered looking into trying to get the modem working, for example. What became the N9 was all the time planned as an arm based device - exact name and specs changed a few times, but it still pretty much was developed as a maemo device, just using the meego name for branding, plus having some of the APIs (mainly, qt mobility and QML) compatible with what was scheduled to become meego. The QML stuff was a late addition there - originally it was supposed to launch with MTF, and the device was a wild mix of both when it launched, with QML having noticeable issues in many areas. Development on what was supposed to be proper meego (the cooperation with intel) happened with only a very small team (which I was part of) at that time, and was starting to slowly ramp up - but massive developer effort from Nokia to actually make a "true" meego phone would've started somewhere mid-11.
ffgjgf1 3y ago
> ARM has been really competitive since And a few years prior to that Intel made the most competitive ARM chips (StrongARM). Chances are that an Intel chip would have powered the iPhone had they not scrapped their ARM division due to “reasons”
- bux93 3y ago
  Intel had purchased/gotten StrongARM from DEC. DEC had started developing ARM chips as they concluded it was a bad idea to try and scale down their alpha chips to be more energy efficient. Then, after the success of these ARM chips in the blackberry and most of the palm PDAs as well as MP3 players and HTC smartphones, Intel sells it off, so it could focus on trying to make its big chips more energy efficient, making the mistake DEC avoided. iPhone was a defining moment, but at the time it was completely obvious that smartphones would be a thing, it's just that people thought that the breakthrough product would come from Nokia or Sony-Ericsson (who were using ARM SoCs from TI and Quallcomm respectively). Selling off the ARM division would not have been my priority? So it's a string of unforced errors. Nevertheless, Intel remains an ARM licensee, they didn't give that up when selling StrongARM, so it seems some people still saw the future..
  - matwood 3y ago
    Sounds like the classic Innovators Dilemma. There wasn't a lot of margin in the ARM chips so Intel doubled down on their high margin server and desktop chips. ARM took over the low end in portable devices and is now challenging in the datacenter.
  - jcheng 3y ago
    > DEC had started developing ARM chips as they concluded it was a bad idea to try and scale down their alpha chips to be more energy efficient. I thought this was interesting enough to track down more of the backstory here, and found this fascinating article: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/2018/06/102717165-05-01-acc.pdf https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20... Page 60, hard breaks added for readability: Baum: Apple owned a big chunk of it, but when Apple was really having hard times, they sold off their chunk at quite a profit, but they sold off the chunk. And then-- oh, while Newton was going on, some people from DEC came to visit, and they said, “Hey, we were looking at doing a low power Alpha and decided that just couldn’t be done, and then looked at the ARM. We think we can make an ARM which is really low power, really high performance, really tiny, and cheap, and we can do it in a year. Would you use that in your Newton?” Cause, you know, we were using ARMs in the Newton, and we all kind of went, “Phhht, yeah. You can’t do it, but, yeah, if you could we’d use it.” That was the basis of StrongARM, which became a very successful business for DEC. And then DEC sued Intel. Well, I worked on the StrongARM 1500, which was a very interesting product. It was an ARM and a DSP kind of highly combined. It was supposed to be like video processing using set top boxes, and things like that. And then we finished that project and our group in Palo Alto, we were just gonna start an Alpha project. And just then it was announced that DEC was-- no. No. Intel, at that time, Intel, DEC sued Intel for patent violations, didn’t go to them and say, “Hey, pay up or stop using it.” They just sued them. Intel was completely taken by surprise. There was a settlement. The settlement was you have to buy our Microelectronics Division and pay us a whole pile of money, and everything will go away. So they sold the Microelectronics Division, which we were part of, except for the Alpha Design Group, 'cause they didn’t think that they could sell that to Intel and have the SEC approve, 'cause the two can conflict. So I went away on vacation not knowing whether I would be coming back and working for Intel, or coming back working for DEC. And it turned out they decided to keep the Alpha Design Group, so I was still working for DEC. Except the reason for the lawsuit was Compaq wanted to buy DEC, but didn’t want to buy ‘em with this Fab and Microelectronics Division. So by doing this, they got rid of the Microelectronics Division, and now they could sell themselves to Compaq.
ako 3y ago
Apple has been working with Arm since 1987, when work on the Apple Newton started: https://www.cpushack.com/2010/10/26/how-the-newton-and-arm-saved-apple-from-death/ https://www.cpushack.com/2010/10/26/how-the-newton-and-arm-s...

1123581321 3y ago

Intel’s problem was the cultural and structural issues in their organization, plus their decision to bet on strong OEM partner relationships to beat competition. This weakness would prevent them from being ready for any serious threat and is what they should’ve seen coming.

duped 3y ago

> Was ARM really competitive until recently? Nope. Intel crushed them. Intel never "crushed" ARM. Intel completely failed to develop a mobile processor and ARM has a massive marketshare there. ARM has always beaten the crap out of Intel at performance per watt, which turned out to be extremely important both in mobile and data center scale.

hollerith 3y ago
I got curious about how ARM is doing in the data center and found this: >Arm now claims to hold a 10.1% share of the cloud computing market, although that's primarily due to Amazon and its increasing use of homegrown Arm chips. According to TrendForce, Amazon Web Services (AWS) was using its custom Graviton chips in 15% of all server deployments in 2021. https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/09/23/arm-holdings-data-center-dreams-will-need-to-overc/ https://www.fool.com/investing/2023/09/23/arm-holdings-data-...
- chasil 3y ago
  The Amazon Graviton started by using stock ARM A72 cores.
- geerlingguy 3y ago
  Oracle, and even Microsoft, have decently large arm64 deployments now too (compared to nothing).
- dijit 3y ago
  ARM would be even more popular in the datacenter if getting access to Ampere CPUs was possible. I can get a top of the line Xeon Gold basically next day with a incredibly high quality out of band management from a reputable server provider. (HP, Dell). Ampere? Give it 6 months, €5,000 and maybe you can get one, from Gigabyte. Not known for server quality. (yes, I'm salty, I have 4 of these CPUs and it took a really long time to get them while costing just as much as AMD EPYC Milan's).
  - otabdeveloper4 3y ago

makeitdouble 3y ago

> Where was AMD? Trying to breathe as Intel was pushing their head under water. We saw AMD come back after their lawsuit against Intel got through and Intel had to stop paying everyone to not use AMD.

mjevans 3y ago
Kind of, but not really in laptops :( they're doing great on handhelds though.
- makeitdouble 3y ago
  I think they're doing better (disclaimer: writing this from a Ryzen laptop) and their latest chip has better thermals and consumption, with a decent reputation compared to 10 years ago for instance. But yes, it's a long road ahead.

Dalewyn 3y ago

> Core 2 series blew them out of the water. And Sandy Bridge all but assured AMD wouldn't be relevant for the better part of a decade. It's easy to forget just how fast Sandy Bridge was when it came out; over 12 years later and it can still hold its own as far as raw performance is concerned.

chasil 3y ago

Intel's flaw was trying to push DUV to 10nm (otherwise known as Intel 7). Had Intel adopted the molten tin of EUV, the cycle of failure would have been curtailed. Hats off to SMIC for the DUV 7nm which they produced so quickly. They likely saw quite a bit of failed effort. And before we discount ARM, we should remember that Acorn produced a 32-bit CPU with a 25k transistor count. The 80386 was years later, with 275k transistors. Intel should have bought Acorn, not Olivetti. That's a lot of mistakes, not even counting Itanium.

BirAdam 3y ago
Acorn’s original ARM chip was impressive but it didn’t really capture much market share. The first ARM CPU competed against the 286, and did win. The 386 was a big deal though. First, software was very expensive at the time, and the 386 allowed people to keep their investments. Second, it really was a powerful chip. It allowed 11mips vs ARM3’s 13, but the 486 achieved 54mips. ARM6 only hit 28mips. It’s worth noting that the 386 also used 32bit memory addressing and a 32 bit bus while ARM was 26bit addressing with a 16 bit bus.
- chasil 3y ago
  At the same time, it had unquestioned performance dominance until ARM made the decision for embedded. ARM would have been much more influential under Intel, rather than pursuing the i960 or the iAPX 432. Just imagine Intel ARM Archimedes. It would have crushed the IBM PS/2. Whoops. Seriously, even DEC was smart enough. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM
kens 3y ago
> Acorn produced a 32-bit CPU with a 25k transistor count. The 80386 was years later, with 275k transistors Coincidentally, ARM1 and 80386 were both introduced in 1985. I'm a big fan of the ARM1 but I should point out that the 386 is at a different level, designed for multitasking operating systems and including a memory management unit for paging.
ffgjgf1 3y ago
> Intel should have bought Acorn, not Olivetti. Intel had StrongARM though. IIRC they made best ARM cpus in the early 2000s and were designing their own cores. Then Intel decided to get rid of it because obviously they were just wasting money and could design a better x86 mobile chip…

mdasen 3y ago

The curse of having weak enemies is that you become complacent. You're right: AMD wasn't competitive for an incredibly long time and ARM wasn't really meaningful for a long time. That's the perfect situation for some MBAs to come into. You start thinking that you're wasting money on R&D. Why create something 30% better this year when 10% better will cost a lot less and your competitors are so far behind that it doesn't matter? It's not that Intel should have seen AMD coming or should have seen ARM coming. It's that Intel should have understood that just because you have weak enemies today doesn't mean that you have an unassailable castle. Intel should have been smart enough to understand that backing off of R&D would mean giving up the moat they'd created. Even if it looked like no one was coming for their crown at the moment, you need to understand that disinvestment doesn't get rewarded over the long-run. Intel should have understood that trying to be cheap about R&D and extract as much money from customers wasn't a long-term strategy. It wasn't the strategy that built them into the dominant Intel we knew. It wouldn't keep them as that dominant Intel.

throwup238 3y ago
> It's that Intel should have understood that just because you have weak enemies today doesn't mean that you have an unassailable castle. Their third employee that later went on to become their third CEO and guide Intel from the memory to processor transition literally coined the term and wrote a book called "Only the Paranoid Survive" [1]. It's inexcusable that management degraded that much. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Only_the_Paranoid_Survive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Grove#Only_the_Paranoid...
- _the_inflator 3y ago
  Yes, I agree. However, I don’t necessarily see this book title as an imperative to innovate. Patent trolling can also be a way to deal with competitors. After all, Apple and ARM came from the idea to have better end user products around softer factors than shear CPU power. Since Intel‘s products aren’t highly integrated Phones nor assembled computer, Intel had no stake directly. It is complex.
  - 3y ago

AtlasBarfed 3y ago

If you're process nodes are going wayyyy over schedule, it shouldn't take much intelligence to realize that TSMC is catching up FAST. You should probably have some intel (haha) on ARM and AMD chips. They didn't care. Why? It's monopoly business tactics, except they didn't realize they weren't Microsoft. It's not like this was overnight. Intel should have watched AMD like a hawk after that slimeball Ruiz was deposed and a real CEO put in charge. And the Mac chips have been out, what, two years now, and the Apple processors on the iPhones at least 10? Come on. This is apocalyptic scale incompetence.

edgyquant 3y ago
Microsoft also got its lunch ate during this time by mobile. They have a new CEO who’s had to work hard to reshape the place as a services company.

scrubs 3y ago

Well, yes. Look at Japan generally and Toyota specifically. In Japan the best award you can get for having an outstanding company in terms of profit, topline, quality, free-cash, people, and all the good measures is the Deming Award. Deming was our guy (an American) but we Americans in management didn't take him seriously enough. The Japanese to their credit did ... ran with it and made it into their own thing in a good way. The Japanese took 30% of the US auto market in our own backyard. Customers knew Hondas, Toyotas cost more but were worth every dollar. They resold better too. (Yes some noise about direct government investment in Japanese companies by the government was a factor too, but not the chief factor in the long run). We Americans got it "explained to us." We thought we were handling it. Nah, it was BS. But we eventually got our act together. Our Deming award is the Malcolm Baldridge award. Today, unfortunately the Japanese economy isn't rocking like it was the 80s and early 90s. And Toyota isn't the towering example of quality it once was. I think -- if my facts are correct --- they went too McDonalds and got caught up in lowering price in their materials, and supply chain with bad effects net overall. So things ebb and flow. The key thing: is management through action or inaction allowing stupid inbred company culture to make crappy products? Do they know their customers etc etc. Hell, mistakes even screw-ups are not life ending for companies the size of Intel. But recurring stupidity is. A lot of the times the good guys allow themselves to rot from the inside out. So when is enough enough already?

chx 3y ago

> Where was AMD? Crushed by Intel's illegal anticompetitive antics?

treffer 3y ago

The problem is this... The money cow is datacenters, and especially top of the line products where there is no competition. Then fastest single core and multi core x86 cpus that money can buy will go to databases and similar vertically scaled systems. That's where you can put up the most extreme margins. It's "winner takes all the margins". Beeing somewhat competitive, but mostly a bit worse is the worst business position. Also... I put money on AMD when they were taking over the crown. Thank you for this wakeup call, I'll watch closely if Intel can deliver on this and take it back. I'll habe to adjust accordingly.

klelatti 3y ago

> Nope. Intel crushed them. The problem is that Intel has had a defensive strategy for a long time. Yes, they crushed many attempts to breach the x86 moat but failed completely and then gave up attempts to reach beyond that moat. Mobile, foundry, GPUs etc have all seen half-hearted or doomed attempts (plus some bizarre attempts to diversify - McAfee!). I think that, as Ben essentially says, they put too much faith in never-ending process leadership and the ongoing supremacy of x86. And when that came to an end the moat was dry.

baq 3y ago
On the contrary, they tried to pivot so many times and enter different markets, they bought countless small companies, some big, nothing seemed to stick except the core CPU and datacenter businesses. IIRC mobileye is one somewhat successful venture.
- klelatti 3y ago
  Except they weren't real pivots. Mobile / GPU were x86 centric, foundry half hearted without buying into what needed to be done. Buying a company is the easy bit.
bonton89 3y ago
Part of the problem is Intel is addicted to huge margins. Maybe of the areas they have tried to enter are almost commodity products in comparison so it would take some strong leadership to convince everyone to back off those margins for the sake of diversification. They should have been worried about their process leadership for a long time. IIRC even the vaunted 14nm that they ended up living on for so long was pretty late. That would have had me making backup plans for 10nm but it looked more like leadership just went back to the denial well for years instead. It seemed like they didn't start backport designs until after Zen1 launched to me.
- klelatti 3y ago
  100%! Also in a way reversing what Moore/Grove did when they abandoned commodity memories. Such a hard thing to do.

jldugger 3y ago

> Was ARM really competitive until recently? The writing was on the wall 6 years ago; Intel was not doing well in mobile and it was only a matter of time until that tech improved. Same as Intel unseating the datacenter chips before it. Ryzen I will give you is a surprise, but in a healthy competive market, "the competition outengineered us this time" _should_ be a potential outcome. IMO the interesting question is basically whether Intel could have done anything differently. Clay Christianson's sustaining vs disrupting innovation model is well known in industry, and ARM slowly moving up the value chain is obvious in that framework. Stratechery says they should have opened up their fabs to competitors, but how does that work?

p_l 3y ago
Previously, wverytine competition managed to out engineer intel, they crushed them either by having spare process advantage they could use to brute force performance... Or lock competition out of markets by blocking large swathes of them through illegal deals.

ActionHank 3y ago

They should have known it was coming because of how many people they were losing to AMD, but there is a blindness in big corps when management decide they are the domain experts and the workers are replaceable.

epolanski 3y ago

> Was AMD really competitive before Ryzen? No, but ARM should've rung many bells. Intel poured tons of billions in mobile. Didn't understood the future from smartphones to servers was about power efficiency and scale. Eventually their lack of power efficiency made them lose ground in all their core business. I hope they will get this back and not just by competing on manufacturing but architecture too.

vdaea 3y ago

Intel's recent CPUs are not as good as Ryzen? That hasn't been correct for a few years now.

djmips 3y ago

Only the Paranoid Survive

Aaronstotle 3y ago

AMD had Jim Keller join them, that should have been a wake up call for Intel.