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In the future two companies will be heavily studied in business school for how badly they blew their technical lead and proficiency to the point that it may be
by cletus 2y ago
In the future two companies will be heavily studied in business school for how badly they blew their technical lead and proficiency to the point that it may be the daeth of them. Those companies are Boeing and Intel.
I would posit in both cases the problem is extreme financialization. Both companies had such a large market share (and even a monopoly in certain segments) that the much-quoted but apropos Steve Jobs quote [1] applies. All these modern CEOs seem capable of doing is stock buybacks, cutting costs and raising prices where they can.
In the 2000s, Intel faced a serious challenge from AMD with the Athlon/Opteron architecture. Intel's failures were a continuation of their Pentium 4 architecture and the company was only saved by the Pentium 3, which became the Pentium-M and the Centrino platform then the Core Duo and the modern CPUs we have now. They're all Pentium 3 descendants.
What we've seen over the last decade is most people have enough CPU power so the move has been towards smaller, cheaper and more energy-efficient CPUs. We've seen this in phones and then tablets and now CPUs. Apple's move to ARM was really the nail in the coffin for Intel as it culminated a decade of not being able to respond to the market.
Intel is seemingly unable to respond to this trend. All Intel CPUs still have super-high TDPs and haven't adopted any silicon to boost AI performance, which is increasingly going to matter. I fully expect this to be further integrated into the M4 and later CPUs.
I, too, expect Windows on ARM to be here to stay because there are simpnly too many advantages to the platform and it's going to eat away at the consumer market in a big way because ARM laptops and tablets will give people what they want: smaller, cheaper and more energy-efficient computers.
Meanwhile Intel just goes from disaster to disaster. The move to 10nm became a running joke almost to the level of Duke Nukem Forever. Intel's once-legendary fab ability is seemingly being eclipsed by TSMC and ARM chips seem to be the primary beneficiary of that.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NlBjNmXvqIM
- walterbell 2y ago> All Intel CPUs still have super-high TDPs and haven't adopted any silicon to boost AI performance Lunar Lake claims 17W TDP with 48 TOPS NPU, https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-meteor-lake-npu-meet-intels-dedicated-silicon-for-local-ai-processing https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-meteor-lake-npu-meet-intels-d...