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Intel Declares Independence From PC, Prioritizes Cloud, IoT and 5G Efforts
A week after announcing 12,000 job cuts, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich has shared vision for the company, hinting a shift in its prime focus away from PC business. In a blog post, Krzanich said that the company will be actively growing its data center business. The chip maker also plans to focus on chips and technologies for IoT devices. "The biggest opportunity in the Internet of Things is that it encompasses just about everything in our lives today-- it's ubiquitous," Krzanich said. The company also plans to boost its memory chips business and make a push towards utilizing them in data centers and various cloud services. Intel said that it has made several investments in this field, noting the $16 billion acquisition of Altera last year. The company says it will be playing a big role in the move to 5G connectivity. "Connectivity is fundamental to every one of the cloud-to-thing segments we will drive," he writes.
Over the years, Intel has failed to keep up with Moore's Law, an axiom that semiconductor density will double about every two years. The company previously extended the timeframe to 2.5 years, but Krzanich assures customers that the they are working to make further advances in order to meet the goal. "Moore's Law is fundamentally a law of economics, and Intel will confidently continue to harness its value," Krzanich said. PCWorld has extensively reported on this.
Over the years, Intel has failed to keep up with Moore's Law, an axiom that semiconductor density will double about every two years. The company previously extended the timeframe to 2.5 years, but Krzanich assures customers that the they are working to make further advances in order to meet the goal. "Moore's Law is fundamentally a law of economics, and Intel will confidently continue to harness its value," Krzanich said. PCWorld has extensively reported on this.
Yes it should refocus on servers. But rather it should be the "home server" market. Maybe even home cluster.
The market for desktops has mostly gone away, replaced by laptops and tablets. These people only needed a PC for spread sheets, simple word processing, and running a web browser.
The gaming machines market is the same if not bigger.
Professional content creation workstations are bigger than ever.
Same money is being spent; just in different form factors.
There is one area that isn't being exploited and marketed enough. The private cloud; i.e. home servers.
Particular when mixed with virtual machines it's something that needs to happen more. Store all your media at home in one place. Use the online cloud only for immediate stuff and for backups. There is huge potential for streaming. A home server can do transcoding on the fly and a dozen other things all at the same time.
It's more about the demise of the low end desktop which in the least has been replaces by cigar box systems.
Basically, the "PC" is going away. The classical Desktop in typical office (tower and monitor) will be the "workstation" outfitted with the Xeon lineup. Everything else will either be embedded chipsets in monitors; think AIO units (All-In-One) running off ARM, or typical BYOD phones and tablets. This is where the industry is headed in the next few years. This is precisely why Windows 8 overshot the paradigm with a GUI geared to content consumption and not multitasking. They screwed up, and Windows 10 is the compromise between Windows 8 and Windows 7. So yeah, there you go.
Life is not for the lazy.