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Samsung Ends Intel's 2-decade-plus Reign in Microchips (ap.org)
Intel has lost its long-held title as the world's top computer chip makerâ"at least by one important yardstick. From an Associated Press report: Intel's more than two decade reign as king of the silicon-based semiconductor ended Thursday when Samsung Electronics surpassed the U.S. manufacturer to become the leading maker of the computer chips that are a 21st century staple much as oil was in the past. Samsung reported record-high profit and sales in its earnings report for the April-June quarter, and while Intel's reported earnings beat forecasts, the U.S. company's entire revenue was smaller than sales from Samsung's chip division. Samsung said its semiconductor business recorded 8 trillion ($7.2 billion) in operating income on revenue of 17.6 trillion won ($15.8 billion) in the quarter. Intel said it earned $2.8 billion on sales of $14.8 billion.
They didn't have any actual fireworks on hand, they just turned on Note 7's and threw them in the air.
Basically Intel is losing to ARM. But not just on mobile. They're also in trouble for tablets, and desktops are going to get real close. Bare Feats regularly does comparative synthetic benchmarks between Apple's tablets (ARM) and laptops (Intel). Last time was in June: http://barefeats.com/ipadpro20...
Below, Intel means 3.5GHz Dual-Core i7 processor + Iris Plus Graphics 650 GPU. And ARM means Apple's ARM-based 2.39GHz A10X processor. As you can see, these tablets are getting really close to laptop performance.
Single-Core (highest=fastest):
Intel: 4650
ARM: 3951
Multi-Core (highest=fastest):
Intel: 10261
ARM: 9332
GPU compute score (highest=fastest):
Intel: 26353
ARM: 27814
GFXBench Metal Manhattan (highest=fastest):
Intel: 37 FPS
ARM: 42 FPS
I for one, am really happy. Intel has needed some competition desperately. Now there's AMD, and there's ARM, and we as the consumers are getting more and better options.
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Microsoft and Intel for the past generation was king of computing, with their dominance in the x86 IBM (Compatible) Personal Computer.
Which had been people primary computing platform. This has been moved to mobile devices for most people primary computing.
Now Intel and what we call the PC isn't going to die, but be used more towards workstation and server jobs. There is plenty of business opportunity and long term growth in these markets. As long as Microsoft and Intel don't try to bring back the good old days of dominance again.
We still need faster computers and operating systems with mouse and keyboards for serious work. But email and web browsing is not longer a primary function, it will be on these workstations, just because people are using it for more important stuff.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The difference engine is not a computer, no matter how much Victorians think it is...
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
phones are not computers .. no matter how many Millennials think they are...
Sure they are. An iPhone 4 could perform 1.6 Gigaflops. A Cray 2 (1985) could perform 1.9. IBM's Deep Blue (1997) was rated at 11.4 GFLOPS. A Samsung S5 was rated at 142. A three year old smartphone is more powerful than a supercomputer from 20 years ago. I'd say that what we call a phone today is more like a computer that you can make calls on. It's certainly nothing like the rotary dial phones I grew up with.
Just because I'm old and can't always relate to Millennials, doesn't make them automatically wrong. I'm pretty sure it's the same in your case as well.
Intel can't beat ARM on cost, and the difference in performance is no longer as significant as it once was. Consumers value mobility more than power now. Cheap smartphone on Google returns search results ranging from $5 to $20.