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Intel Fights For Its Future (mondaynote.com)
An anonymous reader shares a post: The Smartphone 2.0 era has destroyed many companies: Nokia, Blackberry, Palm... Will Intel be another victim, either as a result of the proposed Broadcom-Qualcomm combination, or as a consequence of a suicidal defense move? Intel sees the Qualcomm+Broadcom combination as an existential threat, an urgent one. But rather than going to the Feds to try and scuttle the deal through a long and uncertain process, Intel is rumored to be "working with advisors" (in plainer English, the company's Investment Bankers) on a countermove: acquire Broadcom. Why the sudden sense of urgency? What is the existential threat? And wouldn't the always risky move of combining two cultures, employees, and physical plants introduce an even greater peril?
To begin with, the threat to Intel's business isn't new; the company has been at risk for more than a decade. By declining Steve Jobs' proposal to make the original iPhone CPU in 2005, Intel missed a huge opportunity. The company's disbelief in Apple's ambitious forecast is belied by the numbers: More than 1.8 billion iOS devices have been sold thus far. Intel passed on the biggest product wave the industry has seen, bigger than the PC. Samsung and now TSMC manufacture iPhone CPUs. Just as important, there are billions of Android-powered machines, as well. One doesn't have to assume 100% share in the smartphone CPU market to see Intel's gigantic loss.
To begin with, the threat to Intel's business isn't new; the company has been at risk for more than a decade. By declining Steve Jobs' proposal to make the original iPhone CPU in 2005, Intel missed a huge opportunity. The company's disbelief in Apple's ambitious forecast is belied by the numbers: More than 1.8 billion iOS devices have been sold thus far. Intel passed on the biggest product wave the industry has seen, bigger than the PC. Samsung and now TSMC manufacture iPhone CPUs. Just as important, there are billions of Android-powered machines, as well. One doesn't have to assume 100% share in the smartphone CPU market to see Intel's gigantic loss.
Because the PC market is dying.
Only if you ask the stock market. Stable demand without growth is called a business (though shareholders tend not to care about that). Replacement cycles are long, but nothing has supplanted the PC.
AMD (not Intel, they did not have the skills) not only came up with the only viable 64 bit extension to the x86 architecture
You're leaving out a rather important detail: Intel didn't try to create a 64 bit extension to x86.
Instead, Intel tried to use Itanium and IA-64 to replace x86 and all the cruft in it that had built up over the years. Intel thought people would only buy Itanium for servers, since a 64-bit address space wasn't very useful for desktops at the time. So they priced their chips high.
AMD countered with 64 bit extensions to x86 and cheaper chips.
Cheaper won.
Intel stock is up 50% in the last 12 months (to $50) and they made about $63 billion dollars in 2017.
I think they're doing okay.