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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.
As usual another stupid article full of line noise instead of anything intelligent to say.
Incidentally, if Intel is "fighting for its future" by making huge profits in a variety of areas then why the hell is Qualcomm -- the effective monopolist in smartphone wireless devices and also a huge player in smartphone SoCs -- even conceivably a target of a takeover? Why the hell isn't Qualcomm about to buy out Intel if Intel is so behind the curve and Qualcomm is supposedly so great?
Let's not even forget how this idiot "analysis" is somehow never applied to fanboy-favorite AMD who for some reason is destined for greatness without ever having made a single product that could be used in a mobile phone.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
You are attaching too much importance to the iPhone CPUs (and Android) market. It is doubtful the margins are high on those, especially since Apple has multiple manufacturers. That is like saying Apple missed out on making Android phones because there were so many of them out there. You don't want to enter a cutthroat low-margin market.
The PC market isn't dying, it's just changing architectures away from the one Intel has dominated.
However, thanks to the Internet, cellular companies wanting data transfer, and businesses wanting to offer everything "aaS" -- they still have a large market server side though they're now missing out from many typical consumers.
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.
Intel dies.
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.
Is that what we're hoping for now? Or is it simply that we expect that to happen and are shocked when it doesn't?
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Intel chose not to worry about ARM.
Intel is getting its breakfast eaten by ARM.
Intel is getting its lunch nibbled on by Qualcomm/AMD
AMD is now tasting Intel's Dinner
Intel BOTCHED the Spectre and Meltdown patches. To the point that I will not apply those microcode pathes, and I will seriously consider AMD in the next build.
Intel seems to be doing the MSFT QA Principle, "let your customers be the beta-testers", except they have moved into the "Alpha" phase.
No thanks, I want a CPU that works and that is secure. It's AMD or ARM on the next build.
PC market is shrinking fast and what has replaced it is a plethora of smart products, the smart phone, the smart TV and tablet, for students in the family a cheap notebook. For business, smart terminals, simply easier to manager and no pesky USB or accessible disk drives of what ever type. See desktop replaced in by far the majority of instance and market shrinking back to power users, the core and they hate M$ only barely putting up with them and that is killing Intel because everyone is holding of upgrades because M$ are a privacy invasive big brother freaks who want to control people's digital lives and that is killing upgrades. Desktops are inevitably doomed but they can stretch out the next few decades as long as the OS improves substantially, privacy and security.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
That monopoly is ironically called the AMD64 architecture today. This comes with a number of problems. While Intel managed to keep AMD small after the last time AMD (not Intel, they did not have the skills) not only came up with the only viable 64 bit extension to the x86 architecture, for a while they also had the fastest CPUs. AMD engineering in the CPU space has basically always been significantly superior to Intel, except for raw speed. Meltdown and Spectre have now nicely illustrated what Intel did to get that speed. And AMDs weakness is over, with a brand-new architecture that is very well designed indeed while Intel has nothing. It helps to understand that Intel it not actually a CPU company, they are a memory company and have struggled with CPUs since they began making them. AMD, on the other hand, came from signal-processors to x86 and _is_ a CPU company. This nicely explains Intel's incompetence, incredible as it sounds. They do not have the right culture.
One other instance of that problem is also that while AMD can do extreme customization of their CPUs since the FX generation, Intel is completely incapable in this space. And just look how long it took Intel to get the memory controller into the CPU after AMD did it.
Now, Intel also did never manage to come up with anything x86 that was suitable for a smartphone. AMD did not even try, because they understand CPUs and knew this architecture is not suitable for that field. But they went one step farther: They have server processors that include ARM cores. So AMD has real experience in that field, but Intel is, again, lost. Yet AMD is far smaller and does not need the smartphone market to survive, while Intel likely does. And they messed it up.
My take is that finally Intel found out with much delay that they managed to screw themselves, in addition to their customers.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Intel had a Wintel phone some years ago that was actually really quick and responsive. Plenty of power to multitask and do whatever on your phone. However, ARM continues to utterly destroy x86 on power consumption.
Now it may be too little too late, unless they are somehow able to get that consumption better and maybe move toward tablets/phablets.
Seriously, Intel needs to get out of the mobile chipset game because they are pretty shit at it.
I have been in the mobile certification business for a long time. We do 10's of thousands of tests on protocol stack and hardware layers of modules integrating these chipsets. Intel based products are always a pain. Their support is crap too. Most say, ok.. never again with Intel. We will use Marvell or something. QC tends to be 4 or 5 times the price, so it often doesnt make sense for high volume, low cost stuff.
Anyhow.... they started way too late in this game and missed the boat.
I am thinking this might be planted news by Intel to justify their acquisition as otherwise it would be rejected as a major monopoly already fined for abusing their monopoly expanding its monopoly further.
The bulk of the Nokia engineers are now working at HMD Global, a.k.a "the new Nokia", still in Finland, and their new line of Nokia Android phones and feature phones have generated ~80 million sales in their first 12 months alone.
Far stretch from having been "destroyed".
but nothing has supplanted the PC
If you think about this, it is not a defensible statement. Sure, PCs still have a large collection of niches that nothing has supplanted - but you are ignoring the huge number of niches which have disappeared. You probably have a computer in your pocket right now with approximately the same power as a late-80s Cray. It has almost entirely wiped out the social aspect of the PC - email, IM, web forums, video and music sharing, etc. The PC games market is slowly losing ground to mobile.
Will there always be a market for powerful desktops (workstations)? Sure, I think so. Or maybe I lack imagination. But right now I think things like video editing, rendering, CAD, software development, and data analysis are safe. It's also not hard for me to imagine mobile processors eventually getting good enough for those fields, however. At that point, it will be more cost-effective to just do your work on a machine with souped-up mobile guts. Fast forward 10 years - why would anyone spring for a low-volume x86 chip when the ARM 10 in your pocket can be cheaply repurposed in a "desktop" for your video, CAD, or development work? Hell, even data analysis might be something better farmed out to a server somewhere... I already do this when I need more oomph than my workstation provides.
Intel should be worried - economies of scale are what won them the desktop, and x86 could easily be the next SPARC or Alpha or PA-RISC or MIPS or ...
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For business, smart terminals, simply easier to manager
Thin client vs thick client has been a tick-tock ever since the first mainframes entered the business market.
Desktops are inevitably doomed but they can stretch out the next few decades
That's as close to living as we've ever had... Decades are an eternity in computing.
PC market is shrinking fast
No, it isn't. The PC sales are dropping slowly and steadily, but the PC market penetration has not changed dramatically, people just upgrade more rarely.
Now, Intel also did never manage to come up with anything x86 that was suitable for a smartphone.
Worse.
They did never manage to come up with anything specifically running the x86 instruction set that was suitable for a smartphone.
They used to have a decent Intel-manufactured CPU running ARM instruction set, but somehow managed to abandon the market and sell it off, just at the time when ARM is getting even more relevant thanks to smartphones, routers and IoT.
Search for "Intel StrongArm" and "Intel XScale".
Note that, according to Wikipedia, Intel is still in possession of ARM license that they acquired when bought StrongArm.
So even after selling XScale out to Marvell, they could still start a new line of ARM core *now*, after having come to realization that the Atom doesn't scale down as much as they would have liked (isn't that well suited for smartphones and routers) and its x86 compatibility makes absolutely not sense in those markets (Seriously, nobody is going to run legacy Windows code on a smartphone)
AMD did not even try, because they understand CPUs and knew this architecture is not suitable for that field. But they went one step farther: They have server processors that include ARM cores.
I'm still hoping that, next to the ARM light-weight servers that they are targeting, these ARM cores will eventually also evolve to some high range phablets and dev boards.
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Intel has a long history of anti-competitive behavior. One needs only search "Intel anti-competitive behavior" or see their Wikipedia page to recognize that it's a persistent and ongoing. Yes, they have brought advances to the semiconductor field but they have always behaved in the most unethical manner possible to subvert the competition.
I look forward to the rise of AMD.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
And wouldn't the always risky move of combining two cultures, employees, and physical plants introduce an even greater peril?
Depends on how they handle it. If they operate the acquired company as a stand alone entity (sort of like how Berkshire Hathaway operates) then the cultures don't really have to mix much at all and that can work fine. Mixing company cultures is a serious challenge but it's not always required.
I think Intel's biggest challenge is that they've been a de-facto monopoly for so long that they seem to have forgotten how to compete in areas where they don't dominate. It's always a risk for company that has one big cash cow that they just milk it to the exclusion of all else. The biggest risk to Intel is software makers leaving the X86 platform which is where the vast majority of their revenue comes from. They make some money from IoT and flash memory and security but these are about 12% of their revenue and 7% of their profit combined.
Since the argument was against the idea that the market for the PC is dying entirely, I wouldn't even consider all the people that never would have had a PC if they had an alternative. It's back to its original niche.
If the definition of PC is x86 compatibility, the market may eventually go away. If the definition is full-power, full-size personal computing device, I can't yet imagine a future like that.
However, Intel can't maintain itself on its current markets, as they are all shrinking in favor of Mobile and, to a lesser extent, Cloud.
Well Intel supplies an awful lot of those CPUs for the cloud so I don't think that worries them so much. Mobile is an issue for them because that is definitely where the growth is. The biggest threat to Intel is that they have so much of their revenue and profit tied up in the X86 platform. If software and PC makers continue to migrate away from X86 it's going to hurt Intel badly sooner or later.
Intel has a stranglehold on server CPUs. AMD is making a comeback there but the ARM camp does not have compelling enough solutions in that space. Low power is great but it's not everything.
I think there's an argument to be made that it is ossifying. CPU and other architecture capabilities have risen to such a level in the last decade that it has disrupted the upgrade cycle. We're still running workstations we bought in 2009, and they even run Win10 (though not the latest creators update, but who cares). They do fine for browsing, document editing and the like, and now we simply replace them as they die, which doesn't actually happen all that often.
Now maybe my company is pushing the envelope a bit, but the refurb market, both for workstations and servers, is huge these days, because an off-lease three or four year old PC, server or laptop can be had for quite a bit less, and is going to do most tasks just as well as one I could go out and buy today. Yes, there are specialty and niche applications like gaming or CAD where you're going to want the latest and greatest, but for most people, if you browse and watch Netflix, you've pretty much covered the basis.
Where the frequent upgrades have been steady is in smartphones. That's where people seem to be giving their kids or Great Aunt Minny their three year old iPhone because the new shiny one is out. In part it's because portable devices are more likely to be damaged or destroyed, and in part because smartphone manufacturers have been as successful at using OS updates to push frequent upgrades as Microsoft was back in the day. And the fact is, in pure numbers, smartphones and feature phones are just much vaster markets than for PCs, and a great deal of the traditional casual computing that would have gone on on a PC now goes on on a phone.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Steve Jobs wanted Intel CPUs in his iPhone but his engineers did not. Anyone who's familiar with the differences between ARM and x86 would know that an Intel powered smartphone was not a good idea.
Intel tried to enter the smartphone market five years ago and failed due to glitches, power consumption and incompatibility with existing apps. If Steve Jobs had gotten his way, the smartphone revolution may never have happened.
Think globally but act within local variable scope.
PC market is shrinking because they failed to solve the problems necessary to make them relevant in a portable device world.
A home PC should be like a furnace - rarely physically interacted with but fully integrated into the home. Every fixed screen in my home should be dumb, they should all run off a single PC. All "smart devices" should simply be interfaces that use the PC's hardware to execute/control their functions. Smartphones/tablets/portable devices should have a power saving mode that enables them to operate as a "dumb" screen or as a separate fully powered device.
The trouble is that they've left it to 3rd parties to solve these problems and write patchworks of underfunded software and "unique" hardware solutions. They should be developing standards, interfaces, and cohesive solutions to make a single, powerful PC relevant again for more than just hardcore gaming. I should need a multi-CPU system to run hundreds of small devices around the home without hiccups.
Intel has a long history of buying companies that succeeded where they couldn't. 20 years ago they had a 'mergers/acquisitions' team (M&A). They weren't getting the market share they wanted, so they purchased several networking companies, including Level One Communications (at the time big Broadcom competitor.)
Was it successful? Not long after the M&A team added a 'D' for divestitures...
Whatever Broadcom is doing differently that makes them successful, that is the first thing Intel will change.
. It's back to its original niche.
The problem for us (and for Intel) is that niche is a small fraction of what they are sized for. Their multi-billion dollar fabs sitting idle is a financial disaster. Intel is already doing some contract manufacturing, but that's a tough game with many experienced competitors. Yes, I think you are right that there will always be a market for workstations, but I think we're going to see a slow drift towards what is becoming the new standard in commodity hardware. Most of us will use "PCs" with repurposed mobile guts, which is an interesting paradigm shift, and scary as hell if you are Intel.
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they should all run off a single PC. All "smart devices" should simply be interfaces that use the PC's hardware to execute/control their functions
For vendors... they keep more control if they use their own cloud, AND end users don't have to worry about replacing an expensive single PC to restore all those functions when it fails/dies
You don't want to enter a cutthroat low-margin market.
As one of the largest players in the CPU space, you absolutely do want to do that.
First of all, low-margin does not mean NO margin, and a billion of anything at low margin is still a lot of money.
Secondly, that is a lot of great R&D opportunity in a challenging space you are giving up to sone other company. You can sit around all day designing new processors or features but until it comes into contact with real world uses and needs, your design will lack the coherence it needs to attract other buyers. ARM has had tremendous uptake because its evolution has been guided by the fiery furnace of having to provide real working CPU's for so many mobile devices across multiple generations.
Lastly - if you are the high volume producer you are SUPPOSED to be able to go for low volume business because you have built to work at low margins already. The production capacity you have is supposed to give you higher margins than other smaller companies could manage when selling a ton of whatever, so it shouldn't even be that low a margin if you are one of the few companies that can produce billions of something.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Vendors have an interest in not having to provide their own cloud. That is an on going expense for a one time purchase. Those who want it for control, are usually up to no good. Those who want it for data, really don't need the cloud service, they just need the software to phone home telemetry and perform updates, things that can be standardized for user privacy & security. The reality is that it's not a sustainable business model to run IoT devices without a subscription service.
On the expense issue, it's true that you don't want to replace an expensive PC to restore all those functions. I think the structure of PCs also needs to change along with it so they're externally modular. It would not be an easy problem to solve but I think it's solvable with common hardware interfaces.
By externally modular I mean that I don't need to open up the system to replace anything. I just order any X interface module knowing that it will be compatible with my X interface system. Need more processing power? Plug in another CPU module. One of the two RAM modules failed? Pop it out and plug in a fresh RAM module. The only time you would need to go to great expense is if you wanted/needed to change interfaces.
Obviously it's not that simple, there would be huge hurdles to overcome and such a system has potential drawbacks. As it stands now though I am relying on numerous 3rd parties for the continued functioning of my IoT devices and the retail price + diminishing returns on monetizing my data will not continue to sustain their cloud services. They also have more points of failure - not only what's in my home but also internet service at large and my ability to connect without heavy latency to their cloud service.
Wasn't Broadcom already eated by Avago?
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.
Vendors have an interest in not having to provide their own cloud. That is an on going expense for a one time purchase.
No... it's probably a small expense for most products, and an eventual opportunity to get recurring revenue out of their customers -- either by starting to bill a new subscription (The Cloud excuse helps facilitate a "Rental model" for license to use the hardware and software --- Being cloud-based usually means additional revenue opportunities for the provider or more options to further exploit existing product owners for an extra revenue stream down the road), selling additional products or add-on services (Such as "plug-ins", "apps", or "music streaming"), or collecting data for marketing/advertising, OR after the end of the 3-year support period notifying their customers that they'll need to upgrade to $NEWER_HARDWARE_MODEL to keep using it.
they just need the software to phone home telemetry and perform updates,
Phoning home to a cloud infrastructure, so they need to build it anyways....
why not make it more integral to the product, to ensure the end user doesn't just firewall it off or disconnect it from the internet?
amd epyc has the pci-e for storage without needing to cross-flash / reflash to IT mode or lot's of pci-e switches.
Many don't get replaced at all...
A lot of people bought a PC to access the internet as there was little choice at the time, a lot of those people have moved onto tablets, gaming consoles and smartphones since then so while they still have a PC, it is probably gathering dust, won't be replaced if it dies and probably doesn't get used much if at all.
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Most smartphones support bluetooth keyboards...
Many can be docked to a larger screen, so you have the same device wether your mobile or in a fixed location - best of both.
For many use cases a smartphone is "good enough", typing may be slower but many people aren't very proficient typists anyway. There are also various speech to text options which have improved a lot in recent years.
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Intel did succeed in winning the Mac market. But Intel did not win a large portion of the UNIX market, because it eschewed UNIX. HPUX, AIX, Sun SPARC, Motorola, all these UNiX platforms were non-Intel. Intel lost out on the RISC market to a large extent. But remember that Intel, along with DEC, contributed to the demise of the IBM mainframe market.
Intel also lost out on the low heat, low current, low cost, portable, small device market. The logic goes: it doesn't make sound business sense to sell a processor for pennies, when you can sell a more powerful processor for $250.
Intel chose its niche in the marketplace, partnering with Microsoft. Now that market has changed and Intel is holding the bag. Some free clone of UNIX is driving those billions of small devices.
IBM lost out on typewriters and adding machines, Kodak lost out on film, Zenith lost out on TVs, GE and Westinghouse lost out on the incandescent bulb. The maelstrñom in the marketplace is forever changing.
You really wonder why they would turn this down?
From what I understand it would be a very different way of doing business. Apple wanted Intel to make CPUs that Intel didn't design. While Intel has made and makes ARM processors in small volumes, the numbers Apple projected would make Intel a chip foundry like TSMC, GlobalFoundries, and Samsung that is more invested in making other people's ICs. It would be like asking Ford to make GM and Honda cars. During WWII, all American automakers made Chrysler designed Jeeps for the war effort but they don't normally do so.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Subscription services sound nice, there's just not the income to support that very widely. People also can't afford the rate of obsolescence that would be required to sustain such a model either. We're already seeing that in the smartphone market and that's essentially what happened to the PC market. Buy small/cheaper devices that are "good enough" instead of an expensive/complicated/bulky PC.
I'm certainly not going to buy a "smart coffee maker" with a subscription & planned obsolescence when I can buy a dumb one without. I would buy one that is standardized and has a common interface though.
I think we also need to consider the massive shift that's coming with AI. If it turns out to be half as disruptive as experts claim there will be a serious shift in society. When AI/robotics can manufacture things cheaply and resources become more scarce (both physical and individual) will we still want the planned obsolescence model? We may just find society shifting the dynamic from profit based motives (obsolescence, disposability, etc) to longevity, interoperability, and customization.
5G is coming soon with big promises about speed and availability. Always-online netbooks is a thing already. Maybe the next generation netbooks will use a non-Intel CPU to save both production costs and power?
If people replace their PCs with a new Internet-enabled device(netbook, glorified cell phone, or something entirely new), sales of Intel CPUs will drop. A lot. It may be the death of both Intel CPUs and Windows OS.
All hail Android? All hail ARM?
I have a 2011 MacBook Pro as my primary workstation. With an upgraded SSD, this laptop is plenty fast enough for everything I do. Internet speed depends more on my home's connection, which isn't great but that's a product of where I live (Podunk). 3-D modeling with Blender is fast. Video editing isn't horrible. Xcode and compiling for Arduino / mcus is entirely reasonable. Until it completely gives up the ghost, I have no reason to upgrade this model. And from what I've read about soldered in memory and what not in newer models, I've no interest.
Intel isn't likely to go away anytime soon. They have some of the most advanced chip fabrication facilities in the world. Even if they didn't make x86 Processors, other manufacturers would be lining up to get their chips fabricated at their plants. They've also expanded into other areas although their x86 market remains to be their cash cow.
Now the only grudge I've got against Intel is their massive anti-competitive behaviour against AMD in the past but nowadays they're one of the few companies that provide full opensource access to their GPUs and they generally do produce excellent mobile laptop chips.
If the definition of PC is x86 compatibility, the market may eventually go away. If the definition is full-power, full-size personal computing device, I can't yet imagine a future like that.
This! My tablet isn't even close to replacing my x86 machine. I need a keyboard, mouse, multi-windows, file-system with user-created directories, etc. It might not have to be compatible with my current Wintel machines, but it has to have similar capabilities.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
No, we'd need to go from devices with walled gardens with a 30% cut on app purchases to a device with an open (but secure) market.
Whether you personally do it or not is beside the point - the market has gone that way.
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This is a real question. I don't have anything against Intel, and my current workstation has Intel Inside.
Does Intel have anything that plays well in the phone/tablet market? My understanding is that Qualcom and/or Samsung don't own the market just because they were there first, but because their products are designed specifically for the application, whereas Intel's offerings in that arena all appear to be relatively low power x86 chips. Key term being "relatively". Like Microsoft's early struggles with hand held devices, trying to shoehorn a desktop OS into something with a 4 inch screen, Intel appeared to be trying to leverage existing designs in a market where they weren't appropriate.
I could be missing something, but it seems like Intel's largest current issue is that they make the best possible processor for an increasingly smaller market, and don't make anything particularly appropriate for the most aggressively expanding markets. An issue they share to a certain extent with Microsoft.
It'll be interesting to see what happens should Intel acquire Broadcom. I think there's a good chance -- maybe 40% that after acquisition Intel will drop or severely de-emphasize Broadcom's SoC products in favor of one of their lower power laptop x86 processors. And fail miserably at it.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
For anything commercial, for this to work, we need to convince commercial developers to go from selling $1000 specialized vertical marker applications to selling $1 mobile applications.
I think they'll use the same OS and programs that they've always used, but the chips will change to whatever is currently offering up the best bang for the buck. Windows can run fine on an ARM now, and in 10 years I believe it will be a lot more common if Intel can't adjust. Autodesk, Microsoft, and Adobe can still sell their big commercial programs compiled for a different architecture. My Sony TV is already an all-in-one computer running Android TV... it's not a big stretch too see it being sold with upgraded storage, a keyboard, mouse, and Windows.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Vendors have an interest in not having to provide their own cloud. That is an on going expense for a one time purchase
They love forcing their own cloud. They can force your devices to quit working so you'll buy the next new thing. If you had direct interface, you could use the thing pretty much forever.
ARM is RISC with some extensions...RISC was always touted as better but CISC always won out. Intel has putzed around for the last 5-7 years as they did not have a real competitor in the CISC world. I think with Epyc being as good as it is, it will become a race again.
Ummm, that's a very stupid argument, I hope you realize.
Windows beat Linux because you can't play heavy games on Linux. And that's the only reason. You sure as hell can't play those games on a smartphone. First, it's running Linux, and second, it hasn't the power. It will never have the power because energy consumption goes up with the square of the CPU's abilities and batteries can't increase in capacity that fast.
Second, you can't do any decent wordprocessing in a phone or tablet, they're too prone to hanging, they don't have the screen and they still don't have the CPU to go beyond basics.
Third, the tablet market is collapsing because ebooks are crap and most people have now figured that out. Sales are way down and people are moving back to paper.
Fourth, the network speeds are too slow. It's fine in America, where 340 million suffer with barely faster than dial-up, but MOST OF THE WORLD is a damn sight faster and there are 6.7 billion of them. Rather a larger market. And they're expecting devices that can handle 10 gigabits per second to 400 gigabits per second, because to them that is NORMAL INTERNET SPEED. Smartphones and Tablets aren't capable.
Fifth, home users are used to 6-10 terabyte hard drives and SATA 3 speeds. That's NORMAL. When was the last time you bought a smartphone with a 10 terabyte SIM card?
Sixth, VR. You can't do CAVE or headsets on the USB port and, besides, it'll be needed for the charger to avoid setting the battery on fire.
Seventh, PCs don't explode. Smart phones and tablets DO. That's the problem with Li-Ion. And it can't be fixed, as "The Mouse" from Top Gear discovered.
Eighth, decent keyboard. A decent keyboard is faster and more effective than a touch screen, less vulnerable to false positives, less vulnerable to dirt and much more robust. Percussive maintenance on a PC keyboard won't shatter it. Try that on a cell phone and you end up with two half phones.
Ninth, HPC/Virtual Data Centre. Virtually all HPC these days is pile-of-pc style. That's why Intel's top Xeon processor is actually a good bet. As long as it doesn't have the same security bugs. When you're buying 100,000 PCs at a time, you ARE the market. The same goes for virtual data centres, such as Amazon's, or the system Google uses. Google buys vast numbers of commodity machines and plugs them together to form an incredibly high-end distributed system. Does anyone seriously think they're going to switch to a network of mobile phones? Higher cost for less power? That's not Google's approach.
Tenth, Programmers. Nobody programs phones on a phone. Nobody actually hacks the Android OS or the BIOS from the phone itself, simply because if you brick the phone you can't recover. They use a PC to do the programming and then upload, using JTAG where possible to unbrick. And most people program at least a little.
Eleventh, UI. The UIs for phones suck. They're badly designed, they're slow, they're unstable and they have to be that way because there aren't the resources to get them right and Android hasn't been ported to VST anyway.
Twelfth, real-time. Musicians, stage crew, roboticists, scientists, doctors, etc, need real-time. They either use an RTOS (FreeRTOS, VxWorks, RT-Linux) on a platform designed for heavy-duty real-time work (such as a VME crate) or they use a high-end PC that can get close enough. This is not something a Kindle can do.
Thirteenth, in honour of the new Doctor Who, there's SFX. How the hell does anyone think they could run Renderman, Maya or PoVRay on a cell phone? You can't stack up Kindles to create the effects for Titanic! For a start, those were high-end PCs running on a fast network. To get equivalent CPU power, you'd need enough Kindles to FILL the Titanic!
The total number of represented people in all these markets is so utterly overwhelming that if the world did abandon PCs, it would have to abandon civilization. You couldn't meet the requirements of any of them with any handheld device humanity will possess any time in the next hundred years. So unless you build an actual TARDIS, if you want a civilization, you're going to need the devices that keep it running.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There was exactly zero chance of Intel making iPhone CPUs. It was never on the table. Intel wasn't in the business of fab to mobile market.
Otellini was smoking something when he made that claim. Absolutely nobody else in the company believed it. The market was too small, the IP was wrong (as in Intel was on the wrong end of it). Just like everybody else Intel/Otellini didn't think apple could cook up enough business to change their business model. Which was complete verticle slice of IP/Process/CPU/MB/Servers and it was making quite a bit of coin doing it. Becoming just the company that makes apple designed CPUs for phones, no viable business model for that.
Maybe a fever dream left a vague unease behind, but it wasn't even a possibility. Intel never made the short list.
I'm certainly not going to buy a "smart coffee maker" with a subscription & planned obsolescence when I can buy a dumb one without.
The "Smart" coffee makers are called Keurig, and they're pretty popular --- some of the latest models use DRM (Digital Rights Management) technology in the form of a chip in their manufactured coffee pods to discourage/prevent using 3rd party or generic pods.
I don't think ARM or AMD are going to be the next big threat to the Intel monopoly.
AMD isn't and likely won't be a threat. Intel makes more in profit than AMD does in revenue. AMD is unfortunately a rival in name only and they operate at a significant cost disadvantage to Intel because Intel is vertically integrated and AMD isn't. I'd like to see AMD doing better but if you look at the financial statements of both companies (and I have) you'll quickly conclude that AMD is trying to diversify away from competing with Intel because it's a game they cannot win. They've been trying and failing for 30+ years and the only reason they continue to exist is because Intel needs them around to keep the anti-trust authorities off their back. Intel could put AMD out of the CPU business in a blink if they had a free hand to do so. (They would simply drop the price of their CPUs to less than AMDs cost until AMD exits the market - Intel wouldn't even have to take a loss to do it)
ARM is a threat but an indirect one. ARM can't (and likely won't) compete with Intel in PCs but ARM is kicking Intel's ass in mobile. As mobile grows the traditional computer market shrinks to some degree which hurts Intel. The biggest threats are usually the indirect ones. Nobody is going to compete and win head on with Microsoft in desktop operating systems but linux is winning through the back door by eroding the market through mobile. Intel faces a similar threat. ARM's threat to Intel is by eroding their existing markets.
Even they will be supplanted. It's going to come from left field, specifically from a company that is researching the next generation of computing.
One can always imagine some advance in technology that can kill the incumbents but there are more immediate threats to Intel that don't require invoking some as yet undeveloped new technology. The biggest one I think is that the large companies that operate data centers (Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, etc) start to roll their own CPUs. They appear to be working on it. Power management is a serious issue with data centers and Intel has never been very good at that. (which is a big reason they struggle in mobile) Plus there is significant margin leakage when you buy as many computers as these companies do. Vertical integration can provide serious cost savings. And these big companies definitely can bankroll the move to a different CPU architecture if they are so inclined. Intel makes about 30-40% of their revenue from this sector so it's not trivial to them.
Well, running the software on dedicated hardware (or on a full blown VM somewhere on the cloud - as several gaming solutions do) and streaming to your phone still beats everything in term of battery life vs performance.
(Also, you can turn the PC on and off remotely no need to have it run all the time. That's the whole point of Etherwake or newer technologies for lights-out management like IntelME, IPMI, etc. those even provide the VNC remote access. But saddly often also provide tons of exploitable bugs.).
Enables you to also leave the complex tax running on a power-grid machine and completely disconnect it from the phone (Zorpheus mentionned Photoshop. But such a setup would make even movie rendering possible).
Enables to switch device (quickly do a few manipulation over the smartphone, then switch the remote controlling to the tablet when in a more comfortable train, then finally switch to physicall keyboard and screen once you're back home).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I wasn't arguing wether the x86 or the ARM micro architecture is the "ultimate best one ever".
The parent was just point that intel never had a good CPU for smartphone.
I'm point that it's worse: they used to have one (an ARM based one) but managed to sell it out at the wrong time.
the micro-architecture is only relevant to make the "never had a good cpu for smartphone" sentence true.
They never had a x86 one.
They actually has a good CPU for smartphone (which happens to be an ARM, but that's completely orthogonal to my point. it could have been MIPS, it could even had been a motorola-compatible, etc.) but they managed to throw it away.
---
Though I partially agree with that the "RISC is always better no matter what" mantra is a bit overrated.
(Mainly, the "cruft" often attributed to x86 doesn't really play a role on the scale of CPU currently made by Intel and AMD for workstations/servers/laptops)
On the other hand, the RISC is still relevant in some extremely small form factors (embed). And as the smartphones progressively grew out of the embed world (there are the precusors of IoT before IoT was a thing), ARM eventually ended up sticking.
Yes, Intel could have poured ressource to make a smartphone-grade lesser-atom-like embed cpu. Probably.
But as you point out, it's definitely not worth the cost.
The single main advantage selling point of x86 (running unmodified binary code) is moot in this form factor (again, 3D Studio on a 5 inch screen ?!)
What would make sense, instead of re-inventing a whole new wheel (a hypothetical smartphone-grade intel cpu) intel did the right thing and acquire a company and a core that is smartphone-ready (StrongArm. - it happens to be an ARM but that's orthogonal to the whole debate. The key point here isn't x86 vs ARM. The key point is "core designed to work in sub-notebooks and settop-box" (i.e.: relatively power hungry) vs. "core designed to work in smartphone, pda, etc." (i.e.: even less ressource consuming)
But somehow Intel threw it away at the wrong time.
That's also why we aren't seeing that many practical real-world use of ARM in servers.
Most of the existing ARM cores happens to be optimized for the ultra-low ressurce stuff such as smartphone. Not that many ARM cores happen to be good for servers (e.g.: not many do feature SATA bus).
And finally note that AMD is planning to eventually go the reverse route : acquire a 3rd party ARM core (Cortex core in Opteron A), and then progressively build a server-grade ARM CPU out of it (upcoming K12, eventually one day, when AMD has enough left-over ressource after the current focus on Zen).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
This.
Intel , brilliantly marketed an unseen, barley understood by most , component.
Fast forward two decades, and mostly no one cares what chips run in mobile, the market Otellini ceeded to others, nor does anyone care what chips run on their cloud servers (save when the chip causes millions to be spent in time when Intel chips causes a security hole)
So this article is click bait, yep. Intel will no longer be the growth engine that they've been. Their market is now commoditized and will be a nice business, but the days of Intel under Grove are long gone. But they'll survive , after wave after wave of layoffs, they'll become a steady business.
I am SOOOOOOOO sorry for Intel. It's not like it ever used it's WinTel monopoly to destroy competition back in the 90s.
And, it is just SOOOOOOO consumer-friendly, as exemplified by the way it handled this latest design bugs and enabled people to live a slower, less stressful life by slowing down their devices.
If only there was something I, as a common man, could do to aussage the grief these poor millionaires and billionaires are suffering. Oh, the humanity!
You live by the sword, you die by the sword. Good riddance.
And that goes for the rest of you greedy, sociopathic Silicon Valley types. We look forward to dancing on your graves, too.
...people just upgrade more rarely.
Product Activation is what did me in. I used to rebuild my PC every 6 months, just because I could. After XP changed the game and I had my Windows license deactivated twice after upgrades (both times requiring me to call Microsoft and beg to use my PC again), I just stopped upgrading my hardware and learned to live with what I have.
No, I'm not going to switch to Linux (which I've been trying to do for 15 years). Yes, these days I can just use a pirated Windows if necessary. However, the point is that upgrading became more trouble that it's worth, and so I just upgraded when I needed to, not when I wanted.