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.

Comments

Typical idiocy clickbait from the "editors"

[CajunArson]

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.

Re:Typical idiocy clickbait from the "editors"

[TWX]

The article (or at least the Slashdot synopsis) may be excessively editorializing it, but Intel is threatened by the reduction in the personal computer industry.

Consider that when PCs rose to prominence there were lots of architectures. Even after Wintel and Motorola/Apple dominated personal computers at home, business computing still had other architectures (MIPS, and Alpha immediately come to mind) to the extent that Microsoft felt the need to port their business OS to those platforms, rather than to force x86.

The end of the model that all software has to be compatible with x86/AMD64 and that the gatekeepers for software for new devices (Apple's and Google's respective repositories) require that the software work on their devices almost without respect to the underlying CPUs, plus the 'cloud' model and various other virtual machine models may abstract the software developer away from the physical hardware to the point that we might again see a proliferation of various architectures again. Intel has reigned supreme because it was difficult to port software or to write software to run on everything, but if that has changed then suddenly it doesn't matter what actual CPU is in the phone or tablet or even server, it'll just work when it's time for the software to run.

That's the threat to Intel's business-model, a loss of near-monopoly on processors because new devices don't need Intel's processors.

Re:Typical idiocy clickbait from the "editors"

[nitehawk214]

The same reason why AOL was able to buy TimeWarner in 2000. What matters is apparent value not actual value.

Smartphones are the hot product, so Qualcomm has more apparent value than Intel which has focus on boring (but profitable) pc and server memory and cpus.

Yeah, it is stupid, yeah it doesn't make sense; but that is how stock markets work. A company not making quite as much money as predicted is the same as that company losing money.

Re:Typical idiocy clickbait from the "editors"

[LinuxIsGarbage]

In some ways, what was old is new again.

I think we're returning to the idea of a "Home Computer" vs a "Personal Computer / Workstation" Android and iOS really simplify things down. This to me is like the return of "Home Computers" C64, Apple //, etc. These systems you either switch them on and load right into ROM based BASIC, or you pop a cartridge or floppy in and start it up your application. Very limited functionality, but very simple to use. "Personal Computers", which are mote like workstations, are significantly more powerful, and flexible, but harder to administer, which most people aren't capable of, and have no interest in.

For most people, they want their computer to operate like an appliance. Can they open their email? Can they listen to their music? Take a picture? Watch Netflix / Youtube? Go on Facebook / Instagram / Snapchat / Whatever new trending social media app? Android and iOS are good for this. PCs (running Windows, macOS, or GNU/Linux) still offer more power when it's required... usually for business or power users.

iPhone CPUs?

[110010001000]

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.

Re:iPhone CPUs?

[StormReaver]

You don't want to enter a cutthroat low-margin market.

That would be fine if Intel's markets weren't shrinking. 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. Those are both areas where Intel is not terribly strong.

You would think that Intel and Cloud would go hand in hand, but that isn't necessarily true.

Re:iPhone CPUs?

[tomhath]

"not much"? Seriously?

You don't count motherboard chipsets, network interface controllers and integrated circuits, flash memory, graphics chips, embedded processors and other devices related to communications and computing. as "much"?

Re:Strange article

[omnichad]

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 lies, Intel spies...

[Quakeulf]

Intel dies.

Intel relies on a monopoly

[gweihir]

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.

Re:Intel relies on a monopoly

[jeff4747]

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.

Re:Intel relies on a monopoly

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD did try to create a low power x86 with DSP extensions appropriate for such a market. It was via a skunkworks company named Stexar.

Unfortunately, the ATI acquisition and contemporary price crash on x86 at the time made it look undesirable to continue development. In hindsight, a major lost opportunity as the smartphone market took off very shortly afterwards.

Re:Intel relies on a monopoly

[Kjella]

Intel didn't try to create a 64 bit extension to x86.

Yeah, Intel was trying to pull an IBM and introduce the MCA architecture to get rid of the competition and over on their shiny new platform where they held all the essential patents.

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.

That's one way of putting it. Somebody at Intel managed to do a huge sell-in of compiler optimization and profiling as the future and so they created "Explicitly parallel instruction computing (EPIC)" which gave extremely fine detailed control to the compiler. The problem is that there's a balance between run-time optimization based on the data and static compiler optimization so without a lot of iteration on realistic workloads performance was not that great and sometimes "let's just cross that bridge when we get there" was a superior strategy. And they discovered alternatives like hyper-threading where you let some low-intensity threads use those in between moments, better branch predictors etc. so the ideas of Itanium pretty much died and never came back.

The AMD64 instruction set was more the "let's keep the house but clear the cruft", particularly they added more general registers which was a really big deal. AMD had done real experiments with more addressable registers but found that it was better to only increase it from 8x32 to 16x64 bit and instead use additional registers for run-time register renaming. That offset most of the performance penalty of doubling pointer sizes by itself, so x64 mode was almost free (though with a big higher memory usage for pointer-intensive work) whereas EPIC required a full do-over and struggled massively to emulate x86. Itanium was already struggling when AMD kicked it in the nuts.

Intel should forget about Mobile

[pablo_max]

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.

Re:Strange article

[Carewolf]

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.

Re:Strange article

[MightyYar]

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 ...

Re:Strange article

[omnichad]

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.

Re:Strange article

[Carewolf]

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.

History

[DrYak]

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.

Re:History

[epine]

Now, Intel also did never manage to come up with anything x86 that was suitable for a smartphone.

I went though a short, thirty-year obsession with all things microarchitecture. The appalling stupidity of accepted memes in this space I'll surely carry to my lonely grave.

Crufty x86: here's how it broke down.

First, about 50% of the original cruft drank the shrink-me fluid, and shrank down so small you can barely see it now (e.g. some extra microcode entries in a rarely used, unpopular spiral annex of the instruction decode table for misbegotten 286-era CISC call gates.) Jesus, people, exponential happens.

Second, about 25% of the cruft turned out to not nearly be so crufty as legend would have it. The RISC camp soils itself over the read-modify-write instruction group. But generating a complex address once (yes, x86 does complex address generation within the context of a single instruction) rather than twice alleviates substantial pressure on the address look-aside unit. It's also a very handy and compact addressing mode for minor stack spill (e.g. function variables that don't quite manage to stay in registers all the time). With a 30% instruction encoding density advantage over the original ARM32, you need many fewer transistors in your i-cache to achieve the same i-cache hit ratio. The bigger your caches, the more free transistors to apply elsewhere. x86 is still a bit short on registers despite rmw, but you gain a bunch of this back on lighter context switches, so it's not a complete write-off.

The other 25% is an eternal pain in the ass. Here's how the PITA component breaks down. The majority of it has little impact on peak throughput at all, but it comes at a thermal efficiency cost. The thermal cost is mostly irrelevant if you are sucking juice from a wall socket, and your processor is not hitting the thermal wall. The other side of this is a hideous sunk-cost in the engineering trickery required to pull this off (for a company the size of Intel, however, hideous is mostly peanuts, and nice barrier to entry you've got there, shame if a different device category became prominent).

A minority of the PITA aspects of the instruction set are just permanently a PITA. Deep OOO requires extensive hazard detection, and x86 has hazards up the wazoo (many partial register writes, and seventeen different flavours of flag register update subsets). This costs silicon, this costs power, this costs cycle time, this costs pipeline stages. Lose, lose, lose.

Considering the architecture is now 40-years old, that's not exactly a resounding F on the old report card, by a sane grader.

Because of aspects like instruction decode alignment (with those blasted variable prefix bytes) and extremely complex hazard detection x86 is just always going to produce twice as much heat arriving at the same result 20% faster than any reasonable design that was originally power conscious.

I suspect most of this fixed thermal inefficiency resides in the front end and not the back end. Meaning that an alternative x86 instruction set could be devised (somewhat more drastically different than Thumb-2 vs. Thumb) with vastly more efficient instruction decode (thermally) and vastly fewer implicit scheduling hazards. Caches, register sets, dispatch pipelines, retirement unit, memory ports, execution units, these could all remain the same. Perhaps the only register you'd want to muck with is the flags register, and maybe you'd trash the ability to write to AH (though you'd probably keep partial register writes to AL to handle common byte operations).

[*] Fifteen years ago, the ugly details of this stuff was more in my head, so my examples predate AMD64, but mutatis mutandis.

Maybe by doing so you'd even close the gap enough to compete with ARM. But: a huge redevelopment and validation cost (what, me validate?), another substantially different code generation mode for every major compiler, another by

Shed no tears for them.

[Gravis Zero]

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.

Operate standalone

[sjbe]

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.

This article is nonsense

[lamer01]

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.

Re:Strange article

[JMJimmy]

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.

Re:Strange article

[MightyYar]

. 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.

As the largest player, that's where you should go

[SuperKendall]

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.

"fighting"? really?

[ravrazor]

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.

Re:"fighting"? really?

[Nemyst]

The headline is obviously sensationalized, but Intel's always been pretty forward looking in their planning. They have to act now if they want to face challenges 5 years down the line as ARM takes more and more marketshare. When you're dealing with CPU designs and fabs, you can't turn on a dime.

5G and "always online" netbooks as a threat?

[boa]

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?

Re:5G and "always online" netbooks as a threat?

[boa]

I feel the same way, but people seem to be happy with their cell phones, data cap or not. BTW, in some countries, like Finland, there's no data cap. If 5G delivers what it promises, throughput should not be an issue. And Wi-Fi isn't dead yet either :)

Intel's Future is pretty solid

[foxalopex]

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.

Can Intel even play in this market?

[roc97007]

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.

No truth to iPhone cpu myth

[Darkness Of Course]

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.