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Intel Is in an Increasingly Bad Position in Part Because It Has Been Captive To Its Integrated Model (stratechery.com)
Once one of the Valley's most important companies, Intel is increasingly finding itself in a bad position, in part because of its major bet on integration model. Ben Thompson, writing for Stratechery: When Krzanich was appointed CEO in 2013 it was already clear that arguably the most important company in Silicon Valley's history was in trouble: PCs, long Intel's chief money-maker, were in decline, leaving the company ever more reliant on the sale of high-end chips to data centers; Intel had effectively zero presence in mobile, the industry's other major growth area. [...] [Analyst] Ben Bajarin wrote last week in Intel's Moment of Truth. As Bajarin notes, 7nm for TSMC (or Samsung or Global Foundries) isn't necessarily better than Intel's 10nm; chip-labeling isn't what it used to be. The problem is that Intel's 10nm process isn't close to shipping at volume, and the competition's 7nm processes are. Intel is behind, and its insistence on integration bears a large part of the blame.
The first major miss [for Intel] was mobile: instead of simply manufacturing ARM chips for the iPhone the company presumed it could win by leveraging its manufacturing to create a more-efficient x86 chip; it was a decision that evinced too much knowledge of Intel's margins and not nearly enough reflection on the importance of the integration between DOS/Windows and x86. Intel took the same mistaken approach to non general-purpose processors, particularly graphics: the company's Larrabee architecture was a graphics chip based on -- you guessed it -- x86; it was predicated on leveraging Intel's integration, instead of actually meeting a market need. Once the project predictably failed Intel limped along with graphics that were barely passable for general purpose displays, and worthless for all of the new use cases that were emerging. The latest crisis, though, is in design: AMD is genuinely innovating with its Ryzen processors (manufactured by both GlobalFoundries and TSMC), while Intel is still selling varations on Skylake, a three year-old design.
The first major miss [for Intel] was mobile: instead of simply manufacturing ARM chips for the iPhone the company presumed it could win by leveraging its manufacturing to create a more-efficient x86 chip; it was a decision that evinced too much knowledge of Intel's margins and not nearly enough reflection on the importance of the integration between DOS/Windows and x86. Intel took the same mistaken approach to non general-purpose processors, particularly graphics: the company's Larrabee architecture was a graphics chip based on -- you guessed it -- x86; it was predicated on leveraging Intel's integration, instead of actually meeting a market need. Once the project predictably failed Intel limped along with graphics that were barely passable for general purpose displays, and worthless for all of the new use cases that were emerging. The latest crisis, though, is in design: AMD is genuinely innovating with its Ryzen processors (manufactured by both GlobalFoundries and TSMC), while Intel is still selling varations on Skylake, a three year-old design.
As of 11:37 EST, Intel's stock price is $50.16, and AMD's stock price is $14.61.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This is nonsense.
Any time someone throws out the word RISC in the context of modern superscalar processors, they invariably have no fucking idea what they're talking about.
The denotation between RISC and CISC existed because once upon a time, CISC processors had richer instruction sets at the cost of more cycles per instruction.
These days, all processors (relevant to this discussion) are essentially CISC, and run at more than 1 instruction per cycle. The terms RISC and CISC are dead terms.
All superscalar ARMs have instruction decoders that break them into smaller micro-operations, a la microcode.