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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.
"instead of simply manufacturing ARM chips for the iPhone"
What's simple about it? Intel's ARM was Xscale, which was based directly on DEC's StrongARM (which they purchased.) It was the fastest ARM core at the time, but while it [x]scaled up, it didn't [x]scale down. It had the highest power consumption at low clock rates of all the ARM cores.
Intel did not have an ARM-based product which would have been a viable core for the iPhone.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I think this kind of analysis is quite premature. Presently, there is no mobile-worthy x86 option -- for lots of reasons. Until there is, I don't think you can judge Intel for their direction.
Presume, for a moment, that in a few years, Intel successfully produces an x86 proc for mobile specifications. It's distinctly possible, indeed even probable, that ARM becomes useless, and the entire mobile market moves to x86. What a boon for Intel to have not wasted time and effort during these middle-ground years.
We've lived through this before. I refer you to WAP. How many web developers spent how many hours fumbling through WAP-limited options, before the entire mobile market moved to full web technologies? What a wasted investment for any small company. And what a horrible experience in was for consumers.
We'll wait and see.
And that power-per-watt disadvantage vs ARM predates Intel's integration strategy and also their current process-size disadvantage. I don't see any evidence to the contrary in the linked story.
This just marks the end of an era. Moores Law is dead (and has been dead for quite some time). Intel will need some other way to innovate. All they have been doing is adding cores and trying to push up clock speeds.
Moore's law is about transistor counts. Adding cores adds transistors.
Even this is running into a dead end: because of physics.
They can still add cores for some time, if they can improve yields. First there is a process shrink and cores shrink, then the process is improved and cores grow again. Then we get a new process...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I still say it's Compaq, not MS, that deserves the credit here. Compaq created the PC compatible. Microsoft did have the foresight to make sure its software worked too, but at the time the money was in hardware and you more or less expected incompatibilities between generations of the machine. The idea of cross-vendor compatibility in the micro market was Compaq's, for sure.
This is why Microsoft is doing it. The realized they are not beholden to Intel. They made Windows RT (port of Win32 to ARM) so if the Intel x86-64 ship ever sank, it wouldn't take Windows down with it. They don't need it to sell like hotcakes; heck they don't need it to sell at all. They just need to to be there and ready if ARM overtakes Intel. It's insurance - a hedge against Intel imploding. If that should happen, they'll just transition to Windows for ARM, and all the software companies making Windows apps will (more or less) simply recompile their programs for ARM64, and Windows will carry on as if Intel never existed.
>> shitload of resources and inertia
Agree they have these, but both of these are working against Intel right now: the inertia is what drove them into the ditch while more nimble chipmakers were passing them by, and their ample resources are blinding them from the danger because they assume they can always write checks to get back on the right track if they ever figure it out.
See "Sears"...
This was clear a long time ago. Intel was making X86 mobile chips for Intel to gain market share. Not because the phone makers wanted x86 chips. It was Intel-focused, not customer focused. Microsoft did similar things with Windows 8 and that metro junk.
Recently Intel has branched out into lots of other growth businesses though, buying Movidius, Altera, and MobileEye. They're making silicon photonics chips for optical networks, DOCSIS chips for cable modems and 3D Xpoint RAM to bridge the gap between DRAM and NAND. They integrated an AMD GPU and they are building a new GPU of their own.
It’s ironic that articles like this gain traction after Intel has already turned around and started to gain traction.
i've pointed this out here on slashdot a number of times, dating back at least... six years possibly more. the first really clear signs were when ARM came out with the first dual-core ARM Cortex A9 side-by-side demonstration of running a web browser (linux desktop OS) side-by-side with a 1.6ghz intel Atom. it kept up and in some cases loaded pages before the intel processor. at the end of the demo they showed the clock rate of the ARM chip: only 600mhz.
intel was a memory company. they're proud of their heritage. they designed the world's most efficient and compact memory-efficient instruction set because memory was damn expensive. if you got more instructions into memory, you ran faster, you needed smaller caches, and your product was cheaper. ... except... decoding those instructions takes time. you now have to run the clock at twice the speed of a RISC core in order to decode those "compact" instructions into the same equivalent RISC ones. and that's where things go wrong for intel, because power consumption is a SQUARE law. if the clock rate has to be double, the power consumption is FOUR times greater.
i've made comments regularly about this: it's only because intel was putting vast sums of money into foundries, staying at least one geometry ahead (28nm when everyone else was using 40nm), that nobody really noticed or complained too much, because by being one geometry ahead you reduce power by a factor of 2. ... but they're no longer ahead, now, are they?
now that the power advantages of geometries are beginning to run out (as well as the cost being higher and the yields lower), intel's *really* in trouble, and it all boils down to the design of the instruction set.
they have one hope left: abandon x86 and start making non-x86 instruction set designs. it'll be a really *really* tough sell, but if they can do that they have a chance.
That's a neat idea and you might be right.
If it weren't for Compaq, then what we all think of as generic commodity PC would still just be thought of as "IBM's particular computer, which happens to be quite a bit behind most everything else." There were a fuckton of competing computers in the 1980s, most of which were quite a bit more advanced than the x86 stuff. But everything was proprietary, so even if you were in love with something, in the end you couldn't trust it to stick around (e.g. Amiga).
Who knows how things might have gone if Compaq hadn't nailed down generic commodity hardware as being what it turned out to be. Maybe we simply wouldn't have generic commodity hardware (but there might be some generic software layer or something like that), or maybe it would have ended up something completely different (e.g. 68k based?).
There was a really big turning point with MCA vs PCI as well. That's when it became plain that it was no longer "the IBM compatible".
When IBM couldn't force MCA as the standard it became plain that it had lost control over the direction of the design, and that we were now in a commodity hardware multivendor world.