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How Qualcomm Tried and Failed To Steal Intel's Crown Jewel
An anonymous reader shares an article from Bloomberg: In early November, Qualcomm Chairman Paul Jacobs stood on a stage in the heart of Silicon Valley and vowed to break Intel's stranglehold on the world's most lucrative chip business. The mobile internet and cloud computing were booming and the data centers running this digital economy had an insatiable thirst for computer servers -- and especially the powerful, expensive server chips that Intel churns out by the million. Qualcomm had spent five years and hundreds of millions of dollars designing competing processors, trying to expand beyond its mobile business. Jacobs was leading a coming-out party featuring tech giants like Microsoft and HP, which had committed to try the new gear. "That's an industry that's been very slow moving, very complacent," Jacobs said on stage. "We're going to change that."
Less than a year later, this once-promising business is in tatters, according to people familiar with the situation. Most of the key engineers are gone. Big customers are looking elsewhere or going back to Intel for the data center chips they need. Efforts to sell the operation -- including a proposed management buyout backed by SoftBank -- have failed, the people said. Jacobs, chief backer of the plan and the son of Qualcomm's founder, is out, too. The demise is a story of debt-fueled dealmaking and executive cost-cutting pledges in the face of restless investors seeking quick returns -- exactly the wrong environment for the painstaking and expensive task of building a new semiconductor business from scratch. It leaves Qualcomm more reliant on a smartphone market that's plateaued. And Intel's server chip boss is happy.
Less than a year later, this once-promising business is in tatters, according to people familiar with the situation. Most of the key engineers are gone. Big customers are looking elsewhere or going back to Intel for the data center chips they need. Efforts to sell the operation -- including a proposed management buyout backed by SoftBank -- have failed, the people said. Jacobs, chief backer of the plan and the son of Qualcomm's founder, is out, too. The demise is a story of debt-fueled dealmaking and executive cost-cutting pledges in the face of restless investors seeking quick returns -- exactly the wrong environment for the painstaking and expensive task of building a new semiconductor business from scratch. It leaves Qualcomm more reliant on a smartphone market that's plateaued. And Intel's server chip boss is happy.
In their effort to move stock, Bloomberg conveniently ignores the speculative execution debacle at Intel. Intel's chips are shit right now.
Seems to have been written (or edited) by someone without a semiconductor background. The biggest question I had was what processor architecture were they building around, something the Bloomberg piece never seemed to answer.
If they mean this it's 48 cores and based on ARMv8. Potentially interesting, but the piece lacks all the technical detail about how Qualcomm intended to position the chip technically against Intel, and what advantages it might have over competing ARM-based offerings.
But "ARM" never even appears in the Bloomberg article...
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AMDs 7nm Epycs promise to be truly epic while the current 12nm ones are already good value. AMD supposedly only has a 1% share of the server market right now, but there is a whole lot of evaluating going on. I can imagine 15-20 share of that lucrative market by this time next year.
Now what we have is AMD+TSMC vs Intel. I'm not betting on Intel in the long run. I'll repeat my prediction that Intel has no choice in the long run but to follow AMD's leave and go fabless. Now... the emerging TSMC fab monopoly, that's something to worry about. On balance, not as bad as the traditional Wintel monopoly, but still bad. Keep in mind that the lithography equipment business had been a near total monopoly enjoyed by ASML for years now, and that has somehow worked. It's beyond me why that works.
We haven't heard the last of the ARM server effort. Intel dodged a bullet this time by pure accident. There will be more barbarians at the gate, not necessarily Qualcomm, but they are hardly out of the game.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Intel got StrongARM from DEC, which became Xscale, before they sold it off. That seemed like a kind of weird decision - at the time they owned the best-performing ARM implementation on the market, but they sold it because they were betting everything on x86.
The Pentium 4 NetBurst architecture has more in common with Alpha AXP than Itanic. NetBurst ended up going the same way as Alpha in the end, with high clock speeds but mediocre real-world performance, and horrible power/heat issues.
Problem being that intel is actually going for non-PR speak 10nm (which is PR speak 7nm) and intel is going for high power chips, not low power ones. Latter being the likely reason why it's so hard to get anything out in meaningful numbers. This isn't for memory or mobile chips as is the case with TSMC process. There's a reason why high power chip majors like nvidia aren't touching the TSMC's PR speak 7nm process with a ten metre pole. It's unsuitable for purpose at the moment.
How is AMD 5 years ahead? The only thing they have over Intel seems to be their "infinity fabric" interconnect architecture, allowing them to make efficient multi-die packages. It's good, but I can't imagine that's 5 years worth of advancement.
Other than that, AMD is in the same ballpark as Intel, maybe a little bit behind. That's still impressive, real competition after all these years, however AMD better not fall asleep now that they have (hopefully) woken up Intel if they don't want to get passed again.