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Comment by hyperpallium | Hacker News Reader

Linked statement https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/brian-krzanich-our-str...

tl;dr Moore's law remains important, not because of speed or power improvements, but cost improvements.

The cloud [servers] will grow; the internet of things [clients] will grow. So we'll do that.

He doesn't say this, but the smartphone soirée is over. Imagination laying off workers, iPhone sales down, samsung galaxy s7 sales down. Flagship smartphones are obviously way more powerful than needed for common usages. A $40 smartphone is now so good, it's good enough.

What's the point in intel chasing a ship that has not only sailed, but sunk?

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PC sales have also sunk. Maybe Intel should quit the PC business, too. It seems hard to imagine they would do that now, but if 1) Microsoft didn't have such a strangehold on PCs, and 2) if Windows wasn't so dependent on x86, we'd be seeing ARM competition creeping up on low-end Intel chips in notebooks already by now.

Intel is lucky to have a lock-in on PCs thanks mostly to old programs being x86-specific. Hopefully Microsoft can change this with Project Centennial, if it's too late for Windows RT.

https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2016/B829

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=516...

I think even if Windows was not dependent on ARM, Intel would continue to own the PC/notebook market for a long, long time to come. As soon as your device is large enough to fit even a 30-Wh battery in, you can already afford to use Intel CPUs power-consumption wise. Cost-wise, they’re still more expensive, but so are all the other components in notebooks such that they don’t make that big of a difference. Consumers are also okay with higher prices for longer-lasting notebooks as opposed to smart phones which are replaced every 2-3 years.

All in all, ARM still sucks performance-wise. Yes, you can run a decent-ish desktop with it, but you really don’t want to do anything that takes any amount of CPU time (development, typesetting, gaming, even browsing the web thanks to today’s JS craziness).

RT is sunk. Intel is in a much better position to compete on price performance in the PC space. They could cut their margins if they have to and still be profitable. They will be in the PC business for a while.

Because people will still be buying phones/tablets in 10 years. And no, they aren't yet good enough. Just browsing the web can often be quite painful as they struggle with javascript. Plus, there are a ton of devices with embedded mobile phone tech (tv's, etc) that have been dragged into the ARM camp.

The 4.1 billion ARM devices sold last quarter should scare the pants of Intel. The very hungry ARM partners that drool over the fat margins Intel is making will steam roller them in the server space if they don't figure out how to compete.

Just browsing the web can often be quite painful as they struggle with javascript.

You mean... browsing the web can be quite painful with a crap-ton of advertisements. Lots and lots of Javascript, auto-play video advertisements... ugh.

If major websites can lag on my i7, I don't think it's a hardware problem.

I have a hard time with small screens (farsightedness) so I only use mobile Internet in emergency cases. Is it a hardware (screen size) problem or a software (too much screen real state eaten by ads) one? I honestly don't know the answer, but it's still a problem.

Edit: I use glasses, specially for reading, but the optmestrists refuse to raise the graduation that would give me a clear vision for small letters. They say it would make the problem worse long term.

It's a bad design problem on the websites. AMP rendered pages are blazing fast to load on mobile and still contain ads. Desktop apps of yore had similar problems and people complained about them then (ex: Java swing apps locking up when devs did real work on the UI thread).

Things can work well with minimal CPU power, it's just grand design problems without the engineering effort going into it to make sure it's performant. Bad performance is much less apparent than bad design to decision makers.

My native apps don't have any problem browsing the network.

Will Intel spin out the fab side of the business?

The large volume segments of the processor market seems headed towards nothing but low margins.

> The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year.

not speed, not power

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