Comment by heisenbit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by heisenbit | Hacker News Reader

Intel rode too long on the x86 and the horse is now tired. It has been tired a while but there were deep moats around Intel. Manufacturing technology was one but others have been catching up as mobile provided the market and cash for sustained investments. Wintel was another but both Microsoft and Apple are both looking at ARM. On the server side ARM, graphic chips and FPGAs are taking away and are threatening to take even more business.

Intel seems to know they need to break into new business. But doing that with the mindset and within the constraints of a quasi monopolist is very, very hard. Building something new requires not just resources but calendar time, commitment and freedom not just on the technical but also on the business model side. Focusing on your core strength is an excellent mantra until one is in a corner and by then it is hard to think different.

Intel's entire business is based on high margins. Trying to take that orientation and apply it to low-margin markets like mobile and IOT has been a complete failure for them.

I don't think they actually care (yet) because a few billions is peanuts to them as long as they have their high margin business but the wolves are at the door.

AMD is actually much better positioned because they have gone through a very painful restructuring and reorientation toward a business model that works with low-margins and they now seem to be coming out the other side.

Intel will eventually have to go through the same restructuring and it will be even more painful for them because they have a lot further to fall.

The only other high margin semiconductor business I see as a competitor to them is not AMD, it's Nvidia.

Gpu technology from Nvidia is continuing to unlock new capabilities that make upgrading a CPU less important and as more code becomes gpu dependent it'll matter less what CPU architecture you are running.

That opens the door for arm to enter the server market.

That is doom for Intel.

Ja, even now Nvidia can simply put an average general purpose core into GPU to run Windows and release something like libGPU to let devs access computations on GPU directly.

I believe that they are acutely aware of that, but at the moment they chose "to not to slaughter a hen laying golden eggs"

Banias / Pentium M showed Intel can absolutely shift when needed.

The difference is that this is a new product category for them, rather than a new microarch in an existing category.

And from recent appearance, I'd say they're not great at building new ecosystems (IA-64, mobile, now IoT).

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