Regarding HPC I think people here are missing the real problem for Intel: Yes, they still have a strong showing in Top500 systems. But this could easily change soon because there is not that much keeping system developers from switching to AMD, potentially rven ARM. At the same time NVIDIA is essentially in a hard to replace position because an increasing percentage of applications is written to get their FLOPS from their GPUs instead of Intel‘s offerings.

The way Intel tries to fight back I find questionable. Both their MIC lineups and many-core Xeons suffer from a crucial flaw: Almost laughably low memory bandwidth when compared to NVIDIA, even compared to Epic. They rely so heavily on caching that it would require tremendous software efforts to get even in the range of 50% of the performance of GPU ports - I‘d argue it‘s significantly more difficult and less performance portable to do that rather than just do a basic GPU implementation, even with manually handled data transfers.

Add to this the increasingly successful efforts by GPU makers to automate data handling and Intel‘s attractiveness only dwindles further.

And now people are told that they might loose 20% performance? There‘s applications that use these chips like it were real-time systems (because it‘s the only thing financially possible for them). For these use cases, 20% will hurt, a lot.

/rant