For which applications would they be better than any other brand?

The 660p SSDs are some of the best selling consumer SSDs on sites like Newegg. Here's their best selling list if you're curious: https://www.newegg.com/Internal-SSDs/SubCategory/ID-636?name...

Otherwise, Intel SSDs have quite a bit of share in the datacenter space. If you haven't seen them before, that's likely because you're not an enterprise customer.

At the height of Intel bribery scandal Intel was directly transferring $750 Million per quarter back to DELL.

The entire purpose is so that they can juice up the numbers for when they announce quarterly numbers.

For the kind of executives that stay at a company like Intel, the only thing they care about is the company’s stock price, and they’ll do anything to keep it high, even if it’s at the expense of what quite literally is destroying or directly hemorrhaging in the long term to the company itself. It’s how you end up with crazy situations like this.

Because "The Channel' sales model provides all sorts of strange incentives from vendor reps through to end users. Everyone is playing everyone off everyone.

Lets say there's two solutions that would solve my end users problem equally well. Both have list prices of 10K, both have normal disty cost of 7K, but brand X is running a promo where I get a 50% off front end discount from disty, but brand y is not.

Now I call the customer up and let them know that not only is brand X the best solution, but because of my great relationship with brand x I've secured them a 20% discount off list.

So now the customer is getting what they need cheaper and I've got more margin in the deal, which is what my commision is calculated out of.

So essentially when vendors do this they're not trying to make things cheaper for the customer to increase demand, they're trying to make sure that their products put the most money in sales people's pockets so that sales people will push their stuff the hardest.

Though on this specific occasion I was following the letter (or lack thereof) of the promotion, but certainly not the spirit. Grabbing existing demand vs generating new demand.

The NAND business was awful last summer (and last year overall), so I'm not surprised.

Cell was a PowerPC variant, which is still doing ok as the POWER series of CPUs. The Summit supercomputer[1] used POWER9 and is the fastest supercomputer in the world.

If you go speak to IBM and you have an interesting app you can get time on a POWER9 server to see how well it runs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summit_(supercomputer)

It's the two in combination that I believe to be an existential threat. nVidia is succeeding at entrenching CUDA as a standard, just as Intel's x86 grip is loosening and processors are becoming commodities.

This leaves nVidia in a great position to commoditize their compliments, offering high performance ARM CPUs (like Amazon is offering) for a tiny margin just to fuck with Intel. And it really would. Versions with nVidia GPUs in the cache hierarchy (HBM) are just the icing on the cake.

Intel smartly got out of the memory business because it didn't want to join a race to the bottom fabbing commodity transistors, but there's a good chance that's in their not so distant future.

And yeah, TSMC is a pretty big threat too... I was ignoring 10nm as part of this, because we don't have any data yet as to whether it represents a permanent shift in Intel's ability to compete on fabrication. I personally doubt that. But it is possible.

Fair point, but what I mean is Intel is probably at a good time to make its own dGPU for mobile, just to clarify.

Back in the early days of consumer 3D graphics accelerators, there was no such thing as a shader program and GPUs were not Turing-complete. You had to pick from among the texture blending modes that your GPU natively supported. Some GPUs exposed an interface that was basically a large portion of the OpenGL 1.x state machine, implemented in hardware.