Intel Is Finished | Hacker News Reader

Intel Is Finished

seekingalpha.com

22 pointsrishabhd40 comments

Pro tip: anyone that actually has knowledge about the way to make money trading a company isn’t blogging it for free. If they are trading with that information themselves it would lose effectiveness by sharing. If it’s truly valuable information but they aren’t using it then they are selling it, not giving it away. The only free stuff on Seeking Alpha either has no value or the author is attempting some variation of a pump and dump scheme.

Edit: I’ll acknowledge that a motivation for giving away information is to push your “premium service” but this just doesn’t work with financial stuff. You can’t give away free “alpha” because once it’s out there it isn’t alpha, so anyone trying it isn’t going to make any more money than anyone else. So it’s a terrible way to sell your service except to people that are too dumb to realize it. Plus, buying calls to protect a short isn’t some novel information worth paying for. Only chumps are paying for premium advice from someone that uses that as their taster.

Intel is absolutely not finished. Sure, in some filter bubbles, AMD has won and the remaining share is eaten by ARM, but take a look at the bigger picture:

If you're buying a server, Ryzen/EPIC-Servers are just appearing right now. The dell server line-up [0] is still mostly Intel-Servers, with one novelty AMD server per category. I bought a laptop this summer and most offerings - by far! - are Intel, especially in the ultrabook category. In the gaming scene, AMD has its fans, but raw single-core performance is still important and quite a few people still choose Intel. Lastly, your average consumer really doesn't even know the difference. ARM could be a threat, but the low adoption of Windows ARM and ARM servers shows that this yet to realize.

Additionally, the recent publicity stunts from Intel also clearly show that they see the upcoming threat and are reacting to it. And even if they don't, long lasting contracts and sheer inertia will keep them above the water for quite a few years to come.

In summary, yes, Intel is not in a great position, but it is far from dead. And if you're attempting to short it now, there's a good chance Intel will stay liquid for longer than you.

[0] https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/poweredge-rack-servers/...

>but it is far from dead

Modern day mainstream Media and word usage uses the word Dead when they meant it has become largely irrelevant. Basically IBM was dead a long time ago, except it really isn't.

The same with any modern technology, software, or in particular Web Frameworks, which is moving faster than any other fashion. Every few months a frameworks is declared as dead.

>raw single-core performance is still important and quite a few people still choose Intel.

Intel has lost its crown here to top zen 3 Ryzens.

This article is basically numerology (TA) and offers very little insight on Intel. Unless you are interested in the intel stock you don’t need to read.

I’m sure there are many great articles to be written arguing for and against Intel being finished... but this is more kabbalah (sorry, “gap trading”) than insightful business case study.

SeekingAlpha contributors are paid per click, and this author's article has a clickbait title, is short, light on technology, light on fundamental analysis, and instead is just technical analysis and chart reading.

People are clearly just upvoting based on the title.

(No position on INTC.)

>People are clearly just upvoting based on the title.

Yes, that is why I even flag it. The article has no technical ( in terms of both technology and stock trading ) discussions, and very little analysis.

I'm not saying no SA articles should ever be posted here, but a lot of them really are just clickbait devoid of any real analysis at best, and this article is such an example.

In fairness though, mainstream articles aren't much better.

BS. AMD has been down for a long time and then they came back up. It's simply Intel's turn to take a seat for a while. Nothing is finished until the actual door closes.

Intel can bounce back from this. They need to clean house first.

Worst case scenario, Intel becomes the "new IBM" and is left supporting roughly ~3 decades worth of legacy equipment.

Literally worst case scenario for Intel, which isn't really that bad.

In a medium / better case, Intel simply has to deal with opponents who are slightly faster and/or power efficient than Intel, but still gets a slice of the general market.

First AMD came along with Ryzen, now Apple is moving to it's own silicon... I'm not optimistic at all for Intel's future. Had they bought the licensing rights to ARM maybe I could see them being relevant but what is it that Intel brings to the market that's in the least bit unique?

We know that Intel has a 32-bit Arm architectural license and likely has a 64-bit but not all of those are publicly known.

Intel is a major investor in SiFive [1]. I think they're aware of the need to diversify in the CPU space.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SiFive#Growth

Intel Capital invests in tons of exciting startups. I wouldn’t take that investment as a sign of corporate direction but more of a good, if speculative, investment.

It looks like the total capital raised by SiFive is under $200 million, which makes even a sizable investment by intel to be peanuts to them.

Intel has had an ARM license since 98

I really doubt that MSFT is going to go into chips in a big way. That would not pass anticompetitive muster given the lock-in with their OS. Even if they claimed publicly they would sell the chips to anyone, who will believe the deal will be any good or lasting?

Have you heard of this scrappy little upstart company called Apple? I heard they also do their own chips and OS...

They're also not close enough to a monopoly to worry any regulators.

In the US the iPhone has 50% of the general market [0]. Of the youth market it's 90% [1] so the general market share will just keep rising.

With just 50% of the market though, Apple has enough power to sway the entire industry.

You simply cannot have a successful app business in the US without being on the iPhone.

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/266572/market-share-held...

[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/10/06/us-teen-iphone-ow...

Apple has 7.7% of PC market in the latest Gartner report. As the prior poster noted, that is far from a monopoly. Per Net Applications in October, Windows was on 88.8% of all PCs worldwide. Microsoft trying to lock their OS into their own CPU/SoC would be monopolistic.

Standard Oil Had less than 10% of the total energy market in the US in 1900 (coal was the king back then). Still it was broken up. It is all about how you define the market.

Antitrust/monopoly is all about how you define the market. "XX% of broad product category units" is one way to define the market, but it's not the only way and it's not the 'canonical' way. Other ways could include: % of product category revenue, % of category software revenue, % of category third party developers.

I'm not saying that all these alternative market definitions are more or less valid than product category units, I'm just saying that it's not cut and dry case closed because internet commenter #536864336 did a Google search comparing sales numbers between two companies.

It is safe for all but the shortest-term investors to ignore the ramblings of chartists. Intel has serious challenges in several markets, all of which are understandable without squinting at day-to-day price fluctuations.

This headline was true two years ago. And the news continues to get worse.

This is what happens when a tech company gets a near monopoly for a few years. Their success after Skylake doomed the company.

What is the status of ARM at AWS? There were rumors of them making their own silicon as well a few years back.

It's in general availability at AWS today.

AWS Graviton2 is available for the M6g, T4g, C6g and R6g instance families, and more. (variants with more networking and local storage ones too)

They're out: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/

It will be interesting how that looks in the next generation. The Graviton looks decent, but not an intel killer, but more of a price/perf value. Apple's shown that ARM can be quite competitive, especially for Amazon and similar companies that to pay for not just hardware, but space, power, and cooling.

Nice, thanks totally missed them. Do we know how performant they are compared to their x86 offers?

Just found that: http://junsun.net/wordpress/2020/06/geekbench-performance-of... For the curious

They have been available for a while. Lookup AWS Graviton instances.

Whew. If true, that is quite a fall pretty quickly from a world where they owned a lot of the market.

BlackBerry once owned nearly the entire smartphone market.

The tricky part is in the earlier parts of a decline "upcoming redemption story" and "headed for the dustbin of history" look pretty much the same from most seats.

Very true. The Blackberry "pearl" was amazing at the time.

This move by MS should drive AMD and others to invest in Linux adoption and to push Windows to the curb in desktop usage. There is no good reason Linux didn't gain higher percentage market share besides no one being upset enough about MS monopoly and concentrating the effort against MS market power.

Now AMD and Intel have strong motivation to invest more in the Linux ecosystem. Windows can be beaten and it will be.

And investing in adoption doesn't only mean improving the stack and etc. It means putting some effort into making desktop Linux available as pre-installed on computers consumers can easily buy when they need a new PC.

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