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Option 4: spend some of their massive amounts of money to rebuild their R&D capabilities. Simultaneously give up their outdated idea that their core architecture is so valuable and secret that it must never be fabbed elsewhere. And spend the money to keep up with fab technology. And possibly put an actual engineer at the helm. Right now Intel seems to be going the way of Boeing — plenty of money, but less innovation than they ought to have.)

Keeping fab and design under one roof does not require that the fab and the design sides of the business exclusively with with each other.

(I think Intel should keep Altera, too. A paired CPU and FPGA solution has genuine value. One thing that Intel appears to still be good at is software tooling. If Intel were to provide tooling for their FPGAs that was anywhere near as good as their x86 tooling, then Altera could take off as everyone’s favorite platform. Right now they’re at substantial risk of losing new developer mindshare to Lattice because of the IceStorm project. I have trouble imagining that more than a few $M of total resources have been spent there.

As it stands, nVidia is a major player in big chips that do serious computation. Whatever one may think about CUDA, it’s in a whole different league from the garbage currently available from Xilinx and Altera.)

In 10 years, the biggest markets will likely be:

1. Mobile (I include cars, IoT etc)

2. Server/cloud (most new servers will be deployed to AWS, MS, Google, and maybe Alibaba)

3. Graphics / ML (you mentioned Nvidia and CUDA)

How would your suggested option 4 help Intel gain a significant foothold in any of those markets? (or stop the Arm transition in the case of #2)

Crazy idea: Why doesn't Intel launch their own cloud IaaS offering?

Value proposition: Intel needs to scale manufacturing and R&D, in a way that doesn't leave them in a performance bind (ie without performance, they can't sell at scale, and thus can't afford to buy performance). Abstracting compute behind an IaaS offering would let them do exactly that while providing an alternate sink for binned chips.

Furthermore, they've got decent HW/SW integration talent in-house, and they could offer a key feature other clouds couldn't: vendor agnosticism. Building {PaaS product} on an Intel cloud seems strategically smarter than building on one of the continually-vertically-integrating clouds.

I think an IaaS-only cloud is a losing proposition. Customers want a variety of services at different levels on the same account. There may be room for innovation in federation/reselling higher-layer services but I'm not sure.

Also, Intel-only would be limited compared to other clouds offering Intel/AMD/ARM.

It's more likely that Intel will increase market development funding to the existing cloud providers as their market share declines.

Is x86 likely to stay as the dominant cloud architecture though? My understanding of ARM on AWS is that if your stuff supports it then it’s better performance per dollar and basically a no brainer. I don’t see why x86 would continue to be the dominant deployment target long term, especially with Apple moving their line to ARM meaning that developers will increasingly demand compatibility with it across the stack.

You're ultimately buying ops-per-dollar.

It seems like Intel could create a pretty compelling offering. Especially since AWS, Azure, and GCP all seem to be giving them the strategic middle finger.

I like that idea, just for how crazy it is!

My bear case for Intel Web Services would be:

1. As IBM, HP and others discovered, the expertise required to run cloud services is very different from what's required to sell servers (or CPUs). 2. To compete with Amazon and MS, you would need to spend several tens of billions of dollars just to get a similar infrastructure footprint.

A variation on your proposal would be for Intel to buy a bunch of smaller cloud players, like DigitalOcean, and CloudFlare. Intel has the huge amounts of cash that these companies need to compete with AWS and Azure, Intel would then be vertically integrated, just like AWS is, and they would get the customer base and expertise from those acquisitions.

I think Intel's core offering would be value-add neutrality, which is attractive compared to building on (and competing with) first party AWS/GCP.

DigitalOcean, CloudFlare, etc would definitely have to be involved... but it's a tricky balancing act to avoid their becoming dominant solutions, at which point you would have AWS, except as a combination of companies.

Not sure how to square that circle. Maybe an extension of the Open Compute group + FRAND licensing of Apache-style preferred value add solutions on top, with Intel operating the hardware as a certified implementation? Essentially enabling MVNOs for cloud.

Intel's key distinction from foundry-less competitors, is that they can scale capacity to whatever they want, at least on older nodes. And the more volume they scale to, the more they ammortize their own costs (ie fab version of Amazon's AWS rationale).

The key would be establishing an ecosystem where innovation at the higher levels, and FRAND licensing of same, financially rewarded and incentivized players to invest in the platform.

They must win back the process advantage. It's existential for them, and important for the U.S. geopolitically.

Their fabs need more customers to justify the astronomical investment. They must expand their foundry business.

If China encroaches on Taiwan, the US is economically obligated to intervene; losing access to TSMC would be a massive hit. (It seems that TSMC is getting increasingly-advanced over their competitors, but maybe that's just my media blindspot.)

I expect the federal government to take action here, probably by giving huge monetary incentives to Intel/AMD for creating a state-of-the-art fab in the US.

China has been hiring engineers from TSMC to make their own chips. https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/China-hires-over...

TMSC is planning to build a fab factory in the US. https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyshih/2020/05/15/tsmcs-anno...

Option 4, lobby for favorable government contracts under DoD, NASA, etc. with the rationale of protecting American strategic advantage.

> The major important players (Apple, Amazon, MS, Goog) want to go ARM and then maybe RISC-V for their own strategic reasons anyway.

I think this is partly because they can easily get a license to use ARM or RISC-V in custom chips, but doing that with x86 is pretty much impossible.

> The major important players (Apple, Amazon, MS, Goog) want to go ARM and then maybe RISC-V for their own strategic reasons anyway.

Source? I don't think they care, I think they just don't want to be beholden to a single supplier, like they were to Intel for a while.

Notice that:

"AWS Graviton processors are custom built by Amazon Web Services"

and

"Apple Silicon"

It's not just about x86 -> Arm, it's about bringing more control of the design in house. This only gets more important as we move towards more SoC type designs. Imagine, for instance, AWS doing an entire SoC with Nitro, disc controllers, memory etc on one chip. I'm not sure that they could, or would want to do such a thing with Intel and x86.

Edit: Adding my sources ;)

Graviton quote: https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/graviton/

Apple silicon quote: https://www.apple.com/mac/m1/ (for fun, try to CTRL+F this page for "arm")

Take the fight to TSMC by fabbing for other companies. Probably combined with your option 3.