This article makes it seem that being a major player in mobile is the only way Intel could survive. Mobile is a decelerating market, while cloud and servers, where Intel has a huge lead is an expanding market and profitable. In 2017, Intel's revenue hit an all-time high, as it did the year before, and its stock is an all time high. This is not a company "fighting for its future."
The headline is definitely sensationalist but there are threats and missed opportunities on Intel's horizon and past.
The lure of mobile is the upgrade cycle as those are much shorter. The same, short upgrade cycles were a boon for intel in the hey day of desktops/laptops.
The bigger threat the article fails to focus on is ARM.
Singularity for apps has always hinged on write-once-run-everywhere. Intel hasn't been able to compete with ARM lately and it seems that ARM is moving into Intel's turf. A few months back Microsoft launched windows 10 on ARM -- that's an inflection point. Apple relatively recent iPad Pro also continues to blur the lines along with other initiatives around app continuity (Mac/iOS) or the Nintendo Switch's hardware continuity that offers a glimpse into what the same thing could look like for mobile in general.
It's not for Intel's lack of trying either. It's just that ARM got off to a good start while Intel failed to make in-roads with Atom and whatever else.
> A few months back Microsoft launched windows 10 on ARM -- that's an inflection point.
Microsoft has launched Windows for various non-x86 platforms over the years, including ARM, and it has always petered out. Maybe it will take off this time, but I wouldn't bet too much on it.
Clarification: Only 32 but apps. Not 64 bit apps, which the Windows world has almost fully moved to. And I’m sure they would run at reduced performance as well.
most non-compute intensive programs still are compiled for 32-bit, or have 32 bit versions available. also, visual studio still defaults to 32 bit when creating a new c++ project.
Some people might consider that a blessing in disguise with Slack.
I'm not sure what the behavior is, maybe best case Slack crashes and restarts itself. You could almost call that behavior a feature of 32bit Slack: "automatic garbage collection"
Almost anything compiled for 32bit windows would work just as well on a beefy tablet. Laptops and Desktops are, more and more, being reserved for power users and computationally heavy tasks.
> Laptops and Desktops are, more and more, being reserved for power users and computationally heavy tasks
I'm not seeing this in the business world. Yes, there are some tablets in use, but their numbers are still very small in comparison to desktop and laptop computers. And a huge majority of these users are definitely not what I would call "power users".
Reminds of the early nineties when MS was keeping everyone in the 16-bit world. Win 95 was this amazing kludge that straddled 16 and 32 bits. Thankfully they’re not the monopoly they once where.
For what it's worth, Windows NT 4.0 ("full windows") ran on DEC Alpha, and using FX!32 emulation, executed x86 Win32 apps. There was even a 64-bit build of NT running internally at Microsoft as a proof-of-concept, but wasn't publicly released.
Yeah but the upgrade cycle won't stay short for long, just like it hasn't for desktops.
Give it 10 years and people will be keeping their phones until they break.
Also anyone can make an ARM CPU so the margins are thin, whereas with x86 CPUs Intel will basically only ever have one competitor - AMD. They want to find another monopoly.
We’re already keeping phones until they break, by handing them down through the family. I’ve bought 5 iPhones and all but 2 of them are still in use. In fact the second one, a 3GS, was only fully retired at the beginning of last year.
The upgrade cycle has really just been a process of filling up the market. In fact I’d argue there are still a lot of old devices still in use beyond an ideal lifespan. There’s still going to be a much quicker refresh cycle than desktops for a while, but they’re likely to converge gradually.
What we might see is high end users keeping their flagship for longer, and refresh phones ‘downstream’ in the family to more recent midrange devices rather than passing on their own device and getting a new flagship. In fact, that’s what I just did for my teenage daughters.
Problem with mobile devices is they long outlast their manufacturer's software support. My iPad, for instance. The first device was announced in 2010, and software support ended with 5.1.1 in 2012. Two measly years of updates. This thing has not had an official update (including security updates) in nearly 6 years. Your 3GS hasn't been supported for 4 years. Whereas, I can keep a desktop computer for 20 years and update its software throughout that time.
We should be able to keep our devices until they die, but without regular software updates, you're playing with fire.
Keep using a computer for 20 years? A 20 year old computer is not going to run the latest version of Windows.
Now I do have a 10 year old Core 2 Duo 2.66Ghz with 4GB RAM, Gigabit Ethernet and a nice 1920x1200 display serving as a Plex Server. In day to day use, the only time I can tell the difference between that and my modern laptop is when I try to run too many things at once and that could be alleviated by upgrading the RAM to 8GB.
As far as the iPad 1st generation, it's true that you can't get software updates -- I have one too -- but you can still download the "last compatible version" of apps for it. I reset mine last year and re-downloaded and ran Netflix, Hulu, Crackle, Google Drive (for reading PDFs), Spotify, Plex, and all of Apple's iWork Suite.
It still supports AirPlay and prints to all of my printers. I can check my Exchange email at work. The browser on the other hand crashes constantly.
I think that very dependent on the target demographic and country. Also definitely some delusion in it too, many people I know will go on about planned obsolescence and so forth in a put the world to right speech and then whip out the latest iPhone or Samsung flagship to call an Uber that they have on contract.
Intel gave up too early in my opinion, the Zenfones (pre-Snapdragon) were great phones, I just don't think Asus alone had enough penetration to make it worth their while.
The Intel CPUs were performance-competitive with the SD8xx chips at the time but most of the newer zenfones use slower SD6xx chips.
My experience with the Zenfone 2 was not very positive though. It seems to have been more Asus's fault than Intel's, but also Intel could have done a better job with their kernel. Yes the CPU was fast relative to its price (because Intel was dumping them) but almost everything else about it was not very good. Battery life was poor, seemingly because Intel never got core parking to work in their Android kernel (I also owned a Lenovo Atom tablet which had the exact same problem so I'm going to blame Intel here). Most apps ran pretty fast but anything with ARM binaries ran very slowly in emulation or in a few cases didn't work at all. ASUS's Android skin was terrible and had an obscene amount of preinstalled bloatware. There were loads of bugs, and installing updates was always a guessing game of whether it improved things or made it even worse. Sometimes GPS wouldn't work. The Marshmallow update was both extremely late and extremely buggy. The plastic back started developing cracks after about a year without ever dropping it.
The ability to run windows software in either Wine or a VM was a rather cool-but-useless novelty.
Subsidies baked into the cell plan are mostly gone in the US too, replaced with monthly installments that superficially are the same but in practice allow you to pay up front and then only pay for cell service on a monthly basis.
Even today I see an increasing number of friends moving from 2 years cycles to 3 year cycles.
The "killer app" for smartphone refresh rates staying low are (1) battery degradation and (2) forced OS updates for app updates, which in turn slows the phone down to compel an update[1].
[1] I'm actually curious if OS updates slow down older phones these days. This was the case 5 years ago but perhaps things have changed/
I have a Nexus 5X that was 2 years old late last year. At that time I git it's last major OS upgrade. (It will continue to get security updates for another year or so.) This is as good as it gets in the Android world.
It was hobbled at the outset with 2GB RAM. At introduction performance was adequate. It has degraded since then. There are times when I exit an app and it takes several seconds before the home screen is populated. Navigation normally runs in the background but if I open a different app, it may get bumped and disappears from notifications. I listen to podcasts frequently and its background process (the part that keeps audio going if I open other apps) gets bumped.
These are not related to processor horsepower but I believe are symptoms of insufficient RAM. It could also result from additional installed applications, but I have uninstalled more than I have added and it seems not to improve.
I had a 5X that I recently replaced due to the common boot loop failure.
Towards the end of its life its performance had degraded to the same point you experienced. Multiple seconds for the home screen to populate, camera lag, etc. It's crazy that a cell phone with 2GB of ram is incapable of running recent versions of Android with decent performance and even crazier when I'd open up a task manager and see mandatory things like Google Play Services consuming almost 60% of the ram on the device.
- Devices that support Verizon's bands & CDMA are mostly only sold as Verizon branded devices. (CDMA is less important every year but I still occasionally need 3g)
- ~All Verizon phones have locked bootloaders and no official way to unlock them.
- Manufacturers don't make the easy mistakes which let you unlock their bootloaders anymore.
Depending on your device, installing an aftermarket ROM can range from "easily accomplished from initial query in a search engine to ROM installed within 1 hour" to "I am stuck in a nightmare of poorly written, contradictory forum posts written in a mishmash of languages with lots of instructions that say 'this is easy, but WARNING COULD BRICK YOUR DEVICE'." Who has the time or patience for such confusion?
I've been doing a variant of the 3 year cycle: buy a year old model (e.g. I bought an S7 just after the S8 came out), and then keep it for 2 years (it's even possible I'll be able to keep this one longer. It's not feeling slow yet).
Advantage is that you buy for half the price of a new flagship.
for me the camera is one major reason to upgrade every 1.5-2 years. But I buy a phone(asus) that is at least 50% cheaper than most of the high end phones so I figure I'm coming out ahead. They probably have better cameras but mine has been good enough until the next refresh cycle
For me, cameras have become good enough in around 2014, before then, smartphones cameras tended to turn low light pictures into a blurry mess.
Things will always improve, but for cameras, we are getting to the point where if your smartphone camera isn't good enough for you, you are probably at least an enthusiast and you probably want to get a real camera.
Since then, I've seen absolutely no game changing improvement.
On the Android side, it's sorta debatable whether Google Services is really part of the OS or not, but in any case, a Galaxy S4/5 with the latest google SW is a performance disaster. Maps regularly freezes for like 3-5 seconds at a time; its sluggishness is almost certainly causing additional auto accidents. Pretty much every other G app takes more than a second to open, despite being compiled-to-native-code during installation. Disabling airplane mode will cause 100% CPU on all cores for like 15+ seconds. Performance was certainly better when the phone was new 4-5 years ago.
I have an iPhone 6S - I'd say OS updates do slow the phone down, but they also tend to be really buggy and generally rubbish for a while. I think it's probably more bad engineering and software quality than anything nefarious.
The said that as the battery degrades, they limit CPU spikiness that can abruptly kill the device even with a non-trivial amount of juice left.
That's not nearly the same as "slowing down the phone with every upgrade".
Often people have reported better performance after an OS upgrade, although obviously results may vary, and subjective impressions are always, well, subjective.
Something you keep in your pocket along with your keys, that will be dropped ten times, and on which you will regularly sit will inevitably have a shorter life than a laptop. And for the rare people who take good care of their smartphone, there is the matter of non replaceable batteries on a non fixable device.
> Singularity for apps has always hinged on write-once-run-everywhere.
From app developer perspective, processor architecture is low on the list of the problems you have to solve to run anywhere. User-facing apps aren't written in C or anything that close to metal anymore; I suspect that most of the Java, Kotlin and Swift code is completely architecture agnostic: add new capability to the compiler, change the build command and your ARM app becomes x86 app.
I once had to help port a large system written in Ada from SPARC/Solaris to x64/RHEL. The only issues we rant into were predominately related to the endian difference between the two architectures, and that was really only due to the fact that our code did a lot of low-level bit manipulation :)
I have a curious question. I am not a Ada Developer but I have two that work for me. Another retired in OCT 17 after successfully porting our project from Solaris to RHEL 6. He told me at that time that we could not go back and compile the code for a Solaris system even though we still have the Solaris box we originally compiled on. Are there any issues you can see preventing us from going back and compiling the code for Solaris?
And ARM is little endian in all currently deployed processors.
So about only pitfall is assembler, SIMD intrinsics and depending on undefined behaviour like arithmetic or not signed right shift.
Oh and different thread safety guarantees. ARM is much more lax with loads and stores and will require locking and correct use of atomic operations.
Reminds me of the time I had to program a Z80-based controller board. It came with a non-standard C Compiler where integers were 16-bits long. Of course, I didn't realize this at first (I suppose I could have read the documentation, but...), so I had to figure it out for myself while debugging :)
It was my first time programming C on something that wasn't a 32 bit CPU :)
All I want is a single socket CPU and a motherboard that supports ECC/isn't total garbage. AMD has said it's on the motherboard manufacturers, and I haven't been able to get a straight answer as to whether ECC works as it should on motherboards that support Ryzen - https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/80wpd1/ryzen_2_ecc_sup...
You can get a non-Threadripper Ryzen CPU+mobo with ECC support for far less than $400. Obviously it lacks the PCIe lanes of the TR setup. These are both ridiculously cheaper than you could get similar capability for before Ryzen launched. If you really want 48 PCIe lanes for $400 you can get a used Xeon X99 setup for that much.
Ryzen Threadripper and the TR4 socket are advertised with ECC support on the AMD website¹², in contrast to regular Ryzen/AM4. This may mean that all motherboards support it. I can't be sure, however, ECC seems to work fine on ASRock X399 Taichi.
My take is that the analysis refers to Intel's long-term prospects, not today's or yesterdays's revenue. These reports serve as a foundation to guide decisions on future long-term investments.
Apple is the only manufacturer that actually produces competitive processors. Qualcomm is lagging behind x86 by at least a factor 2 compared to laptop chips and by factor 6 compared to desktop chips.
On top of that the arm laptops that have been announced were significantly more expensive than an equivalent x86 laptop and the x86 emulation isn't good enough to count on it.
Your talking about what’s on the market right now, or coming out based on existing tech. It’s exactly that kind one short term “everything’s fine, we’re doing great as we are” thinking that the OP article is deconstructing. It’s what killed Nokia, Blackberry and Palm, as he pointed out. Chip fabricators like Intel are making investments now that won’t affect the market for 6 years (2014 announcement of expected launch of 450nm tech in 2020).
ARM tech is on an intersect trajectory with x86 tech, and it’s only a matter of time before those lines cross. Up until then Intel will do fine. After that, all bets are off. Fortunately for Intel, they’re a couple of steps ahead of you in that at least they now see the problem.
Not trying to be pedantic, just so that no one gets confused.
Jim Keller, who's been on both sides of the table, x86 with AMD and ARM with Apple, expects that a fully developed ARM CPU will be 15-30% more efficient than their x86 counterparts.
What makes ARM fundamentally better than Intel? The instruction set? I just don’t see it. Intel has an incomprehensibly massive installed base of compatible software. All other things being equal, why does ARM catch up?
Right now judging from Cloudflare's benchmarks, the win will be in TDP. [1] Heat is a very nasty issue to handle in large datacenters, and can end up costing quite a bit in cooling. Intel's been making some great strides in this area, but ARM chips like Qualcomm's Cintriq are pretty tempting in this space.
I guess it depends for what sort of compute. For a heavy monolythic computation isn’t CISC a structurally faster approach? For lots of cheap, low wattage micro-services/containers I could see ARM being more efficient/cheaper.
> Mobile is a decelerating market, while cloud and servers, where Intel has a huge lead is an expanding market and profitable.
No, it is not decelerating, it's still growing [0]. Besides, demand from other low-power applications such as IoT will only lead to increased demand for low-power (mobile) chips.
> In 2017, Intel's revenue hit an all-time high, as it did the year before, and its stock is an all time high. This is not a company "fighting for its future."
" ... as Microsoft shows, revenue is a lagging indicator in the technology business." -- pg [1]
Given enough time, all investments will eventually mature.
In other words, revenue is about the past -- reaping the rewards from mature (technology) investments. Growth is about the future -- future returns can only come from nascent (technology) investments.
Growth in a new product with lots of potential applications is a much better indicator of a company's potential to continuing earning returns in the future, before that product reaches maturity (and revenue attributable to that product starts to decline). Intel needs a new product category to future-proof its existence.
EDIT: as pointed out by several commenters below, I incorrectly internalized your use of "decelerate" to mean "decline" but I'll leave my comment as-is.
Decelerating doesn't mean that it's no longer growing. It means that growth is declining over time, so growth today is less rapid than growth a year ago.
That doesn't mean that growth will stop, though it might.
You make very good points except I think you are confused by what decelerating means. A market may be growing and at the same time be decelerating, as in it is growing albeit at a slower rate of growth each year or quarter.
> "Growth in a new product with lots of potential applications is a much better indicator of a company's potential to continuing earning returns in the future"
New opportunities in an existing market are equally as effective in spurring on growth. For example, there doesn't seem to be any reduction in appetite for servers, and Intel has been the market leader in this space for a while. Just because we've had server market for over half a century doesn't mean it's lacking in potential growth.
If it's accurate, the following graph is quite telling:
But as cloud service provider grow stronger, they will begin to make their own chips, like TPU. That is a much bigger threat to Intel. Essentially, as Moore's law is effectively put into an end, people will seek to make their own customized chips, CPU will be marginalized as time goes by.
Except they wouldn't. It took Apple a decade to up their silicon to a level where it is now. For most of that time, their activity was a money sink for them. And even today, even with some of the best talent in IC design one can get in USA (PA Semi and its veteran designers from HP, Sun, Freescale, and whatever else was remaining of American semi industry), their chips are still half outsourced, 70% external IP if you remove SRAM from calculations.
Apple is company with an own silicon, but it will never be a true microelectronics company.
Google's TPUs are another examplary case. Goog did spare no money to get into the market first and secure a tech/platform lockdown. Yet, what took them at least 5 years, and extremely expensive to make reticule limit chips, was bested by a no-name Chinese fabless that blew TPUs out of the water on power/cost/performance ratio.
All American dotcoms that are actively trying to get into hardware are oblivious to the fact that there is an inherent difference in between a hardcore engineering company to a company whose topmost technical expertise is underhanded web programming.
I won't be so certain. An ASIC/FPGA chip that accelerates specific Database operation is already a reality. The problem is the cost effect ratio.
BTW, cloud provider already making tons of customized hardware themselves. And talking like Amazon/Google/Microsoft only have talents for web programming is short sighted and simply not sure.
>And talking like Amazon/Google/Microsoft only have talents for web programming is short sighted and simply not sure.
Well, I am saying that they do obviously spend an ennormous effort trying to do so. To better formulate what I said, the fact that they did acquire some hardware/semi expertise in house, does not mean that this expertise drives them as a company.
If tomorrow 2 engineers, one from semi side, and one fromwebdev, will knock at the door of CEO with "I found a way to do things A and B 250 times better, but you have to scrap half of your business plan," a webdev will be heard, and semi guys not.
Btw, the chip Amazon showed, was from a company they acquired solely for that - to not to pay an arm and a leg for high end switching chips.
And about OEM servers - it is surprising that big dotcoms are late comers to the party, and were relying on off the shelf brand hardware to the very last moment.
Big hosting providers from outside of dotcom ecosystems were relying on direct OEM orders and custom built DCs for more than a decade. I do remember selling Atom based single board computers stuffed into U1s and Intel core 2 duo systems with soldered on memory and cpus to budget web hosting guys back when I worked as a trainee in a trade company back in 2007-2009.
> "If tomorrow 2 engineers, one from semi side, and one fromwebdev, will knock at the door of CEO with "I found a way to do things A and B 250 times better, but you have to scrap half of your business plan," a webdev will be heard, and semi guys not."
What are you basing this assumption on? Have you worked for one of these companies? Do you know anyone that does?
Also, regarding Microsoft, any suggestion that they're focused on acquiring web devs is clearly short sighted. If you want a better idea of its priorities, I'd suggest taking a look at which sectors it earns its main revenue in, as well as taking a look at the work being done at Microsoft Research.
It takes a giant effort for ordinary managerial cadres to wrap their mind around of what a web company is and learn the whole model of behavior expected from them. The few who manage to learn some basic technical disciplines and go up in ranks tend to overestimate the importance of their experience.
You meet such people a lot in a dotcom setting. It takes great effort to persuade such person to bother to put efforts to understand yet another mentally voluminous subject that will break his idea of "cool" yet another time.
It is like trying to persuade a prideful child who just learned how to drive a tricycle to learn to drive a normal bike...
No, I don't work for Microsoft. However, I have enough experience with their ecosystem to suggest that their revenue focus is not in web dev. Other products (such as Windows, Office, Azure and Xbox) are their prime source of revenue. Whilst I don't doubt they have plenty of web devs (TypeScript and VS Code both spring to mind as web-based tech from Microsoft), I wouldn't say that is their core competency, so...
> "a company whose topmost technical expertise is underhanded web programming"
... doesn't ring true. However, if you know people on the inside I'd be interested in knowing how the size of the web dev teams compares to other teams, such as the Xbox division.
> Yet, what took them at least 5 years, and extremely expensive to make reticule limit chips, was bested by a no-name Chinese fabless that blew TPUs out of the water on power/cost/performance ratio.
I'm not familiar with what company or product you're referring to. What is it?
Novumind, they showed their engineering samples few months ago. And yes, they got quite close to their initial promise of 3 teraflops per watt.
Cambricon - possibly a scam, though also claims performance on an equal level with moderately sound technical approach. They never released much info other than fancy CG videos.
I can't find much information about Novumind (NovuTensor is their product) nor Cambricon. NovuTensor seems to be only doing inference , and only a specific type of inference (judging from their hardware, probably only images), which is a lot simpler to speed up than the training that TPUs do.
I'd take the statement "Unknown Chinese company beating Google with fewer resources and less time" with a huge grain of salt.
NovuMind only does 3x3 convolutions. Literally a hard burnt ASIC. Also, the TPU's efficiency is close. (Btw both their "FLOPs/watt " numbers are useless, they don't account for utilization)
And Cambricon... well, I'll just leave it at that...
I don't think that relevant. For running NNs, this is pretty much all what you need from an asic hardware - raw floating point matrix multiplications per second. And measuring how much power it takes for it to do so is a good measure of power efficiency.
Surely, he is a top cadre, and an accomplished academician. The number of his students serving on CTO level jobs is in double digits.
The fact that Google went so far with cadres, and said to be throwing high six digit salaries even on people who came to the unit fresh out of universities clearly signifies the extend of their efforts and commitment. Their intent seem to be to bang money on it until it works, no matter the cost.
>Hardly clueless and inexperienced...
I never challenged the technical expertise per se. I'm saying that a generic web/dotcom/clickfarm business can't be normally turned into an engineering company of an inherently different nature, regardless of how much money will be banged on the exercise.
People say that for the past 5 years, the TPU unit was running effectively, like a research institute of some kind: regular workshops with academicians, amount of research works written exceeding the amount of code, and so on.
TPU unit people did their job splendidly, but Google's managerial unit that authorized the whole affair seem to me to be having hard time wrapping their mind around the question on how and what to do with it.
On the other hand, Ren Wu, being originally a semi engineer, had a very clear idea what he wants from the very start: off-the-shelf i/o ip, axi bus, wide registers, sram fifo, directly register fed matrix multiplication units, and predominantly synchronous operation. Voila. No talkshops, company being turned into research institute, or six digit salary cadres what so ever. The chip might well be a one man project.
To clarify, Dave doesn't head the hardware efforts (I doubt he wants the management headache!). Norm Jouppi was the lead of the TPU efforts. But Dave absolutely is part of it, he just doesn't have to herd the cats. :p
To the previous parent, the TPU didn't take five years - I don't know where you got that. But, in any event, I'd argue the key innovation in TPUv1 wasn't actually the design of a specific optimized processor: It was seeing the need for a year or two before anyone else in industry did!
Also - I think translation problem, what's "reticule limit"? In any event, if you're comparing what someone produced today with TPUv1, that's a bit of a weird comparison considering that the v2 is live and available in beta. :)
But, that said: For training, it's odd that you'd criticize the die area of the TPU when the major competitor is Volta -- 815mm^2 (!). It's pretty clear that TPUv2 and Volta both have similar aims in terms of high memory bandwidth (both use HBM), monstrous matrix multiply throughput, and a high-speed interconnect to be able to scale to larger clusters.
Making a single-chip inference engine, which NovuTensor appears to be, is a very different thing. So it's better compared to TPUv1, which is also an inference engine. I can't find the die area of TPUv1 out there, but it's not a monster, as you can probably infer from its 75W TDP.
It would be helpful in this discussion to be precise whether you're comparing to TPUv1, Cloud TPU (the v2), or something else, and if you're talking about inference or training.
(I assume my disclaimer is already obvious - I work part time at Google Brain - and that everything I'm writing is my own opinion, etc., etc., etc.)
This thread is full of well-written arguments that don't offend anyone. I understand that these points may be wrong, but these comments sure as hell shouldn't be downvoted.
They also do not have a product for the server market.
Yes, they have server-oriented processor families. No, after the storm that has been Meltdown/Spectre, none of these processor families are still considered "safe enough", even firmware-related fixes won't cut it there because the profitibality of a data center is calculated with TFLOPS/m^2 in mind.
Even if profitiability was not an issue (=> government), they won't quite cut it, because you really do not want a system that has this big of an vulnerability just sitting around your high-security/high-impact infrastructure. I do know government agencies in my country who - ever since the Meltdown/Spectre information broke - banned the purchase of Intel processors "until further notice".
Intel is in dire straits, and they should be worried.
intel is just fine. spectre and meltdown were blown way out of proportion. almost every CPU to date has had similar vectors to exploit them or worse. if intelligence agencies don't know this they have shitty assurance and should get better. most agencies for high integrety systems wont have been using intel/amd as there are cpus out there (ibm for example) which offer much better assurance with regards to memory integrity etc.
that being said, government is a tiny market compared to businesses (cloud providers etc. etc.) so really if they all switch to ibm or so intel still wouldn't be in trouble. it would be a tiny bump in the road.
I don't see how Spectre and meltdown were blown way out of proportion?
Google and Amazon seem to have treated them quite seriously.. Maybe they should have just closed their eyes.
The solution to Spectre right now is "Don't do speculative execution". Meltdown exploits a pretty embarrassing bug in the hardware. One has to wonder how it got through all of the testing/review that must happen before a new design is sent off to a fab($$$). Don't forget that there are 30+ class action lawsuits filed against Intel due solely to these bugs.
Most people who run servers aren't cloud hosts, so they're not running untrusted code on their servers in the first place, making Spectre/Meltdown pretty much a non-issue.
These sorts of issues were discovered a decade ago when speculative execution first hit the scene, we just never had a practical exploit (in public knowledge anyway) until recently, and even then it really isn't that bad despite all the security apocalypticists shouting that the end was nigh.
> They also do not have a product for the server market.
And it doesn't matter because NOBODY ELSE DOES EITHER.
Intel is so much bigger than everybody else in the space in terms of volumes, that even if they vaporized tomorrow, it would take a couple years for everybody else to plug the hole.
Mobile may be "decelerating", but the replacement cycle is shorter and even the poorest people in the world who will never buy PCs are already buying phones. The market is much bigger.
Being in mobile also has the effect of being in IOT.
Doubling down on market you know well is a lot easier than spotting a new one. Judging by their dabbles in both mobile and IoT hardware they're areas of interest (whether seriously or just scare tactics to show they could move into the area notwithstanding) - but the perception is they missed the boat.
What happens if they don't spot the next server/cloud market, like they didn't spot mobile?
agree, even if they sold nothing atall in the smart phone market, all the smart phones of the world still need servers to service the users needs.. and they practically all run on intel or ibm cpus.
Take mobile devices- add a new type of battery, allowing for true decentralized servers- and intels seemingly value in the serverspace evaporates in a cloud of smoke.
Add to that, a new generation of envelop layer in the making (Augmented Reality) - that will replace desktops and workstations, and intels huge castle seems truely build upon sand.
In addition they also failed on the other big market- massive parallelization (Neuronal Nets, Cryptocurrencys, etc.) - it just seems that intel lost its ability to innovate quite a while ago- and was just kept upright by its ability to monopolize markets.
Im sure steam-engine companys had great share-value, until the day they had not.
I think the point is that the article is basing the title that "Intel is fighting for its future" on the idea that they might make a bid for Broadcom to survive. The idea that Qualcomm could invest in cloud and servers and maybe, if lots of things happen in Qualcomm's favor, threaten Intel's server business has little to do with that.
Wal-Mart is investing heavily in ecommerce which could threaten Amazon if they become successful. It's hardly accurate to say that Amazon is fighting for its survival.
Yes And I guess only time will tell. If we travel back in time, and told Paul Otellini that Apple is going to make 100 to 200M chip a year with Intel, going for prices less then $30 per unit. Would Otellini have said yes? For some reason I doubt it. When there was no transformation of Smartphone to the industry, and saw importance of PC shrinks in his own eyes.
Purely looking at those numbers. For the same amount of transistor @$30, Intel were selling those at anywhere between $80 to $300. Not to mention Intel has to invest in Fabs just for Apple as 100 - 200M is no small numbers.
Intel cares about its margin, and its profitability. Sometimes we argue we should do things at lower margin to avoid the risk of being wiped out. Sometimes vice versa.
I am not entirely sure what Intel's exec were thinking, they were possibly driven out of Apple and Mobile decision because of fear of shareholders protest at lowering margins, and driven back to Mobile precisely because of shareholders.
And not only is Intel late to Mobile. They were late to GPU as well, and GPGPU in general. We are now looking at 2020 before an dGPU from Intel is out.
Basically Intel hasn't been innovating for a few years. And may be they haven't been to war for a long time. They loses the sense of danger. May be they were typical Silicon Valley's optimist where everything is going to be fine.
Which strangely is different to Andy Grove, only paranoid survives.
But then I dont see x86 ever lose out in PC or Datacenter Market. Right now the biggest threat is AMD, and that is not an existential threat.
I also dont see how Broadcom and Qualcomm merge would be an existential threat to Intel. Apple might not use Intel's modem, but that is not exactly a problem. Intel needed some customers to use its product so it could at least cover the R&D cost of modem, which is getting insanely complicated. And Mobile Network has already reached an inflection point where Modem aren't going to get the rapid development and improvement as we had in the last 10 years.
With iPhone, we manage to move from End of 2G to 3G to 4G and now to 5G. All within 10 years. We have reached a stage where Top Speed no longer sales. Market wants more data, or higher capacity rather then unattainable top 1Gbps speed. We have Massive MIMO and LAA, and in the next 5 years we will see anywhere from 4x to 20x capacity improvement, along with better reception. All these improvement are now bottlenecked by Carrier upgrading their sites, assuming we have a steady rate of mobile phones upgrade.
Intel has a clear market of 1.5 Billion PC to upgrade to, while not everyone will be upgrading their PC with Modem. It is by no means a small market. And Apple has their own W2 with 802.11n and Bluetooth 4.1. It is only a matter of time before they have their own 802.11ac and Bluetooth 5, as well as possible 802.11ax. All these are currently coming from Broadcom. I am much more worried about Broadcom then Intel.
