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Intel Urged to Take 'Immediate Action' Amid Threats From Apple Silicon and AMD
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Did the dinosaurs of old see it coming? And even if they did, would it really have changed anything? All things die eventually... that's what evolution is all about.
You think Apple and AMD are in a different boat? Their time will come. It always comes.
You think Apple and AMD are in a different boat? Their time will come. It always comes.
I know everybody is here to celebrate the death of intel, and I'm not a huge fan of them either...It is just sad there is not some new US-based silicon powerhouse to take their place.
Intel about to go the way of Blackberry 😅
lol @ the idea of TSMC spending only a few tens or twenty millions to get their process working. just completely hilarious. You can't even buy a single stepper for that.
I've been testing various x86 apps under the insider previews of both Parallels and Windows 10 ARM and have been pleasantly surprised at how snappy everything is, and relatively reliable. The emulation actually works pretty damn well, albeit not as good as Rosetta. I think Microsoft could easily work out those kinks, and that along with exponentially better performance out of a new generation of ARM PC chips that can easily overcome the emulation overhead (as the M1 does) will easily move this whole thing along super fast. You do that, then you get demand for arm native ports of say, games up, and Intel is done. AMD will also likely move to arm, and is probably in a better position to do so than Intel
Here's a nice little sticker idea for the outside case...
"Intel NOT Inside"
"Intel NOT Inside"
They've been resting on their laurels since about 2006 when core 2 dominated the CPU world. People love to accuse apple with little to no innovation but it really is Intel that is guilty of that.
Side note - I picked up an M1 MBP because my 2016 MBP is literally falling apart. This thing is incredible. Graphics are better than the discrete, no fans running all the time, it's amazing. Can't wait for the 16" version
Side note - I picked up an M1 MBP because my 2016 MBP is literally falling apart. This thing is incredible. Graphics are better than the discrete, no fans running all the time, it's amazing. Can't wait for the 16" version
They felt their market dominance - especially in the datacenter space where it reached 90% recently - was enough to allow them to coast. And their margins on those Xeons was so high that they had no compelling reason to invest significantly on something better.
Intel's real threat is their largest datacenter customers developing their own chips or going to AMD at massive scale. Amazon has released the second generation of their AWS Graviton series and Google and Twitter are now starting to deploy EPYC in addition to Intel. Neither is a threat at the moment, but when you consider how many millions of Xeons Intel sells per year to Amazon and Google alone, any significant drop in those sales would have a serious impact on Intel's revenues.
Intel needs to take the competitive threat posed in the 2020’s extremely seriously. It hasn’t been in this position in over 20 years, if ever. Wintel has been a thing since the 90s. Intel inside used to inspire a sense of pride.
Now intel is that second class citizen no one wants to touch. I go to microcenter, and all the excitement and buzz are over at the AMD motherboards and processors. No one is over at the intel booth. I’ve witnessed someone’s grandma getting mad at a microcenter rep for trying to steer her away from buying a Ryzen-based laptop for an intel based one. I’ve never seen anything like this before.
Apple is a prestigious customer that has left, and it has now put forth a chip that embarrasses intel and makes Core look silly. AMD Ryzen is embarrassing Intel on x86. Now mircrosoft is threatening to leave x86... windows came of age and of market dominance on x86. Remember Wintel? Now that’s going away... We’ve never seen anything like this before.
I don’t know how intel will turn the ship around, but it’s not too late yet. However, there’s danger lurking on the horizon for intel... like RIM, Nokia, IBM and others, being dominant for years in the technology industry means nothing If you fail to innovate. Intel has been peddling BS for years when it was dominant, and may well fail if it doesn’t turn things around soon.
Now intel is that second class citizen no one wants to touch. I go to microcenter, and all the excitement and buzz are over at the AMD motherboards and processors. No one is over at the intel booth. I’ve witnessed someone’s grandma getting mad at a microcenter rep for trying to steer her away from buying a Ryzen-based laptop for an intel based one. I’ve never seen anything like this before.
Apple is a prestigious customer that has left, and it has now put forth a chip that embarrasses intel and makes Core look silly. AMD Ryzen is embarrassing Intel on x86. Now mircrosoft is threatening to leave x86... windows came of age and of market dominance on x86. Remember Wintel? Now that’s going away... We’ve never seen anything like this before.
I don’t know how intel will turn the ship around, but it’s not too late yet. However, there’s danger lurking on the horizon for intel... like RIM, Nokia, IBM and others, being dominant for years in the technology industry means nothing If you fail to innovate. Intel has been peddling BS for years when it was dominant, and may well fail if it doesn’t turn things around soon.
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With a huge company like this they can’t just change overnight. Plus processor design takes a long time. It takes years to develop a new design. If Intel did make significant changes this year, for instance, we might not see the release of that for a couple years still. Tigerlake is a good step in the right direction, but more work definitely needs to be done.
The writing has been on the wall for many years now. I don’t know how anyone can seriously have a wake up call and sound the alarm all of a sudden when the drums have been pounding so loudly about this for so long now.
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Intel also has an image/marketing problem due to all of the issues Third Point points out. Long gone are the days of the colorful radiation suit people (so 80's) or even Intel's original catchy jingle.
Now Intel is known for making expensive lava-hot chips chock full of security flaws using dinosaur manufacturing processes that require each to consume 1.21 Gigawatts of power just to keep up with the competition.
If they don't so something drastic on all fronts, they will be about as relevant as IBM in the modern CPU era.
Now Intel is known for making expensive lava-hot chips chock full of security flaws using dinosaur manufacturing processes that require each to consume 1.21 Gigawatts of power just to keep up with the competition.
If they don't so something drastic on all fronts, they will be about as relevant as IBM in the modern CPU era.
Too soon for Intel to throw in the towel on manufacturing. Also keep in mind they're still selling every chip they make and are running at full capacity. If anything there is a shortage and their chips are hard to purchase in some markets.
This isn't a company with a demand problem but they are reaching the limits of their 14nm technology and that is the point where the rock comes tumbling down the other side of the mountain. Things can quickly switch from having a demand issue to having no demand at all.
It seems that wont happen for a couple years. They have time to pull things together, fix 10nm, get the high performance designs out the door.
Apple is never coming back to Intel or x86 for that matter but there is still a very large market for this instruction set. Regarding the machine learning stuff I do completely agree with the analysts. Intel is almost completely absent here and while their high end processors include instructions to accelerate machine learning and inference these are baby steps compared to what NVIDIA and to a lesser extend AMD are putting out with their GPU's.
Intel is working on dedicated accelerators to succeed their XEON Phi accelerator cards but they are like a decade behind NVIDIA at this point which is insane to even say. Intel is now playing catchup in every market segment they're in.
SSD's, CPU's, GPU's, Machine Learning and even Networking. NVIDIA recently released 400Gb/ps network cards that can use 5 meter long passive DAC cables. Something the industry thought may not even be physically possible (they thought optical fiber may be required). Meanwhile Intel is struggling just to get customers to buy 100Gb/ps InfiniBand products.
They're just seemingly stuck in a rut unable to execute. Even their latest network cards which feature PCIe 4.0 don't have an Intel platform to negotiate that interface speed with requiring an AMD platform, how bizarre is that?
This isn't a company with a demand problem but they are reaching the limits of their 14nm technology and that is the point where the rock comes tumbling down the other side of the mountain. Things can quickly switch from having a demand issue to having no demand at all.
It seems that wont happen for a couple years. They have time to pull things together, fix 10nm, get the high performance designs out the door.
Apple is never coming back to Intel or x86 for that matter but there is still a very large market for this instruction set. Regarding the machine learning stuff I do completely agree with the analysts. Intel is almost completely absent here and while their high end processors include instructions to accelerate machine learning and inference these are baby steps compared to what NVIDIA and to a lesser extend AMD are putting out with their GPU's.
Intel is working on dedicated accelerators to succeed their XEON Phi accelerator cards but they are like a decade behind NVIDIA at this point which is insane to even say. Intel is now playing catchup in every market segment they're in.
SSD's, CPU's, GPU's, Machine Learning and even Networking. NVIDIA recently released 400Gb/ps network cards that can use 5 meter long passive DAC cables. Something the industry thought may not even be physically possible (they thought optical fiber may be required). Meanwhile Intel is struggling just to get customers to buy 100Gb/ps InfiniBand products.
They're just seemingly stuck in a rut unable to execute. Even their latest network cards which feature PCIe 4.0 don't have an Intel platform to negotiate that interface speed with requiring an AMD platform, how bizarre is that?
Oh I am sure TSMC spends hundreds of millions if not billions on a new process between R&D, infrastructure rollout and initial production, but Apple is not picking up the entire tab for that.
My comment is that Apple is willing to be "first mover" to that process while it is ramping up and yields are poor and are likely spending tens to scores of millions on those "pilot orders" to be first in line when production and yields do ramp up.
This is the main issue. Just years upon years of bad management and it has finally caught up to Intel. Whatever lead they had, is gone. They have to play catch up and if they don’t fix their management issue, they will continue their path towards obscurity.
Intel should take the advice that Michael Dell once gave Apple and just close up shop and return all the money they have to shareholders.
Intel won’t be screwed just yet. If they get their act together in the next 3-4 years they’ll survive given their huge cash reserves. If they’re still in the same state then they’re truly screwed.
As I have heard many times, that ship has sailed. Apple would never have brought their own processor to market if they weren't fully committed.
The problem for Intel is that the obvious solution, spinning off its fabs, will kill it in the long run. The only advantage Intel ever had over AMD was its fabs. Intel’s designers are terrible.
This thread is a great example of how most technologists can't see the forest for the trees.
They still have their 1980s blinders on equating "computing" with "Windows on x86."
Within the past decade semiconductors have exploded in our lives. Not just smartphones.
A lot of this is powered by the cloud.
Microsoft isn't particularly interested in ARM for their moribund family of Surface devices but they certainly won't balk at deploying them there.
They are developing their own ARM silicon for Azure. Amazon is doing the same for AWS.
It is likely that Apple is using Apple Silicon in a small percentage of their cloud servers but it will grow over time.
Remember Johny Sroudji's primary speaking point during the WWDC keynote. Performance per watt. He pounded this concept again and again. If Apple can get the same computing power at 50% of the electricity, that gives them a competitive advantage. It's not just about benchmarks. It also include power.
Apple's concern is not to kick Threadripper back to the curb. They want suitable performance at energy efficient levels.
Microsoft is late to the custom ARM game. If they had started this effort 15 years ago, they could conceivably be still a major player in the smartphone market. That ship has long sailed along with meathead Steve Ballmer, LOL.
More computing is moving into the cloud week by week where the servers don't need to be running Windows on x86.
Nobody with any sense believes that Windows on x86 is threatened in the near future. But that's not Microsoft's strategy with their custom ARM silicon.
Many technologists here likely live in households with several hundred microprocessors under their roofs and garages but only a handful say "Intel Inside." And those chips are communicating to cloud servers running on an increasingly smaller percentage of Intel processors.
They still have their 1980s blinders on equating "computing" with "Windows on x86."
Within the past decade semiconductors have exploded in our lives. Not just smartphones.
A lot of this is powered by the cloud.
Microsoft isn't particularly interested in ARM for their moribund family of Surface devices but they certainly won't balk at deploying them there.
They are developing their own ARM silicon for Azure. Amazon is doing the same for AWS.
It is likely that Apple is using Apple Silicon in a small percentage of their cloud servers but it will grow over time.
Remember Johny Sroudji's primary speaking point during the WWDC keynote. Performance per watt. He pounded this concept again and again. If Apple can get the same computing power at 50% of the electricity, that gives them a competitive advantage. It's not just about benchmarks. It also include power.
Apple's concern is not to kick Threadripper back to the curb. They want suitable performance at energy efficient levels.
Microsoft is late to the custom ARM game. If they had started this effort 15 years ago, they could conceivably be still a major player in the smartphone market. That ship has long sailed along with meathead Steve Ballmer, LOL.
More computing is moving into the cloud week by week where the servers don't need to be running Windows on x86.
Nobody with any sense believes that Windows on x86 is threatened in the near future. But that's not Microsoft's strategy with their custom ARM silicon.
Many technologists here likely live in households with several hundred microprocessors under their roofs and garages but only a handful say "Intel Inside." And those chips are communicating to cloud servers running on an increasingly smaller percentage of Intel processors.
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LOL, you don't know anything about the semiconductor industry, do you?
Intel is the #2 semiconductor company in its own city of Santa Clara, California. Nvidia DWARFS Intel in market capitalization by something like $100 billion. Intel was founded in 1968. Nvidia was founded in 1993.
Intel's "human capital management issue" includes top-tier chip design engineers going to the competition on the other side of the street. While Intel is a moribund, listless shell living in the shadow of its former greatness, Nvidia is the rockstar, growing enormously with plenty of future opportunities.
Remember that AMD and Apple are in the bordering cities of Sunnyvale and Cupertino respectively. More reasons for Intel's brain drain.
Intel is under fire not just for their eroding marketshare of desktop computing but also for their increasing irrelevance elsewhere (mobile, handheld, cloud, HPC). What's the chance of a smartwatch having "Intel Inside"? Zero percent.
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I think that Intel is more like 1984' IBM. They will survive after a complete business model change.
Nokia was killed by MSFT erratic management, that's a different story.