A bad year for Intel. Are they still relevant?

[Jcmg62]

The second half of 2018 is an exciting time for Microsoft fans. It's been years since I felt this pumped about Microsoft's mobile efforts.

Microsoft will never, ever, ever go near traditional cell phones again. Because they don't have to. They have a new plan.

A better plan.

Andromeda is almost certainly coming and OEM's are rumoured to be very close to bringing out a host of new form factors running Windows on Arm.

Every other Windows related news article worth reading lately is all about Windows on Arm. We heart Qualcomm. They're our new best friends

On the face of it, we could argue that MS need Qualcomm more than Qualcomm need Microsoft. After all, without Qualcomm's investment in dedicated WoA architecture and chips, it's hard to imagine Microsoft ever finding a route beyond traditional laptops.

But I don't think it's a one way thing.

Qualcomm really need Microsoft too. The smartphone market is saturated. Apple are doing their level best to cut licencing fees to Qualcomm. Law suits are piling up everywhere. They're a business facing huge pressures in the mobile space and very much need a new market to operate in.

The Microsoft/Qualcomm relationship is a very symbiotic one. They need one another, but more importantly, they share a common goal and seemingly work very well together. They're happily committed.

But where does this new relationship leave Intel?

They've consistently failed to get on board with the mobile/ultra mobile pc movement. Whether it's a lack of willingness to move into that space, or a lack of engineering know how in developing chips that work in mobile devices, who knows. Maybe it's both.

But either way, the fact that MS are moving into this huge new ultra-mobile market without Intel has to be seriously worrying for them.

So where will Intel be in 3-5 years time?

We used to say that Microsoft are going to become the next IBM. But not anymore. They've found their legs and are pushing forward. They're exciting us again.

Unless Intel can find a path to relevance in the next 1-2 years, I suspect they'll be the next IBM. They'll have some space in the server and desktop market, but anything cool and desireable will be an Arm device.

Must be scary times at Intel HQ...

 

[Golfdriver97]

Re: A bad year for Intel. Are they still relevent?

They've consistently failed to get on board with the mobile/ultra mobile pc movement.

I'm not inclined to agree with this. Have they been unsuccessful getting into phones? Sure. However, they are in the Surface tablets as a mobile CPU, along with laptops powered by Intel. Those are all mobile CPUs.

I agree that they focus more on the desktop variant, but that is due to the ability to sell to more people. OEMs buy the mobile CPUs. There is really no third party sales for mobile chips. Desktop chips though, is a different story. Not only are you selling to OEMs, but you can sell to the general public too, as they can build their own PCs.

Unless Intel can find a path to relevance in the next 1-2 years, I suspect they'll be the next IBM.

I don't think this statement is anywhere near the truth. Gaming PCs, servers, like you already said, and mining equipment will not be hinged on a mobile CPU. They will need a full desktop sized chip. The gaming market alone will keep Intel afloat for quite a while.

 

[dlls]

I don't see Qualcomm being relevant competition for real PCs chips (laptops included) any time soon. AMD is a real competitor though.
And always connected PCs aren't real PCs as far as I'm concerned. The first generation didn't get any traction, I don't see why future generations would.
A mobile phone is more suited as an always connected portable device not really intended for any heavy workloads. These always connected laptops with ARM CPUs don't make too much sense.
They would make more sense with x86 CPUs. I don't see what's stopping them from adding 4G modems on normal laptops.

 

[Mike Cerm]

Re: A bad year for Intel. Are they still relevent?

I don't think this statement is anywhere near the truth. Gaming PCs, servers, like you already said, and mining equipment will not be hinged on a mobile CPU. They will need a full desktop sized chip. The gaming market alone will keep Intel afloat for quite a while.

Ryzen is eating heavily into the gaming market, for sure. AMD had no competitive CPUs for like 10 years, and now they do. AMD also owns the console market, so Intel isn't making a ton in the gaming market. Mining is stupid and a waste of electricity, and does not happen on Intel CPUs anyway; AMD GPUs are where it's, or custom ASICs. Servers and laptops, all Intel, all the time. Even Chromebooks have abandoned ARM. leaving that whole market to Intel.

 

[Cbarnhorst]

Intel will respond to the competition. What goes around comes around.

 

[Golfdriver97]

Re: A bad year for Intel. Are they still relevent?

Intel isn't making a ton in the gaming market

Not inclined to agree. Here is why: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/processormfg/

 

[Mike Cerm]

Re: A bad year for Intel. Are they still relevent?

Not inclined to agree. Here is why: https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/processormfg/

That chart proves my point, actually. For 10 years, AMD did not have any competitive CPUs, and now they do. Intel has had a massive entrenched lead, but then, in the last 6 months Intel has dropped from 91% to 83%. Steam has about 20 million users, so in the last 6 months, about nearly 2 million people have essentially switched from Intel to AMD. That's actually a lot worse for Intel than I was expecting. At that rate, AMD will close the gap completely in 2 years. Not saying it's going to happen that way, just that it's a huge decline and Intel should be very, very worried.

And Steam is just 20 million users. There's close to 120 million current-gen consoles out there (Xbox One, PS4), and AMD has 100% of that market. Consoles are a low-margin business, for sure, but it certainly is a part of the overall trend that, when it comes to gaming, Intel is becoming increasingly irrelevant.

 

[Hirox K]

Well... I think Intel, AMD cpu can still thrive between developers, creators and gamers.

Game programmer, designer, musician, video editing, realtime 3d recording, live streaming need powerful HW and we still need to run Adobe, 3dsMax, Unreal, VisualStudio, SVN, Git, File system, Office, Reason, Komplete, Local Server typpa applications.
* Besides those, our project manager and ticket system are all web based.

Game planner, people in international business department, accounting, lawyer prob work better with ARM, they need Office and web. WoA is also good for business trip too. Light weight, last longer, it's a very capable Pocket WiFi.

AR, MR and IOT's (cordless and lightweight) future... is in ARM's hand.

Unless, there's some secret weapon from Intel we don't know of.

 

[Sunstorming]

Intel is the bad guy. I only own one Intel based product -- Surface Pro 2017 -- and have never purchased an Intel CPU for anything I own. Ever. I went from AMD K6-3 -> Athlon -> Athlon 64 -> AMD X2 -> AMD FX and very recently to Ryzen 2600. AMD was already trouncing them around 2005; around the same time Intel forced the hands of Dell and other big PC manufactures into exclusive agreements as to not loose more market share. Intel has a long history of dirty tactics. And after they finally got the market all to themselves they sat on their hands and stopped doing much of any x86-64 innovation. They mocked other companies for having high thread counts... they charged extraorbinant prices for minor CPU upgrades. Now it's coming back to bite them in the ***. I think it is hilarious and I quite like watching them struggle to stay relevant in a new market that AMD is dominating them at: Price performance value computing.

 

[Sunstorming]

Intel will respond to the competition. What goes around comes around.

Intel, at the moment, CANNOT respond. They don't have ANYTHING. They showed off a 5GHz 28 core monster that was water chill cooled and said it was coming this year and it turned out to be a big fake. Oh and they "forgot" to mention this overclocked, sub-ambient cooled beast as being an ultra binned CPU with exotic cooling. Right.

This is what makes it so awesome. It's like watching a moronic football player in high school that was so used to winning he go drafted and a free ride in to a big college. And then he got lazy and started drinking too much … the girls saw he was an ***** and the professors stopped giving him free passing grades. Finally, after being kicked to the side after flunking out, he has to actually WORK and make something of himself. On his merits.

 

[Golfdriver97]

Re: A bad year for Intel. Are they still relevent?

That chart proves my point, actually. For 10 years, AMD did not have any competitive CPUs, and now they do. Intel has had a massive entrenched lead, but then, in the last 6 months Intel has dropped from 91% to 83%. Steam has about 20 million users, so in the last 6 months, about nearly 2 million people have essentially switched from Intel to AMD. That's actually a lot worse for Intel than I was expecting. At that rate, AMD will close the gap completely in 2 years. Not saying it's going to happen that way, just that it's a huge decline and Intel should be very, very worried.

And Steam is just 20 million users. There's close to 120 million current-gen consoles out there (Xbox One, PS4), and AMD has 100% of that market. Consoles are a low-margin business, for sure, but it certainly is a part of the overall trend that, when it comes to gaming, Intel is becoming increasingly irrelevant.

It proves your point that AMD is making a comeback. It does not prove that Intel is not making any money on gaming.

The hardware survey is a catch 22 though. There is no mention of the sample size. Steam has about 120 million users actually, and there is no reference to how large the sample size is. The upside to it though, is we can get a glimpse of what the current hardware trends are.

 

[Lee_Bo]

I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with this one, at least from the commercial side of things.

In the pro/av world, all we use are Intel i7, 8-core units for video processing. And at the rate we are installing them, I'm not too worried about it.

 

[Mike Cerm]

Re: A bad year for Intel. Are they still relevent?

Steam has about 120 million users actually, and there is no reference to how large the sample size is.

My 20 million number was wrong -- stats about how many monthly active users in the United States. The last number I can find is from mid 2017, and Steam had 67 million monthly active users worldwide. That is your sample size right there, plus a few million more for growth over the last year. So, my estimate that 2 million people have switched from Intel to AMD in the last 6 months is actually more like 6 million people.

This is a really big deal, because 5 years ago no one would think of building a gaming machine without an i5 or i7, along with a motherboard that also makes money for Intel because they make the chipsets. These days, unless you have an unlimited budget, you'd be crazy not to buy an Ryzen CPU and motherboard, and use the money you save to bump up to a better GPU.

Intel makes the fastest CPUs out there, and nobody would just do that. The problem is that now they have a competitor who makes CPUs that are nearly as good and undercut them on price, particularly at a time when CPU performance is increasingly less relevant. This is especially true in gaming, where a $150 difference between a Ryzen 5 and an i7 might get you an extra 3 FPS, but the $150 difference between a RX 560 and an RX 580 (or a 1060 vs 1070) means an extra 30 FPS.

Gaming is not going to be the thing that saves Intel from irrelevancy. That ship has already sailed. Intel will continue to have a huge presence in laptops, where AMD and ARM still aren't competitive, and in data centers.

 

[neo_eastside]

The second half of 2018 is an exciting time for Microsoft fans. It's been years since I felt this pumped about Microsoft's mobile efforts.

Microsoft will never, ever, ever go near traditional cell phones again. Because they don't have to. They have a new plan.

A better plan.

Andromeda is almost certainly coming and OEM's are rumoured to be very close to bringing out a host of new form factors running Windows on Arm.

Every other Windows related news article worth reading lately is all about Windows on Arm. We heart Qualcomm. They're our new best friends

On the face of it, we could argue that MS need Qualcomm more than Qualcomm need Microsoft. After all, without Qualcomm's investment in dedicated WoA architecture and chips, it's hard to imagine Microsoft ever finding a route beyond traditional laptops.

But I don't think it's a one way thing.

Qualcomm really need Microsoft too. The smartphone market is saturated. Apple are doing their level best to cut licencing fees to Qualcomm. Law suits are piling up everywhere. They're a business facing huge pressures in the mobile space and very much need a new market to operate in.

The Microsoft/Qualcomm relationship is a very symbiotic one. They need one another, but more importantly, they share a common goal and seemingly work very well together. They're happily committed.

But where does this new relationship leave Intel?

They've consistently failed to get on board with the mobile/ultra mobile pc movement. Whether it's a lack of willingness to move into that space, or a lack of engineering know how in developing chips that work in mobile devices, who knows. Maybe it's both.

But either way, the fact that MS are moving into this huge new ultra-mobile market without Intel has to be seriously worrying for them.

So where will Intel be in 3-5 years time?

We used to say that Microsoft are going to become the next IBM. But not anymore. They've found their legs and are pushing forward. They're exciting us again.

Unless Intel can find a path to relevance in the next 1-2 years, I suspect they'll be the next IBM. They'll have some space in the server and desktop market, but anything cool and desireable will be an Arm device.

Must be scary times at Intel HQ...

Intel is a dinosaur on its way to extinction. INTC stock diving down 5% today, headed to $49 (and lower soon).

ARM is absolutely the future of mainstream consumer Windows PC's. ARM business model going to save Microsoft billions a year while offering PC users smartphone capabilities.

Microsoft, Apple or any other OEM are never going back to Intel single-supplier dominated duopoly model ever again.

Intel in irreversible businesses model decline, future will be making government killing drones for Darpa/DoD to track and kill humans.

 

[Golfdriver97]

Re: A bad year for Intel. Are they still relevent?

That is your sample size right there

No it isn't. The sample size is the size of those who participated in the survey. THAT is the unknown number. We don't know how many machines were sampled in any given month versus the full population of Steam users. I haven't participated in a hardware survey in over a year.

The number you are referring to is the population size. To clarify, if a single poll question in the U.S. about saving the mosquito from extinction is made, and the poll states that 150k people were polled. The population (that of the U.S.) versus the sample size (150k). We can find numbers on the population of Steam users (67 Million) but not the sampled size.

However, to the original point....I don't think Intel is anywhere near the trouble that the OP is claiming.

 

[GeorgeOnArm]

Intel only option is to spend a great deal of marketing to hire bloggers to confuse USPs of ARM-based ACPC, before end of 2018. Obviously, we will mobilize - like how the "save Expense the Sci fi TV SERIES" , to get the fact straighten.

 

[neo_eastside]

Intel is the past, its business model, x86 architecture, everything. It's in the same category of industrial irrelevance as IBM and GM.

The future is ARM, AMD will be purchased by an ARM chip maker for its graphics capability once x86 chip business is worth less than AMD's ARM PC/server chip making capability and RTG combined. Intel will transfer worthless x86 license to some Chinese company to avoid being charged with monopoly.

Intel is deep in institutional rot.. CEO, management, etc.

The only ones defending Intel at this point are computer science types w/ a nostalgic attachment to glory years of dying x86 legacy architecture.

Intel has lost its process leadership forever. TSMC and Samsung kicking its *** with mobile driven volume leadership.

Intel is in irreversible businesses cycle decline.

Anyone defending Intel at this point is being linear brained and can't see the forest from the trees.

Microsoft's (and Apple's) post-Intel future a lot brighter (and profitable) than Intel past.

 

[Grant Taylor3]

Qualcomm would need to shift 400m Windows 10 devices per year for this article to be relevant. That is not going to happen any time soon.

 

[naddy6969]

"Qualcomm would need to shift 400m Windows 10 devices per year....".

No. 100 million would be enough. The total Windows PC market is down to about 240 million units per year. If ARM starts accounting for 1/3 to 1/2 of total Windows PC shipments, Intel will be in REAL trouble.

If 400 million are actually sold, that would mean that no one is buying Intel anymore.