I wonder if there's any way to recover for Intel. They don't have anything worthwhile on the market, R&D takes a lot of time and their foundries are a constant source of losses as they're inferior compared to the competition.
On top of that x86 seems to be pushed out more and more by ARM hardware and now increasingly RISC-V from China. But of course there's the US chip angle - will the US, especially after the problems during Covid, let a key manufacturer like Intel bite the dust?
Intel really isn't in as much trouble as tech blogs like to act.
It's not great but lol the sensationalism is hilarious.
Remember, gamers only make up a few percentage of users for what Intel makes. But that's what you hear about the most. One or two data center orders are larger than all the gaming cpus Intel will sell in a year. And Intel is still doing fine in the data center market.
Add in that Intel still dominates the business laptop market which is, again, larger than the gamer market by a pretty wide margin.
You're right about gamers, but other verticals are looking bad for Intel, too.
The two areas you mention (data center, integrated OEM/mobile) are the two that are most supply chain and business-lead dependent. They center around reliable deliveries of capable products at scale, hardware certifications, IT department training, and organizational bureaucracy that Intel has had captured for a long time.
But!
Data center specifically is getting hit hard from AMD in the x86 world and ARM on the other side. AWS's move to Graviton alone represents a massive dip in Intel market share, and it's not the only game in town.
Apple is continuing to succeed in the professional workspace, and AMD's share of laptop and OEM contracts just keeps going up. Once an IT department or their chosen vendor has retooled to support non-Intel, that toothpaste is not going back into the tube - not fully, at least.
For both of these, AMD's improvement in reliability and delivery at scale will be bearing fruit for the next decade (at Intel's expense), and the mindshare, which gamers and tech sensationalism are indicators for, has already shifted the market away from an Intel-dominated world to a much more competitive one. Intel will have to truly compete in that market. Intel has stayed competitive in a price-to-performance sense by undermining their own bottom line, but that lever only has so far it can be pulled.
So I'm not super bullish on Intel, sensationalism aside. They have a ton of momentum, but will need to make use of it ASAP, and they haven't shown an ability to do that so far.
Intel still has well over 70% x86 market share. They have a long runway. Arm had only 15% datacenter market share last year, and still hasn’t made much headway in the Windows market.
The trend toward ARM in both laptops and data centers is clear. It’s being driven by power efficiency as much as performance. The x86 guys have shown that they can make x86 fast and that CISC is really not an issue, but that takes a lot of transistors and those transistors inevitably burn power. For the same performance, x86 will always be more power hungry. And so the industry will keep moving toward ARM and RISC-V.
Arm vs x86 matters a lot for Intel since they don't make Arm CPUs. x86 used to be a massive moat for Intel/AMD. The rise of ARM market-share means that that moat is draining. 10 years ago, AMD and IBM were the only competition (and they were both in rough shape). Now Intel is competing against AMD, NVidia, Qualcom, Amazon, and Arm. Even if Intel can make the best CPU again, they no longer can charge monopoly prices for it. If you have a 10% faster CPU, that only lets you charge a small premium over everyone else.
More than a bit, Intel actually produced ARM processors for a decade. The XScale line of processors was sold to Marvell in 2006, and that knowledge has probably atrophied since then. Intel used to build their network interface cards around an XScale core, not sure what they're using now.
didn't i read something about apple,nvidia and other companies looking to use their foundries? why would they do that if its inferior or was that something else?
I guess it depends on your expectations. Will they be fine as a company? I think yes. Will they be as prominent as they were at different points in their history? I think not.
Product aside, from a shareholder/business point of view (I like to think of this separately these days as financial performance is becoming less and less reflective of the end product) I think they are too big to fail.
On top of that x86 seems to be pushed out more and more by ARM hardware and now increasingly RISC-V from China. But of course there's the US chip angle - will the US, especially after the problems during Covid, let a key manufacturer like Intel bite the dust?