EEVblog Electronics Community Forum
General => General Technical Chat => Topic started by: sarepairman2 on April 19, 2016, 11:52:43 pm
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https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/04/19/2210226/intel-confirms-major-layoff-12000-worldwide-11-percent-of-workforce
what do you think?
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It doesn't surprise me the least bit. For quite a few years, I have been telling friends what I saw in China: the IC design houses, the fab facilities, the massive funding of anything technology there, etc.
If I were running a chip maker (Intel, Qualcomm, TI, linear, etc.), I would be ***extremely*** concerned about my future 10 - 20 years down the road.
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eh, think about all the govt/american industrial usage.
no one is ever gonna trust anything built in china
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Wow, that's big.
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Contributing factor #1... Microsoft.
The processor requirement for Windows Vista was 1GHz. The processor requirement for Windows 7 was 1GHz, 8, 8.1 and 10 as well.
Microsoft has not upped the specs on their processor requirements in 10 years.
Windows 10 is a free upgrade for 3 operating systems. So now you have the most modern OS running on your computer and it didn't cost you a dime.
If you wipe a 6 year old laptop and install Windows 10 on it cleanly, it runs decently.
Factor #2. Intel overproduces.
There is massive performance overlaps in their processors. A 5 year old i5-2520M almost identical performance to a I5-4310M.
Some I5s are slower than previous generation I3 processors.
Some I5s are faster than some I7 processors.
Some Pentiums are faster than I3 processors.
It seems like they keep increasing the top end of their processors without knocking out mid and low range when they should.
They refuse to have a performance spot that isn't covered between top and bottom ranges. They need to set a performance floor every year and drop processors under that performance, or eliminate the massive mid range.
Factor #3 ARM
I shouldn't have to explain this one.. It's pretty self explanatory to anyone who has a mobile phone.
Factor #3.5 Atom
It never has really become what it should have been, Intel's mobile phone processor.
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Essentially they are running into the end of the physics that allowed simple shrinking of the transistors. There are exciting new technologies like III-V Nitride semiconductors but they are slower at this point. There needs to be more research in this area which I believe is mostly going on at the university level and not much in industry. I would like to specialize in semiconductors, the quantum mechanics is really interesting but with such an unpredictable job market in semiconductors maybe I should go into something more in demand like signal processing or something like that.
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4 years ago, I built a new PC to use as my main one, right at the 5 year "major upgrade" mark I have traditionally followed. Now, I don't see any good reason to replace the CPU/motherboard in one year. I did, however, upgrade the GPU and monitor 1.5 years ago. Not sure when I would upgrade the GPU again but I plan on keeping the 4K monitor for 10 years or so.
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So is it time to seriously look at GaAs and InGaAs again?
You had me at "transistor switching speeds up to 250GHz"
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IBM is still doing as big or bigger but they have tuned the process and can do it out of the public view. They've now passed 4 years of declining revenues.
I hope the OP doesn't mind the thread drifting to tech layoffs in general.
What I don't understand is that if IBM with WATSON is trying to capture new market and revenue why they don't ask WATSON what they should do to turn their failing fortunes around. It can't come up with a worse idea than their current strategy.
Personally I think IBM has already had its KODAK moment. Given KODAK's long history and IBM share that much, it faded away relatively quickly as did Polaroid.
IBM is all but dead as we knew it, I don't think anything can really save it.
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x86 has lasted a long time. Are we starting to see it reach the end? x86 destroyed several other major technological alternatives to it. After all, the AIM alliance is but a forgotten name.
The only other core i can think of having lasted so long is ARM.
Then again, in the quest to get smaller, why don't we increase the cpu die size. It's not like motherboards couldn't be made more compact to accomodate for an increase in die size. Above that, what ever happened to 3D gates, and gate stacking?
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Then again, in the quest to get smaller, why don't we increase the cpu die size. It's not like motherboards couldn't be made more compact to accomodate for an increase in die size. Above that, what ever happened to 3D gates, and gate stacking?
There are tons of problems with this: propagation delay, the fact that cost is very highly a function of die size due to the spatial distribution of faults, parallel programming is hard, etc
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x86 has lasted a long time. Are we starting to see it reach the end? x86 destroyed several other major technological alternatives to it. After all, the AIM alliance is but a forgotten name.
The only other core i can think of having lasted so long is ARM.
Then again, in the quest to get smaller, why don't we increase the cpu die size. It's not like motherboards couldn't be made more compact to accomodate for an increase in die size. Above that, what ever happened to 3D gates, and gate stacking?
Hi
A lot depends on how many people you believe will buy $4,000 to $16,000 CPU's. If the answer is dimensioned in the "many thousands per day" you *might* have an interesting product. If the volume is in the dozens per day range, you won't even pay the mask costs for the first run. Certainly there is no money left over to re-hire a bunch of people to design, test, manufacture, and market the beast. Consider that it's not just the CPU, you also need all the support chips as well. That $4,000 CPU will go into a computer costing way over $20K by the time you buy it in a store. How many people will buy one of those? I'd bet not many.
The real issue is that the world figured out a tablet or smart phone will do all the things they need to do. It won't do all the things *I* need to do, but I'm down in that "dozen per day" group.
Bob
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Then again, in the quest to get smaller, why don't we increase the cpu die size. It's not like motherboards couldn't be made more compact to accomodate for an increase in die size. Above that, what ever happened to 3D gates, and gate stacking?
Multicore processors are an evolution of this idea. It is easier to make a multicore processor where each processor need only communicate with a single shared bus, clocked at a much lower rate, rather than one larger, more powerful single core CPU.
But most programs don't parallel too well. Video encoding and decoding are one of the most parallel programming tasks most computers will encounter, whereas something like web browsing and games are typically limited in how many cores can be used simultaneously. So a 64-core CPU wouldn't necessarily be much good.
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The answer is just what Intel said it is. The desktop market is dying. Why? Because the big markets no longer need any more out of them than they have been able to provide for a decade or more. And because the various companies that serve that market went to the cloud as a way to convert the market to a subscription model.
While this geek community, and a few others (physicists, atmosphere modelers and so on) could benefit from bigger and faster processors we constitute a trivially small market that can't pay back the investment to develop those processors. Word processing, facebook, even payroll and inventory management are doing just fine with current processors.
So, it was a nice ride while it lasted, but until the next mass application takes off it is going to be tough sledding. Self driving cars maybe. Personal genetic level health monitors and editors maybe. More probably something none of us has imagined yet.
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Personal genetic level health monitors and editors maybe
Protein mapping and genome stuff takes a huge amount of processor power. The biophysicists are having fun with CRISPR and getting some cool results but this is more at the university research level. Joe at home has no need for this kind of computer...
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I hoped that somehow Kodak would have been able to leverage their large-scale precision coating technology to some kind of solar panel production.
There probably isn't too much Intel can bring to solar that someone else isn't already doing.
At this point I don't need a faster processor, but it would be nice to have one that used less power.
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Joe at home has no need for this kind of computer...
For now.
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4 years ago, I built a new PC to use as my main one, right at the 5 year "major upgrade" mark I have traditionally followed. Now, I don't see any good reason to replace the CPU/motherboard in one year.
+1. I changed my 2007 PC in 2010 because it was just too slow to run a game, CPU pegged at 100% - and intended to have the new one run 4 years instead of 3 so I went one notch up the CPU category. Well... it still runs perfectly fine and there is no application that can't run because it's too slow.
I only built a new machine in 2014 because I had to travel to another country for a project and didn't want to carry the old one with me, and while I went top of the line it was deceivingly not that much faster. Sure there's a difference, but nothing through the roof, maybe a 2x difference in 4 years - while before it used to be at least 3x in 3 years, which incidentally was my "rule" i.e. don't upgrade unless I get at least 3 times better.
The old PC is still at the old location and I use it perfectly fine when I go back there a few times a year.
So yeah, performance improvements have tapered off drastically. Too bad because I would certainly buy something significantly better, the faster those 42 megapixel RAWs process the better - but it feels like satisfying the 3x rule will probably take another 10 years or so at this rate.
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I can't remember the last time I used a PC whose CPU was 'too slow'. Every one I've bought in at least the last five years has been 'fast enough' for everything I want to do with it, and that includes games as well as work.
So, no need to upgrade, and no new CPU sales.
Add to that the well documented reasons not to want Windows 10, and the fact that a new PC will come with it, means I won't be upgrading voluntarily any time soon. I'll keep using my Windows 7 machines a few years longer instead.
Intel: if you want to sell more chips, kick Microsoft up the arse and tell them to take the telemetry crap out of W10. Tell me when you've done it, and I'll consider a new PC.
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You have to keep on re-inventing your business and transform at the right time in order to survive.
Intel missed out on the huge mobile market, suffering from the collapsing pc market, they should have bought Arm when they could have, now it is too late.
So downsizing and getting the bussiness healthy again is a good move, probably the only option left.
Is it sad? I don't know, if I look at some of these obesitas companies with layers of management and bureaucracy completely obstructing fast acting and supporting its customers, it's pretty disgusting.
Most companies that do recover such a large scale reorganization tend to be better and more profitable companies than they were before.
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Intel missed out on the huge mobile market, suffering from the collapsing pc market, they should have bought Arm when they could have, now it is too late.
You might have missed this, but Intel had a big ARM business, an ARM architecture licence, and developed several of their own ARM cores. They sold this business to Marvell. They even developed a cellular platform in the 90s, in cooperation with ADI. ADI still sells the Blackfin, which resulting from this collaboration. Try looking at the Blackfin's architecture and instruction set, and you'll see an ARM that was stretched into a DSP. Intel's problem is not that it didn't see the importance of mobile, or how ARM could be a good solution for mobile. Their problems lie in their execution.
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You might have missed this
Perhaps through my not native english but you miss my point: Intel should not have bought an ARM license, they should have bought ARM, the entire company ;)
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Joe at home has no need for this kind of computer...
Joe at home most likely do not need computer (as we refer to it) at all - what he needs is a device that allow him to browse the net, send e-mails, watch video etc. Of course, in the past the only device capable of doing this all was traditional PC. Nowdays, you have smart TV's, Android tablets/phones etc. Very small percentage of people actually use "computer" for it's "original" purpose.
I guess Ken Olson was right (1977: There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home) in that sense. And that explains PC sales decline.
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You might have missed this
Perhaps through my not native english but you miss my point: Intel should not have bought an ARM license, they should have bought ARM, the entire company ;)
If anyone buys ARM, ARM is dead. The whole appeal of ARM stems from its openness to all manufacturers. What Intel did with the Xscale was the practical approach - innovate around the ARM instruction set, while not blocking everyone else out completely. They just did a very bad job of this.
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If anyone buys ARM, ARM is dead.
Ok, lets say that is true and this would have happened at the turn of the century, Intel purchased Arm and Arm was dead.
Then what? What brand of microcontrollers would all those billions of mobile devices be running at ;)
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If anyone buys ARM, ARM is dead.
Ok, lets say that is true and this would have happened at the turn of the century, Intel purchased Arm and Arm was dead.
Then what? What brand of microcontrollers would all those billions of mobile devices be running at ;)
MIPS most probably.
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MIPS most probably.
Depends on your definition of mobile devices :)
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If anyone buys ARM, ARM is dead.
That's the point - anything coming out next would have been branded intel, which is of course what would have been good for intel ;)
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MIPS most probably.
Depends on your definition of mobile devices :)
MIPS is used in the PSPs and other mobile platforms, and scales right down to the PIC32 MCUs. ARM grew up into the big league, and MIPS worked its way down from the big league to small cores. They both cover pretty much all the bases today, and they both have proven to be very energy efficient.
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If anyone buys ARM, ARM is dead.
That's the point - anything coming out next would have been branded intel, which is of course what would have been good for intel ;)
Hi
Very doubtful. The real answer would have been a small group of guys starting "Son of ARM" and doing the same thing. The thing that makes ARM attractive in a mobile (or *lots* of other things) is the ability to graft it to your own silicon. You don't have to buy the whole chip from ARM (or Intel).
Bob
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Personally, after thinking some more about all this, it may be possible that we are seeing fallout from Netburst and used C2D cores for like, 8 bucks.
I thought at all the computers I've recently seen, and the vast majority of them are Pentium 4s reaching the end of their lives, and a bunch of C2Ds mixed along with them.
These machines still work, but with their caps venting It is only a matter of time before they all go poof.
Call it optimism, but most people I've seen use their tablets to complement their desktop PC, where as I've seen fewer laptop users have tablets. (Is it possible tablets could be keeping desktops alive? :P )
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They made Sandybridge too good. Even enthusiasts with a 2500k@5GHz don't feel the need to upgrade except for PCIe 3.0. For gaming PCIe 2.0 vs 3.0 is a few percent.
For office use today, a Pentium Anniversary is more than adequate for almost everyone, when coupled with an SSD especially. A lacklustre terrible AMD doesn't help either
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The whole pc industry (with the exception of SSD manufacuturers) have innovation gain problems,
not only Intel where Moores law is abandoned and their tick-tock has been replaced with a tick-tock-yawn cycle,
Look at it:
DDR3 vs DDR4 RAM only a few % gain, no big deal, no need to upgrade at all, only lower power.
HDD: prices ($/GB) have been fixed for a long time already and progress is slow, last two years they have grown from 6TB drives to 8TB, if they would have had the same growth as in the 90s there would have been 36TB drives by now for $100 max.
Things are slowing down and the developments are targeted at lower power same performance instead of more performance. Perhaps when multi processor software development breaks through we can see some next steps (multiple processors on a motherboard), but for now it is pretty static.
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Multicore processors are an evolution of this idea. It is easier to make a multicore processor where each processor need only communicate with a single shared bus, clocked at a much lower rate, rather than one larger, more powerful single core CPU.
But most programs don't parallel too well. Video encoding and decoding are one of the most parallel programming tasks most computers will encounter, whereas something like web browsing and games are typically limited in how many cores can be used simultaneously. So a 64-core CPU wouldn't necessarily be much good.
The solution to that issue is not parallelism, but concurrency. It's important make a distinction between the two. Parallel execution implies breaking down a large problem into smaller kernel programs that do exactly the same thing on a data set or domain. Whereas concurrent execution implies a bunch of (sometimes unrelated) programs running side-by-side, and communicate between them asynchronously. Not all algorithms will lend itself to parallelism, but many classic algorithms can be certainly executed concurrently.
Now the problem is synchronisation between cores and the data they share. It's huge mindfuck and it is very difficult to get it right. Most of the time, deterministic mutation of data is thrown out the window with concurrent systems. However, there is a pretty neat and beautiful solution to this, called the Actor programming model (https://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/Going+Deep/Hewitt-Meijer-and-Szyperski-The-Actor-Model-everything-you-wanted-to-know-but-were-afraid-to-ask). Erlang was one of the first programming languages to make use of this concept on thousand core machines with a lot of success.
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IBM is all but dead as we knew it, I don't think anything can really save it.
Yes, no more typewriters from them.
Businesses change. We get upset when someone leaves the electronics business because we stay.
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They made Sandybridge too good. Even enthusiasts with a 2500k@5GHz don't feel the need to upgrade except for PCIe 3.0. For gaming PCIe 2.0 vs 3.0 is a few percent.
Heh. I still run a 2500k. Bought it in 2011, no need to upgrade. Well, maybe when Half-Life 3 is released... ;)
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IBM is another big tech company that has exited chip making and is also issuing layoff notices. At least Intel still choose to refer to those people as people as opposed to IBM which calls them the more impersonal term "resources" and layoffs as "resource actions".
Welcome to Corporate America where employees are seen as "resources" instead of people and are disposed of just as quickly as a used piece of furniture. Take tip here from someone that's been through this and survived it. Get an education and make yourself invaluable within the company and keep updating your education and skill set all of your working career. In the face of global economic competition, no company is going to be able to keep marginally skilled or or non-income producing workers, even if they wanted to.
If this is happened to skilled and educated workers in this county, well, you can just imagine what's going to happen to all those UN-skilled burger flippers at McDonalds that are demanding $15 per hour!
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They made Sandybridge too good. Even enthusiasts with a 2500k@5GHz don't feel the need to upgrade except for PCIe 3.0. For gaming PCIe 2.0 vs 3.0 is a few percent.
Heh. I still run a 2500k. Bought it in 2011, no need to upgrade. Well, maybe when Half-Life 3 is released... ;)
And yes, I too need a powerful computer for ever increasing demands of newer games. In fact I expect the market for gaming PCs to still be around a long time.(although I expect a crash in the gaming market at some point) Aside from games though, various other heavy tasks are also things I need power for.
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We may see a slight spike in Skylake and enthusiast desktop lines when the VR makers get their act together; but even then a PS4 MkII can do so much cheaper (but console is all about compromise).
I doubt Half-Life 3 will ever be released; Valve make far too much money from Steam and hat sales to really care about ever making a game again.
http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/370/662/36c.jpg (http://i2.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/000/370/662/36c.jpg)
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If this is happened to skilled and educated workers in this county, well, you can just imagine what's going to happen to all those UN-skilled burger flippers at McDonalds that are demanding $15 per hour!
Burger flippers are better off in some ways. You can't send a flipped burger through the internet. The future looks tough for skilled mind workers who live in high cost areas. Businesses and customers send their money to the best value area which is usually someplace with low costs, and populated by people who either grew up dirt poor, or at least whose parents did, so they are quite happy with something those in mature economies disdain.
If you live in one of those high cost areas and want to keep a job look for things that can't be transported easily. Auto repair. Home building. Infrastructure work. Military or police work. Service jobs. While there are places that will hang on for a while due to the synergy of having lots of high tech people in a small area, it is a temporary happy place.
The inner optimist in me points out that this will all level out over time, and talent and hard work will be rewarded worldwide. But is will be tough living through the transitional period.
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Call it optimism, but most people I've seen use their tablets to complement their desktop PC, where as I've seen fewer laptop users have tablets. (Is it possible tablets could be keeping desktops alive? :P )
I've been to meetings where people bring their laptop, iPad, and iPhone! And they use all of them!
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I used to think gaming could keep PCs going, but not any more. That market has shifted to consoles and game developers seem to be less and less inclined to spend money making the PC versions of their games any better than they have to.
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On quick research this appears to be a 10% employee cut back or so. How does that rank with other 'massive' lay offs of major corporations?
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eh, think about all the govt/american industrial usage.
no one is ever gonna trust anything built in china
Depends on your vriewpoint. There are people out there who throw NSA-backdoored kit in the same basket as PRC-Army backdoored kit.
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On quick research this appears to be a 10% employee cut back or so. How does that rank with other 'massive' lay offs of major corporations?
Hi
On a percentage basis? It's just "yet another tech layoff". Nothing out of the ordinary in that respect. Been happening pretty much forever and ever.
As a layoff at Intel? It's a pretty big deal. They normally don't do business this way. It marks at least a bump in the road for them. It may be a turning point. Check back in 4 years and that part will be more clear.
As a hit to the whole tech industry? This alone is a drop in the bucket. There is way more "churn" in a typical month that this layoff represents in a year.
Bob
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I used to think gaming could keep PCs going, but not any more. That market has shifted to consoles and game developers seem to be less and less inclined to spend money making the PC versions of their games any better than they have to.
It's been said PC gaming has been dying since I moved away from Amigas and Ataris to IBM compatibles. Steam's still going strong, some MMOs still have more active players than there are PSN and Xbox Live accounts combined, Minecraft is still selling more PC than console or pocket editions...
But outside of the console makers many in games are pretty much convinced this is the last real console generation and that only PCs and maybe (and only maybe) Nintendo will be left as smart TVs become more powerful and consoles become more and more like a locked down PC. Pretty soon you're going to have to choose between a PS4 or PS4.5, Xbox One or upgradeable Xbox One and a half...
But meh, I think both these predictions are as much BS as they always have been. More casual gamers may have moved from their browsers and consoles to their phones but I think there will always be enough "hardcore gamers" to keep the PC master race and console fanboys arguments relevant. And a lot of us will still own at least one console and PC and just join the arguments for a laugh :-\
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Look at renesas synergy s7 and think about the trajectory for products like that.
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Look at renesas synergy s7 and think about the trajectory for products like that.
Its another family of MCUs with an M4 core. Slightly oddball, as most people trying to get to 240MHz go with the M7 core, but nothing very special. They might struggle to get traction with a brand new line, as so many people think Renesas isn't going to be in business for very long.
It might help if you said what you find interesting?
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Hi
The gotcha with ARM is this:
Say I'm a large user of CPU's. (Fill in the name of any major tablet or phone outfit here). Rather than buying CPU chips from (say) Intel (with an ARM in them), I go out and buy a small design house. Those 30 to 300 people drop an ARM plus a few odd parts into a chip design. They cut out all of the stuff that my tablet or phone has no use for. I then don't have the die taken up by things I don't use. I don't have power going into sub sections that are not helping out. I contract directly with a fab to get them made.
The net result is that ARM is not tightly involved in the process. They supply the designs for this and that. They charge licensing on a per feature basis (sort of). They aren't quite a "take it or leave it" marketing outfit. I certainly don't see anything even close to the Intel marketing machine behind ARM. That's a lot of people they don't employ. If the people selling ARM based chips want to stay in business, they need to and indeed do spend big bucks on marketing.
Net result, the "big guy" gets a really good deal from an ARM based design ....
Bob
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Hi
The gotcha with ARM is this:
Say I'm a large user of CPU's. (Fill in the name of any major tablet or phone outfit here). Rather than buying CPU chips from (say) Intel (with an ARM in them), I go out and buy a small design house. Those 30 to 300 people drop an ARM plus a few odd parts into a chip design. They cut out all of the stuff that my tablet or phone has no use for.
Sorry but to my knowledge the ARM core is just an important part of a uC but the peripherals are very important and difficult also. And they are often proprietary designs.
Therefore you will only see huge firms implementing and building ARM cores to a commercial "cheap" microcontroller product, like NXP, ST, Broadcom to name just a few.
And even these huge firms screw up sometimes (I2C peripheral with ST for example).
Not a small design house with 300 people, I wonder if these even exist and what kind of peripherals they would use?
Perhaps if you take an FPGA or something like that, but those are incredible expensive building blocks, a totally different market segment as the standard ARM core uC's.
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Not a small design house with 300 people, I wonder if these even exist
Plenty of them actually. What you get with your licensing fee to ARM is not just the right to use the core but also help in customizing the design to your own process, not to mention the marketing value and brand recognition of ARM.
The intel vs. arm fight on the mobile front isn't a fight of product capabilities but a fight of a business model. Intel's business model is one of vertical integration and sole supplier. ARM's business model is one of intermediation and multi-sourcing. ARM basically recognized that there is ***NO*** value in core and the best way to make money is to sell the IP to others so they can integrate their value-add into the final products. In essence, ARM has turned the mcu vendors into their marketing departments.
we will have to see which strategy will prevail - I think on the high-end, Intel's approach has legs and on the low-end, ARM seems to be winning. Either way, fat margins for PC CPUs are likely in the past.
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Either way, fat margins for PC CPUs are likely in the past.
If the rumoured $1500 (probably between $1000-1200 IMO) for the decacore Broadwell-EP is true then nope. There will be plenty who buy that just for the e-points; and the Xeons still sell like hotcakes to those who need to shave another 30 seconds from their renders.
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I used to think gaming could keep PCs going, but not any more. That market has shifted to consoles and game developers seem to be less and less inclined to spend money making the PC versions of their games any better than they have to.
Been on Steam lately? PC gaming has been as strong as ever, if not stronger.
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Sorry but to my knowledge the ARM core is just an important part of a uC but the peripherals are very important and difficult also. And they are often proprietary designs.
Therefore you will only see huge firms implementing and building ARM cores to a commercial "cheap" microcontroller product, like NXP, ST, Broadcom to name just a few.
And even these huge firms screw up sometimes (I2C peripheral with ST for example).
Not a small design house with 300 people, I wonder if these even exist and what kind of peripherals they would use?
Not these days. I believe you can do a SoC today with a team of 300 people and some Cadence software + hardware (simulators). You buy particular core license from ARM, ARM also can supply quite a bit of peripherals (check PrimeCell series like PL011, PL022, PL061 etc). If not ARM then Synopsys DesignWare would happily sell you peripheral IPs (e.g. USB controller cores). If you need GPU or video acceleration then ARM has Mali, Imagination has PowerVR and also video decoder core and so on. At this point your job is integrating the whole shebang, simulating it inside out in System C, on Cadence Palladium and FPGA boards (see DiniGroup) and sending the design to TSMC or other fab. Check Allwinner or HiSilicon SoCs, these things are pretty much a collection of off the shelf IP cores (and rightfully so - makes it much easier to port drivers sometimes, sometimes not as even if they wanted to open source their GPU driver their hands are tied, as the GPU is an external IP under NDA).
Of course all of this isn't cheap and that's why NXP, ST, Broadcom or TI etc make their money, for small product runs (< millions), without any special requirements, off the shelf SoC is a sensible solution. Situation changes if you are Apple or Qualcomm. Then you buy the most expensive ARM licence - the right to the architecture - and you design your stuff from scratch, using your preferred silicon process and geometry etc.
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I used to think gaming could keep PCs going, but not any more. That market has shifted to consoles and game developers seem to be less and less inclined to spend money making the PC versions of their games any better than they have to.
Been on Steam lately? PC gaming has been as strong as ever, if not stronger.
PC gaming might be doing fine, and if you look at AAA titles, sales are quite strong, with indies doing extremely well.
But, if you look at http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=pc (http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=pc) there are more people running on a dual core and using HD 4000 graphics than the high end gear. Only 0.9% running a 980 Ti. Not saying Steam Hardware is the best way to gauge sales; when I get asked to participate I decline, but statistically it's the best we've got. So what I would call gaming hardware (AMD 270+; nVidia 960 Ti+; quadcore Ivy Bridge+) doesn't sell as much as Steam suggests.
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But, if you look at http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=pc (http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=pc) there are more people running on a dual core and using HD 4000 graphics than the high end gear. Only 0.9% running a 980 Ti. Not saying Steam Hardware is the best way to gauge sales; when I get asked to participate I decline, but statistically it's the best we've got. So what I would call gaming hardware (AMD 270+; nVidia 960 Ti+; quadcore Ivy Bridge+) doesn't sell as much as Steam suggests.
70% are running DX12 compatible cards, only 25% are using a HD4000 machine. And how many of that 25% are peoples laptops they have Steam installed on as well as on their main machine?
Also how the hardware survey info is presented is hard to properly read. I have Steam on at least 5 machines, the two that get serious gaming use have a 690 and 980tis, the others all have Intel graphics. All my machines will show up at least twice as they all have at least two OSs installed. Just that would give you the misleading impression that over half of users run Linux and only 40% aren't running Intel graphics.
Luckily the "active user" stats go by active accounts and not number of client installs.
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But, if you look at http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=pc (http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey?platform=pc) there are more people running on a dual core and using HD 4000 graphics than the high end gear. Only 0.9% running a 980 Ti. Not saying Steam Hardware is the best way to gauge sales; when I get asked to participate I decline, but statistically it's the best we've got. So what I would call gaming hardware (AMD 270+; nVidia 960 Ti+; quadcore Ivy Bridge+) doesn't sell as much as Steam suggests.
70% are running DX12 compatible cards, only 25% are using a HD4000 machine. And how many of that 25% are peoples laptops they have Steam installed on as well as on their main machine?
Also how they present hardware survey info is presented is hard to properly read. I have Steam on at least 5 machines, the two that get serious gaming use have a 690 and 980tis, the others all have Intel graphics. All my machines will show up at least twice as they all have at least two OSs installed. Just that would give you the misleading impression that over half of users run Linux and only 40% aren't running Intel graphics.
Luckily the "active user" stats go by active accounts and not number of client installs.
DX12 doesn't say anything about performance though.
And of those DX12 cards, how many are actually capable? There are a bunch of Kepler cards there that are barely classified as better than the HD4000: GT 620M, 630, GTX 650 is better but that card is only really suitable for games like League of Legends and CS:GO.
The 970, 980, 980 Ti and Titans; GTX 750 Ti and above; and GTX 680, possibly the GTX 670 4GB and their respective slimmed down mobile parts are the only real GPUs that can be considered gaming capable from nVIDIA at least.
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Intel basically made s strategic mistake. They banked heavily on the PC mkt without realizing or for seeing the shift to small mobile processors.
It is ironic in that they practically invented the mcu mkt and 8051 is still today the most widely used mcu.
Fortunately for arm, Intel became too focused on protecting their desktop mkt to see that there is a brand new world out there.
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And of those DX12 cards, how many are actually capable? There are a bunch of Kepler cards there that are barely classified as better than the HD4000: GT 620M, 630, GTX 650 is better but that card is only really suitable for games like League of Legends and CS:GO.
The 620M is still more powerful than the PS4 and Xbox One GPU. The PS4.5/PS4 Neo will just about match it according to Sony's own figures. Maybe not capable of running new games maxed out but still capable of giving current consoles a run for their money.
EDIT: Corrected by coppice
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If you read carefully you will see that I didn't actually say that PC gaming was dead or dying.
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And of those DX12 cards, how many are actually capable? There are a bunch of Kepler cards there that are barely classified as better than the HD4000: GT 620M, 630, GTX 650 is better but that card is only really suitable for games like League of Legends and CS:GO.
The 620M is still more powerful than the PS4 and Xbox One GPU. The PS4.5/PS4 Neo will just about match it according to Sony's own figures. Maybe not capable of running new games maxed out but still capable of giving current consoles a run for their money.
The PS4 is more like a GTX660 in its graphics capabilities. Its really quite big step up from the PS3. I understand the XBox One is somewhat weaker.
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The PS4 is more like a GTX660 in its graphics capabilities. Its really quite big step up from the PS3. I understand the XBox One is somewhat weaker.
Yeah you're right, I got the wrong figures. Sorry.
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And of those DX12 cards, how many are actually capable? There are a bunch of Kepler cards there that are barely classified as better than the HD4000: GT 620M, 630, GTX 650 is better but that card is only really suitable for games like League of Legends and CS:GO.
The 620M is still more powerful than the PS4 and Xbox One GPU. The PS4.5/PS4 Neo will just about match it according to Sony's own figures. Maybe not capable of running new games maxed out but still capable of giving current consoles a run for their money.
http://gpuboss.com/gpus/Radeon-HD-7870-vs-GeForce-GT-620M (http://gpuboss.com/gpus/Radeon-HD-7870-vs-GeForce-GT-620M) http://www.futuremark.com/hardware/gpu/AMD+Radeon+HD+7870/review (http://www.futuremark.com/hardware/gpu/AMD+Radeon+HD+7870/review)
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/171375-reverse-engineered-ps4-apu-reveals-the-consoles-real-cpu-and-gpu-specs (http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/171375-reverse-engineered-ps4-apu-reveals-the-consoles-real-cpu-and-gpu-specs)
In no way is the PS4's GPU in any way comparable to the 620M let alone when we take into account the PS4 devs have access to bare metal coding and optimisation to maximise the GPU's performance vs the multiple layers PC game devs have to live with. If we factor in clock speed, it's closer to a 780M.
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Console vs PC gaming belongs somewhere else other than this thread since Intel was never or had been on the running in the console market and the PC gaming market even if healthy-ish is just a drop as far as Intel is concerned and has been that way for the last decade and a half.
Footprint on data centers is where their potential is at. The consumer part is dwindling I will dare to say that at least 90% of home computing can be fulfilled with cheaper ARM based systems at lower cost and power requirements.
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Intel basically made s strategic mistake. They banked heavily on the PC mkt without realizing or for seeing the shift to small mobile processors.
...
Fortunately for arm, Intel became too focused on protecting their desktop mkt to see that there is a brand new world out there.
I agree that they made a strategic mistake, but I'm not sure it was for lack of realizing the shift to small mobile processors. They knew it was happening, they just could not figure out a way in that market to make the fat margins that their investors expect. Investors would have pounded them for saying "we're going to this much less lucrative business because it's the future." And as far as I can tell, it _is_ much less lucrative, for all the reasons you have described in other posts. The vendors of ARM parts do not have the differentiation that would command high margins.
Andy Grove had written about a somewhat similar situation in the past, when they were getting crushed in the memory business (previous bread and butter) and made a strategic pivot to processors being their main thing. But even that was an easier transition than this because they were going up market, not down.
The current situation is maybe more like what happened to SGI with graphics cards or the minicomputer companies with PCs. They ran upmarket, but the slice that could command margins got smaller and smaller. This is the "disruptive technology" that Clayton Christensen has made a career talking about (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovator%27s_Dilemma)). I'm not sure there's really a way out for companies caught in this situation, except to make strategic investments in the upstarts and to cash cow their business as long as they can and hope to figure something out before it dries up.
Now they're talking all about IoT, which is kind of interesting, but I don't see how SoCs for IoT won't be a race straight to the commodity bottom.
Note: not everyone believes in the disruptive innovation concept. Here's an interesting critique: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-disruption-machine)
It is ironic in that they practically invented the mcu mkt and 8051 is still today the most widely used mcu.
They also had a lot of opportunities to make something of the MCU market. 196/296, i960, etc. Some of those were fine parts for their day. Intel just had this funny habit of canning embedded processor lines, pissing off their customers immeasurably.
When I was there I worked for awhile on embedded controllers that mostly went into hard drives. The strategy of the entire division was 1) find some productive use for old fabs, 2) make things nobody else is doing well that are necessary to ship computers (computer needs an HD, HD needs a processor, so let's make that). USB came out of that division, too. That's a fine strategy, but it's a little weird, too, in they did not see a meaningful business for embedded stuff in its own right. It was all through the x86 lens. And in fairness, it made them a sh!t-ton money. Definitely catching up to them now, though.
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Just adding some PC market study links:
http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3280626 (http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3280626)
http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS41176916 (http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS41176916)
Seems like these studies reflect both commercial and consumer products, but the market seems to be shrinking.
Not to a horrible halt, but the writing is in the wall so I guess that's why Intel decided to change their strategy.
Not too sure on their IoT vision, but they do need to dominate the commercial and cloud services if they are going to succeed.
FPGAs on chip was part of that effort I guess (the cloud) and the reason they did acquire Altera.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/14/intel_xeon_fpga/ (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/03/14/intel_xeon_fpga/)
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Hi
The gotcha with ARM is this:
Say I'm a large user of CPU's. (Fill in the name of any major tablet or phone outfit here). Rather than buying CPU chips from (say) Intel (with an ARM in them), I go out and buy a small design house. Those 30 to 300 people drop an ARM plus a few odd parts into a chip design. They cut out all of the stuff that my tablet or phone has no use for.
Sorry but to my knowledge the ARM core is just an important part of a uC but the peripherals are very important and difficult also. And they are often proprietary designs.
Therefore you will only see huge firms implementing and building ARM cores to a commercial "cheap" microcontroller product, like NXP, ST, Broadcom to name just a few.
And even these huge firms screw up sometimes (I2C peripheral with ST for example).
Not a small design house with 300 people, I wonder if these even exist and what kind of peripherals they would use?
Perhaps if you take an FPGA or something like that, but those are incredible expensive building blocks, a totally different market segment as the standard ARM core uC's.
Hi
ARM will indeed sell you a reasonable set of peripherals. They aren't going to include a graphics sub system that will run the next generation of gaming consoles. There are also a *lot* of people who will quite happily sell you various peripheral designs and include support as well as performance guarantees. If you look at a full blown chip from (say) Freescale and it's complement of peripherals (and multiplexing and clock options and this and that) it *would* be a daunting task for a small group to duplicate. The secret is that they don't duplicate it. There is no need for pin multiplexing, they only have one pinout. Multiple clock subsystems likewise are not needed. They have one clock scheme and it gets throttled in a specific way. They don't need a dozen UART's, a dozen I2C's, a dozen SPI's, and five different types of external RAM. Their CPU still is quite powerful. The chip does just what is needed. Is this "cheating"? In a sense yes it is.
As a reference, this is the outfit I was thinking of as I wrote the post:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi
At the time Apple bought them, they had 150 engineers on the design team. They were doing well enough in the "fabless CPU" business to have multiple designs under their belt. They are hardly the only people doing this.
ARM holdings *total* head count is a bit under 4,000 people. Effectively, their entire workforce is < 1/4 of Intel's layoff count.
Does ARM manufacture and test chips? Of course not. Does the 150 guy outfit manufacture and test chips? No they don't do that either. They contract that out to a fab and a test house. There's likely a contract packaging house (or three) in the mix as well.
Bob
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Intel basically made s strategic mistake. They banked heavily on the PC mkt without realizing or for seeing the shift to small mobile processors.
Intel DID realise mobile was the future in the early 90s, and developed a smart phone platform very early on. Recognising needs has not been their problem. Its all about the execution.
Kodak realised digital cameras were the future in the early 70s, as they saw the video camera business develop. They made the first working digital stills camera in the mid 70s. They invested heavily in sensor development, CDRs and other components of the digital camera environment. They did very well in some of these for a time, and they were definitely identifying good places to put their investments. They were not agile enough to stay ahead of things, though. Others passed them by, and they have gone.
Intel looks a lot like Kodak right now. They invested billions to develop a phone platform in the 90s that failed so badly in the marketplace that they wrote off their billions. Xscale was one part of that which hung on for a time, and was the main apps processor in most early 2000s smartphones. They knew what they needed to do, but again they just haven't been agile enough. I assume they are trying to hang on until the market matures sufficiently that innovation slows down and they can keep up. That might be happening right now. This year's phones are not massive improvements on last year's.
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ARM will indeed sell you a reasonable set of peripherals. .............
The chip does just what is needed. Is this "cheating"? In a sense yes it is.
As a reference, this is the outfit I was thinking of as I wrote the post:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi)
Thanks for clarifying. :-+
Intel looks a lot like Kodak right now.
Intel is betting on multiple technologies. Processors is only one part, they also produce flash chips and sell them succesfully in their own brand of ssd's, and they also now seem to have the next generation of memory together with Micron in their grasps: xpoint. If they don't screw it up like they did with Rambus a decade ago this could become a huge new technology.
And with a promise to be 1000 times faster than a ssd and cheaper this could well become a next gen pc upgrade enabler.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2973549/storage/intels-crazy-fast-3d-xpoint-optane-memory-heads-for-ddr-slots-but-with-a-catch.html (http://www.pcworld.com/article/2973549/storage/intels-crazy-fast-3d-xpoint-optane-memory-heads-for-ddr-slots-but-with-a-catch.html)
Besides they still make billions of profit, I know dozens of companies that would "kill" for that.
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Intel looks a lot like Kodak right now.
Intel is betting on multiple technologies. Processors is only one part, they also produce flash chips and sell them succesfully in their own brand of ssd's, and they also now seem to have the next generation of memory together with Micron in their grasps: xpoint. If they don't screw it up like they did with Rambus a decade ago this could become a huge new technology.
And with a promise to be 1000 times faster than a ssd and cheaper this could well become a next gen pc upgrade enabler.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2973549/storage/intels-crazy-fast-3d-xpoint-optane-memory-heads-for-ddr-slots-but-with-a-catch.html (http://www.pcworld.com/article/2973549/storage/intels-crazy-fast-3d-xpoint-optane-memory-heads-for-ddr-slots-but-with-a-catch.html)
Besides they still make billions of profit, I know dozens of companies that would "kill" for that.
Mobile has been Intel's biggest bet, but they put a lot of money into a variety of things, such as electronic toys and home routers. Very little has gone well for them. Although the XPoint work with Micron looks interesting, if you look at recent quarters they have been loosing money in their flash business.
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Intel basically made s strategic mistake. They banked heavily on the PC mkt without realizing or for seeing the shift to small mobile processors.
Intel DID realise mobile was the future in the early 90s, and developed a smart phone platform very early on. Recognising needs has not been their problem. Its all about the execution.
Kodak realised digital cameras were the future in the early 70s, as they saw the video camera business develop. They made the first working digital stills camera in the mid 70s. They invested heavily in sensor development, CDRs and other components of the digital camera environment. They did very well in some of these for a time, and they were definitely identifying good places to put their investments. They were not agile enough to stay ahead of things, though. Others passed them by, and they have gone.
Intel looks a lot like Kodak right now. They invested billions to develop a phone platform in the 90s that failed so badly in the marketplace that they wrote off their billions. Xscale was one part of that which hung on for a time, and was the main apps processor in most early 2000s smartphones. They knew what they needed to do, but again they just haven't been agile enough. I assume they are trying to hang on until the market matures sufficiently that innovation slows down and they can keep up. That might be happening right now. This year's phones are not massive improvements on last year's.
Hi
I worked for Kodak back then ... they most certainly did *not* understand the digital side of things. Their experience was all in building giant building sized machines that ran for decades making product. Once they built the machine, they were set for 40 year in this or that business. The only thing they ever made money on was film and paper. The other stuff was given away at a loss to get people to use the film. With digital, there is a new this or that every two or four years. A fab costs *more* than the machines they were used to and is obsolete in a few years. They also had a couple of leaders who just plain didn't do their jobs (leading the company to success).
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Intel is in a bit different boat. Their industry (CPU's) has not vanished. It hasn't been replaced by something entirely different. They are certainly seeing the PC market shrink. The whole market ... growing. They need to adjust, not close the doors.
Bob
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Hardware alone doesn't mean much without the proper marketing.
So how about AMD? A coworker just pointed me to this article:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3060273/components-processors/a-new-amd-licensing-deal-could-create-more-x86-rivals-for-intel.html (http://www.pcworld.com/article/3060273/components-processors/a-new-amd-licensing-deal-could-create-more-x86-rivals-for-intel.html)
Maybe this was part of the Intel decision, if they knew this was being dealt behind their backs.
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The Chinese deal basically means and wants to take the arm model rather than the Intel model. We will see how it works out. If it is successful, it will hurt Intel greatly given how much of their business is in China.
I wonder about if there are IP related issues.
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On quick research this appears to be a 10% employee cut back or so. How does that rank with other 'massive' lay offs of major corporations?
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-22/halliburton-fires-one-third-global-staff-what-we-are-experiencing-today-far-beyond-h (http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-22/halliburton-fires-one-third-global-staff-what-we-are-experiencing-today-far-beyond-h)
Halliburton Fires One Third Of Global Staff: "What We Are Experiencing Today Is Unsustainable"
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-21/retailer-bankruptcies-are-hailing-down-us-economy (http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-21/retailer-bankruptcies-are-hailing-down-us-economy)
Retailer Bankruptcies Are Hailing Down on the US Economy
It's probably a mistake to try analyzing Intel's problems entirely from the perspective of machine architecture choices and consumer preferences. Wider economic factors are likely to predominate. If you don't know what I mean, I think by the end of 2016 it should be much clearer to you.
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On quick research this appears to be a 10% employee cut back or so. How does that rank with other 'massive' lay offs of major corporations?
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-22/halliburton-fires-one-third-global-staff-what-we-are-experiencing-today-far-beyond-h (http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-22/halliburton-fires-one-third-global-staff-what-we-are-experiencing-today-far-beyond-h)
Halliburton Fires One Third Of Global Staff: "What We Are Experiencing Today Is Unsustainable"
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-21/retailer-bankruptcies-are-hailing-down-us-economy (http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-21/retailer-bankruptcies-are-hailing-down-us-economy)
Retailer Bankruptcies Are Hailing Down on the US Economy
It's probably a mistake to try analyzing Intel's problems entirely from the perspective of machine architecture choices and consumer preferences. Wider economic factors are likely to predominate. If you don't know what I mean, I think by the end of 2016 it should be much clearer to you.
Hi
Some companies observe that the headline "firing 10% of workforce" causes the stock to go up. They then seem to then get into a regular process of layoff announcements. For some reason, the process of "headline -> stock price" keeps working. After a while, you sort of wonder - is this real? Back to the numbers and look at their total employment. Oddly enough, despite laying off "10% of workforce" every 3, 6, 9 or 12 months, their total number of people employed keeps climbing > 10% year over year.
Yes, I realize the very concept that headlines *might* be less than the whole story comes as a great shock to all of us :)
In the context of Intel, the key question is (obviously) - are they hiring a boatload of people to do "the next big thing" at the same time they are moving a bunch of poor sods out? Indeed, only time will tell. Yes, if they were in the oil business, there would be no need to wonder about the answer.
Bob
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I can't remember the last time I used a PC whose CPU was 'too slow'. Every one I've bought in at least the last five years has been 'fast enough' for everything I want to do with it, and that includes games as well as work.
So, no need to upgrade, and no new CPU sales.
Add to that the well documented reasons not to want Windows 10, and the fact that a new PC will come with it, means I won't be upgrading voluntarily any time soon. I'll keep using my Windows 7 machines a few years longer instead.
Intel: if you want to sell more chips, kick Microsoft up the arse and tell them to take the telemetry crap out of W10. Tell me when you've done it, and I'll consider a new PC.
Hmm, i pondered if i could run win10 on one of my old PC's, googled around a bit and found out one can actually run win10 on 12 year old 256MB
machine! That suggest something for Intel perhaps!? So in hindsight upgrading to win7 and 8 appears like a robbery, if MS had made win10 lets say
just after XP then none would had to upgrade to a beefier CPU to begin with and Intel to hire all those lazy engineers to make beefier CPU's
and as such would now have not been forced to layoff all those lazy engineers ..:) Oh how i remember the days of fanless 486's....
http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/you-don-t-need-a-crazy-powerful-pc-to-run-windows-10-here-s-the-proof-1288287 (http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/you-don-t-need-a-crazy-powerful-pc-to-run-windows-10-here-s-the-proof-1288287)
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I can't remember the last time I used a PC whose CPU was 'too slow'. Every one I've bought in at least the last five years has been 'fast enough' for everything I want to do with it, and that includes games as well as work.
So, no need to upgrade, and no new CPU sales.
Add to that the well documented reasons not to want Windows 10, and the fact that a new PC will come with it, means I won't be upgrading voluntarily any time soon. I'll keep using my Windows 7 machines a few years longer instead.
Intel: if you want to sell more chips, kick Microsoft up the arse and tell them to take the telemetry crap out of W10. Tell me when you've done it, and I'll consider a new PC.
Hmm, i pondered if i could run win10 on one of my old PC's, googled around a bit and found out one can actually run win10 on 12 year old 256MB
machine! That suggest something for Intel perhaps!? So in hindsight upgrading to win7 and 8 appears like a robbery, if MS had made win10 lets say
just after XP then none would had to upgrade to a beefier CPU to begin with and Intel to hire all those lazy engineers to make beefier CPU's
and as such would now have not been forced to layoff all those lazy engineers ..:) Oh how i remember the days of fanless 486's....
http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/you-don-t-need-a-crazy-powerful-pc-to-run-windows-10-here-s-the-proof-1288287 (http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/you-don-t-need-a-crazy-powerful-pc-to-run-windows-10-here-s-the-proof-1288287)
Hi
Somehow the idea that an OS should *force* you to upgrade a CPU has always seemed wrong. If you dig into the "why" a bit, it actually is wrong. What forced the upgrade was more the programs that would run on the OS. Simply put, it's much easier to label your software "Requires Windows 95" than to spell out it's real needs. It's been a *long* time since your word processing software or spread sheet needed more CPU. It's not clear that email ever did need much CPU ever. Outside of a few engineering tools (CAD, simulation etc) and some games, it's a rare piece of software that has even forced an upgrade to a 64 bit version of Windows.
The problem isn't that Microsoft did this or that (in this one unique case, there's a lot of other things you can rightly blame them for). It's that the software people run no longer is CPU resource bound. Desktop bloat might force people to drop a bit more RAM into an old machine. It's not likely to force them to get a whole new motherboard after 4 years.
There are *lots* of things people upgrade without needing to. If you believe that all those clothing stores at the mall are only replacing worn out stuff ... think again. Products can sell for a lot of different reasons unrelated to cold hard facts. You may *think* you are immune to that sort of thing ... even if you are, the other 99.999% of the population is not.
Ask Joe average about the CPU in his PC. Chances are he can't tell you what is in there. Right there .. a problem for Intel. Now describe two CPU's to Joe. Stop when his eyes glaze over (likely 15 seconds into the description). Which one will he go for? In almost every case, the one with the higher clock speed. The rest of the specs simply don't get Joe excited.
Remember back when clock speeds went up with each generation of CPU? Remember how you needed a bigger power supply for the new CPU? That's what stopped the party. Finding a wall plug that will supply 4KW is not easy (in most homes ... not here .. but most homes). Running the air conditioning in the winter because the PC is heating the room to much .. no fun. Adjusting the window in February means a cold draft. Power, in a number of ways, is a problem for Intel.
Intel can't sell people CPU's because they actually need a faster PC (they don't). They can't push the one and only spec that 90% of the population recognize as "better", to sell what people don't need. No matter how many times they play with I3, I5, I7 names, people just get confused rather than excited. That's because CPU's *are* confusing, and less and less exciting.
Why do I say less exciting? I have a need to set up a pretty fancy workstation to run a bunch of design and simulation software on. I've been waiting to get a "wow" moment out of Intel's latest and greatest. Instead, when I compare to the machine I built 4 years ago, I get a "is that all there is?" moment. Even with a fairly high powered "need", Sky Lake just does not get me excited. So off I go to Wikipedia ... hmm ... what gets mentioned about Sky Lake? You see a lot about low power laptops. You see mention of use in smart phones (name one) and tablets (not many). Simple answer, INTEL stopped being focused on desktop performance a while ago !!!
So who killed the desktop upgrade cycle? Everybody did. That includes Intel.
Bob
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.......
Once you see Intel bolting acquisitions on in order to get a foothold in the next "thing" you will know they are in some trouble.
Look at Microsoft buying Nokia for $7.2B (was it?) and then a year later writing the value down by a bit more than that. What's the deal with Win10 strategy? If they aren't selling software like they always used to what are they selling? Microsoft seems to be wanting to sell hardware in almost the exact reverse of IBM formerly selling hardware and moving to software and services. You have to wonder if any of them know what they are doing.
There was a fund manager Peter Lynch who coined the term "diworsification" to describe the process of company boards seeking to expand by buying other companies. Look out for it, it is nearly always the beginning of the end.
Hi
Ok, so Intel acquired Altera end of 2015 and the layoffs hit 4 months later ...
Yes, that's not quite Dell and EMC, but it *was* an acquisition. $17B may not matter a lot to Intel ... hmmm .... how much did they "save" with the layoffs? .... hmmm ...$1.4B ... hmmmm....
Bob
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IBM has been written off for dead twice in my lifetime, and at least once before that. The indicators looked at least as bad each of the previous times. That is, IBM was a leader in industries that were declining because they had been superceded by new technologies. They didn't appear to have any new ideas, and management appeared clueless.
While past performance does not predict future success, I wouldn't place large bets against them. But if I was an employee in one of their current businesses I wouldn't get cocky either. In each of the three past re-incarnations of IBM there was a great deal of carnage among the existing employee base (and to a lesser extent the customers of that technology base.)
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IBM has been written off for dead twice in my lifetime, and at least once before that. The indicators looked at least as bad each of the previous times. That is, IBM was a leader in industries that were declining because they had been superceded by new technologies. They didn't appear to have any new ideas, and management appeared clueless.
While past performance does not predict future success, I wouldn't place large bets against them. But if I was an employee in one of their current businesses I wouldn't get cocky either. In each of the three past re-incarnations of IBM there was a great deal of carnage among the existing employee base (and to a lesser extent the customers of that technology base.)
Hi
I think the whole history of IBM and it's various revivals from the dead is something we could fill a number of threads with. That's not to say in any way that it's irrelevant to Intel right now. The thing we have not (yet) seen with Intel is their ability to change course. Back in the 1970's they were the obvious "CPU guys". I say that from the perspective of a direct competitor that I worked for at the time. They have been the PC CPU guys since there was a PC to put CPU's into. Can they change focus? We'll see ....
Bob
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A report from an insider... :(
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lost-your-job-recent-layoff-kim-williams (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lost-your-job-recent-layoff-kim-williams)