What is Intel gonna do? How do the CPU wars shake out?
It feels so weird to see Intel get its lunch stolen, after so many years of x86 dominance. What do you do now? It feels like amd is pulling away fast
The only thing that intel lost if price premium. Which is important but does not mean intel is defeated. Does AMD has money to bleed like intel ?
When price premium goes away, you need to cut costs (otherwise EPS will drop). This means better design process, smaller organization, etc. Intel cannot bleed money by selling below cost for a long time, not for PCs/servers. When we did it for tablets, it lasted only for a year. For modems, 2-3 years. Those two businesses were much smaller than PC/servers. If we decide losing money at PC/server market, it's gonna be HUGE. How do you explain that to investors?
Intel has lost its price premium for quite few times in the past. Investor needs to see the future. Every business struggles they know that.
Intel is trying hard to become more than just a CPU company.
Strategically, the list of missed opportunities is what hurts an old corporation the most. Microsoft bounced back brilliantly, cannot say the same for Intel... yet. Markets evolve in new directions and so should a company. But of course, that doesn’t mean you lose focus on your core business.
It is true they are trying hard doing something different but sad part is they are failing. Like andornot said MS is successful but Intel is not yet.
"With process parity, Intel needs to clean up the inefficient design practices, increase reuse, and sadly reduce the number of people at the company." And yet, if you look at the people being laid off, it is just politics as usual. Just like last time it is the political incumbents using the opportunity to purge their teams of people they deem disloyal, which more often than not are the capable people. The people left are far more interested in milking the cow and gaming the system instead of turning Intel around.
Intel has been deliberately keeping core counts low. They probably have a large headroom just adding cores to the die without price increases.
You nailed it.
So...why not unleash that headroom? You've had years now to do it, right?