AMD knocked it out of the park with x86_64, which allowed a seamless transition to 64bit. Intel ended up having to license x86_64 implementation from AMD.

AMD beat Intel with their K6 and similar series of chips where, just like this time around, they were able to get way more performance per tick out of the CPU. Intel was supposedly dead in the water due to their toaster era P4 chips that ran hot as hell, and consumed way more power to get the same job done. AMD started making some serious inroads in the server CPU market with early era Opteron processors. Following that era, out came Centrino era of mobile processors, which took a different approach to the CPU architecture from the P4 and set things up for the Core2Duo etc series of processors and on in to the i7s and the like.

I'm highly skeptical that Intel is any more dead now than it was then. It has a track record of going away and completely changing the whole story all over again, and they've got the financial resources to keep on doing so.

This is generally how dominant companies die. ExxonMobile doesn't die because someone built a better oil company. They die when someone builds a better battery.

How is today's chip industry compared with yesterday's chip industry as dramatic of a shift as going from oil to batteries? That seems like a much more significant leap than x86 to ARM. What am I missing?

1. CPUs are diminishing in importance. They aren't the bottleneck for most applications. Whatever the new hot tech is, it's probably limited by GPU, RAM, or storage. ARM doesn't have to be better than Intel, they just have to be good enough and more ubiquitous. The top of the market will go GPU and the bottom will go ARM, and the middle will be an ever shrinking x86 market share. The few places that will need heavy CPU resources will be the same people who can apply pressure to Intel's margins.

2. Intel can't force ARM chips out of the market, because they aren't playing the same game as AMD. The licensing business model of ARM has allowed them to separate Intel from their traditional allies while also pooling the efforts of Intel's competitors.

3. The next generation will know ARM. The hobby chips that Intel is discontinuing now means that they are handing over the next generation of 'learners' to ARM. ARM based training/learning boards are proliferating fast. Right now "everyone knows/runs X86", but that will change.

The process of chip making will look very similar in the future, but the brand of the CPU will matter less every year. Intel's not "dead in five years", but Intel will definitely cross the point of no return in that timeframe. Shifting a big company's focus is more difficult than growing another company who already has the right focus.

Back to the analogy: Batteries wouldn't invalidate oil. There are a multitude of other areas where petrochemicals are used. Batteries would shift the market enough to make it difficult for exxonmobil to follow.

I would argue that there has been, specifically that Moore's law isn't working as it once did, so the competition is catching up. It's becoming a commodity space now that smaller process sizes are hard, and gains from that are paltry.

For example on the mobile space, for the applications fully written in Java, .NET, Swift[1], JavaScript, how the CPU looks like doesn't matter at all.

[1] - When using LLVM bitcode as deployment target, although it is leaky.

Exxon can make batteries and Intel can make things like ARM chips. But they aren't really because they aren't good at it.

From the outside, looking in, it seems like the two leaps are on massively different scales which I feel is important when talking about things that will kill a large corporation.

I guess my key question is what makes ARM so much different than x86 that it invalidates Intel's existing knowledge? Batteries have a completely different product life cycle than oil. For one, batteries don't burn away and they recharge. This creates completely different business models. Is there some major difference between ARM chips and x86 chips that I am missing?

1) Binary compatibility doesn't matter nearly as much as it used to. This was everything in the 80's, 90's and still important into the early 00's. It's why people were willing to pay top dollar for Intel CPUs for decades. First it was to run DOS apps like Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect and then it was to run Windows apps including Microsoft Office which were the primary thing most people had PCs for back then. Most mainstream computing users (business and personal) would be hard pressed to come up with a specific need that requires x86. Thanks to the web, Linux, Apple, mobile, etc. x86 is just another architecture that can be used, not the architecture it once was.

2) Competing products are anywhere from a fraction to an order of magnitude less expensive than Intel's offerings. Unless you absolutely need maximum performance, cheap and good enough is where the majority of the market is.

Look at what Intel has been banking on first with their failed attempt in mobile and now with their failed attempt at IoT: they thought that because they had 1 (the thing that doesn't matter much anymore) that they could disregard 2 (the thing that does). Intel sure looks like it's having a Kodak moment: the market that exists today is much smaller in terms of $/CPU or $/perf or $/watt but Intel refuses to do what it needs to adapt.

CEO/CFO of Intel looked at the balance sheet every Quarters and make decision if they should continue to invest in ARM SOC (A few years back before they sold that div to Marvell.)

x86 has 50% + margin, #1 market position.

ARM is #4,5, 6 in market position behind TI, Qualcomm, Freescale and lossing $$$ every quarters.

One need to investment huge amount of $$$ continuously fundamentally at IP for GSM, LTE, Mobile OS Team, SOC team and there were almost zero chance to catch up with #1 #2 players of the time -- Qualcomm, TI, 8-10 years ago.

And I just want to mention to the parent, Intel were never painted "dead" in the K6 era. Because K6 didn't actually beat Intel. It was the Athlon and Athlon 64. And even in that Era Intel wasn't dead by any means. AMD had at best 30% of market shares, and everyone knew Intel could continue to play the pricing discount game for as long as they wanted.

Right now the PC industry is shrinking. As a matter of fact it is shrinking faster then expected contrary to what numbers you may have read, that is because one specific segment, the PC Gaming Industry is booming, and especially in SEA region. That is why you see "lots" of Gaming Laptop appear, when I would have wanted the same 10 - 15 years ago they simply wont there. And this segment has help the numbers to look not as bad as it is.

Microsoft and Apple are fully aware of how Chromebook is taking places in Education. And Microsoft knows if this continues, there may be a generation of people who dont know Windows, and what could be even worst, they dont use Office, especially Excel! Any Windows Netbook or Notebook are unable to complete with Chromebook on priceing because of Intel. Unless Microsoft and AMD get a deal that uses a Cut down Xbox chip to a price point, Microsoft is forced to go with ARM to complete with Chromebook.

I think Intel is well positioned in the server market. Their biggest threat isn't ARM but AMD, which lower their margin.

Assuming we dont see a killer App on PC that requires a huge jump of CPU performance. The next generation of AMD APU will likely make a killing in the consumer market. AMD Vega GPU along side with Zen. And then Next year you get Zen 2 + Vega on 7nm.

Intel should have open up their Fab. At least they should have worked with Apple, ensuring 300M of these SoC dont goes to Samsung or TSMC. But since they have been straggling to make this decision, TSMC and Apple is now pretty much lined up all the way to 2019 which is the TSMC 7nm+.

With the current CEO i dont have much faith in Intel. I really wish it was Patrick Gelsinger who had became the CEO.

let's not forget the "don't build with AMD chips or else" game which they got sued over, though too late to matter

I doubt they have the clout to pull that one again, especially when you consider how the courts would react to them doing it again.

I cannot speak for the K6 vs original Pentium but the K6-2 was what I had as a kid and even though it was cheap and cheerful it seemed handily bested by the P2. Synthetic benchmarks which took advantage of 3DNow were roughly even but games were pretty poor - with otherwise equivalent hardware (128MB ram, Voodoo3) my friend's Pentium II 300MHz outperformed my K6-2 366 @ 400-ish MHz comfortably in every game we played. The K6-3 maybe edged the P3 according to the magazines I devoured at the time, but I don't think it was pretty popular and it seemed like a stopgap until the Athlon came out. Athlon genuinely bested the P3 and P4 on price, power and performance for a good while. I still have fond memories of picking up a sub-GHz AXIA core Athlon for under 100 GBP and taking it to 1GHz and slightly beyond. That was pretty fun :-)

How old is the Intel compiler again? Both the Pentium 2 and K6 had the MMX extension. Code compiled with the rather popular Intel compiler checked the CPU vendor ID to force programs into badly optimized code paths with disabled extensions on competitors products. It was a nice undocumented feature until 2005 and makes any experienced performance difference suspect.

There was in interesting submission the other day about performance of the Ryzen vs i7, and how their AVX2 instruction support isn't what it's racked up to be[1]. I'm not really qualified to assess the source or claims accurately, so I'll let others read it themselves and come to their own conclusions, but it was interesting.

1: https://hashcat.net/forum/thread-6534-post-35415.html

1. "Ryzen's AVX2 support is a bold-faced lie" To say this only shows complete ignorance. It was publicly known for many years that Ryzen will have only 128-bit AVX units, compared to the 256-bit AVX units of Haswell and its successors.

Nevertheless, using AVX-256 is still preferable on Ryzen, to reduce the number of instructions, even if the top speed per core is half of that reached by Intel.

2. The benchmark results just show incompetence. While the top speed per core is half, the number of cores is double, so you just need to run twice more threads for a Ryzen to match the speed of Intel.

It is true that an i7 7700K will retain a small advantage, because of higher IPC and higher clock frequency, but the advantage for correct programs is small, not like the large advantages of those incompetent benchmarks. I have both a 3.6 GHz /4.0 GHz Ryzen and a 3.6 GHz / 4.0 GHz Skylake Xeon, so I know their behavior from direct experience.

While 4-core Intel retains a small advantage in AVX2 computations over 8-core Ryzen, there are a lot of other tasks, e.g. source program compilations, where Ryzen has almost a double speed, so you should choose your processor depending on what is important for you.

3. The most stupid benchmark results are for SHA-1 and SHA-256. Ryzen already implements the SHA instructions that are also implemented in Intel Apollo Lake processors (to boost the GeekBench results against ARM) and will also be implemented in the future Intel Cannonlake processors (whose 2-core version is expected to be introduced this year).

If they had benchmarked a correct program that uses the SHA instructions, Ryzen would have trounced any Kaby Lake processor.

Skylake/Kaby Lake have two full-fledged 256-bit vector units.

Ryzen has four partial units. There are two 128-bit adders, and two 128-bit multipliers.

Intel's best case is a constant stream of 256-bit FMA instructions. They can do two per cycle, while AMD can do one.

The more plain adds and multiplies, the better Ryzen does. The same for 128-bit vector instructions. With enough of both, it can actually do significantly more work per cycle.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Micro_Devices,_Inc.....

I see no reason to believe that they could do so, organizationally, even if there was a desire to.

However, mobile devices are the same kind of disruption to PCs as the later were to the UNIX workstations and servers of yore. Intel missed that transition and failed to see the threat. They've tried in early 2010 to establish any x86 Android presence but it didn't work out. Funny, but things might have been different if XScale wasn't sold off, who knows...mobile/handheld mostly stagnated back when it was WinCE/Palm, even though Palm invented the HPC and Microsoft practically invented the smartphone.

IoT/IoE is another major disruptor, on many fronts, and Intel doesn't seem to get it. NFV is probably going to converge on ARM64, due to the "good enough" factor, TCO, specialized I/O accelerators, cheap customized server SoCs and cutthroat competition. Windows on ARM64 opens up VDI opportunities, as does the proliferation of "smart" Android-powered devices. Open source ended being the Colt of the computing world (Chip vendors create computers but Linux made them equal), so in the cloud, architecture is irrelevant, only the bottom line...it's a race to the bottom and we all get to win, but Intel might not make it.

And in the business world backwards compatibility is everything.

The critical thing to observe here is that, while obviously x86 applications will be slower on this platform on paper, most consumers will not notice or care. This creates a better product for casual use and arguably a better product for business use, one where the power efficiency of ARM creates a direct benefit to the consumer that Intel can't match (battery life and efficiency) for which the occasional odd performance issue in some heavy "Desktop" app is a small price to pay.

Hence why they are doing a JIT this time around, but as we all know Intel isn't happy about it.

Nowadays it seems they will get cornered on desktop and server CPUs, unless they happen to buy ARM licenses or try to re-invent CPUs with builtin FPGAs.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-08-16/intel-lic...

But the fight against ARM is even worse, it's Intel punching itself in the face.

That's what invariably happens to a public company which has complete control on a very high margin market, sees an opponent coming, and figures out a solution to stop that opponent with the downside being a requirement to slash their margins. In a stock market / short term profit economy, for a public company, keeping the margins as high as they can for a few more years always seem to be the choice, even if it always end up pushing them out.

And that's why Atom processors remained utterly incapable of competing: if they did become good, then they would eat into the upper Intel lines all the way up to the i3, and that's a lot of short term money lost.

So, yeah, if that ends up pushing Intel on the way out, it will be self inflicted damage, not technical incompetence.

Microsoft famously acquired Danger Mobile and then crushed it destroying the first widely adopted smartphone tech for consumers.

If Microsoft could be so short sighted that they ceded their market to Apple and Google I think it's safe to say that Intel is incompetent enough to bungle these acquisitions.

Intel used to make DRAM, and it transitioned its business to CPUs. Perhaps Intel is doing the same here, it noticed that it's future in is FPGAs now.

Also, there are tons of acquisitions in tech that were successful. Not sure you can mesure the future of any business on that.

Microsoft bought Danger in 2008, 5 years after Andy Rubin left to start Android [0]. 2008 was also the year after iOS was released and the year Android was released. Too little, too late.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danger_Inc.

If Intel can clean up the tooling for these things it could make them a lot more popular.

> People that are only aware of the CPU market need not chime in unless they actually have information to add.

I can just add that Intel's documentation in the IoT chips is seriously lacking.

I just find it odd that in the absence of information, commentators feel like they have something to contribute anyways haha

[1] https://intelledger.github.io/introduction.html

Just came across this interesting article: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.01061

Aren't Intel SSDs considered the benchmark for all datacenter/server work ?

I know we make a point to source Intel SSDs and I don't remember any horror stories like there were with other vendors' SSD parts ...

I say that as somebody who jumped on the consumer SSD train early (ten years ago, I guess) and never looked back, because even with those terrible first-gen controllers (JMicron, Indilinx Barefoot) the advantages were so incredible.

For a while now, though, things have seemed good enough. For my workloads (software dev, gaming) there seems to be no real-world noticeable difference between the Samsung 830 (or 840?) in my 2011 MacBook Pro and whatever new-ish PCIe drive is in my 2015 MBP.

Now obviously there will always be outliers that need that extra speed and reduced latency of course.

And maybe if there was another quantum leap in drive performance, I'd come up with new workflows. I wouldn't say "no" to more perf, obviously.

I wonder if this will ever replace flash, or if it will end up being used as a supplement to it?

> There's also a lot of room for improvement on power management, especially when it comes to the latency of coming out of deep power saving states.

Interesting! I'd never thought about that. It would be awesome if drives could just seamlessly wake up and start delivering data with no real penalty. Anywhere I can learn more about this or the burst optimization? Is that something anybody in the press is measuring and benchmarking today?

The main burst optimization is SLC write caching, which is universal on client/consumer drives that use TLC NAND flash (three bits per cell), and common on more recent drives that use MLC NAND flash (two bits per cell). M.2 PCIe SSDs also suffer from the thermal constraints of their small form factor and they will throttle under sustained benchmarking, but almost all of them can stay below their thermal limits when subjected to real-world workloads.

As for power management wake-up latency, I'm about halfway through testing my collection, and it'll be a part of my SSD reviews going forward. It's not an issue for desktops because they seldom make use of drive and link power management, but laptops face some serious tradeoffs. I'll make a full article of it over the next few weeks, but I have to finish a few other reviews first. Keep an eye on AnandTech.com next month.

This is really not possible to answer in such vague terms ("too much more", "most workloads"). It depends on what your workload is and how disk dependent it is. Storage is still an order of magnitude slower than DRAM. So improving the performance of disk, depending on what you're doing, would still significantly increase performance.

They are toast without their CPU business.

I think they're not under mortal threat and still have plenty of time to react, but now would be a good time to start ...

Many of Intel's products, like their modems, have just been ploys to sell more desktops (i.e. sell more desktop processors). They've found that the mobile processor industry is just a race to the bottom so they're sticking to the high-margin desktop and server processor sectors.

Do they? It's my impression that Intel's integrated GPU cores are currently best-in-class in performance-per-watt, even compared to the PowerVR cores in Apple's mobile products.

I totally agree with you except for maybe one small thing - if anything I'd say they've outmaneuvered the competition for graphics chips. Their market share for PC graphics hardware is about 70%. By tying the graphics hardware to the CPU, and making it good enough for everybody but hardcore gamers, they've relegated AMD and nVidia to fight over the other 30%. (And I'm honestly shocked that AMD and nVidia have that much of the market. The truckloads and truckloads of PCs bought by corporate buyers generally do not have discrete GPUs...)

http://jonpeddie.com/publications/market_watch/

Now, you can certainly point out that they have 70% of a declining market. Which is true. And you can also say that Intel has little traction in graphics hardware outside the PC space, which is also true. And that is why I agree with you and your point still stands, so please take my post as a semi-interesting footnote and not an argument.

This seems like an accurate statement. Intel basically owns little at this point except their fabs, which themselves are a peculiar variety of very expensive real estate that only becomes less valuable over time.

These modules were an unsuccessful attempt at capturing the Raspberry Pi user base. It was a good idea on Intel's part to offer an alternative. The rejection of that alternative is a bigger deal than it sounds like. Those users are largely in high school and college now, but they won't stay there forever.

Intel never followed up on their SSD controllers for the second generation though, and instead just bought the same chips everyone else did, eliminating any advantage in buying the Intel drive. Samsung stovepipes their SSD manufacturing and have managed to put out a superior product.

OCZ then went bankrupt, which probably helped the whole SSD industry.

At one time, they were even the largest maker of lenses in the world, also. So influential that even today, Rochester has smaller optics companies that are world class.

Kodak was not stupid - they designed the very first DSLR sensors and still make high quality monochrome and color sensors today.

They knew that there would a film/digital transition, even tried to plan for it.

However despite all that, the inertia of their business pretty much killed them (along with some dumb ideas, poor middle management).

Same as Intel knows that low-power chips are eating up the bottom, that ARM is strong in this space, etc. But so far Intel hasn't had a good response (same as Kodak) to the new challenger.

Intel had nothing to offer to compete with ARM in mobile space. Largely ignored ARMv8 servers when they were mostly specialized or micro. Now E5-competitive chips are entering the market from multiple competitors, and even mobile SoCs have grown up into laptop chips...