Apple Silicon: The Passing of Wintel

Re:Apple Silicon: The Passing of Wintel by giantrobot on Monday July 13, 2020 @12:22AM (#23817136)

While desktops specifically are seeing declining sales, laptop sales have remained fairly strong in recent years. Intel still powers the lion's share of laptops sold be they Chromebooks, MacBooks, or Windows laptops. So it's not like their sales are instantly going to dry up. ARM is also still making progress in the server space but it's not predominant. Intel is still powering a lion's share of server hardware as well.

So Intel's got the income to make big shifts. There's also enough momentum of continuing x86 sales that their revenue from them won't dry up immediately if they did start building ARM chips.

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Re:Apple Silicon: The Passing of Wintel by coldtea on Monday July 13, 2020 @12:54AM (#23817300)

>While desktops specifically are seeing declining sales, laptop sales have remained fairly strong in recent years. Intel still powers the lion's share of laptops sold be they Chromebooks, MacBooks, or Windows laptops. So it's not like their sales are instantly going to dry up.

I don't think absolute numbers are what matters. For a company in the stock market, the fact that mobile has grown 10x the size of desktop sales, where the desktop has become stagnant means they lost big on a market...

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Re:Apple Silicon: The Passing of Wintel by giantrobot on Monday July 13, 2020 @01:58AM (#23817557)

Intel has huge gross margins on their chips. They make up the difference in sales numbers with their margins. They've had minimal competition from AMD in the desktop/laptop and server markets so they've made money hand over fist.

While they could be a player in the smartphone CPU market it's not like they had it tied up and lost it. Intel's real challenge now is recognizing that the desktop/laptop and server markets are no longer guaranteed sales for them.

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