Maybe classifying Intel as a sinking ship may be too much of an exaggeration.

Competitors maybe passed them in the last couple of years, but Intel is still in a really solid position to turn things around.

Apple's situation was a lot more dramatic. Intel still has a very good market share and can probably take a couple+ years to safely get back on track, in my opinion.

Yeah, absolutely. There's still a lot of excellent engineering being done at Intel that you can't find elsewhere. It's not like Apple where their core product had eroded into irrelevance, they were making tons of undifferentiated products and they literally had nothing of value except the dying embers of fan loyalty to sustain them.

Amongst other things:

- SGX is really far ahead of AMD SEV. The latter is probably easier to sell because it's marketed as "drop in" (encrypts whole VMs), but SEV has been repeatedly hacked or shipped with obvious gaping design holes that they patch later and call features. SGX is a lot more focused, a lot more flexible and frankly a lot more secure.

- Optane NVRAM is completely unique, as far as I know. It's only 10x slower than DRAM which is nothing, but it's persistent! It totally changes the whole IO hierarchy.

- AVX512 / DLBoost are able to hold their own against mid-range GPUs for some AI tasks, which is impressive and useful.

- Their core chips are still very fast. AMD chips are selling more for less, which is a good position for them to be in, and TSMC's process advantage is helping them out for now. But they don't have a truly massive edge in tech like Apple's competitors had when Jobs returned.

- Intel have a long tail of obscure features that AMD doesn't, although it's often hard to know this. SGX and AVX512 are high profile but there are others that are less well known.

I don't count side channels as an issue because it's also an issue for all their competitors, and frankly I found the near single-minded focus on Intel by the security community to be rather misleading. I even read a side channels paper that admitted they suspected AMD had the same problem but they didn't bother to check simply because they didn't have access to any AMD hardware in the first place, which was unusually honest.

Apple's M1 is very impressive in its space, but for high performance cases like servers it's only quad-core - you can't use the little low power cores for much. Apple have shown no interest in making server parts for a long time, and Apple's engineering is bespoke so it tells us nothing about what other ARM vendors can do. So in that space it's still just AMD vs Intel and Intel is a long way from being on its back yet.

> Apple's M1 is very impressive in its space, but for high performance cases like servers it's only quad-core

this is true, but does not account for the fact that apple M1 is just the first (public) iteration of such cpu.

...and that if they wanted to I'm sure Apple could spin a server version with many more cores in pretty short order.

It's not that easy. Adding cores is not just changing "const int CORE_COUNT" somewhere in a VHDL file. Scaling up cores without hitting communication or other bottlenecks is a difficult engineering problem that has taken a lot of effort from Intel and AMD.

What I'm curious is; is how Nuvia and the departure of Williams et al impacted their ability to do this?

> How often do big companies like Apple and Intel succeed in righting a sinking ship though? You can’t keep pointing to the one guy that succeeded.

I feel like the view of Intel as a "sinking ship" is an inside-basebally misread of the situation.

If you buy a PC or a laptop or a server today, you're most likely getting an Intel CPU. It's now at least possible to buy AMD in many market segments from major vendors - and of course many of us do - but to the broader consumer and hosting world Intel still dominates.

You can look ahead and extrapolate and say "they can't compete with TSMC right now, and maybe they're going to start falling behind further." Fair analysis. But they dominate the market to an extent that's hard to overstate.

Contrast this with between-Jobs-stints Apple, which was a tiny shrinking company with a niche product and no clear strategy.

Intel is almost in too-big-to-fail territory. They aren't sinking, just because they now have real competition. Yes, they need to do "something" to maintain dominance - but why would you see their situation and conclude they won't? The new CEO here is a sign that they see the trouble ahead, and they're ready to steer around it.

Perpetually. These companies are always in competition, always under pressure, and always advancing their products. Not every tech company is IBM or Research In Motion. Intel and Apple are juggernauts.

If you have $233 billion (a LOT of money) and you want to own a world-class chipmaker, would you rather start from scratch or just buy Intel for cash?

As you say, Apple can be pretty unequivocally considered a success story. To the extent that it was ever troubled at all in the first place, Microsoft is also widely considered to have turned around its fortunes. Dell seems to be another turnaround story.

Then there are companies that have at least managed to stabilize themselves reasonably, e.g. IBM and HP (I wouldn't consider either of them a huge turnaround success, but I would not expect them to head for bankruptcy anytime soon either).

And even companies that did go under, e.g. Kodak, took an enormous amount of time and effort to do so, and not without launching a cryptocurrency first…

Competition is always an amazing driver for getting large companies to start doing the right thing. As long as they are not completely shut out, they have a chance of succeeding.

Until still have some amazing technology compared to AMD, they're five processes screwed right now but I think they have a chance to succeed. But given the timeline on new CPUs and fab processes, it'll be 4 years before we see the fruits of anything he does.

IBM still exists. Microsoft still exists. Apple still exists. Notably, AMD also still exists and flourishes again. All of these companies were at one time or another considered dead in the water. Did every big company survive? No. But I don't think there's enough data to make a prediction which fate Intel will see.

survivor bias