> They could have been using decades of margin to build and consolidate positions in other segments of the market.
That seems pretty simplistic. Optane and Larrabee were bold efforts. (Heck, so was Itanium). It's not like they didn't try throwing money and R&D at things. But that isn't always enough.
> Rather than, say, taking the ARM licenses they ended up flogging and building a competitive mobile CPU on their leading process, they invented weird Atom chips that ended up in like 3 phones.
They made a decent effort with Xscale too, to be fair.
Sure, but they threw it away about a year before the iPhone came out.
Yeah, they did try a lot of bold efforts, but they've pretty much all been mis-steps. They always had factions that were "x86 forever" and when things weren't going great those factions would come in and say "hey, why are we working on this thing that's not our x86 bread-n-butter?" and they'd either kill it or they'd only half-heartedly keep it going until the underinvestment killed it.
It took Intel way too long to get the power consumption on the Atom processors down (not ops/Watt, but total Watts), back when Atom had a chance in the phone market. (A difficult task, which is why I bought ARM Holdings stock shortly after Android came out because I realized (1) nearly everyone was going to soon have a smartphone and (2) whether iPhone or Android won, it was going to be very difficult for Intel to get competitive in the smartphone market fast enough to prevent ossification of the market around ARM. Unfortunately, SoftBank took ARM private and closed out my trade.)
Now, the same dynamic of the low-end x86 processor eating its way up the stack to threaten the high-margin mainframe and RISC servers is playing out with low-end ARM eating its way up the stack and displacing a lot of uses for the high-margin x86 server chips.
Uh, probably fortunately. Softbank bought ARM for $32b 7 years ago, and fat chance it's worth that inflation-adjusted now.
The thing that made them big is pretty obvious: high-margin premium priced x86 CPUs, which is a position they were able to hold for decades due both to manufacturing excellence and being able to shepherd the standard. They simply can't do it anymore-- execution has stumbled, and the market for x86 is gradually weakening, especially in spaces outside the cut-throat, lower margin, consumer/corporate desktop "it must run Windows and my line-of-business software/Call of Skyrim" vortex.
They could have been using decades of margin to build and consolidate positions in other segments of the market, just to be sure that the next clever new device comes out with an Intel chip, even if it's non-x86. They didn't.
Rather than, say, taking the ARM licenses they ended up flogging and building a competitive mobile CPU on their leading process, they invented weird Atom chips that ended up in like 3 phones.
Okay, flash is huge now, but it's a low margin game maybe not worth their investment. But they chucked out Optane, which still had some possibility as a "halo product" and for some commercial price-is-no-object markets.
It remains to see how sticky Arc graphics will be; they got a boost by the tight market conditions last year where people would grudgingly take any card they could afford. Will people come back to them out of explicit preference? I also wonder if the Larrabee/Xeon Phi adventure set them back or ahead-- trying to make a GPU architecture out of x86 was an interesting take on "GPUs are hard to program", but did it yield a lot of useful knowledge?