Intel Corporation Message Board

While I fully understand the "not invented here" syndrome I believe Apple has a greater responsibility to do what's best for its customers and shareholders. From my perspective switching to Intel is not an action designed to insult anyone, it's simply a necessary step to keep the company relevant. There are many ways to reward significant contribution by talented employees other than perpetual employment.

BTW, I enjoy your articles.

The word is getting out how many top tier vendors will be making devices with Intel's products and the change in industry behavior has to have an impact on ARMH's prospects. Margins will be impacted first followed by top line revenue. This is long overdue.

Apple needs time to prepare its ecosystem for this change. Best guess is that they make the switch with Intel's 14nm products by mid-2014. Without Intel's 14nm product it is difficult to imagine how Apple could expect the iPhone to be exciting or even competitive.

Indeed, it won't be long now. In less than two weeks we'll see a range of new Haswell-based ultrabooks, convertibles and tablets on the store shelves.

There was no intent to minimize Intel's accomplishments, but the accomplishments along with what the Core architecture did to AMD are visible and common knowledge, while the missed opportunities are not.

The main purpose of calling attention to management performance (which includes missed opportunities) is to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. It appears Intel's management today has a focused strategy to compete in mobile, although some of the experiments in the media industry remain questionable and deserve closer board scrutiny.

It's great Intel is becoming well positioned for mobile today, but why make excuses for what was clearly very poor business judgment regarding the cellphone/pre-smartphone market that was well known to be growing faster than the PC market at the time Then after seeing the early success of the iPhone why did it take six more years for Intel's management to finally produce a CPU/SoC product that was competitive to ARM offerings?

Further, I would fault Intel's management for failing on another pivotal opportunity in mobile. After seeing Apple's success with it's proprietary mobile iOS it was clear there would be an alternative mobile OS that would become the standard for all mobile devices not made by Apple. Why didn't Intel see this opportunity earlier and take the lead to create the free Linux-based mobile OS and mobile software ecosystem instead of waiting for a search-engine company to do it? By the time MeeGo was launched as a "Me Too" effort the battle to be the dominant mobile OS was already over.

And during this period why did Intel spend so many billions on WiMAX and Clearwire that were entirely wasted investments in the mobile carrier business that didn't leverage Intel's core business and didn't make Intel any more competitive against ARM?

During that same period Intel's accomplishments against AMD were impressive and deserve recognition. But It is near impossible to understate the dysfunction that prevailed within Intel's executive ranks with respect to mobile. What is inconceivable is how the board stood by and allowed this to continue for so long.

Asus, Lenovo, Acer, Dell and others will be making Intel-based tablets with Windows and some of those models will be dual-boot with both Windows and Android. Samsung doesn't really have a choice, they have to get on board the Intel train or risk losing market share.

The argument that the iPhone hadn't launched and "no one knew what it could do" is a poor excuse for Otellini missing one of the most critical inflection points for the evolution of handheld computing devices. Fact is, at the time the Blackberry and other pre-iPhone smartphones were already enormously popular and the global market for mobile devices was growing exponentially. And at the time Intel already knew cellphones were one of the fastest growing markets for the semiconductor industry, but instead of making CPUs suitable for handheld use and taking the business from ARM Otellini pumped billions of dollars into a useless multi-year effort financing the U.S. startup Clearwire and pushing their WiMAX standard - which was ill-fit and doomed from the start with mainstream carriers.

The wasted opportunity is absolutely tragic. Learning this now just makes the "come from behind" situation that much more annoying.

There are a number of things wrong with the forecast. First, the analyst divides the tablet market into separate Windows and Android categories, and this simply doesn't reflect that Intel-based tablets enjoy the huge advantage of being dual-boot and can run both Windows AND Android.

The analyst doesn't explain what the other 25% of Windows tablets is supposed to be. Does he believe RT is going to make up a quarter of the Windows tablet market going forward? What evidence is there to believe that?

The analyst goes on to assume, incorrectly I might add, that for Android based tablets Intel is competing on speed alone and that consumers won't experience any benefit unless new apps are developed to take advantage of Slivermont's architecture. Of course the guy is ignoring that at the same speed Silvermont is predicted to deliver up to 5 times better battery life than its competition.

Clearly the analyst must believe battery life is unimportant to tablet buyers. Just as he ignores the value to consumers to buy a tablet that is capable of running both full Windows 8 AND Android on the same device at the user's convenience.

Almost no one was interested in ARM-RT tablets even when RT devices competed against Intel's five year old Atom. If the public didn't want it then, they surely won't want it now.

ARM investors also believed that ARM's low-power designs would scale up in performance with the same energy efficiency as their low-power models. The belief that ARM will be able to capture Intel's traditional markets rests on this assumption. Of course this is as clueless as believing the car that gets 28 mpg while driving 30 mph is going to get the same mileage while driving 100mph.

Like Mark Twain said, "It's not what you don't know that gets you, it's what you know with absolutely certainty that just ain't so".

It's amusing how ARM promoters claim ARM will capture significant parts of Intel's business simply because one of their licensees makes a part. The topic they conveniently omit is why would anyone want to buy their product when vastly superior offerings from the industry leader are already available. Intel has done a superb job denying ARM any entry point into its core markets, including servers.

Awesome! There are lot of older PC's and laptops that need to be upgraded.

McCain's effort will have little impact given the FCC is controlled by Democrats. But on a more practical level, if and when Congress, the FCC and the courts all support forcing cable companies to unbundle their programming so many years will have passed that no one will even remember what Intel's Web TV was.

What happened to Motorola? Looks like this former titan of the mobile industry went to Google to die. If they don't introduce some really compelling products soon they will be completely forgotten. They need Haswell and Bay Trail fast.

If you mean Windows 8.1 that's a positive sign for desktop and laptop sales, and for anyone using a tablet with an external keyboard. Under the right circumstances Metro can be useful but giving users both options is the far better way to go.

It effectively answers the question, "How will Intel make their extraordinary gross margins competing in the table and smartphone business".