@bxd this is the very definition of disruptive innovation. I thought Intel with the atom and smartphone push were trying to avoid this. Now they have retreated. The end is near
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So the proposition is that x86 Core remains ahead of ARM based CPUs (measured by IPC, performance/watt or whatever) and that Intel still retains process lead.
Intel will say it remains in front on process - saying that foundry 16nm and 10nm are inferior to Intel's reckoning.
Are there any solid tests for this - say comparing performance of A9 v i3?
I am thinking that it will be game over should A10 or A11 match or exceed i3/i5?
Mini computers ate the main frame
Work stations ate the min computers
PCs ate the workstations and almost everything else
ARM and the smartphone is like a locust that is going to leave the land bare. If you are fat with high margins you will be eaten. Nobody allows that kind of profits to go untouched.
If Intel refuse to play in the low margin business they better get out. The volumes being generated by Samsung and TSMC now require them to invest more and commit more aggressive schedules. This will soon leave intel behind for the first time in many decades at 10nm and once you fall behind with no competition ( no AMD, no windows release etc.. etc. ) you are cooked.
Intel just laid off 12,000 workers in face of declining PC revenues, and the move has all of us asking “what’s next?” for the company that launched the microprocessor revolution.
The booming smartphone market is almost exclusively based on microprocessor technology from tiny ARM, a British chip design company with no manufacturing capability and a market cap that, for most of the pre-iPhone era, was smaller than Intel’s advertising budget.
Intel, then, is left clinging to the top of a palm tree while the technological tsunami that it started with the 1971 launch of the Intel 4004 sweeps across humanity.
So what happened? How did the company founded by Gordon Moore, the father of the integrated circuit, the eponymous author of Moore’s Law, and one most far-seeing prophets of the digital age, miss the mobile boat entirely?
To understand what went wrong for Intel after the launch of the iPhone, you first have to know what went right for the chipmaker during the “Wintel” duopoly years — how the company used a specific set of business practices to maintain shockingly high profit margins, shut out rivals, and ultimately draw the wrath of the FTC.
This isn’t so much a technology horserace story as it is a business story, and once you see how the business and tech parts fit together to create the “PC era” we all lived through, it’ll be obvious why the company couldn’t pull off a daring pivot into mobile the way it once pivoted from making memory chips to microprocessors.
But before we can get into the history, I have to take a brief detour and try to brain a zombie idea that just won’t die. It came up most recently in this piece by Jean-Louis Gassée, and I call it the “ARM Performance Elves” hypothesis.