| I think Intel has two problems: First, ARM is doing to Intel what Intel did to the Unix workstation vendors in the 80’s. Second, given that they’re being cornered into the server business, they need to have products that are rock solid there until they can regroup. This is one of a long parade of recent screwups with their big bets in this space: (1) A while back, all their server atom chips (tons of crypto and I/O with piles of ECC DRAM and cores for < $1000 and < 20W) had a bug where they stopped booting af 18 months of uptime. These compete exactly in the space server-ARM has a chance, so many affected vendors were already dual sourcing. (2) NVIDIA crushes them for AI, and Intel is a distant third for graphics in general (3) Samsung SSDs generally trounce Intel ones. (4) They’re rapidly losing client device share. Their big recent innovation there is AMT, which is increasingly considered an anti-feature. That leaves conventional IT compute, (web services, DBMS, etc) for their core business, but even on-prem stuff is moving to private cloud, which needs multi tenancy, and they’re looking pretty risk for that use case too (vs AMD?) They’ll certainly be around for a long time, but it’s not clear how long they’ll keep their “no one gets fired for buying IBM”-level of dominance. |
This is true only for the consumer SSD market, where Intel outsources large portions of the product development. It's also a market that Intel may abandon completely in the next few years as Intel and Micron start to pursue separate flash memory development. If Intel doesn't score a solid win with a consumer SSD in the next two generations, it would be reasonable for them to pull out and focus solely on enterprise SSDs, where they have no trouble winning.