[ragnarok451]

It's funny because this seems like a textbook case of the innovator's dilemma (from Clayton Christensen) in a nutshell - what worked for Intel was just working so well, that cannibalizing it with something new didn't make sense - until it was too late.

[FeloniousHam]

Ben Thompson on the latest Exponent[1]: "When you start out a company, you're walking around and you have complete freedom of movement. And then you get some processes in place, you get better at things, and now you're riding bike. And then you're driving a car. And eventually at some point, the best, most efficient companies are like bullet trains. They're so much faster than anybody else and so much more powerful and so much more efficient, it's like "how can I compete with that?" Well it's actually quite straightforward how you compete with it, you go somewhere there are no bullet train tracks."

[1] https://exponent.fm/episode-190-intel-apple-disruption-and-d...

[tosh]

I think you will like this essay:

https://jamesallworth.medium.com/intels-disruption-is-now-co...

discussed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25092721

[rodgerd]

Intel have tried time and time and time again to get away from x86; some of their efforts have been underwhelming (the i960) while others were genuinely radical and innovative (the iAXP 432), and others were at least interesting (the Itanium).

[_ph_]

They tried a couple of times, but I wonder whether they tried hard enough. Admittedly, that the Itanium failed was partially AMDs fault, which breathed new life into x86 by their 64 bit extensions. But besides a slow start, Intel didn't seem to be in a hurry to push Itanium down the line and offer for example a cheap cpu+motherboard combo for enthusiasts. While Itanium for a while had a relatively large transistor count, by todays standards it is tiny, any smartphone cpu is way larger. The last Itanium was made in a 32nm process, imagine it in today 10nm. Especially with markets shifting, more computing in the cloud, Itanium based servers could be really strong, if Intel just would make them.

Also, Intel declined to make a cpu for the iPhone, dropped their own ARM line and also didn't get into fabbing for other companies when they still had a large lead in fab technology.

I do get the impression, Intel was far to happy selling x86 chips. Which worked and gave them lots of revenues, till they got stuck with the 10nm process. And of course while TSMC grew into the power it is today.

[dboreham]

And they made ARM devices for a while.

[rodgerd]

Yeah, ditching their ARM line looks very foolish now, doesn't it?

[kunai]

IIRC this is also exactly what happened with IBM and original PowerPC Macs way back in 2005 that prompted the switch to Intel and x86.

Funny how 15 years out it's the exact opposite now.