This is too bad, and a bit understandable. Intel is in a really odd place at the moment. It is the 800lb gorilla in the CPU space who knows that the manufacturer of gorilla food is currently unable to produce enough food to feed it (the PC market). More systems running windowed operating systems that people use will on a day to day basis will ship with ARM chips this year. That is a huge shift. And while Intel is still king of the server shipments there are people who want to be there too (Power and ARM). Two things contributed to that, the first was that the smartphone became the "PC" for the masses, the second was that Linux is instruction set agnostic in the data center.
Intel really really needs a market they can dominate that consumes lots and lots of chips. IoT is one bet, Wearables (apparently was) one bet. The scary thing for Intel is that if they don't have enough demand to keep their billion dollar fabs pumping, they start burning cash. Not clear what the strategy there is. Look at IBM which sold off their chip capability to Global Foundry. Once you have over capacity, a chip fab rapidly becomes a huge liability.
That said, the world could probably use a state of the art open access chip house that wasn't in Asia or controlled by the Chinese. Not sure that Intel could go there given their company history and organization.
Digression: One of the uniquely nice things about Sun was that since their fiscal calendar ended on June 30th, when they axed major projects the layoffs came in the spring rather than right before New Years. It always sucks to be laid off but there are worse and better times to do so.
Intel has never been a company focused on chip volume, they chose to exit the DRAM business 20+ years ago. They focus on high end high margin products, which is now primarily servers with the contraction of the PC market. This is how they justify greater than $10B yearly expenditures on fabs and R+D. They have maintained, and still do maintain a 2 generation lead on process technology.
Alternate architectures are not going to do much to dent the two generation lead in process.
IoT and Wearables mean nothing to Intel, there is not enough money there. Mostly a marketing effort to signal to their investors they aren't going to miss the next big opportunity like they did mobile. Of course that ignores the fact that Intel was never going to be much of a player in mobile. All the money in mobile is in the base stations, not in the handsets, and Qualcomm (3rd largest semi conductor company behind Intel and Samsung) completely dominates the IP in that market. What matters there is radio technology, not microprocessors.
And because of that, TSMC grows into the largest Pure Play company with market cap surpass Intel, and TSMC still has room to grow.
PC market is shrinking, their Server market is healthy for now but if Zen is anything as decent as rumoured it will give Intel some competition.
I dont believe ARM or PowerPC will give much trouble for Intel, at least not in the short run of 3 - 4 years time. Pretty much like Intel dont have much IP in mobile, no one will have the similar Server / Enterprise Grade IP in Storage, PCI-E, Memory, Networking and FPGA as Intel. All these matters a lot more then x86 these days.
I am not sure where the 2 Generation lead came from. It is more of a Generation lead. And it is shrinking, mainly due to Intel slowing down and other picking up pace a little. The 10nm from Samsung and TSMC next year wont be anything as good as Intel's 14nm. But their 7nm in 2018 will be better then Intel 14nm+. Of coz Intel will have 10nm by then, but it will be much smaller volume.
> IoT and Wearables mean nothing to Intel, there is not enough money there
Wearables maybe, as the market is relatively small as form factor-defined markets go, but I wouldn't be so quick to write off IoT, which describes a business model change more than a certain form factor or set of devices.
I listened to Murthy Renduchintala, President of the Intel IoTG group, speak at GE Minds+Machines earlier this week. He stressed FPGAs (acquisition of Altera) as well as SDN/NFV as key areas of interest for Intel going forward.
This is considering IoT from a semiconductor company's perspective; There will not be much revenue from the chips for this market. How much can they make per smart light bulb? You also have to note that Intel doesn't have semiconductor IP for nearly any radio protocol (BT, BTLE, Zigbee, they have wifi but not low end) necessary to build SoCs to win those markets.
IoT will be a big market, but the profits won't be going primarily to the semiconductor companies via chip sales. We won't likely see an "Intel Cloud Platform" or Intel selling IoT deployment services.
The FPGA tech is interesting, but mostly irrelevant to IoT. FPGAs can really benefit from Intels leading edge manufacturing, so that is a smart acquisition (even before considering IA integration possibilities).
Intel does not have much of a presence in networking, and there are a lot of competitors there who are more invested, and further, design their own silicon (Cisco, Juniper, Huawei, brocade maybe). Maybe if they are able to productize the silicon (as opposed to more exotic materials) optical transceivers they have spent a ton researching they would have something huge here.
All the money in mobile is in the base stations, not in the handsets, and Qualcomm (3rd largest semi conductor company behind Intel and Samsung) completely dominates the IP in that market.
Citation needed.
From the second half of your comment, I think it's possible you are confusing the base band processor[1] with base stations. Qualcomm does have a lot of IP in baseband processors, and has made a lot of money from them. However, baseband processors are on the handset not the base station.
It's also incorrect to think that mobile CPUs aren't a large market. They aren't Intel size, but they are quite substantial. The majority of Qualcomm's revenue is from CPU sales[2] (although SoCs like the Snapdragon include the baseband processor on the same chip)
Intel really really needs a market they can dominate that consumes lots and lots of chips. IoT is one bet, Wearables (apparently was) one bet.
Yes. And Computer Vision applications will likely be that market. There were big algorithmic break-throughs in the last decade and things are now mature and robust enough to be finally useful. Plus some immediate obvious customers are starting to show up: autonomous cars, AR/VR, drones.
Intel has acquired companies in the space for quite a while now (announced and un-announced deals) and will likely continue to do so. Trying to be an important player in this space is the right strategy IMO.
The potential of being a competitor in an as of yet unproven market wouldn't be a good reason to acquire them. If that market becomes very very big AND Nvidia wins it, Intel could buy them in cash if they wanted, they certainly have it on hand.
Why they haven't acquired them in the past, Intel clearly doesn't think they are worth it and preferred to compete against them directly on graphics.
Why would they? In the bigger scheme of things computer vision is still pretty much a clean slate. Nobody's making any serious money (yet). And Nvidia is still first and foremost a graphics company. Buying Nvidia for CV tech would be like buying Airbnb for its "trips" business.
Apart from that the FTC / US Justice would never allow that merger in the first place.
Intel's IoT effort seems very strange to me. You can get Rpi or similar board for $5-25, while and Edison or Currie is a lot more expensive. I know dev boards is not where they want to make their money .. but surely the chips cannot price compare with the ARM SoCs on the cheaper boards. Fine .. you can run Windows on your embedded device with these things (Windows IoT Core ... but that also works on cheaper boards like RPi). Do they have a path to success in IoT or is it just like step 2 for the underpants gnomes?
Btw .. I feel the same way wrt Cisco and IoT. Perhaps the only large company that gets IoT IMHO is Amazon.
Intel's acquisition of Altera seems promising but I don't know how big a market that is. High-end applications are certainly price-insensitive but there is a lot that can be done with older gen hardware and the Chinese are creeping up on that already.
Well, Intel has a "product management disease" - when orders for new development come from Ivy league schooled management doctrinaires, and not obvious demands of the market. All American semi companies I know suffer this, and that's why Chinese eat their lunch.
> That said, the world could probably use a state of the art open access chip house that wasn't in Asia or controlled by the Chinese. Not sure that Intel could go there given their company history and organization.
Why should a chip house not be in Asia?
What are the issues with control by the Chinese [I assume you mean the Chinese government]?
The primary issues are trade tariffs, loss of intellectual property, and national security.
Trade tariffs for providing economic sanctions against countries you don't like, you could add $0.10 to every chip sold into the US as a tariff and pretty much instantly put the US into a recession.
IP theft is always an issue, and it depends on a local jurisdiction government for enforcement, so if the local government is lax in their enforcement you will experience more IP theft. Hence the whole Gonkai aspect of things.
National security because, as we've seen in research, inserting a capacitor in the chip that is not part of the circuit can create an undetectable back door in silicon[1] and that can compromise chips in sensitive systems. Again local governmental oversight is the lever to avoid such things but if you were in a state of cold war with the government in question?
> Trade tariffs for providing economic sanctions against countries you don't like, you could add $0.10 to every chip sold into the US as a tariff and pretty much instantly put the US into a recession.
But that would harm China too.
For people not aligned with the US, what is the advantage of the US versus China with regards to backdoors? Especially after the Snowden leaks, it seems to be an issue of who is worse.
Of course, but who would it hurt worse? Rarely do nation-states engage in conflict and not also hurt themselves in the process, the idea is that it hurts the target a lot worse than it hurts at home. You might say that humans often start fights knowing they are going to get hurt but feeling like the fight is justified. China has economic controls that the US does not, which gives it the ability to dodge which the US doesn't have in an economic fight.
But many chips are bought in the US, so China would be hurt quite significantly (you're saying the US would be put into a recession which means the US buys lots of chips).
What is your estimation of how many chips are sold in the US versus sold in China and manufactured into products there? Tell me your understanding of what percentage of products sold in the US and sold in China use chips manufactured in China vs in the US?
Intel took it a step further and shut down the Peak’s software support (including cloud storage), effective by year’s end.
And thus the reason I stick to companies like Garmin for my "wearables". If Garmin up and pulls out of the wearables market, then the market is well and truly screwed and my choice won't make any difference. But a company like Intel or Microsoft can just up and go "well, that hobby project didn't work out. Back to our core business. Oh, and pull the servers down." and you the consumer are left holding the bag.
Not in this case. They're issuing MSRP refunds, no questions asked, in exchange for returns whose shipping they also cover.
Full disclosure: I've just shipped back my own Basis Carbon Steel - a device not even implicated in the overheating issue, but one for which they're still accepting returns and providing refunds. I paid ~$150 for it a few years back; they've said they'll be sending me a $234 check. Obviously, since I haven't yet received the check, I don't yet know with certainty that they'll live up to that claim, but they've given me no reason to doubt that they will. Overall I'm very favorably impressed with the way they're handling the issue.
They will. I made nearly $10k buying up used (and new) ones on eBay and other places and sending them back. I've gotten paid for everything so far.
I also learned about the recall around June, around two months before it started hitting the media, which gave me an advantage. Although my most recent purchase was within the last month, there's still a small opportunity.
Also someone else seems to have cornered the eBay market, items that go on sale now tend to be bought relatively quickly (looking at sold items) before I see them. I probably could have done better by setting up instant alerts and sniping auctions, but I'm pretty happy with what I did get for the level of effort.
I think there might be a culture clash between you and the grandparent.
As I understand it, no one is getting taken advantage of by the grandparent. eBay's a marketplace and the seller put their items up for bid. Fair dealing does not require a buyer to tell a seller what their item is worth to someone else. When a buyer gets a bargain, we celebrate.
Fair dealing does require sellers to be truthful about the quality of their goods though. Lying about a lemon and pawning it off onto someone then profiting off that lie is a bad deal.
I'm speaking as an American, and that's my understanding of how we trade. Your word is your bond, handshake deals are as good as a written contract - that sort of honor code is pervasive.
You should mind your own business. I mean that to be taken politely and not as a slam. There's just no better way to say it, so I said it. There is not enough information in your sentence for me to guess at what your thought process was, so I'm going to assume you were just expressing empathy and trying to be nice.
I'd like to hear a moral justification for how you came to judge the grandparent.
It's not my job to tell other people how to make money. They all got good prices from me that they were happy with.
If I had a model for stock trading that was better than the people I was trading with, is it unethical to use it since I could just tell people the stocks are worth more and they shouldn't sell it to me?
I buy products for resale all the time, and I don't need to tell the people I buy from how much more I plan to sell it for.
(Plus, some of the product was bought from larger companies that would never have bothered to get the refund themselves. One person I bought around 20 peaks, I'm pretty sure they were selling them on Amazon before they banned the listing and needed to liquidate. Some stuff I bought from Amazon directly, where it would clearly be impractical to tell them.)
I'd like to be in a position where such altruism had no downside, but I have one family member who requires round-the-clock care and another being laid off at the end of the year with no meaningful prospect of reemployment. Picking up ten thousand dollars that someone else is leaving on the table would do them a great deal of good right now.
Ah, yeah, you gotta do that. Sorry for jumping to conclusions -- I shouldn't transmute the moral failings of our economic order into personal immorality so carelessly.
So I get the impression that you find something generally immoral about capitalizing on unequal distribution of information.
I can't help but be reminded of the time years back when an Internet rando told me, in all earnestness, not only that I should not profit from my knowledge of how to write saleable software and the sale of my labor in so doing, but that in a truly equitable society I would not be allowed to do so, because not everyone knows how to do that and it's wrong of me to privilege my own interests over those of people who lack the knowledge I possess. In that case there's a slight difference of detail in the origin of the unequal distribution, but the general concept seems very much the same.
I would be interested to hear whether and how you see a meaningful distinction between the cases, and in general to see some expansion on the nature of the moral calculus which moved you to make the comment to which I and several others responded.
A fair risk they will just plan to do it themselves, then forget about it or rather postpone it because they can't find return address or something and then lose everything.
I do that kind of thing for friends but not for everyone.
It's true that you'll get your money back, but it's still a pain for the consumer since this isn't an optional recall. They're shutting down the servers that enable the client-side apps, so the Peaks won't sync anymore. This means consumers have to deal with the hassle of returning the unit and move to another platform, after taking the time to move to this one.
Business units and companies sometimes cease to operate. It's less than ideal, but a fact of life all the same. In this case, they're doing so in a fashion that's as consumer-friendly as possible. I think it's more worthwhile to laud that, in hopes other IoT businesses will find it worth their effort to do likewise, than to fuss about something that can't be changed in any case. But of course that's just my view of the matter.
Intel in particular has a pretty long record of making itself more directly relevant to consumers and just as long a history of mostly not having much success in that regard. (See ViiV/Digital Home for example.)
In general, though, wearables probably have to be considered a relatively underwhelming market so far. Yes, there are various fitness bands and smart watches that are mostly sold for fitness-related reasons and... Well, pretty much just fitness bands.
It's probably related to a lack of compelling capabilities in unobtrusive products that "just work" and don't require a lot of ongoing care and feeding.
I see the article mentions the Basis recall, but I want to expand on that here for those who might look first or only at the comments.
For those who don't already know: Because the Basis Peak developed a nasty habit of overheating to the point of second-degree burns, Intel has recalled all Basis devices - not just the Peak, but prior versions as well.
If you currently own a Basis device or devices, visit https://www.mybasis.com/safety/ in order to find out how to send your recalled device or devices back to Intel, in exchange for a full MSRP refund. (This is no small consideration! In my case, I bought a Basis Carbon Steel several years ago for about $150. In exchange for shipping it back to Intel, to whom it is currently en route, I'm told I will receive a check for $234.)
Be advised also that the Basis data services will be shut down at the end of this year. If you have fitness data in those services which you want to retrieve, you must do so before January 1, 2017, or it will no longer be recoverable. Also, and for the same reason, no Basis devices will be able to sync from that date, which will make them essentially unusable even if they would otherwise be.
It's sort of a shame to see a good product go down in flames like this. On the other hand, the way Intel's handling it is extremely impressive, and I'm very glad to see it - we can but hope, however forlornly, that this is the first example of a new and much more customer-friendly style of handling IoT deprecations.
Intel's wearables push always seemed more like a PR stunt than an actual, thought-through business tactic. They put a great deal of effort into stuff like Arduino support and sponsoring BMX championships, a TV show (America's Greatest Makers), conceptual clothing lines, etc but apparently people who actually wanted to use their hardware in products had trouble getting support or chips and the specs just didn't seem to stand up (when they were available at all).
It was, and to appease investors that they are doing something about new markets after missing mobile. No one in their right mind would choose Intel as the platform for a wearable. The microcontroller companies: ST, NXP, Freescale, etc have been deeply embedded there for decades.
Depends on the country. I've heard about people who made little fortunes being laid off. The most lucky one got laid off twice after long tenures at two different companies (due to the companies closing sites in the country or something like that).
Ever since the old guard missed the mobile wave, they don't seem to want to take any change on the "next-big-thing". If apple goes into something, they all jump right in, business case or not
Tech companies should just not try to make consumer products. Build your chips and your displays and your compilers and OSes, but please let retail businesses figure out what customers might want before you start building stuff just because you can. Apple is just about the only company that has managed to get away with doing both.
Asus, Acer, Samsung, Toshiba, MSI, IBM, Sony... all these companies and many others sell components to other companies, but also made consumer products that many people love. I don't quite get your logic.
Intel really really needs a market they can dominate that consumes lots and lots of chips. IoT is one bet, Wearables (apparently was) one bet. The scary thing for Intel is that if they don't have enough demand to keep their billion dollar fabs pumping, they start burning cash. Not clear what the strategy there is. Look at IBM which sold off their chip capability to Global Foundry. Once you have over capacity, a chip fab rapidly becomes a huge liability.
That said, the world could probably use a state of the art open access chip house that wasn't in Asia or controlled by the Chinese. Not sure that Intel could go there given their company history and organization.
Digression: One of the uniquely nice things about Sun was that since their fiscal calendar ended on June 30th, when they axed major projects the layoffs came in the spring rather than right before New Years. It always sucks to be laid off but there are worse and better times to do so.