THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

WHAT, EXACTLY, has happened to Intel? The once unassailable leader in both PC processors and chip manufacturing generally now looks second best by almost every conceivable technological metric. AMD’s CPUs appear cleverer. TSMC’s manufacturing technology seems more advanced. Intel, it seems, has completely lost its way.

Even in the mobile PC space, which Intel has absolutely owned for decades, AMD’s new Renoir APU has the edge. Likewise, how is it that AMD has offered PCI Express 4.0 on desktop PCs for a year, but Intel hasn’t even announced future support for what is a crucial highspeed interconnect?

Things are so bad that Apple is said to be planning to ditch Intel in favor of its own ARM-based processors. Worse, Intel itself is rumored to be considering TSMC as a manufacturing partner for selected future products, including its first consumer graphics card in decades. Truly, that would be the ultimate humiliation.

Or would it? Last year, despite those issues, Intel enjoyed record revenues of $72 billion. In fact, in pure commercial terms Intel’s main problem has been keeping up with demand for its chips from so-called hyperscalers. That’s the likes of Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Facebook et al, who simply can’t get enough of Intel’s Xeon processors. Meanwhile, there are good reasons to think that Intel will soon be back on track when it comes to both chip manufacturing and CPU architectures.

thing summarizes Intel’s woes? Try “10nm.” Chip production technology isn’t Intel’s only failing—a strong case could also be made for the company becoming ever more complacent over the past decade when it comes to CPU