Swan song. They're going to start cutting r+d and lose capacity to bring anything new to market
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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And that's how they lost mobile to Arm, because before the iPhone, Intel wasn't serious about mobile because of lower profit margins. Then when the mistake became obvious, they instead wasted billions trying to catch up quickly! And when that failed they gave up! The cost of course weren't so much development, as it was incentives to try to bribe phone/netbook/tablet makers to use Intel. While their product remained inferior.
It's also how they lost compute in datacenters to Nvidia and AMD. They only considered it basically just a GPU low profit niche market, until long efter it obviously was way more than that.
It's kind of arrogant to think a product needs to have 50+% profit margin to be worth it, if it can help penetrate a growing market or a multi billion dollar market.
This seems like a continuance of the Intel death spiral, and a continuance of the mindset that mostly stalled Intel development on the destop and datacenter for almost a decade, allowing AMD to become highly competitive, and enter Intel core markets with better products.
And that’s how they lost mobile to Arm, because before the iPhone, Intel wasn’t serious about mobile because of lower profit margins. Then when the mistake became obvious, they instead wasted billions trying to catch up quickly! And when that failed they gave up!
I am old enough to remember when there were x86 smartphones (very niche, they weren't available where I lived around that time, but they were in the news). This is spot on.
There were also x86 (Atom) based Android phones. For instance Asus sold them.
I don't think that's much more than 10 years ago.
That's what I am referring to. Seems like they got into the market in 2012 or so.
I remember thinking it would be a bad idea to get one.
I think you were right. 😋
😅
Good-bye Intel GPUs I guess.
Sounds like a short sighted plan.
Absolutely, it's not a plan, and it's not even a strategy, it's basically only a sort of financial tactic. And you almost never win on tactics alone.
AMD had a strategy back in 2016 to become more profitable by increasing profit margins over time. But this was to be accomplished by making more efficient and more competitive products.
The development roadmap was the plan for better products and which markets to compete in, the pricing structure was the strategy to increase profitability, and take server market share.
Right now it seems like intel is without either plan or strategy, they are trying to find their footing with day to day tactics.
So does this mean they are giving up on Arc dGPUs? There is no way they can maintain 50% gross margins for Arc.
I agree it's highly unlikely Intel makes much on Arc. But discontinuing it seems incredibly stupid. Even AMD continued Radeon development when it wasn't very profitable for them, and they were short on money for development.
And now Radeon is a significant part of AMD's datacenter compute, that AFAIK is highly profitable.
Of course they are kind of working in the shadow of Nvidia, but Nvidia has such insane profits, that it makes room for high profitability for secondary players, if they can deliver something decent.
And if Nvidia fucks up, AMD is ready.