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IM Flash doesn't have 3D NAND yet. But by the end of this year, they may be ahead of Samsung or at least head on head. I doubt that Sandsk and Toshiba will have the money to keep up in this race against Samsung vs Intel\Micron.
Just give it a quick thought: Global harddisk space basically dominated by this duopoly, Samsung and Intel/Micron. There's some nice volume for those empty Intel fabs, don't you think?
Us Intel bulls should keep a close eye on the IM joint venture. Micron needs Intel know how to fight back Samsung. That's a mighty good old US semiconductor partnership.
I don't think we'll see classic HDDs that long in the market from here. This is old tech going the same way as magnetic floppy drives. Thinking again about shorting Western Digital.
IM Flash doesn't have 3D NAND yet. But by the end of this year, they may be ahead of Samsung or at least head on head. I doubt that Sandsk and Toshiba will have the money to keep up in this race against Samsung vs Intel\Micron.
Just give it a quick thought: Global harddisk space basically dominated by this duopoly, Samsung and Intel/Micron. There's some nice volume for those empty Intel fabs, don't you think?
Us Intel bulls should keep a close eye on the IM joint venture. Micron needs Intel know how to fight back Samsung. That's a mighty good old US semiconductor partnership.
I don't think we'll see classic HDDs that long in the market from here. This is old tech going the same way as magnetic floppy drives. Thinking again about shorting Western Digital.
wthdik2
I really don't get your point. You can buy sub 100$ Windows tablets with office and x86 support for legacy apps. Why opt for ARM? It's not lower power, not faster and not even cheaper since Bay Trail. If people would choose like you're saying, nobody would buy Android tablets anymore today.
So, name one single advantage for ARM in the Windows space, just one.
I wrote this a few times already but nobody seems to be listening. IoT will be a big market, not much doubt about it. You just have to rename all this embedded microcontroller market to IoT and there you go - huge market. But that's a market with ultra low margins. Haven't heard of any rich microcontroller company recently, have you? Where's the difference to mobile or the PC market: Simply performance. People don't care about the CPU perfomance of their fridge or toothbrush but they care a lot about the performance of their smartphone and PC.
Intel can profit from that through its own foundry business. Design wins won't move the needle much (despite for comms maybe), so that's not a must in my opinion. It certainly doesn't harm if Intel has proven silicon with its own IP for this market, but they should be very open towards producing about everything anyone wants to on Intel's fabs. No reason to push Intel's design here.
If one wants to see something positive, I think it is that Intel is forced to go low end with SOFIA, so hopefully they'll learn how to play this cost competitive. Once they have something competitive, hopefully Broxton with integrated modem by the end of 2016, they can get breakeven. If not, I don't see Intel having the capabilities to win this, which, long term, is a bad thing for them.
Something positive that hasn't been mentioned here during all this mobile first discussion: The Steam boxes are about to get released. The first ones will be mainly Windows based, since only about a quarter of the games will run on the Linux based Steam OS, but in general, I think this could be a very positive thing for Intel. Just look at the volume of the console business. That's 20-30 million devices per year. If Steam catches a bigger chunk of that business, that will most likely be Intel based machines, and in many if not most cases, high end ones. So, AMD gets the ultra low prices from the console vendors and Intel gets the high end prices from the enthusiasts, not bad, is it?
If Steam OS will manage to support most of the games that are sold on Steam, it will most likely make its way through, replacing Windows on these machines. That makes them cheaper, and, if Valve does its job right, they can concentrate their work on multimedia and games, making Steam machines the perfect multimedia extension for your TV, even with support for full productivity work, since it is Linux based. I think that has a lot of potential, since the consoles get updated way too slow but many people would prefer to stay more on the leading edge with their gaming hardware but don't want to have a clunky desktop in their living room. There's a lot of money to make for Intel in this segment, since these people are paying well for the fastest hardware. Intel already embraced the enthusiast segment for PCs since these are the end consumers who buy the highest end CPUs.
Steam OS could also allow for better scaling, meaning that you could have a mobile gaming device with integrated screen which uses for example one of the Intel Ultrabook processors. My Macbook Air for example runs games well that were from the last PS3 and Xbox generation with really nice looks. If game developers take care of performance scaling, this would open a new segment between handhelds and consoles. With Steam OS, these devices could still be used for everyday work according to the user's preferences.
If Steam OS gets big, on the other hand, Intel really must be careful since Linux is pretty much platform agnostic, so that's the other side of the medal. Intel really must dominate in terms of performance from lowest (electrical) power devices up to the highest power ones. That's a must for this to be safe.
It is really a pity that one can't buy shares from Valve. I wouldn't hesitate if the price was right.
We know already what Broxton is going against, Andy. We'll see how that plays out. Broxton will have a hard time due to the missing integrated modem. Intel needs way too long for that. I have no clue what their problem with that is. By the way, I am really interested in how Qualcomm an the likes will manage modem integration in a Finfet process. That's a new playing field. We'll see if there will be delays or yield issues with that.
Guys, I do think the air is getting a bit thin for Intel. If Qualcomm really is able to top the performance of ARM's A72 and they'll release it this year, things start to get ugly for Intel. The performance of these chips is beginning to threaten Intel's business. Yes, I know, these benchmarks are all lying, these are all not high performance CPUs and so on, but if Intel isn't fighting them right now and do it seriously, these competitors have enough money to also go against Intel's core business. It's just a matter of time. Intel needs to be better than all of them, otherwise, sooner or later, they'll also be better than Intel in servers and one day in desktops. All that money from mobile (and memory in case of Samsung) is financing them their leading edge fabs. Yes, Intel is ahead, but that's by one year and Samsung seems to execute aggressively with their process advances. I wouldn't expect a big lead for Intel at 10nm anymore, not with their capital spending they can afford. Maybe half a year, not more.
Look, Intel has 14nm for quite some time now. Why aren't there 14nm mobile chips in the market? Why don't they have their damn modem integrated already? That really is an issue they could have seen years ago, together with the integration issues in mobile in general. What the heck were these guys thinking?
Why is Cherry Trail just a process shrink, without improvement of the CPU (yes, GPU is updated, which is more than necessary)? Does Intel really think they can continue with their lame tick tock stuff in mobile against these guys? Releasing one architectural CPU upgrade while the competition releases 2 or even 3? WTF? Do they really think they can get away with 10% performance improvements of their main CPU core? That's not the way how they can defend a 50 billion dollar business.
I stick with my investment case: Either Broxton delivers on all fronts and sells well (and that at least at breakeven price), with integrated high end modem by the second half of 2016 in devices, or Intel will be in deep trouble. This is not going to end well.
Intel as a foundry business with some server, most PC and some IOT share? This is going to end badly. This competition will, sooner or later, eat into Intel's core business and I don't want to be part of that when it happens.
Luckily, the Windows 10 upgrade cycle is likely to give some more upside to Intel's shares and Wallstreet doesn't care much about mid-long term prospects. So there's enough time to wait and see what happens 2016 before pulling the trigger.