Intel Corp (INTC)

[mas]

The foundries 10nm process is only about 20% denser than Intel's 14nm which cost-wise can be made up in better yields and Intel's 14nm yield should be quite good by then just in time for Intel's 14nm Broxton/Sofia/Modems to be produced cheaply in volume. Intel's 10nm should then restore Intel's process advantage debuting around the same time as the foundries inferior 10nm variants. The problems Intel has faced at 14nm is understandable considering it is the world leader and 193nm lithography is still being used many years after debut. For a manufacturing guy though BK is more of a marketing BSer than Otellini lol. Like AE said he is unremarkable.

This whole process discussion while interesting is not really relevant in the short to medium term to INTC while the rough process differences remain between everyone. What is more relevant in the nearer term is the threat that Zen might be to Intel's x86 chips. AMD supposedly can get 32 SMT cores on a die in a 2-way SMP configuration which shows it's not a really hot design like the 'Dozy cores. It won't have Intel's single-thread performance but it will be closer like Stars cores were and it looks like they can get more cores than Intel on a die.

AMD now being fabless won't get into any market share wars wanting to maximize profit instead but it might be taking back some of the share it has lost since 2006 anyway just by having a better quality product than the post-Stars crap it has been churning out. The other danger is that a big cloud user like say Amazon goes ARM server in quantity just for performance/cost reasons.

So there are traditional threats to Intel outside of the most common popular fear these days of encroaching ARM mobile chips on advanced foundry processes which has always been overstated and exaggerated.