Intel Corp (INTC)

[chipguy]

The future of computing is mobile.

Yeah right. You think your paychecks and banking transactions
are performed on a laptop let alone something that can be dropped
in a toilet?

Desktops and notebooks are slow growing at best, but they're going to fade in relevance in due time.

Desktops and notebooks are task appropriate to a huge proportion
of work and recreational computing. Until human eyes and fingers
can be miniaturized this will not change. Form follows function.

Soon you will have enough power in your tablet/phone to dock it

Yes, a supercomputer the size of your fingernail!!!

Leave the pablum superlatives for popular mechanics to dish out
to the great unwashed.

At ANY GIVEN TIME whatever computing/rendering/storage capacity
you have in a X gram, Y cubic centimeter phone you can easily get
at least 100x more of all of that in a 100X gram, 100Y cubic centimeter
desktop case. That's the funny thing about Moore's rising tide in semi
technology, it lifts all boats equally.

Another thing is that smart phones aren't really all that smart in any
absolute sense. They give that impression to the uninformed because
they typically perform tasks where the heavy lifting is done on a x86
server in some huge datacenter somewhere. They are effectively a
hand-held thin client. The more phones that get sold, the more data
centers have to be built and filled with x86 servers to service them.
Ironically the overwhelming value of the phone is simply connectivity
to x86 based data centers. But go on believing its all happening in
your hand if it makes you feel better.

I don't think many people truly appreciate the threat from the ARM folks here.

Clearly Intel needs to bull its way into the smart phone SoC market
to maintain growth and semi market share but anyone who thinks the
bulk of computing silicon value is heading down into handhelds needs
to pull their head out. The microwave oven was a great complement
to the electric stove but it didn't replace it. Heck, IBM mainframes are
still a lucrative ~$4B/year market with the highest growth rate of all
server segments in 3Q. So aeassa, when do you think ARM servers
will reach sales of $4B/yr?

Here's an interesting nugget from yesterday:

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prAE24552013

MEA x86 Server Market Enjoys Strong Growth in Q3 2013, Says IDC

...the MEA x86 server market expanded 9.9% in volume during Q3 2013, with revenue rising 10.6% over the same period.

[..]

Shipments of one-socket servers grew an impressive 24.8% over Q3 2012, securing market share of 30.4%, up 3.6 percentage points higher than last year. Two-socket servers remain the dominant socket capability, however, comprising more than half of the MEA market with 65.1% unit share. Four- and eight- socket servers continued to grow in the third quarter of the year, recording year-on-year volume increases of 24.3% and 47.4%, respectively.