Replies to post #136623 on Intel Corp (INTC)

[Unkwn]

ARM>Haswell. Who'd 'a thunk it?

Who said Intel integrated graphics would be particularly great? That always was Intel's weak spot. As long as people are only gaming on their tablets since they don't find anything sensible to do with them that matters I guess. Go google CPU performance.

Still mad you missed the train on Intel's share price?

Isn't Tegra K1-32 still on 28nm planar process while Haswell is on Intel 22nm with the vaunted "TriGate" 3D transistors? ......what's up with that??

Who said those would be helping for graphics? Graphics are low clocked and very broad designs. Not something you need finfets for. Finfets are needed for very high clocks (only Intel has them, foundries are all stuck at < 3 GHz designs) and lower power consumption/leakage.

And how do you think they came to "dominate" this ~$200/unit market? 2 words: "Contra" and "Revenue".

Maybe and it's actually fine with me as long as they keep ARM out of their PC business (which includes Chrome OS for me), which they do well as of now.

Besides: Do you think that Nvidia isn't losing money with their ARM SoC business? What about Samsung? Do you think they are making money with it? In the high end, only Qualcomm makes money that way and this has a lot to do with their lead in modems, which is about to vanish. We'll see who is going to survive that game but Nvidia doesn't really have the financial support for it I guess. Samsung certainly has, no doubt about it.

Sorry, I thought you were talking about Intel's "major business." If you think Chromebooks qualify as "major business" for Intel, I stand corrected. To me it read like you were talking about a business that Intel actually made money in.

If PCs include Chromebooks, then ARM is already invading Intel's PC business.

Not Chrome OS is Intel's major business but PCs are and I count Chrome OS in that. From a volume perspective, it currently doesn't matter for Intel, but if Chrome OS is going to grow up and eat into Windows market share, it is very important for Intel to dominate that ecosystem like ARM did at the rise of Android.

Intel will make money in it with Core I versions of those devices - you can already pay 100$ more for some Chromebooks and get a Core I variant. The more productive work Chrome OS will allow for (local installations are announced already), the more compute power you'll need. Intel has it and people are going to pay more for it. Business as usual. I think Chrome OS actually could be the way out of Intel's PC demise.

Regarding contra revenue, we're going to see how that affects Intel's earning which are going to be announced soon.

[wbmw]

Isn't Tegra K1-32 still on 28nm planar process while Haswell is on Intel 22nm with the vaunted "TriGate" 3D transistors? ......what's up with that??

Process leadership is often necessary - but sometimes insufficient. Haswell is a PC design, and scales to 4GHz speeds, at the higher TDPs. Tegra K1 is great as a 6-8W processor, but you'll neither get great 3-5W performance if you scale-down, nor will you get >3GHz speeds if you scale-up.

There's also an argument to make about the architecture. Haswell reuses the graphics architecture of Ivy Bridge, while you can argue that nVidia's Kepler is quite a bit better. From what I can see with Broadwell, not only can Intel score better than Haswell 15W - but it does so at around a third of the power (I'll note that the 50k score could have been at the "config-up" TDP of 6W, instead of the nominal TDP of 4.5W). So I think Broadwell gets the benefit of both the process shrink, as well as the Gen8 architecture enhancements.

Of course, nVidia seems to have done miracles with the Maxwell design, showing between 1.5-2x the performance/watt of Kepler - and which they will integrate into Tegra next year. So it may take Gen9 and Skylake before Intel can get ahead of nVidia at their own game.