Now Wintel is waning and significant $$$$$ is diverting away from Wintel.
This is the current state of affairs.
When Intel got serious about attacking the server market in the
early 90s it faced incumbents who collectively had far more $$$.
The key advantage of Intel was its cash was concentrated while
that of all its competitors was diluted over many overlapping
and redundant development efforts. Sound familiar?
I think $$$$$$$ flowing more evenly among competitors will adversely affect the size of Intel's lead.
The problem Intel faces in mobile isn't money but the rate of
change of the market. It is still in flux and nobody can predict
where the sweet spot of the next generation silicon is in terms
of features vs perf vs cost vs power. The ARM collective is
throwing dozens of darts all around the board while Intel can
only throw one or two. The odds are that at least one of the
ARM darts will be closer than Intel's when the market sweet
spot reveals itself. Keep in mind that this also means most of
the ARM players miss at least as much as Intel. But the market
will mature and become slower moving and more predictable.
This will favor Intel's slow to market but intensely engineered
product development over the throw shit quickly together and
see if if this recipe sticks to the wall approach of most ARM
licensees.
You appear to contend that Intel is beyond the reach of anything.
To me, that sounds like a dubious proposition.
Absolutely not. Any company can fail if it loses the thread.
Let's divide Intel's component side future into three slices.
The first is traditional x86 - PCs and servers. IMO servers
are very safe for Intel and will continue to grow. PCs are
now a mature market but still fill a vital function in business,
government, and households. Absolute sales will probably
still increase slowly because about 3/4 of households in the
world still don't have a PC but PC silicon will represent a
gradually dropping percent of total IC sales over time. IMO
anyone predicting PC sales are on a one way slide to oblivion
is a flaming idiot who should have a system Z box dropped
on their head to knock 50 years of sense into them. The odds
of another architecture taking meaningful share away from x86
in PCs is IMO very low.
The second slice is tablets. These are in many ways netbooks
without a keyboard that aspire to be laptops without a keyboard.
The similarity to PCs means Intel should have a much easier
entry point than smart phones, especially if tablets becomes a
popular platform for serious gaming (i.e. CIV5, not angry birds).
Silicon requirements will stabilize faster than in phones so it
is easier for Intel to aim the big guns at it. I think it is unlikely
that Intel will fail to capture the majority of the non-Apple
tablet market within 5 years.
The third slice is phones. Here the processor side of things
is the least important and the RF side is the most important
as things stand right now. With wireless data standards moving
so fast it is hardly surprising that the data RF IP leader is
in the lead today for phone processors. Will Intel gain a foot
hold here? I think the odds are better than even that it will
eventually although it will be much slower and painful than
in tablets. It depends on whether Qualcomm or someone else
can drive global RF standards churn with LTE quickly replaced
by LTE2 and so on to keep everyone else in catch-up mode. If
phone RF standards stabilize like WiFi then Intel may be able
to employ exotic process add-ons like 3-5 islands to achieve
higher degrees of phone silicon integration than competitors
but that is years down the road if ever. The key for Intel is
keeping system level costs competitive by getting the device
feature set right but not including baggage that reduces its
own margin on the device. The processor side is second order
effects unless it is extraordinarily good or bad.
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