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> Intel's had many competitors and they're doing just fine (even despite screwing up repeatedly with their processes!)

With AWS offering ARM systems, all the Chromebooks, Apple, the complete loss of the phone market, Intel’s staying power is about to be tested to the extreme.



Most of those don't matter and didn't matter anyway: Chromebooks and Apple desktops are a tiny portion of a small market; Apple's volume chips are iPhones. Intel never really had a grip on any kind of mobile handset market and hasn't for years, despite that they still post record profits. That's because the margins on handsets are very slim, unless you're Apple.

The only actual major change here is AWS offering Graviton, which actually hints at their real cash cow: datacenter SKUs with absurd markup. Something like 80% of their profit margins are here. More accurately, the change is that there are now viable silicon competitors to Intel in the performance department. So it's now clear that ultra-integrated hyperscalers who can actually afford tape out costs (7nm CPUs are not cheap to produce in volume) have an option to vertically integrate with e.g. Neoverse. Smaller players will not do this still, because alternative options like Rome will be adequate. But the only reason any of them are changing anything is cost savings, because now there are actual viable competitors to Intel when there were zero of them for like, 15 years. Producing cutting edge silicon products isn't easy, but it's very profitable, it turns out.

To be clear, Intel isn't charging $10,000 for a Xeon Platinum because it costs $9500 to make and they make $500 in profit. (Likewise, AMD doesn't produce competitors at 1/5th the price because they made a revolutionary, scientific breakthrough in processor design.) They're charging what you'll pay, not what it takes to produce. Seeing as they currently still have a complete stranglehold on the datacenter industry and make more in a quarter than most of their competitors do in several years, I suspect they've got much more "staying power" than the watercooler chat on this website would lead you to believe.




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