Paul Otellini

Intel speeds up road map to tackle threat from ARM

is the title of an article by ComputerWorld that talks about Intel’s decision to move off of center from desktop and server processors to mobile processing.

My thoughts? Without having seen the numbers put together by Intel I say it could be a poor strategic decision. The mobile ship has basically sailed. My view on this comes with a set of assumptions. They are:
1. That wireless communication speeds are likely to continue to increase.
2. That computationally intensive tasks will increasingly be offloaded to the “cloud” as many like to call it.
3. That processing power is near enough to being sufficient for all necessary application that a mobile platform
may want to run.

Given my assumptions it’s not hard to see why I say that this could be a poor long term decision for Intel. The market is near a point where mobile devices will no longer benefit marginally from additional speed increases. So what is it that Intel has to offer the market that’s not already present? Definitely their new “3D” process should benefit the market in terms of energy consumption, but they just as easily could render profit from this technology through licensing and royalties instead of allocating so many resources to a new division where they definitely lack market share.

It is understandable that Intel would want to shift out of consumer processing. This is a market with a limited shelf life in terms of sustainability. Fewer and fewer people will need PCs with the emergence of devices that fulfill their needs that were previously only met by desktop machines. The server market will remain strong for some time but they know that as well. I think however that they’re moving in the wrong direction for profitability. That’s just me, and I have nowhere near the quality of metrics Intel is likely to have when making these decisions.

Time will tell the truth. She never lies.