In today's WTF moment Intel has announced that it's getting out of the PC business. I guess this explains why they laid all those people off. It's funny that AMD might actually win the PC CPU war but only because Intel says the war is over. http://www.pcworld.com/article/3061...s-it-lays-out-a-broader-5-point-strategy.html
Sounds exactly like IBM about 10 years ago. Now IBM Is pretty much irrelevant, while Lenovo took over their spunoff PC division to great success. This sounds like a bunch of business douches talking who don't even understand or care about the business intel is in and are just chasing short term gains, while spouting trendy buzzwords like "cloud" and "internet of things." I see nothing concrete in what they are proposing. Just a bunch of bullshit. They are going to run intel into the ground. I expect intel to be bankrupt in the next decade if they go down this path. If anything they should be dropping everything else and just focusing on what they do well, PC CPUs. They are PC CPU company first and foremost.
Intel kind of blew it on the mobile processor side, so I can see why they would look for a way to deemphasize the PC biz as it's primarily mobile oriented now...
I'm both surprised and not surprised. I'm surprised because PCs have been their bread and butter for a long time and they are really good at it. I'm not surprised because there has been a 20% drop in PC sales and they can't make anything faster than a Skylake, AMD will probably be able to match the Broadwell this year and maybe Skylake in a few years and Intel wont be able to beat them on anything but power usage. At that point they'll probably lose half their PC market share. I'm sure PCs will always be a money maker but they're a R&D behemoth that can't survive off scraps like AMD can. Also when you take a look at Nvidia's plans for the future they seem kind of similar to Intels. Nvidia doesn't go as far as to abandon the PC but they do seem to be doubling down on project outside of the PC realm.
Intel pulling back from PCs will be a good thing for consumers if it means AMD becomes competitive in the CPU market again.
Intel is discontinuing the Atom CPU. Seems like a smart move. The Atom was hot garbage, and the netbook fad died ages ago in favor of ultrabooks and tablets. And Atom was never going to compete with ARM for smartphones and tablets. http://www.pcworld.com/article/3063...-tablet-markets-after-cutting-atom-chips.html
I'm surprised they didn't cancel it back in 2011 or 2012 when it became clear that ultrabooks with Core i series ULV chips were the way forward for ultraportable notebooks and not netbooks.
Maybe they kept it as a competitive business strategy. Keep it in the reserve and force other chip companies to keep prices low so Intel wont sell it. Low prices means lower profits means less money for R&D and maybe I'm overthinking it.
Got some Skylake i5 systems in today. I also have some Haswell i5 systems that I have been running (using one myself) for a while. The base clock between the two is a little different (3.0 on Haswell compared to 3.2 on Skylake) but I might run a few CPU benchmarks on them both to see what difference there is.
Skylake is so old. Make way for Kaby Lake which is Super Exciting because it's just like Skylake, and Haswell, but with slightly improved power efficiency. https://www.techpowerup.com/222140/intel-core-i7-7700k-kaby-lake-processor-detailed