Intel Chairman Says Company Had Lost Its Way

News
By Kevin Parrish
published

Andy Bryan and Brian Krzanich talk about smartphones and tablets.

Intel chairman Andy Bryant recently admitted that the company is currently paying the price of not jumping into the tablet and mobile device bandwagon in time, seemingly echoing a similar admittance by Microsoft. He said the data was there to see the shift from desktop to mobile, but Intel simply missed it.

Bryant also admitted his embarrassment over the fact that Intel seemed to have lost its way. But now Intel has a new CEO, Brian Krzanich, who looks at the world as it is, not as how Intel wishes it would be. "His impact on strategies is starting to be felt," Bryant said during a day-long investor meeting at the company's Silicon Valley headquarters.

Krzanich chimed in, saying that Intel's technology can be used in all form factors, from the biggest servers to the desktop to the tablet to the smartphone to even smaller devices. In fact, the company has even opened its doors to manufacturing ARM-based designs.

"The PC market is beginning to see signs of stabilization," Krzanich said. He noted that although there's still a decline in the PC sector, the decline is actually slowing. What Intel needs to watch, he said, is the emerging market. Currently, Intel sees big money in the data center market, predicting a continued growth of 15 percent through 2016.

On the smartphone front, he pointed to a few design wins, despite the company's struggles, and said 2013 was the year of establishing its footprint. The company also seeks to more than quadruple its tablet business in 2014 by pushing over 40 million units.

"We've got to have that footprint," Krzanich said. "We've got to have that scale."

Kevin Parrish
46 Comments Comment from the forums
  • -Fran-
    They're still making CPUs, so they haven't lost their way. I think Intel tried to chew more than it could. IMO it wasn't the size of their mouth the issue, but the timing they started to chew.

    Oh well, I don't think they'll have any issues putting some order in the house and going after the markets they want.

    Cheers!
    Reply
  • stevejnb
    Eh, short term wise, the numbers agree with him, but... Tablets and smartphones are moving past their infancy and are reaching a point where they need more power and to be more capable. Intel is proving that they can be competitive on the fronts of size and efficiency, but do ARM processors have it in them to compete on the capability front while still offering small sizes and high efficiency? I have yet to see evidence of that.

    The way I see it, Intel is doing so-so in the mobile market right now but, as demand for higher power tablets/phones comes around, Intel is the best show in town and this will be reflected in the CPU choices of various companies in the near future.

    There is always the cloud revolution looming which could result in hardware requirements hitting rock bottom and size/battery life being pretty much everything, but I think that is far enough off that we'll see Intel's powerful but still small and efficient CPUs pick up big time.
    Reply
  • blubbey
    Never underestimate Intel. They have some good people, great fabs and a hell of a lot of money.
    Reply
  • NightLight
    i still prefer intel over amd, just because i had so much bad luck with amd stuff. Fact is, they have the best proc's out there for the moment, however, the level of performance it being held down artificially by lack of competition... Time for a new, mindblowing age of computing.
    Reply
  • Josh Brumpton
    Good, fed up of everything switching to mobile.
    Reply
  • MajinCry
    Remove the "If GenuineIntel == 0" from the compilers, and then we'll talk.

    -Removed- Intel.

    -Watch the language
    Reply
  • jimmysmitty
    12068192 said:
    Remove the "If GenuineIntel == 0" from the compilers, and then we'll talk.

    -Removed- Intel.

    -Watch the language

    You mean the compilers that are not even used in the majority (90%) of software? The same compilers that are designed to work best with Intels hardware, much like CUDA/PhysX with NVidia or Mantle/ TressFX for AMD?

    If Intel does that then NVidia and AMD should open up their proprietary software/hardware as well, no?

    Guess what, it wont happen as that's how companies one up the others. Ford has Microsoft SYNC. Other companies have their own equivalent but SYNC has advantages.

    Without them everyone would have the same hardware and there would be no reason to pick one over the other.
    Reply
  • MajinCry
    12068313 said:
    You mean the compilers that are not even used in the majority (90%) of software?
    I doubt that figure. Would you please provide evidence for it?

    12068313 said:
    The same compilers that are designed to work best with Intels hardware

    Read this.
    12068313 said:
    much like CUDA/PhysX with NVidia or Mantle/ TressFX for AMD?

    Quite fallacious.

    That comparison doesn't even work. They're technologies tailored to each card. If you're going to use THAT method, you'd best use an API. Such as DirectX. Which doesn't hold water, due to NVidia (por ejemplo) not being able to do a "If != NVidia then Cripple()" at runtime.

    12068313 said:
    If Intel does that then NVidia and AMD should open up their proprietary software/hardware as well, no?

    If what, Intel removes the "Cripple AMD()" function from their compilers, NVidia and AMD should make their software/hardware open source?

    Ladies and gentlemen, I quote you a non sequitur!

    12068313 said:
    Guess what, it wont happen as that's how companies one up the others. Ford has Microsoft SYNC. Other companies have their own equivalent but SYNC has advantages.

    Another completely, and utterly, fallacious comparison.

    A more accurate one would be: Toyota has gained 80% of the oil marketshare and implemented a way to check if your engine is manufactured by Toyota or not. If your engine is a non-Toyota certified engine, it will use up twice as much oil than a Toyota engine. However, if you fool the check into thinking you have a Toyota engine, it uses up as much as a Toyota engine with no problems at all.

    If Toyota were to do such a thing, you'd probably support it too. :pfff:

    12068313 said:
    Without them everyone would have the same hardware and there would be no reason to pick one over the other.

    Without "them"? You mean different hardware manufactures or anti-competitive practices?
    Reply
  • iamtheking123
    The whole "Intel optimized compiler" thing is a joke. It's a product written BY INTEL. If they want to make it not work at all with AMD CPU's, it's their right to do it. You don't like it? Use a generic compiler.
    Reply
  • ddpruitt
    12068621 said:
    The whole "Intel optimized compiler" thing is a joke. It's a product written BY INTEL. If they want to make it not work at all with AMD CPU's, it's their right to do it. You don't like it? Use a generic compiler.

    The problem is that the Intel compiler is oft used for compiling benchmark apps, see the problem? To top that off the Intel compiler is know to use undocumented features in order to provide better performance than any non-Intel compiler can provide and thus it tends to be used fairly often. The biggest issue is that given the same feature set Intel put effort into deliberately making sure that optimized code is different depending on the chip that it runs on. For example code that would optimize well to a particular SSE instruction would only be optimized on Intel chips, on non-Intel chips the slowest instruction would be chosen. This is a no-no for a number of reasons. This problem is large enough that benchmarks on Intel chips can't be trusted anymore. See:

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/07/12/intel_atom_didnt_beat_arm
    Reply