back to article Can nothing trip up the runaway cash monster that is Intel? Well...

Intel posted solid earnings for the second quarter of its fiscal 2014 on Tuesday, yet for all its encouraging growth, Chipzilla remains hard hit by the soft PC market and it still shows worrying weakness in the otherwise-booming mobile sector. Total revenues for the three months ending June 28 were $13.8bn, a 7.8 per cent year …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Investors aren't counting on Intel to succeed in mobile

    Because they won't. But Intel dominates in PC CPUs, and whatever decline there is in PCs will be made up for by increases in servers.

    Intel's mobile revenue may actually be negative, when you add in the "contra revenue" they had to pay to induce companies to buy their mobile SoCs at all.

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: Investors aren't counting on Intel to succeed in mobile

      But Intel dominates in PC CPUs, and whatever decline there is in PCs will be made up for by increases in servers.

      For how much longer? The current server boom coincides but doesn't correlate with the PC business.

      ARM is continuing to expand up the food chain and we'll start seeing serious ARM servers over the next 12 months. If any of them deliver significant reductions in capital or operating expenditure we can expect to see the results in Intel's bottom line as it will be forced to reduce prices to maintain market share.

      1. Charles Manning

        Intel is getting a huge lift from mobile...

        All those mobiles hauling stuff from the interwebs are backed by servers and show up in the Intel books as servers chips.

        What must be really frightening for Intel is that mobile and even this IoT stuff are both growing fast but Intel is not reflecting that. Even if Intel's revenue is increasing, their market share is declining in these areas. It does not help to show tiny growth when everyone else in these sectors are going gangbusters.

        Worse still for Intel is that they have already played all their trumps and aces in mobile and IoT. What more magic can they come up to slow the bleeding? Let alone stop it and turn it around.

        1. Mage Silver badge

          Re: Intel is getting a huge lift from mobile...

          Intel swallow pride and use the ARM licence they already have since forever. They didn't flog ALL their ARM to Marvell either. They have an ARM based comms SoC.

          1. Nigel 11

            Re: Intel is getting a huge lift from mobile...

            Yes, Intel will eventually have to follow plan B. Use their world-leading process technology to fab the world's best-performing ARM chips for whoever pays them to do so. They won't make so much money this way, since royalties will flow to ARM, but a profit is a profit.

            IMO ARM trying to breakl into the server room is much like Intel trying to break into mobile space. For various reasons, I expect Intel to keep its hold on servers for a long time to come.

            1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

              Re: Intel is getting a huge lift from mobile...

              ARM trying to breakl into the server room is much like Intel trying to break into mobile space.

              It will depend on the kind of servers being required: for some jobs x86 is just what you need, for others it's just too much silicon. Of course, there will only be any kind of take up if the migration between systems is easy enough and we may need a whole new metrics area which works out which services run best of which architectures. I think AMD's approach may work well here: x86 for grunt stuff, GPU for vectoring, custom (ARM) for encryption and standard ARM for simple stuff like http-serving.

          2. Charlie Clark Silver badge

            Re: Intel is getting a huge lift from mobile...

            @Mage

            They didn't flog ALL their ARM to Marvell either. They have an ARM based comms SoC.

            AFAIK They did sell all the ARM to Marvell, the comms SoC was bought from Infineon and is a different beast to the pretty impressive StongARMs they had.

  2. John Smith 19 Gold badge
    Unhappy

    " we believe that over time we can make [mobility] a profitable business,"

    As soon as we've got our pals Microsoft to drop all ARM support.

    FTFY.

    They won't do SOC's the way mobile mfgs want them and they damm sure won't price them the way mobile mfg's know they can be priced.

    1. Charlie Clark Silver badge

      Re: " we believe that over time we can make [mobility] a profitable business,"

      As soon as we've got our pals Microsoft to drop all ARM support

      Microsoft has pretty much done this already with the Surface 3 Pro being the only Surface 3 in town. Pretty much everyone else has given up making Windows Phone now that Microsoft makes them itself. But the world hasn't really noticed because, despite what the enthusiasts say, Windows Phone is very much a niche player.

      1. Charles Manning

        Re: " we believe that over time we can make [mobility] a profitable business,"

        "Microsoft has pretty much done this already with the Surface 3 Pro being the only Surface 3 in town."

        And nobody noticed or cared....

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    ARM in the Enterprise Server?

    Really? WHEN will ARM ever get to the performance level of even current Xeon let alone future variations. This is very much like a dog chasing a car. Yes, the dog is smaller and uses less energy but over the long haul the car still leaves it in the dust. Lets not forget that when Facebook was showing off it's small card ARM server designs for Open Server Intel just happened to show off their version (Intel, where is it? Been very quiet.) that was not only power and cost effective but already 64 bit and you could plant a bunch of them in half of a 1U chassis. I believe this shows that if nothing else Intel IS ready to counter ARM if it really begins to get market share. Didn't the i960 prove that Intel CAN design a very successful RISC chip if needed? Pretty sure they can now fab 50 of those cores on the current die process.

    NEVER EVER count Chipzilla OUT. They have the design teams and state of the art fabs to pretty much counter any threat that comes their way. Remember AMD? Intel does AND remembers what Athlon did to them. I believe that lesson was learned.

    If nothing else the mobile market for Intel, while not particularly a money maker was absolutely crucial in learning how to make low power chippery and that is showing up in Xeon now. So too was Itanium a learning project in core architecture. While not particulalrly financially successful it changed everything in Intels main chip business core architecture.

  4. Toastan Buttar

    Horses for courses

    Got a mains connection or a dirty great laptop battery? Use Intel.

    Relying on keeping energy use to an absolute minimum? Use ARM.

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