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Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. Intel's thinking right now (or rather in the past couple of years) seems to be that "hey, we missed the smartphone market, but at least we're early for the IoT market, right?"

Except there are two things wrong with that theory:

1) "IoT" is mainly a new name for something that has already existed - a market that has already been dominated by ARM: the embedded/microcontroller market. ARM has much better expertise in this market, better relationships, and better ecosystem, as well as a full range of products.

2) If Intel's chips weren't competitive in the mobile market (especially when you compare all three metrics of performance, power, and price), then why would they be in the embedded IoT market, which plays even more to ARM's strengths?

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1) "IoT" is mainly a new name for something that has already existed - a market that has already been dominated by ARM: the embedded/microcontroller market.

The IoT is much more than just the embedded hardware. It's the potential that lies within connecting embedded hardware. Extracting and refining data from embedded machines/sensors/nodes. The whole ecosystem of apps/services that can potentially be created on top of these new data streams.

You're not wrong, but from the a hardware vendor perspective, grandparent is right: an IOT device is simply a embedded/microcontroller market. Maybe with a bit more emphasis on connectivity, but this is not new in any way.

Agree on the definition of an "IoT device" but scoping that way misses most of the market opportunity.

While the embedded/microcontroller tech hasn't changed drastically, the cloud/edge processing & analytics parts of the tech stack are new. The "services" business models are also new.

Again, I do not disagree with you. However, the hardware vendor (the one who sells the parts that will be used on these devices) still keeps selling about the same devices.

And these are the kind of devices Intel has decided to overlook 15, 20 years ago and now ARM is eating its cake.

Insisting on this vision would be missing a bit part, or even the entire core, of the new Intel strategy -- they plan to sell more Xeons to those additional data centers that would be required to process new IoT data.

> Maybe with a bit more emphasis on connectivity

What makes it an even bigger ARM turf than otherwise.

>> The whole ecosystem of apps/services that can potentially be created on top of these new data streams.

I haven't seen any of that yet, just hype. Of course every company wants to collect more data on consumers and is hoping IoT will enable them. None has provided a compelling reason for a "consumer" to buy an IoT device. Look at how Nest was all hype and then had a thermostat fail at its primary function when it lost the net connection. That's a huge step backward, and it's not going to get any better when the data collection remains the priority.

Consumer-facing smarthome/wearable devices like Nest are a very small vertical sliver of a much larger market. Think industrial, automotive, medical, aerospace and defense. Check out platforms like GE Predix, PTC ThingWorx, AWS IoT, Azure IoT, etc. Industrial analytics/efficiency/optimization - that's where the big money is.

I agree that consumer-facing IoT devices are a single vertical in a long list of verticals (many of which are more mature) but I really wanted to mention that IBM also has a platform in this space that was omitted from your list: Watson IoT.

(Disclaimer: I work on the MessageSight messaging engine used in Watson IoT)

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