Intel is laying off a major portion of its wearables group
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Intel really really needs a market they can dominate that consumes lots and lots of chips. IoT is one bet, Wearables (apparently was) one bet. The scary thing for Intel is that if they don't have enough demand to keep their billion dollar fabs pumping, they start burning cash. Not clear what the strategy there is. Look at IBM which sold off their chip capability to Global Foundry. Once you have over capacity, a chip fab rapidly becomes a huge liability.
That said, the world could probably use a state of the art open access chip house that wasn't in Asia or controlled by the Chinese. Not sure that Intel could go there given their company history and organization.
Digression: One of the uniquely nice things about Sun was that since their fiscal calendar ended on June 30th, when they axed major projects the layoffs came in the spring rather than right before New Years. It always sucks to be laid off but there are worse and better times to do so.
Yes. And Computer Vision applications will likely be that market. There were big algorithmic break-throughs in the last decade and things are now mature and robust enough to be finally useful. Plus some immediate obvious customers are starting to show up: autonomous cars, AR/VR, drones.
Intel has acquired companies in the space for quite a while now (announced and un-announced deals) and will likely continue to do so. Trying to be an important player in this space is the right strategy IMO.
Why they haven't acquired them in the past, Intel clearly doesn't think they are worth it and preferred to compete against them directly on graphics.
Apart from that the FTC / US Justice would never allow that merger in the first place.
Alternate architectures are not going to do much to dent the two generation lead in process.
IoT and Wearables mean nothing to Intel, there is not enough money there. Mostly a marketing effort to signal to their investors they aren't going to miss the next big opportunity like they did mobile. Of course that ignores the fact that Intel was never going to be much of a player in mobile. All the money in mobile is in the base stations, not in the handsets, and Qualcomm (3rd largest semi conductor company behind Intel and Samsung) completely dominates the IP in that market. What matters there is radio technology, not microprocessors.
Wearables maybe, as the market is relatively small as form factor-defined markets go, but I wouldn't be so quick to write off IoT, which describes a business model change more than a certain form factor or set of devices.
I listened to Murthy Renduchintala, President of the Intel IoTG group, speak at GE Minds+Machines earlier this week. He stressed FPGAs (acquisition of Altera) as well as SDN/NFV as key areas of interest for Intel going forward.
IoT will be a big market, but the profits won't be going primarily to the semiconductor companies via chip sales. We won't likely see an "Intel Cloud Platform" or Intel selling IoT deployment services.
The FPGA tech is interesting, but mostly irrelevant to IoT. FPGAs can really benefit from Intels leading edge manufacturing, so that is a smart acquisition (even before considering IA integration possibilities).
Intel does not have much of a presence in networking, and there are a lot of competitors there who are more invested, and further, design their own silicon (Cisco, Juniper, Huawei, brocade maybe). Maybe if they are able to productize the silicon (as opposed to more exotic materials) optical transceivers they have spent a ton researching they would have something huge here.
I am not sure where the 2 Generation lead came from. It is more of a Generation lead. And it is shrinking, mainly due to Intel slowing down and other picking up pace a little. The 10nm from Samsung and TSMC next year wont be anything as good as Intel's 14nm. But their 7nm in 2018 will be better then Intel 14nm+. Of coz Intel will have 10nm by then, but it will be much smaller volume.
Citation needed.
From the second half of your comment, I think it's possible you are confusing the base band processor[1] with base stations. Qualcomm does have a lot of IP in baseband processors, and has made a lot of money from them. However, baseband processors are on the handset not the base station.
It's also incorrect to think that mobile CPUs aren't a large market. They aren't Intel size, but they are quite substantial. The majority of Qualcomm's revenue is from CPU sales[2] (although SoCs like the Snapdragon include the baseband processor on the same chip)
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseband_processor
[2] http://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/031116/qualcomm...
Btw .. I feel the same way wrt Cisco and IoT. Perhaps the only large company that gets IoT IMHO is Amazon.
Intel's acquisition of Altera seems promising but I don't know how big a market that is. High-end applications are certainly price-insensitive but there is a lot that can be done with older gen hardware and the Chinese are creeping up on that already.
Why should a chip house not be in Asia?
What are the issues with control by the Chinese [I assume you mean the Chinese government]?
Trade tariffs for providing economic sanctions against countries you don't like, you could add $0.10 to every chip sold into the US as a tariff and pretty much instantly put the US into a recession.
IP theft is always an issue, and it depends on a local jurisdiction government for enforcement, so if the local government is lax in their enforcement you will experience more IP theft. Hence the whole Gonkai aspect of things.
National security because, as we've seen in research, inserting a capacitor in the chip that is not part of the circuit can create an undetectable back door in silicon[1] and that can compromise chips in sensitive systems. Again local governmental oversight is the lever to avoid such things but if you were in a state of cold war with the government in question?
[1] https://www.wired.com/2016/06/demonically-clever-backdoor-hi...
But that would harm China too.
For people not aligned with the US, what is the advantage of the US versus China with regards to backdoors? Especially after the Snowden leaks, it seems to be an issue of who is worse.
And thus the reason I stick to companies like Garmin for my "wearables". If Garmin up and pulls out of the wearables market, then the market is well and truly screwed and my choice won't make any difference. But a company like Intel or Microsoft can just up and go "well, that hobby project didn't work out. Back to our core business. Oh, and pull the servers down." and you the consumer are left holding the bag.
In general, though, wearables probably have to be considered a relatively underwhelming market so far. Yes, there are various fitness bands and smart watches that are mostly sold for fitness-related reasons and... Well, pretty much just fitness bands.
It's probably related to a lack of compelling capabilities in unobtrusive products that "just work" and don't require a lot of ongoing care and feeding.
Not in this case. They're issuing MSRP refunds, no questions asked, in exchange for returns whose shipping they also cover.
Full disclosure: I've just shipped back my own Basis Carbon Steel - a device not even implicated in the overheating issue, but one for which they're still accepting returns and providing refunds. I paid ~$150 for it a few years back; they've said they'll be sending me a $234 check. Obviously, since I haven't yet received the check, I don't yet know with certainty that they'll live up to that claim, but they've given me no reason to doubt that they will. Overall I'm very favorably impressed with the way they're handling the issue.
I also learned about the recall around June, around two months before it started hitting the media, which gave me an advantage. Although my most recent purchase was within the last month, there's still a small opportunity.
Also someone else seems to have cornered the eBay market, items that go on sale now tend to be bought relatively quickly (looking at sold items) before I see them. I probably could have done better by setting up instant alerts and sniping auctions, but I'm pretty happy with what I did get for the level of effort.
I do that kind of thing for friends but not for everyone.
I can't help but be reminded of the time years back when an Internet rando told me, in all earnestness, not only that I should not profit from my knowledge of how to write saleable software and the sale of my labor in so doing, but that in a truly equitable society I would not be allowed to do so, because not everyone knows how to do that and it's wrong of me to privilege my own interests over those of people who lack the knowledge I possess. In that case there's a slight difference of detail in the origin of the unequal distribution, but the general concept seems very much the same.
I would be interested to hear whether and how you see a meaningful distinction between the cases, and in general to see some expansion on the nature of the moral calculus which moved you to make the comment to which I and several others responded.
If I had a model for stock trading that was better than the people I was trading with, is it unethical to use it since I could just tell people the stocks are worth more and they shouldn't sell it to me?
I buy products for resale all the time, and I don't need to tell the people I buy from how much more I plan to sell it for.
(Plus, some of the product was bought from larger companies that would never have bothered to get the refund themselves. One person I bought around 20 peaks, I'm pretty sure they were selling them on Amazon before they banned the listing and needed to liquidate. Some stuff I bought from Amazon directly, where it would clearly be impractical to tell them.)
As I understand it, no one is getting taken advantage of by the grandparent. eBay's a marketplace and the seller put their items up for bid. Fair dealing does not require a buyer to tell a seller what their item is worth to someone else. When a buyer gets a bargain, we celebrate.
Fair dealing does require sellers to be truthful about the quality of their goods though. Lying about a lemon and pawning it off onto someone then profiting off that lie is a bad deal.
I'm speaking as an American, and that's my understanding of how we trade. Your word is your bond, handshake deals are as good as a written contract - that sort of honor code is pervasive.
You should mind your own business. I mean that to be taken politely and not as a slam. There's just no better way to say it, so I said it. There is not enough information in your sentence for me to guess at what your thought process was, so I'm going to assume you were just expressing empathy and trying to be nice.
I'd like to hear a moral justification for how you came to judge the grandparent.
Kudos to Intel, and I've obviously incorrectly prejudged them.
That said, I still would like to avoid migration to a new platform, even with a full refund. It's why some of us stick with Apple. :-)
For those who don't already know: Because the Basis Peak developed a nasty habit of overheating to the point of second-degree burns, Intel has recalled all Basis devices - not just the Peak, but prior versions as well.
If you currently own a Basis device or devices, visit https://www.mybasis.com/safety/ in order to find out how to send your recalled device or devices back to Intel, in exchange for a full MSRP refund. (This is no small consideration! In my case, I bought a Basis Carbon Steel several years ago for about $150. In exchange for shipping it back to Intel, to whom it is currently en route, I'm told I will receive a check for $234.)
Be advised also that the Basis data services will be shut down at the end of this year. If you have fitness data in those services which you want to retrieve, you must do so before January 1, 2017, or it will no longer be recoverable. Also, and for the same reason, no Basis devices will be able to sync from that date, which will make them essentially unusable even if they would otherwise be.
It's sort of a shame to see a good product go down in flames like this. On the other hand, the way Intel's handling it is extremely impressive, and I'm very glad to see it - we can but hope, however forlornly, that this is the first example of a new and much more customer-friendly style of handling IoT deprecations.
Depends on the country. I've heard about people who made little fortunes being laid off. The most lucky one got laid off twice after long tenures at two different companies (due to the companies closing sites in the country or something like that).
Though not everyone is so fourtanate.
The notice says "... Service Shutdown Information We are shutting down service ... offering refunds for all Peak and B1 devices and accessories. ..."
So sounds like Intel is recalling ALL Basis device, not just Peak. However, B1 is not mentioned anywhere else on the page besides Peak.