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Comment by crazypyro | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, but what I'm saying is how is the scale of a move of x86 to ARM comparable to oil to batteries?

From the outside, looking in, it seems like the two leaps are on massively different scales which I feel is important when talking about things that will kill a large corporation.

I guess my key question is what makes ARM so much different than x86 that it invalidates Intel's existing knowledge? Batteries have a completely different product life cycle than oil. For one, batteries don't burn away and they recharge. This creates completely different business models. Is there some major difference between ARM chips and x86 chips that I am missing?

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There are two things about x86 vs <pick an architecture... right now its ARM> that are significantly different than they were 10+ years ago:

1) Binary compatibility doesn't matter nearly as much as it used to. This was everything in the 80's, 90's and still important into the early 00's. It's why people were willing to pay top dollar for Intel CPUs for decades. First it was to run DOS apps like Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect and then it was to run Windows apps including Microsoft Office which were the primary thing most people had PCs for back then. Most mainstream computing users (business and personal) would be hard pressed to come up with a specific need that requires x86. Thanks to the web, Linux, Apple, mobile, etc. x86 is just another architecture that can be used, not the architecture it once was.

2) Competing products are anywhere from a fraction to an order of magnitude less expensive than Intel's offerings. Unless you absolutely need maximum performance, cheap and good enough is where the majority of the market is.

Look at what Intel has been banking on first with their failed attempt in mobile and now with their failed attempt at IoT: they thought that because they had 1 (the thing that doesn't matter much anymore) that they could disregard 2 (the thing that does). Intel sure looks like it's having a Kodak moment: the market that exists today is much smaller in terms of $/CPU or $/perf or $/watt but Intel refuses to do what it needs to adapt.

Also, stupidly a lot of these Intel IoT lines weren't actually binary compatible with existing x86 code for various reasons. Some of them had a hardware bug where the LOCK prefix locked up the hardware, some were outright missing less-used instructions, and the documentation of what was actually supported was terrible.

The Galileo supported i386 instructions only, no MMX or anything later. The Joule, Edison, and Minnowboard Max are all Atom processors, and support full, modern instruction sets.

Part of the reason probably more biz related.

CEO/CFO of Intel looked at the balance sheet every Quarters and make decision if they should continue to invest in ARM SOC (A few years back before they sold that div to Marvell.)

x86 has 50% + margin, #1 market position.

ARM is #4,5, 6 in market position behind TI, Qualcomm, Freescale and lossing $$$ every quarters.

One need to investment huge amount of $$$ continuously fundamentally at IP for GSM, LTE, Mobile OS Team, SOC team and there were almost zero chance to catch up with #1 #2 players of the time -- Qualcomm, TI, 8-10 years ago.

I'm not an electrical engineer or hardware expert but there must be something because Intel has been trying to compete with ARM for many years with no success. It doesn't seem like it's just something you can just pivot too (or Intel is just really, really, bad at pivoting.)

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