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Comment by kogepathic | Hacker News Reader

> IoT accounts for less than 5% of Intel’s sales. The group had revenues of $721 million last year

This isn't a surprise to anyone who's encountered any Intel IoT product. I think for most of us, the biggest question was why it took Intel so long to pull the plug.

Intel released products for IoT, then didn't update them forever (look at how many times they announced successors [0] [1] to the Quark) and they wonder why no one was interested to build products with their solutions.

As an aside, this article is terribly written (grammatical errors everywhere, spelling mistakes like "msrket").

[0] http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2014/2014070801__Dublin_Bay_So...

[1] http://wccftech.com/intel-quark-liffy-island-seal-beach-proc...

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The IO of Quark was problematic as well [1]. It's SPI interfaces are basically the same speed as an 8-bit MCU, which is kinda problematic given that SPI is fairly common to push a dozen or two megabit/s (implementation is much, much easier than reaching for USB or PCIe, while serial is simply too slow).

[1] Disclaimer: When I looked at it when they were released. Perhaps it was addressed later.

Yep, Intel had no idea what it was doing when it was designing its IoT product line. Normally, on its CPUs Intel got to do whatever it wanted and everyone just dealt with it because it was Intel (and they were rather open to working with the industry on standardizing communication buses, slowly getting rid of all the bridges, and etc). However, on a microcontroller, you have a lot more silicon than just the CPU architecture and cache so they had to go out and license a bunch of crap (and it usually is crap) peripherals that would never have have met the standard for their consumer/server CPU product lines. Combine that with the reduce R&D budget and they couldn't even properly test have the interactions. The number of errata for even their simplest chip rivaled that of their new gen processors when tech drastically changed (pentium -> core 2 due -> i3/5/7)

> the biggest question was why it took Intel so long to pull the plug.

Everyone everwhere in business loves growth. If there's a new market that never existed before, or if you can take away a competitor's share, you win.

It makes sense for Intel and its competitors to invest in growth markets like IoT. But if its offerings don't meet the need or the R&D expense doesn't pay off after a few years, it makes sense to retreat.

In other words, innovator's dilemma, and Intel is right in the big fat middle of it. Big companies "don't have the patience" to develop "small markets" into big ones, even if the potential is great. If it takes many years to get there, then they won't be able to show their stockholders how much growth they've had from that particular industry.

Intel is going to have quite a few more innovator's dilemmas in the next few years, including in the notebook market, which I imagine Intel will eventually deem it "unprofitable" because of AMD and Qualcomm's aggressive offerings, and it will get out and run to its server profits.

What surprises me is $721m seems like a lot for a product no one buys. Also surprised it's not worth employing 100 people bringing in $7m/yr/head. I would employing such people.

>Also surprised it's not worth employing 100 people bringing in $7m/yr/head.

$721m divided by 97 would be applicable if the entire IoT group consisted of those 97 people but it's not. I can see that the article makes it confusing and some might interpret it as if Intel is laying off all the IoT employees. (I don't know how many total Intel IoT employees there are since Intel doesn't seem to not have publicized that headcount.)

My guess is that since Intel recently discontinued x86-based IoT boards (Joule, Galileo, and Edison), many of the layoffs are directly connected to that.

Intel is still in the IoT game but pursuing other strategies to compete with the low-power-more-efficient ARM-based IoT market.

$721m revenue is not $721m profit. The division may have been operating at a loss. Big shipments may have been provided to retailers and booked as revenue, just waiting to return unsold or massively discounted.

Not a big sum for a semi business. There are quite a few semiconductor companies of less than 100 people and billion buck sized revenues

one waffer for less than a 100 waffers tapeout will cost at around 9k if we talk about 14nm.

it is very likely that they were actually making losses

How many useful die per wafer? Is there a ballpark yield for 14nm?

I too suspect this was not a profit-in-the-now division. They were probably playing a long-term game. I think they ceded the game to someone else .. but who?

>How many useful die per wafer? Is there a ballpark yield for 14nm?

~550/580

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