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Comment by bgorman | Hacker News Reader

It is really amazing how much money Intel has thrown away chasing "mobile" dollars. First, they squandered billions trying to make mobile Socs, now the last part of the company that can get inside a cell phone is throwing in the towel as well. While Intel was doing all of this, it managed to squander away its core manufacturing competency as well. I have a feeling Intel will be the next HP, sliced and diced for parts - none of which resemble the company at its best.

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I think the problem is that they believe they "squandered" supplying the iPhone CPU. They stated that mobile CPUs would never sell in quantity, so they weren't interested. Missing that boat, they've believed the need to be in front of mobile at any cost.

I think Intel failed to realize that they had made the right call with iPhone: their very culture isn't about being innovative, but providing microcode flexibility at high instructions/watt. They had a chance to define servers, and still do. They should have been all over the whole spectre/meltdown/timing security issues and owned creating a secure server chip. Instead, they've fretted away so many options that they never had a chance to win.

My two cents.

Intel owned a big slice of the embedded ecosystem well into the 90's. They threw that all away to focus on high margin Pentiums.

it seems like a regular business error ..

How did they fret away options with Meltdown?

The "cloud" as we know it rely heavily on CPU's hardware security and their virtualization technologies to enable untrusted computation from users.

CPU security is actually one of the few topic Intel is extremely good at (don't trust the RISC/CISC flamewar) and could define the way cloud providers are built upon.

SGX in particular had revolutionary potential.. Galen Hunt's Haven project showed remotely-attested, encrypted Drawbridge containers executing arbitrary Windows programs within secure enclaves... But then Meltdown and Spectre doomed SGX to side-channel attack. I don't think Intel is even making an attempt to salvage the instruction set...

What do you mean with salvaging the instruction set? Since I wouldn't count SGX a part of the instruction set and spectre/meltdown are not IA specific.

When Intel was making mobile SoCs, they couldn't get everything onto one chip, nor were they able to make a LTE capable device. What they were able to produce were $100 tablets and phones for the low end of the market that were subsidized to the tune of ~$30ea, or in the case of Wal-Mart's $50 Intel Atom Android tablet, to the tune of $40 to $50 per device in subsidy.

Intel and Microsoft both missed the mobile boat and suffered the consequences

It wasn’t squandered—I was able to use their investment in my personal growth as a springboard to a FAANG career.

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