Hacker News Reader

Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

Intel is very likely to miss holidays with 10nm. OEM manufacturers in South China, are screaming murder, and even ones who were Intel shops for decades like Weibu are jumping the ship. Intel is losing China big time.

I'd say, a lot would've been fine even if Intel gave them existing 14nm chips, but since all 14nm capacity is gobbled by server chips, it's not gonna happen.

I believe Intel is making a huge error by prioritising big wholesale Xeon buyers like Amazon over OEM manufacturers. Hosting providers will be back the moment Intel regains the tech lead or finally makes 10nm Xeons, but OEMs will walk away and not return.

View on HN

Two conflicting thoughts on that:

- If the big wholesale Xeon buyers and users qualify AMD chips and start buying a lot of them, Intel will find that landscape a lot more competitive, this is a more "sticky" market than OEM products for consumers.

- They could be betting that AMD will lose the plot again, as they've done throughout their corporate history, e.g. after the 486, and after K8. The OEM consumer market is less sticky and will trivially move back to Intel if they have competitive offerings.

My own experience tells me of things being quite opposite of this. Big hosting providers care little for what runs in their servers for as long as it's fast (they always can pass costs onto their clients without loosing much, especially bigger ones)

In OEM, things are dominated by much more complex dynamics in between supply chain, factories, and clients.

Intel had no problem with Taiwanese, as a lot of TW companies had relationship with Intel since the "Desktop First" era, but in mainland, Intel had to fight a bloody battle for the fresh and juicy laptop and tablet markets for the last decade, with kickbacks, blackjack, and hookers. Their position here was never strong to begin with.

Xeons, even at wholesale prices, are probably much more profitable than laptop chips though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com