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> I have argued in the past the Intel "lost" the smartphone CPU war because Apple decided not to wait for them to come up with some high margin processor compromise and instead to re-invest profits into the development of bespoke processors that gave their products an edge over their rivals. Others like Samsung followed suit with own processors for Android.

Kind of a weird way to phrase it given that iPhone 1 through 3GS ran on Samsung SoCs. It wasn't until the iPhone 4 that Apple used their own SoCs. Not sure how Samsung could be following suit in that case.

Edit: also, Apple was never going to wait around for Intel. Apple is actually one of the early investors in ARM, back in the early ninties, had used ARM.in the whole iPod line (as well as the ill fated Newton), and iPhones lined up with ARMs in mobile TDPs starting to have full MMUs.

Samsung has Exynos however, due to Qualcomm and patents you don't ever see their phones equipped with it here in America.

I mean, now you don't. But earlier cellphones hadn't integrated the baseband yet so it was a moot point either way.

Still not seeing how Samsung followed Apple in SoC design when Apple started by using Samsung SoCs.

Apple followed Samsung in SoC design, but Samsung (in 2016) followed Apple (2011) in core design. I expect that’s what they’re getting at.

At a certain time, a mobile x86 product had a lot of appeal because of the potential to reuse the software already optimized for x86. The choice then was, wait for Intel to produce good x86 mobile chips to leverage that, or accept that you have to continue using a different architecture. At the point you are deciding to give up on Intel, rolling your own chips starts to look a lot more appealing, since ARM just licenses the IP anyway (and it becomes a differentiator between their product and Samsung's, which is arguably their closest competitor).

There were two good paths to take, but one depended in Intel and they never provided it.

I mean, see my edit. They were an early investors in ARM, pretty exclusively used ARM in their mobile products for about a decade at the release of the iPhone. They were never going to wait for Intel.

Edit: Like they had been using ARM since before Intel released the original Pentium.

Everyone was waiting for Intel, either to switch ot to know how to respond to compete.

Inthink if Intel came out with a compelling product, Apple would have switched. I suspect they invested in ARM because it made sense at the iPod level, but once you start converging mobile and desktop experiences, there are major benefits to having the same architecture for both. Just look at how rampant the ARM MacBook rumors have been for the last few years.

I think the ARM investment by Apple was good regardless of whether they wanted to switch to Intel for higher end mobile, so I don't see it as evidence as to why they didn't want to.

They had been using ARM in released products since before Intel released the original Pentium.

Nobody was waiting for Intel to get into the cellphone market. The TDP of Intel chips just never made sense, and it was clear that this was because they just didn't institutionally care about that market segment in a real way.

Maybe pundits were waiting, but nobody serious.

Edit: and all these ARM desktop rumors are just that, rumors. They have the ability to ship a competive low to mid end laptop on their own arm chips today, and aren't. Their wide OoO designs would run beautifully in a formfactor that isn't thermally throttled so much. IMO they don't want to switch ISAs and are waiting out the x86_64 patents.

TDP of Intel chips like the PXA270, amirite

"They had been using ARM in released products since before Intel released the original Pentium."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Newton

...I'm not sure it was before the Pentium though, because it appears they both came out in 1993.

Intel didn't care. They dabbled into it with XScale, at a time the best mobile ARM processors, then gave up and sold the whole thing. Shortsighted, should've kept at it.

> Apple is actually one of the early investors in ARM

This is such an understatement. From Wikipedia: The company was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and VLSI Technology.

Apple is a cofounder of ARM.

I guess not everyone read books about Steve Jobs.

It was Steve's idea that Intel had the best chip and Fab, and he wanted the best in iPhone. He was willing to wait for Intel to give him what he demands, the price he asked for was way lower than Intel's usual margin but very high for Apple's BOM Cost.

Ultimately one of this Top Engineers put his name badge on the table and said if Steve insist on Intel he will quit. Steve Jobs ultimately backed off. They than bought P.A. Semi and the rest is history.

Intel's failure to capture the iPhone SoC opportunity was described by Paul Otellini, Intel CEO at the time as the biggest missed opportunity / failure of his life. ( And I am still quite pissed they forced out Pat Gelsinger )

If Steve had persisted he would have repeated the same Apple Lisa mistake. And the world might not be quite the same.

*Makes me rather sentimental while typing this. I miss Steve Jobs.

AMD is also eating Intel's lunch in datacenter. Last time I checked (I don't keep track of Intel pricing) AMD had a 5x price/performance advantage over Intel at the launch of EPYC ROME.

Winning a benchmark isn’t winning. Winning sales is winning. Last I heard most sales still go to intel.

But exciting times if this flips, competition is good for all

Winning a benchmark by a wide margin is pretty close if you have your foot in the door, which of course AMD does not.

Their success here is going to be nonlinear depending on how long they stay in the lead.

AWS has AMD offerings. That's plenty foot in the door.

True, but these things take time to move mostly due to time-constrained contracts.

It's very hard to buy prebuilt AMD products into the enterprise still in my experience

It’s generally hard to buy AMD CPUs period.

Last time I visited a Best Buy in NYC, they had a large desk full of AMD-based laptops, several featuring Ryzen.

Maybe they figured availability finally, at least for systems producers.

They're probably speaking about epyc. In general, the availability of epyc, and the number of servers made for it, are very small.

I can buy lots of AMD CPUs and motherboards online - tons available. But prebuild AMD from Dell? No SKU's. I think it's going to be a MAJOR lag there.

In part this may be because AMD bios stability has historically been poor - perhaps folks don't want the headaches? But intel bios security with ME has also been poor - soo...

I assume there is a pretty big lag between AMD CPUs being much better and prebuilts including them and businesses noticing they are better.

Have there been any published benchmarks of relevant datacenter workloads on this CPU? I certainly haven’t seen any. The previous generation EPYC was really slow on branchy code, despite looking ok on ffmpeg benchmarks and the like.

We just published this:

https://www.scylladb.com/2019/12/05/is-arm-ready-for-server-...

Intel became too big and too slow. Their R&D efforts are not as efficient as Apple's or in this case Amazon's. This story also proves that in many cases you are better off with a specific design instead of a generic one. If the marketing message is true Amazon has a huge edge.[1]

1. 40% better price performance over comparable current generation instances

Keep in mind that getting 40% better price performance doesn't mean their tech is better. It could just mean they're cutting margins (to drive adoption).

Absolutely. From the customer perspective does it matter? If later on it goes back to Intel levels than it means other cloud vendors can compete without a custom CPU. What worries me is what if it is true and not for the too thin margin?

This is entirely Intel's fault for trying to get fat by choking out the market with a gazillion UPCs and a ton of markup. They exhausted their own food supply.

Intel's gazillion SKUs are really just a few abstract-ideal "optimal product, highest price" makes of processor, binned down into many different "sub-optimal product, lower price" channels. If you collapse the binnings together, they're really only producing ~four CPUs at a time.

At least for commercial availability. There's tons of enterprise SKUs just to serve customers like AWS, of course, but that's not to "squeeze the market"; that's because the customer wants custom IP cores in their chips.

With how 10mn is going for Intel, I bet the SKUs really are just the result of binning, not something driven by the sales and marketing side.

they also made bank, like good monopolists ought

But who cares about a R&D processor that you can only use on a specific cloud hosting provider? All people will care about is if they will have to modify their applications to utilize it, and knowing Amazon that is precisely what they'll try to do. AWS is anti-competitive and it should raise alarms with many in the tech community.

Agree and to add a few more things.

These ARM CPU are made with ARM Core Design ( NEOVERSE N1 ) , which means there are no reason why Google or Microsoft, or even Apple and Facebook cant have their own N1. And they will because of the competitive advantage as you mentioned.

This solves the Chicken and Egg Problem where ARM CPU from Qualcomm and Ampere or other Vendors could not get into Server Market due to software compatibility. And no one was willing to invest porting and making sure every software runs well on these chip without Hardware. ( One of the reason why Qualcomm exit the Server Market ) Now Amazon is doing both, all the Open Source Web Stack AWS offers will support ARM, assuming Amazon upstream all those work.

And once those Software are ARM ready, other smaller Cloud Providers such as Digital Ocean, OVH, Linode etc.. will offer and switch to ARM once there are ARM CPU available.

On top of my head, the last estimate HyperScaler represent 50% of Intel's DC and Enterprise Revenue. Intel's yearly revenue from DC is roughly $20B, so we are talking about a potential lost of $10B+ over the next decade. And DC has been the most profitable segment for Intel.

Microsoft now also has new incentives to port Windows to work on ARM. ( A lot of Azure Customers runs out Windows VM ) They are also on their way with Windows on Snapdragon. Although I think it will be a few years before it becomes stable enough and mainstream.

So 5 years down the road, You now have the servers on AWS running on ARM, all mobile and Tablet are on ARM. Intel are selling less unit to amortise its cost of R&D in each leading node. AMD with better Node fighting for marketshare. If Windows on ARM worked, it is only a matter of time Apple moves its whole Mac line across to ARM as well, may be 2025+. ( Pro Application developers will have incentive to port their work to ARM on both platform )

If Andy Grove were still alive, or his apprentice Pat Gelsinger were still around at Intel, they would be facing the same dilemma half a century ago, -Should Intel invest more in protecting the memory business and fight Japanese manufacturers or should the company flee from memories market and create a new growth market?

And this time around, Should Intel invest more in protecting the x86 business and fight ARM or should the company flee from x86 and create new growth market?

It was nearly 5 years ago Intel announced Custom Foundry. They had a chance to take on and compete with TSMC. They were far too worried their best tech and IP would info would leak out. They would rather do it all by themselves. 5 years later, I doubt even if they are reopening Custom Foundry there will be any customer wanting to sign up.

Sorry if this is a grim outlook of Intel, I am sure they will stick around, just like any great companies once were, IBM, Sun, HP, they will have a long tail of decline until they become mostly irrelevant.