It followed the same familiar pattern, screw up the company over a long protracted acquisition, try to gain market share through bundling, all whilst driving the core talent ouf of the business by completely failing to invest. This is a big reason where Intel's problems came from. They looked to diversify rather than deliver.
> BMW Group, Intel, and Mobileye are joining forces to make self-driving vehicles and future mobility concepts become a reality. The three leaders from the automotive, technology and computer vision and machine learning industries are collaborating to bring solutions for highly and fully automated driving into series production by 2021.
Needless to say - a few years of toiling away and it turned out that this was not going to happen the way Intel had hoped. In fact if you go and look at BMW's website about autonomous driving it's almost comical that their list of acheivements stop the year before that deal was signed.
I'm not saying MobilEye aren't doing decent stuff (and they've certainly done a fantastic job of staying independent of Intel) but they've done nothing like what was expected of them. It's also important to remember that the bundling and strategic acquisitions Intel make often masks how successful they really are in a business - it'll often turn out the design win is more about bundling a bunch of services together rather than actually beating out competition.
Sure, this isn't living up to earlier estimates, but everyone in this field has been way behind early estimates, often by years. I think Mobileye revenue was up >100% last quarter? Obviously pandemic recovery helps, but even without it, 50+% seems likely.
If they can keep having failures like that, investors are going to be really happy with the outcome.
>. I think Mobileye revenue was up >100% last quarter?
As I say, they're doing fine. It's nothing like what they promised to do, and the company has restructured in a way that clearly indicates they'll be spun out in the next 24 months (like Mcafee). But the premise of the "big bets" wasn't shuffling at the edges, it was meant to be the future of Intel, and that's clearly failed at this point.
It'd be a bit silly for Intel to be successful in all of those spaces and not ask "and what would it look like to sell this part without bundling our CPU".
They can keep on trucking with R&D
So, intel made a custom processor for this that's really good at the correlations. The original one was the D4, and later they used their movidius chip. Both have lots of multiplier-accumulate silicon, so it can do the computations in parallel. Their architectures are also set up for convolution (which re-uses a lot of data) rather than random-processing (like a CPU does), so they could feed these math engines without a lot of data transfer -- this makes it more power efficient. You could do something similar in an FPGA, but dedicated silicon is going to be faster, cheaper, and use less power.
Of course, it works well as a tech demo and in controlled environments, and it's easy to understand and then brute-force with custom hardware. The problem is that it sucked the life out of better techniques which might actually work in the real world.
Google's core is search & advertising. But they are also in email, video streaming, messaging & video chat, cloud computing, mobile phones, gaming (Stadia), self-driving cars, drone delivery, quantum computing, and probably many other things that I can't think of.
Edit: Yes I know it’s technically Alphabet, but in practical terms, it’s Google
Lidar has high computational needs, which directly influences accuracy, and both spacial and time resolution.
Post-processing steps also have high computational needs, such as infering structure, do coregistration, handle point density, etc.
Also, practical applications often demand and depend on meeting constraints such as low power requirements and size.
If a company such as Intel managed to leverage their know-how to provide Lidar hardware that was competitive in both performance and price then they could as well develop a machine that prints money.