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Comment by klelatti | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that at the moment Intel only really have one business - selling CPUs for desktop/laptops and servers. In the latter market they are under severe pressure from AMD and Arm based CPUs. The former is relatively low growth.

They might want to have a third party foundry business but at the moment they don't have a credible one.

So they have massive historic and prospective capital investment and a cost base focused on difficult or uncertain markets.

Add to this poor recent execution and you have a toxic mix.

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IMO at 14 nm (when it was the leading-edge process), they should have spun off the foundry business. They had accepted a few customers at 22 nm, which allowed them to work out the kinks as a pure play foundry, but instead they acquired their biggest customer. They wanted to keep their CPU hegemony so much that they couldn't see the big opportunity.

Agreed. Also there has been a tendency to see losing / turning down the iPhone as the pivotal moment but I think it was the years after that which were crucial. They relentlessly pushed x86 on mobile when it was clear there was little or no appetite. If they'd built Arm based SoCs for Qualcomm etc (inc maybe Apple) then it might have been a very different story.

You clearly didn't see their quarterly earnings¹, where the only business units with growth were graphics, network, and MobileEye.

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1: https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1563/...

Not sure what I didn't see. The CPUs are around 4x the everything else put together so to first order of magnitude Intel is a CPU business.

Grandparent's focus was on "growth". And clearly, the report says CPU is "down".

My 'growth' comment referred to the laptop /desktop __market__ which medium / long term - which is what the investors will focus on - is clearly low growth.

Intel's single quarter performance in that market is quite a different thing altogether with short term post pandemic issues and Intel's own competitive struggles.

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