Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mtgx | Hacker News Reader

This is something I've argued before, too. Even if Intel gets every bit as good as the ARM competition in mobile devices, that may be pretty irrelevant to them, as they will have a very hard time competing as "just another mobile chip maker with tiny profits per chip". It will be hard for Intel to adapt to that as a company. And that's besides having to defeat established incumbents in the mobile chip market. The end of the "normal" PC market is not good at all for Intel.

As the situation becomes worse for them, you'll see them adopt more desperate moves such as mandating every "ultrabook" (a trademark they own) manufacturers buys their McAffee antivirus, and other such moves, to try to increase their profits and revenues, but I don't think it will help them much in the end.

The ultrabook market is a dead-end, anyway. So far their ultrabook sales have been several times lower than initially predicted, and most PC buyers want to buy "cheap" Windows machines, not $1000 Windows machines. The people who want that kind of PC, usually go for a Mac instead, and the latest sales data shows that. And Macs are still a niche market in the grand scheme of things. It's about the best Intel can hope for as far as "ultrabooks" go. And they better hope Apple is not moving to 64-bit ARM chips for Macs in 2014.

With full-power Intel Core chips rolling off the line today using <7W of power, we're almost at the point where you can have MacBook Pro computing power behind the glass of a tablet and still get 8+ hours of run time. Dock it to a hard keyboard with another battery to turn it into 12-16 hours. That's today, and it'll get better every year as the processors and batteries improve.

I think Microsoft is actually ahead of the curve here, and the tablets of the near-future will be more like the Surface Pro than the iPad. Your grandma can use hers to check e-mail and run pre-screened apps from an app store, while you can use yours to run Visual Studio or Photoshop. With full computing power in tablets, they could supplant not just Android/iOS but laptops, ultrabooks, netbooks and desktop towers.

Except that Microsoft is failing on their OS marketing and can't rely on corporate adaptation of Windows 8. The RT version of Surface is a sales fail. Much of their new software push is cloud based, which wouldn't necessary require a full version of Windows. Heck, they even lease Linux VMs on Azure, just confusing the whole message. Why run Windows when every thing except for corporate servers can be done on Android or Linux?

> Why run Windows when every thing except for corporate servers can be done on Android or Linux?

So.. everything?

I think he meant something more like "office server".

When this marvelous device with processing power, large battery and keyboard comes to the market in a serious way, I propose we call it a "laptop".

Have you not seen the surface in person? It makes a macbook look bulkier than the Governator. The surface pro is quite a powerful device with great battery life.

Even with the keyboard attached it weighs less than a macbook air.

Why would grandma want to buy a powerful $1000 tablet when a $200 tablet can do everything she wants to do perfectly fine?

The main issue is that the vast majority simply don't need all that much computing power, it was the lack of alternatives to the PC form factor that kept CPU power, prices and Intel's profit margins inflated.

I don't doubt that there will be a market for powerful tablets. But it's a small market; the grandmas of this world won't be buying them any more than they used to buy powerful workstations.

> a $200 tablet can do everything she wants to do perfectly fine?

Show me one table at $200 that does everything a grandma would want.

> The main issue is that the vast majority simply don't need all that much computing power

That's just wild speculation that needs a reference, especially since the history of PC proves otherwise.

Nexus 7? Or for a $100 more, an iPad Mini...

Yep, basically we've hit that point where computers are the appliances people always wanted them to be.

Intel is going to have a hard time keeping high profit margins on lower cost chips. If any company can handle it though they should be able to.

There was a time when many people looked forward to a faster CPU, because it meant you could open Word documents more quickly.

That time is long gone. As a developer, laptops have been fast enough for my purposes since around 2000.

Coding Horror, 2010:

    CPUs? All stupid fast at any price, with more cores 
    and gigahertz than you'll ever need unless you're one 
    of those freaks who does nothing but raytracing and 
    video transcoding all day long.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/09/revisiting-solid-st...

Excluding servers and scientific computing, the only groups I know of that still want more power are hardcore gamers and video editors. Even for these, the bottleneck is frequently somewhere else than the CPU.

I think my mother and sisters represent mainstream computing better than I do: The check mail, watch YouTube videos and look at pictures of the family. There's nothing there that requires more computing power than what tablets have today.

The Google Nexus 7 is $200. It has enough computing power for what most of my family uses computers for. It still has other limitations that may make it unsuitable as a wholesale PC replacement - say ports for plugging in a large monitor, options for printing, drivers for various USB devices - but those limitations do not primarily call for a faster CPU.

If you disagree, I'd be curious to know where you see a mass market for significantly more CPU power than what we expect from the natural evolution of ARM.

Nexus 7 isn't enough for a grandma?

$200 today. I'm willing to wager that Grandma will get by just fine with a $100 tablet in three years.

Geeks tend to forget that a vast portion of the population just needs a web browser, a handful of popular games, chat, and email.

With everyone hopping on the Facebook train, it's not even clear that chat/email is really that required anymore.

That 7W isn't the maximum power consumption, it's the typical power consumption. Maximum is a less impressive 13W - and that's not counting the power used by the chipset, since this isn't a SoC.

No sorry. A very few Intel chips are coming off at 7W (really more). If they all were it would matter but just getting a few there does not help. I can't get a 7W macbook air...

By the time this happens, ARM chips will be as powerful as Cores are today.

When I said almost, I meant a few months. The new Intel chips are already available now, they just haven't made their way into retail products yet.

Ultrabook prices are dropping every other month. I'm assuming that the expectation is that ultrabooks with higher processor speed, higher build quality, and possibly convertable to tablet factor will eventually be as cheap as or cheaper than netbooks are today.

Intel keeps increasing the specs on ultrabooks (like mandatory touch) to keep prices high and sales low.

I don't know that mandatory touch is going to be a limiting factor on price. Take a look at the Asus x202e. Reasonably slim, core i3 processor, touch screen, almost ultrabook/battery life and size (didn't quite make the spec)... 500$.

If anything it tells me even more that Intel is looking to gradually morph the ultrabook brand to mean slim, powerful hybrid/convertible as the technology makes it possible. ie: they're trying to evolve the notebook computer in such a way that it encrouches on the 'tablet market', just as tablets have made their way into the pc market...

More significantly: simply because the ultrabook exists, the other 'normal/cheap' laptops are getting slimmer, cheaper and all-round better.

I think the mac/windows drama is still on on -- with the ipad and devices like it marketed to consumers an entertainment device, and Wintel keeping the productivity market.

There's never going to be an end to the "normal" PC market until people find a way to get work done on all the devices that will purportedly take the PC's place.

IBM had to evolve away from hardware into technology services. Intel would be wise to do the same.

The only remaining competetive CPU maker out there will retire to technology services? It is getting hard to notice throughout the "lets run this tablet CPU as a server" but Intel has a huge advantage in process, performance and knowledge.

Right now, they only lack the humility to apply that to low-cost energy saving chips. I'm sure lost profits will apply the necessary pressure.

Oh no, don't copy IBM! They've evolved away from technology into accounting gimmicks. What do they have to offer for the future at all? Intel should innovate its way out of this mess or die, not go into services, that would be pointless for society.

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