The “war” on Intel has been going on longer than most people think and 2020 is the year when the war on desktop computing begins. The war has actually has been won on other fronts but the PC / Server market will remain the last bastion of Intel dominance, which will contested starting 2021.

Phone / Tablet space

The year is 2005 and Steve Jobs, CEO and Founder of Apple at that time was embarking on a secret project that will eventually be the first iPhone. It was a handheld computer that needed a low-power, but high performance processor to run the iPhone. Apple was making money but do not have the muscle and influence that it has today.

So Steve Job contacted his most recent partner, Intel, and ask if Intel can make a processor for a small handheld computing device that they are working on. Intel at that time has the most power-to-watt efficiency on the laptop / desktop market but don’t really have a solution for the ultra-low power market. Intel make out some projections and analysis and concluded that the market is not big enough for Intel to make money on. This is their first miss opportunity.[1]


Intel Atom. This could be on the first iPhones and the world would look a lot different for Intel.

Eventually the iPhone was released and become a runaway success for Apple. Apple used a Samsung ARM chip for the first iPhone and eventually started using their own design on the A4 and the rest is history.


Desktop / Laptop sales plateau, while smartphone and tablet sales grow and grow.

This is the front of Intel CPU “war” and it’d already started in 2005. Unless Intel suddenly comes out w/ a very compelling device in a very integrated market, Intel do not have any play in this segment for the time being.


These are what actually killed Intel dominance in Personal computing when personal means handheld.

In terms of total computing dominance, Intel has lost its market share to Apple and ARM for a long time ago. Good thing, the computing industry is huge and most users is still using desktop, laptop and servers for work, so that will be the next contested space.

Desktop / Laptop computing

Apple announced it’s transition away from Intel to their own M-series chip during WWDC 2020. The first product to hit the shelves are the basline models of Mac Mini, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro.

Now, for most part, Apple market share is not really a threat to Intel in the PC-segment. However, Apple market share is not insignificant.


A 13–16% market share warrants competitor to at least take notice to new trends in the market. And with rave reviews that a 10W TDP chip start to stomp on 45W chips, PC makers will at least explore the alternative.

Now Microsoft do also release their own ARM solution called the Surface Pro X which runs on their own SQ-series chip, however, at the moment, it’s not as competitive as the M-series from Apple.


Surface Pro X. Run on SQ-series which based on ARM designs. But not yet competitive at the moment.

Now, Microsoft is the real king maker in the PC industry. In the x86 space, it doesn’t matter if AMD or Intel wins, because in the end, they all run on Microsoft Windows and do work on Microsoft Office. If Microsoft and Qualcomm and fix and update their SQ-series chips to release a newer version of ARM-based Windows that run x86 codes faster and cheaper than the Intel version, that will be the serious blow not only for Intel, but AMD also.


We have to wait for Dell XPS 13 to be on ARM and Windows to be fast enough to beat out Intel for lesser the price.

Server / Cloud Services

Cloud service provided a new opportunity for Intel. With the raise of AWS and other cloud computing service provider, so is the rise of Intel. However, it is not all a bed of roses for Intel much longer.


A typical cloud provider in this Microsoft Azure. In the early days it was just the Virtual Machines, now it’s all services that is architecturally agnostic.

In the beginning, most customers would rent virtualized servers from providers. Later the providers started to make more and more software based services for anybody to use (for a fee). First it was storage, then database, later messaging queue, the networking, then authentication access, now with the raise of nodejs and other interpretation language, we have serverless.

If a lot of customer actually uses the platform instead of using servers on the cloud (which is the trends), the platform itself will be architecture agnostic. Do people actually care that Storage Blob is running on ARM or Intel? Most customers don’t care.

Conclusion

The war on x86 architecture has been going on for years and reached the tipping point when Steve Jobs goes up to the stage on WWDC 2005 and showcase their new product: the first iPhone. It could be an Intel moment back then, but Intel took the wrong step and the rest is history. Before that moment, Intel runs the hardware while Microsoft runs the software. Now, you have Google, Apple, a host of internet companies that not necessarily run on Intel hardware.

The desktop / laptop / server segment will be the last bastion for Intel dominance but it will be highly contested starting 2021 when Apple release more and more powerful Macs, Microsoft will update their Windows to run better on ARM and ARM players will product more and more desktop-class chips to compete with the likes of Intel and AMD.


ARM: We started from the smallest screen, now we going to be at the biggest screen.

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Footnotes

[1] Intel could’ve powered the original iPhone, but decided against it, says ex-CEO Otellini - ExtremeTech