Intel's Recent Announcements - Can they make the leap ?
On April 19, as Intel announced their Q1 2016 earnings, they also announced a major restructuring that impacted some 12,000 workers and a new focus in 4 key areas..
Cloud - Datacenter
"Things" - so Client and IoT
Memory & FPGA
5G Networking
Intel also confirmed that all of the above will continue to be influenced by Moore's Law - which has been the driving force at Intel since it's inception.
Intel has been promoting their Rack Scale Architecture (RSA) for Cloud/Datacenter for some time as well as their various HPC and GPU offerings in that space. For Intel I think they are safe in this space for now. The ARM SoC manufacturers have so far not been able to penetrate at any scale.
In the Memory & Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) market, this focus to me is on storage. In the next 5 years, SSD will be the only real storage, so both the Memory itself and the processing (FPGA) that manages capabilities like encryption, de-duplication, compression, etc will be key. There is a lot of competition here from companies like Samsung and SANDisk who are really pushing SSD storage technologies forward.
On the "Things" side, the one big change is the cancellation of the Atom "Broxton" generation of CPU. This impacts Intel's current position in the smartphone and tablet market.
For example my 2014 Dell Venue 8 Pro is powered by the Z-3740D Bay Trail generation of the Atom and the newest version of the Venue is powered by the x5-Z8500 Atom - what will now be the last generation of Atom - Cherry Trail.
The Broxton generation of Atom was to follow Cherry Trail and in fact was rumored to potentially be the core of MS's Surface Phone. But obviously that will be no more. In fact one has to wonder if MS's recent announcement around the release of their new mobile devices in April 2017 was potentially influenced by Intel's changes.
Personally I've felt my little Venue has done fine, it runs Windows 10 with out problem and while not a performance blazer, considering the fact that I'm running full on Windows versus Android or iOS it's been great.
So similar to MS, Intel has validated that they seriously missed the 1st Big wave of modern smartphones/tablets are are rebooting to try and catch the next wave. Both of these firms have lost out on billions of unit sales during this explosion and they are going to press hard to try and not miss the next wave.
To the end, Intel is focusing on 5G technologies and killing their SoFIA projects which were X3 Atoms with integrated LTE. 5G Wireless is a huge leap forward from the current 4G LTE.
So think about 1Gbps+ wireless connectivity with very low latency able to stream not only thing like video effortlessly, but also support thousands of simultaneous connections from IoT devices. The Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance (NGMN) expects 5G to start rolling out in 2020.
In my opinion 5G has the potential to render WiFi as redundant. While WiFi can support >1Gbps connectivity today with 802.11ac Wave 2, the bottleneck is some cases becomes the WAN connection.
Now sure in corporate worlds having a multi-gig WAN connections is not a problem, but for the consumer world, we are just now begin to see 1Gbps spreading. Could we reach 10Gb at the home by 2020 ? - Maybe.
But consider as I've discussed in other posts about your Phone being your primary compute device. Today most folks keep both their LTE and WiFi on and in fact many OS try to see which connection is available or faster and switches between them to try and get you the best connectivity. With 5G that need may lessen..
If Intel and MS wants to be a serious players in this space, they really have their work cut out for them as the level of competition to grab a portion of this market is going to be massive. I wish them luck.
Cloud - Datacenter
"Things" - so Client and IoT
Memory & FPGA
5G Networking
Intel also confirmed that all of the above will continue to be influenced by Moore's Law - which has been the driving force at Intel since it's inception.
Intel has been promoting their Rack Scale Architecture (RSA) for Cloud/Datacenter for some time as well as their various HPC and GPU offerings in that space. For Intel I think they are safe in this space for now. The ARM SoC manufacturers have so far not been able to penetrate at any scale.
In the Memory & Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) market, this focus to me is on storage. In the next 5 years, SSD will be the only real storage, so both the Memory itself and the processing (FPGA) that manages capabilities like encryption, de-duplication, compression, etc will be key. There is a lot of competition here from companies like Samsung and SANDisk who are really pushing SSD storage technologies forward.
On the "Things" side, the one big change is the cancellation of the Atom "Broxton" generation of CPU. This impacts Intel's current position in the smartphone and tablet market.
For example my 2014 Dell Venue 8 Pro is powered by the Z-3740D Bay Trail generation of the Atom and the newest version of the Venue is powered by the x5-Z8500 Atom - what will now be the last generation of Atom - Cherry Trail.
The Broxton generation of Atom was to follow Cherry Trail and in fact was rumored to potentially be the core of MS's Surface Phone. But obviously that will be no more. In fact one has to wonder if MS's recent announcement around the release of their new mobile devices in April 2017 was potentially influenced by Intel's changes.
Personally I've felt my little Venue has done fine, it runs Windows 10 with out problem and while not a performance blazer, considering the fact that I'm running full on Windows versus Android or iOS it's been great.
So similar to MS, Intel has validated that they seriously missed the 1st Big wave of modern smartphones/tablets are are rebooting to try and catch the next wave. Both of these firms have lost out on billions of unit sales during this explosion and they are going to press hard to try and not miss the next wave.
To the end, Intel is focusing on 5G technologies and killing their SoFIA projects which were X3 Atoms with integrated LTE. 5G Wireless is a huge leap forward from the current 4G LTE.
So think about 1Gbps+ wireless connectivity with very low latency able to stream not only thing like video effortlessly, but also support thousands of simultaneous connections from IoT devices. The Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance (NGMN) expects 5G to start rolling out in 2020.
In my opinion 5G has the potential to render WiFi as redundant. While WiFi can support >1Gbps connectivity today with 802.11ac Wave 2, the bottleneck is some cases becomes the WAN connection.
Now sure in corporate worlds having a multi-gig WAN connections is not a problem, but for the consumer world, we are just now begin to see 1Gbps spreading. Could we reach 10Gb at the home by 2020 ? - Maybe.
But consider as I've discussed in other posts about your Phone being your primary compute device. Today most folks keep both their LTE and WiFi on and in fact many OS try to see which connection is available or faster and switches between them to try and get you the best connectivity. With 5G that need may lessen..
If Intel and MS wants to be a serious players in this space, they really have their work cut out for them as the level of competition to grab a portion of this market is going to be massive. I wish them luck.
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