Jon Smirl

Intel: Growth Has Been Formidable

If ARM based netbooks are successful it will be a disaster for Intel and Microsoft. The lure of sub-$300 notebooks is a strong one. Google holds the keys with ChromeOS which also runs on ARM chips.

Note that ARM chips power most cell phones. Which design is a better platform for the netbook? Trying to shrink Wintel or growing the very power efficient cell phone larger? Both can be done but my money is on the ARM CPU.

Intel may lose in both cases. They lose if ARM wins. They also lose if ARM causes the margins on their CPU chips to fall to zero. We won't know the outcome of the netbook war for another five years.

Semis' Downturn - Which Companies Will Survive, Part 2

Nvidia has a long term strategic problem which is going to be fatal unless they can come up with a miracle. The integration of GPU/CPU by Intel and AMD is going to alter the PC graphics market such that Nvidia can't easily access it.

AMD's ATI is also showing a lot of smarts. ATI is licensing their GPU design to ARM chip manufacturers. That will shut off another outlet for Nvidia.

Nvidia may have a couple more profitable years, but it is dead in the long run if it can't come up with a solution for this trend.

This is Moore's law at work. Each year Intel/AMD get more and more transistors to play with. That means that all of the chips around the CPU will get integrated into the CPU sooner or later. Remember the floating point coprocessor? It's pretty much extinct. GPU is on the same path.

Besides, it is way inefficient for GPU memory to be off on the PCIe bus, it belongs over on the main memory bus. Integrated GPUs will be better than the current standalone ones when this process reaches completion.