Intel is definitely in trouble but five years way too fast of a prediction, even assuming Intel is utterly unable to do anything in the interim.
Take AMD. AMD doesn’t have the volume or capacity with partners like TSMC to produce at the rate Intel does, even if demand justified it (and I’ll go on record and say there isn’t demand for AMD chips that will match demand for Intel chips across segments and there won’t be for five years, to use your timeline).
Intel is truly on the ropes and is getting screwed on all sides, but AMD is less than 1/10th the size and in this sort of commodity market, size absolutely matters. AMD can’t reliably take the sorts of orders Intel can. It doesn’t have the clout or cash flow to buy the wafers. It doesn’t have its own fabs and is fighting for space and resources against Nvidia and Apple, who are both larger.
It’s great AMD has had such a resurgence (I’m a Mac user but I’m finalizing a build on the first AMD system I’ll have owned since 2003), but they aren’t a real factor in Intel’s decline, outside of adding to the narrative of all aspects of Intel’s business being challenged.
Apple is a threat insofar as it shows the limitations of current Intel hardware, but outside of smartphones, it doesn’t do the volume to pose a real challenge for many of Intel’s markets. Apple isn’t selling into the same places Intel is and across the spectrum of requirements and it is a vertically -integrated company who wants to sell its hardware, software, and services. Apple doesn’t want to sell into the data center (the recent AWS deal proves that very clearly). It’s similar for Amazon. Amazon having its own custom chips for certain workloads doesn’t change the fact that most of AWS’s millions of servers are and will continue to be Intel. Could that change long-term, sure! But it’ll take more than five years for them to get to a point where they can produce those chips in a volume that could match Intel (assuming Amazon even wants to be in the business of making large volumes of its own processors).
Intel is facing massive challenges that will likely be most visible several years from now, and I’ll go as far as to say that the company is wounded right now in a very real way. But economies of scale and R&D cycles necessitate that we’re not going to see a collapse in market in five years.
The theme underpinning this comment is that the competition can't scale up - which is effectively a view that TSMC can't scale up and indeed TSMC is the big risk in this hypothesis.
But TSMC has scaled up quickly before to produce 200m+ iPhone CPUs. And the money is there - Amazon, MS, Google, Nvidia and even AMD are not exactly paupers.
As I've said below Intel's P/E ratio is less than 10. That's extraordinarily low for a company in this market with growing revenue and eps. Clearly the market agrees with me that Intel can't sustain these earnings even over the medium term.
Take AMD. AMD doesn’t have the volume or capacity with partners like TSMC to produce at the rate Intel does, even if demand justified it (and I’ll go on record and say there isn’t demand for AMD chips that will match demand for Intel chips across segments and there won’t be for five years, to use your timeline).
Intel is truly on the ropes and is getting screwed on all sides, but AMD is less than 1/10th the size and in this sort of commodity market, size absolutely matters. AMD can’t reliably take the sorts of orders Intel can. It doesn’t have the clout or cash flow to buy the wafers. It doesn’t have its own fabs and is fighting for space and resources against Nvidia and Apple, who are both larger.
It’s great AMD has had such a resurgence (I’m a Mac user but I’m finalizing a build on the first AMD system I’ll have owned since 2003), but they aren’t a real factor in Intel’s decline, outside of adding to the narrative of all aspects of Intel’s business being challenged.
Apple is a threat insofar as it shows the limitations of current Intel hardware, but outside of smartphones, it doesn’t do the volume to pose a real challenge for many of Intel’s markets. Apple isn’t selling into the same places Intel is and across the spectrum of requirements and it is a vertically -integrated company who wants to sell its hardware, software, and services. Apple doesn’t want to sell into the data center (the recent AWS deal proves that very clearly). It’s similar for Amazon. Amazon having its own custom chips for certain workloads doesn’t change the fact that most of AWS’s millions of servers are and will continue to be Intel. Could that change long-term, sure! But it’ll take more than five years for them to get to a point where they can produce those chips in a volume that could match Intel (assuming Amazon even wants to be in the business of making large volumes of its own processors).
Intel is facing massive challenges that will likely be most visible several years from now, and I’ll go as far as to say that the company is wounded right now in a very real way. But economies of scale and R&D cycles necessitate that we’re not going to see a collapse in market in five years.