UPHEAVAL as Otellini retires: Will Intel look inside? Shares in chipmaker Intel were halted before Wall Street opened up for business on Monday as the company announced that its president and CEO, Paul Otellini, 62, will step down from those roles in May of next year. Otellini has been at Intel since 1974, and rose through the ranks to eventually run its PC and then server …
What "Upheaval"? The guy is retiring in six months. That is not upheaval or anything shocking. If they were reporting that Otellini was finally going to be sent to prison for 25 years along with Bill Gates, for chronic violations of anti-trust laws and criminal fraud, then it would make sense to halt the stock market so everyone could cheer and celebrate justice finally prevailing.
Despite trying to, Intel hasn't been able to change, because the duopoly with Microsoft has been so strong. But that's changing. The supremacy of X86 is almost over and in the next few years, Intel may have its biggest change since switching from being a memory company to a CPU company. The CPU may finally have become a commodity like memory.
"They screwed up big time with 64-Bit. Producing Itanic and then letting AMD produce the 64-Bit architecture we have today"
... and they've then gone on to crucify AMD with their own instruction set. To the point that certain websites are predicting AMD leaving the parts of x86-space where 64-bit is relevant.
I've not great love for Intel, but I have to say when they stop messing about and concentrate on pure technological execution, they can really get the job done..
Who can name two commercial successes Intel have had in the last decade or so, outside the (as already noted) Wintel-dependent market?
If not two successes, then one?
If one decade isn't enough, try two.
Anybody with a clue can name plenty of expensively-promoted Intel failures. IA64, not quite officially dead yet but surely not far off, has already been mentioned. Their integrated graphics are (still?) a long standing joke. Intel's exit from the ARM market was ill-timed.What happened with Intel and WiMax? And although it's perhaps early days yet, wtf did they buy McAfee, WindRiver, and VirtuTech for? And so on.
x86 isn't just Intel's core, it's all they've really got.
Times change, eventually. Can Intel change with them?
What other CPU's are there?
ARM is a success numerically but its profits are rounding errors for intel.
Intel's issue with ARM similar (though not as advanced) as MS' issue with linux on the tablet/phone. Its a strategic problem of an alternative ecosystem being built, not a problem of immediate sales loss.
Apart from that, Intel is doing very nicely with x86/64.
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