Intel's new plan: A circle that starts in your hand and ends in the cloud As predicted by The Register, Intel has created an x86-powered reference platform for home gateways that makes the box you use for broadband services an Atom-powered target for virtual machines delivered by carriers. Announced today at Computex in Taipei, the new AnyWAN GRX750 is a system-on-a-chip that can serve as the basis …
If your home gateway can, for example, pack a web server that offers an interface to a personal video recorder, it provides a carrier with all sorts of possible ways to upgrade your device rather than shipping you new tin force you to sit through the adverts.
FTFY
OWN YOU!!!
We all know where this is going - the parasitic corporates permanently feeding off billions of bank accounts, as they already do only more so. Because, when it comes to greed, money, and power, you can never have enough.
"'Service', oh yes, that's something we throw in to let the proles attached to the accounts feel they are getting something in return. Otherwise they tend to complain. Now, how's my latest mega-yacht coming along - it's bound to be bigger than yours?"
The phrase 'Jack of all trades' springs to mind for some reason.
And of course the gateway itself becomes far more easily upgradable, a nice change from the mostly dumb broadband boxes sold today.
So they can guarantee that the box will have the CPU and storage resources required to meet forthcoming protocols? Let's look at this through the filter of IT history.
Are they really suggesting that such a generic box that was originally used to process ADSL 1 and to distribute IPv4 packets around could be upgraded to support G.FAST and IPv6?
Or that a box that originally rendered SD video in the early 00s by offloading decoding to the cloud would still be capable of rendering 4k video this year? Would they have had the foresight to fit it with an HDMI socket? Would it have enough grunt to throw that many more pixels around?
These would have been either a miracle of engineering or an expensively over engineered solutions. I'd be very interested to know how they implement a DAC in a way that can be upgraded.
We make our money on really expensive CPUs. They are fast. Far faster than any normal person needs at all, and only gamers can max them out for more than a couple of minutes at a time (and they spend money on graphics cards made by other people). We have tried making small CPUs, and can now get the performance per watt similar to our competitors, but we cannot sell them for the enormous prices we like. In fact, any cheap CPU we sell means we lost the opportunity to sell something more expensive.
Desktop sales fell as they were replaced by laptops, and we did not care because we own the laptop CPU market. Laptops are becoming phones, and someone else owns the phone CPU market. Our future is in data centres - the only place where people can aggregate work loads big enough to fully utilise our most profitable products. We need more and bigger data centres to maintain our revenue, so here is the plan:
1) Other people can earn a pittance by collecting underwear with IoT CPUs.
2) Send all the underwear to the cloud
3) We profit.
You forgot the part where they never will again get the margins they have enjoyed throughout their history and responding to market forces and are desperately trying to downsize (as well as throw things against the wall like this and hope it sticks). Considering they are decades behind some of their competitors in being able to get by on razor thin margins its going to be a brutal five years going forward for them. A lot of overhead can't be reduced overnight or even in a quarter and being a generation ahead of everyone else in fab technology is quickly becoming not worth the cost. Haven't heard much about moving to 450mm lately huh? The cloud is not going to be profitable enough to offset the industry changing and growth stagnating long term as the mature market it now is.
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