someone (someone.delete@this.somewhere.com) on September 27, 2013 8:25 am wrote:
>
> The situation today is very much different from that late 80's and '90s'. Simply
> saying ARM will win because it is coming up from below just like x86 did to the
> server RISCs is grossly simplistic as well as almost certainly wrong. The money
> situation is very different and that determines the winner.

"Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose"

I agree that things are different. I don't agree that they are very different.

You compare Intel during the 90's to other chip manufacturers during the 90's, and point out (correctly) that Intel outperformed and undersold those other manufacturers. And no, ARM doesn't do that (well, they do the underselling thing). So the situation is certainly different.

But the thing is, I don't think you should just look at the CPU. Look at the PC as a whole when it started, and compare to the competition back then. Look at what happened before the i486 (and then later Pentium and particularly PPro when Intel actually started taking the performance crown).

Back then, the big iron people (and the not-so-big iron people - workstations etc) dismissed the PC for the same reasons you dismiss ARM. Chaotic PC marketplace (think of all the incompatible "almost PC" clones), slow machines with limited memory etc. And the PC succeeded despite those issues, because the fact is, the market wanted cheap machines, and they were "good enough".

I don't think tech people necessarily understand this, but there are people for whom the tablet or cellphone isn't "in addition to" their real computer, it can be a real replacement for one. Not for me, not for you, not for anybody who does "real work" with a computer. But for a small - and growing - segment, there may not be a primary computer at all.

And if that spreads more widely, and PC's become the "workstation" of the 80's, Intel will actually start losing CPU shipments. Sure, they'll keep the higher end, but by the time you don't have a low end, you're losing a lot of the advantages that you traditionally had. At some point, the erosion gets to be difficult to handle.

And I don't think Intel is there yet, and I agree that the situation isn't the same as it used to be. But the "growing up from below" is definitely real, and I think Intel needs to worry, and Intel needs to execute. The fact that people are even talking about something like an ARM-based MacBook Air, and aren't being laughed out of the room, that is what Intel needs to nip in the bud.

And for once, I think Intel is actually very aware of this. With Itanium, Intel was completely oblivious. I know. I argued this very thing (back then about Itanium) face-to-face with top management at Intel 10+ years ago, and they were in complete denial.

And that may be the big thing that is truly different this time around. There are no internal politics and blinders on within Intel. ARM is seen as a real threat. There are still politics on other levels (I don't know why Atom took so damn long to really improve, but I blame internal Intel politics), but I think don't think anybody has blinders on wrt ARM at Intel any more.

Linus