Is this the end of ‘Intel Inside’?
It might not look like it yet, but Intel is in a fight for its life. The stakes for its employees and investors are high, and are likely to turn on some fierce battles for market share that will play out in 2024 and beyond. For the everyday consumer, what’s at stake is mostly nostalgia.
One day, the little “Intel Inside" sticker that’s been on PCs since 1991 could cease to exist. Instead of an Intel chip, these computers could have processors from an array of manufacturers, principally Qualcomm, but also possibly Nvidia, AMD, and lesser-known companies like Santa Clara, Calif.-based Amlogic and Taiwan-based MediaTek. What’s happening now is a tipping point decades in the making.
Ever since a little chip-design company called ARM built the mobile processor for Apple’s first Newton personal digital assistant, which came out in 1993, it’s been gaining steam, primarily in the mobile-phone business. By the time Intel sought to enter the mobile-processor business in 2011, it was too late. Apple was the first company to bet that ARM-based processors—thought by many to be useful only in phones—could be the brains of even the most powerful desktop computers.
This gave Apple a huge head start over Intel, and the rest of the industry, in designing chips that prioritized power-sipping performance in a world where that’s become the primary limiting factor in the performance of all devices, not just phones. Now, Google, Qualcomm, Amazon, Apple and others can use ARM’s blueprints to custom-design the chips that power everything from phones and notebooks to cloud servers. These chips are then typically produced by Samsung or Taiwan-based TSMC, which focus on making chips for other companies.
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