Ongoing hardware instability issues, a sharp drop in stock prices, layoffs… Intel’s recent troubles have raised concerns among the public: Is it on the brink of collapse? Will it follow the path of Nokia, who famously said, “We didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow we lost”?
01
Nokia was once considered “too big to fail”
Although Nokia still exists today, its scale has greatly diminished. It once held around 50% of the global mobile phone market, but now its market share is down to single digits.
However, between 2007 and 2013, this giant company lost almost all of its market share practically overnight.
In hindsight, it’s clear that Nokia was left behind by the times due to the following pitfalls:
Firstly, Nokia was reluctant to transition to full touchscreen phones.
This may seem laughable now, but at the time, this concern was quite reasonable.
Before Apple demonstrated the viability of this new form of phone with the iPhone, how to make such a phone practical was not yet clear.
In addition to failing to anticipate the change in phone design, Nokia also refused to switch to the Android system, insisting on pushing its own operating system.
However, this led to a lack of developer support and once again, the company failed to foresee the importance of third-party applications to users.
Looking back at the whole situation, everything seems obvious now—how could they make such mistakes?
But we have the benefit of hindsight, knowing how things ultimately turned out.
Nevertheless, Nokia still stubbornly survives and even now produces excellent Android phones, so perhaps it can regain some of its former glory. However, the recent history of Intel bears some unsettling similarities to Nokia’s turning point.
02
Intel has narrowly avoided disaster before
No one is perfect, and Intel has had a few close calls with disaster.
For example, the ill-fated Netburst architecture, the costly Itanium disaster—where Intel attempted to forge its own path with the IA-64 architecture, aiming to dominate the high-end server and supercomputer market.
Of course, there’s also the unforgettable Larrabee, Intel’s peculiar attempt to build a GPU based on its CPU technology.
Innovation requires taking risks, but taking risks also means potential failure, and these setbacks have likely had a more severe impact on Intel’s profits and market position.
03
ARM is encroaching on Intel’s core market
When Apple decided to adopt ARM technology and began designing its own processors and GPUs, it was undoubtedly a massive gamble.
However, this gamble turned out to be a tremendous success for both Apple and its users.
Apple’s future seems inevitably tied to its ARM-based Apple Silicon.
Unsurprisingly, after a few years of adjustments, ARM-based Windows laptops are now springing up in the market, aiming to deliver the performance and energy efficiency improvements seen in the Apple ecosystem.
Notably, these laptops do not use Intel (or AMD) hardware. The current high-end models are equipped with Qualcomm chips.
While Intel still dominates the high-end desktop processor market and large enterprise applications, most computer users are looking for products similar to the modern MacBook—devices with more than enough performance, while also being thin, portable, and boasting ultra-long battery life.
Despite some lingering software compatibility issues, it is clear that ARM architecture will play a crucial role in the future of personal computing. Intel needs to develop its own version of Apple Silicon to compete in this market segment, let alone dominate it.
04
Intel’s hardware is facing bottlenecks
In addition to missing out on the ARM revolution, Intel is also facing challenges with its hardware.
For years, it has struggled to shrink its chips to smaller process nodes.
Since Intel manufactures its own chips rather than relying on companies like TSMC or Samsung, it enjoys numerous advantages in terms of cost and supply.
However, this also means that Intel cannot take advantage of advanced manufacturing processes that it seems unable to achieve on its own.
As a result, the performance improvements in recent generations of Intel CPUs have been underwhelming, and people clearly feel that Intel is running in place.
Worst of all, recent reports suggest that Intel’s 13th and 14th generation desktop CPUs may have an unfixable design flaw.
So far, there appears to be no plan for a recall, but doing so would mean losing public trust in the brand.
Although Intel currently holds nearly 80% of the global CPU market share, as Nokia has shown, if a company is unwilling to face market changes, this figure could shrink to almost zero in an instant.
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