Intel – 28 Months Later
Like the hero of a zombie movie – Intel has fixed its manufacturing process and awoken from its coma – only to find the world radically altered. Intel has a lot of talent, but the competition is clawing at the door.
Category Archives: Roll Your Own
Are We Reaching the Limits of Homegrown Silicon?
Oppo is has largely given up designing its own chips, but they faced a very specific set of challenges which do not apply to many of the others looking to roll their own semis.
Marketing CPUs in a Multi-Polar World
How do CPU companies market in a newly, highly-fragmented market? There are no easy answers in this very complex, rapidly moving environment, but there is some hope.
Our Semis Are From the Niagara Falls Area
Apple has a history of relegating its homegrown chips to the Apple Watch. Is that the fate of their future cellular modem?
AI Semis Market Landscape
There are really three markets for AI semis – training, cloud inference and edge inference. All of them are already fairly crowded. Choose your battles carefully.
Semi Software – Bug, Feature or Product?
Many semis companies say they want to sell software. We think they really want recurring revenue and software company multiples. And what they really need is competitive advantage, which software can sometimes provide but is not the only way.
How many CPUs do we need?
Less than a decade ago, CPUs were the dominant form of compute and everyone ‘knew’ the market could only support two vendors. Today, there are over a dozen companies making CPUs.
Data Center Market Math
The data center silicon market is massive, but also challenging for incumbents let alone new entrants. We do some math to back this up.
Semis Top Five
We think there will be a few more legs of semis consolidation. So we compiled a list of 5 semis companies who we think will survive:
1. ADI & TI
2. QCOM
3. NVDA
4. Some chip company from China
5. The smoldering remains of Intel, probably owned by others.
How Soft is that Hardware?
We are all familiar with software and Internet companies building their own chips. Less appreciated is the extent to which semis companies are all gradually morphing into software providers as well.