Intel has always had significant competition in the CPU market. Years ago in addition to AMD it was Cyrix, IBM, National Semiconductor, et al. Intel is still here.

Now, granted that much of their dominance has been due to questionable business practices, but I'm only addressing the result, not the means.

Intel will survive.

And Intel isn't just sleeping on Atom. Atom will become more efficient and faster over time. Chip making is a matter of design and mathematics. I think Intel has the know how to get in the game. Not overnight, but its Intel. Not doomed. Not even close.

Intel may be doomed, but I think not. It is room for lots of actors. To use a general purpose CPU for Video and 3D and multimedia in general is by definition a terrible waste of precious battery power. I think we will see more netbooks and tablets being built as the N8; a modest cpu and a higly specialized video and 3D chip. Nevertheless, multi-core ARM wouldn't hurt power consumption too much, so Intel may very well be doomed, sort of.

The problem is that even small improvements in battery technology would be very beneficial for Intel, and battery technology will be improved.

True in a way that i'm MUCH more interested to see U8500, OMAP4430/OMAP4440, Tegra 2 or even Qualcomms dual cores inside my phone in the next 5 months than anything coming from Intel, but in a other hand it's a bit hard to fail in a market where you are non existant.

I would rather see the ARM stuff inside fairly large tablets as well, but Intel might got fighting change there with Z600 series early next year?

Intel executive management may be arrogant but they're not stupid. They can read the same trend data we do that shows mobile will overtake desktop in a few years. They'll find a way to compete.

They might be waiting for tablets etc. to become just a tad more advanced so that they can stuff their basic line-up of processors in there, as well as offer mobile processors for mobiles.

But could it be that we're at a spot in time where everything is converging towards mobile, which is all the time becoming more and more like traditional processors? I mean decreasing power consumption must've been a priority since forever, so is there really a difference (soon) between mobile processor and a "ordinary" processor?

Just talking out of my hat here, I have no expertise in the field.

Intel's current scheme for the smartphone market is to use the Moorestown platform. AFAIK power figures are not yet available, but 2 hours is quite pessimistic, as the old Menlow architecture could feasibly reach that on one ~2Ah cell. Extrapolating from the cheaper, more power-hungry netbook CPUs is misleading.

Still, I don't expect Intel to see much success in the smartphone market -- Atom-based products will be slower, thicker, or have short battery life, and the ability to run x86 binaries (most importantly, Windows) on a smartphone isn't widely desired AFAICT.

They're far from doomed, though -- even people who don't use any Windows apps without cross-platform substitutes will be reluctant to leave their familiar OS for a little extra performance in their netbook, and Intel has faced competitors offering better value (and full compatibility) in the desktop/laptop space for years with no customer exodus.

Well that website you gave me brought me to a website about Moorestown, New Jersey.

The problem is, it all depends on the market segment.

For your smartphones and <600 vertical px. devices, an ARM/non-x86-compatible processor is perfectly fine. Battery life is a -big- issue, and being able to run desktop applications isn't - As we found on the N900, even when you -can- run full programs like Gimp or OO.org, the limited screen space makes it painful at best. And if you are redesigning the GUI already, compiling for a different chip is no big deal.

For tablets and <768 vertical PX devices(6-8"), the same thing may apply, but you can probably put in a bigger battery so power usage isn't quite so much of an issue. Still, an ARM chip makes sense in these devices - You want portability, and you don't need all the features of a desktop chip.

For laptops, especially desktop-replacement ones, things change. You need power at low heat, the ability to run Windows(realistically; only people like me use Linux exclusively), and battery life isn't expected to be great - four hours of light usage is typical, one or so under full usage conditions.

For full Desktops, Power is important, especially in gaming, graphics workstations, or CAD applications. You want a heavy-duty processor, powerful graphics, and who cares about power usage(So long as you can deal with the heat generated). Intel's the best, provided you have $$$ to spend. AMD comes in a close second, with the best power/cost, at the expense of a little top-end power. Still, as more applications become multi-threaded, AMD will be a better and better choice.

For Servers, most everything is massively parallel(Look at Apache & web-servers for instance). It looks to me like the requirements are lower heat and cost, with performance/watt being king. AMD's pretty good at this, though Intel again can provide more performance/chip.

So, provided I haven't screwed up -too- badly with my representation, there's room for multiple companies and multiple segments. Intel's not going to lose any of its main market shares to anyone other than AMD, unless we see a sea-change in the market.

For example, what would happen to the market if - instead of using a CPU for most all tasks - the new concept is using a small and fast, featureless CPU that ends up doing on-the-fly reconfiguration of a PLC or DSP to optimize it for whatever tasks being done. Provided the applications could cope, it could certainly shake things up in the computer market.

Just my thoughts...
-Rob

Oops... fixed.