You never wondered how how that marvelous Ronco kitchen gizmo could put about two hundred horsepower on a potato? Pretty sure the demonstration stuff was souped up.

 Intel stock is fine from a standard shareholder point of view from what I understand.  Their heyday was Aug or Sept 2000 and even with todays minimal drop they still sit at the high end of the arc.

 I've heard a number of doomsday predictions floating about but the people I still maintain contact with in the market have accurately predicted the monetary flow of Intel for a while.  For instance a few months ago there was a lot of talk about an incoming drop in trust of Intel stock but as predicted by those working the numbers it went up.  It made no sense from the consumers point of view.

 I wish I knew more about how all the math worked but the variables are about like trying to figure out exactly how your credit score is calculated by each entity that runs your score.

 
 
Let's talk BIG picture.     ...... got to get it big enough for Intel to be able to see it, you know


Intel isn't competing with anybody unless they HAVE to, other than that Intel is content to sell a whole lot of old style 14nm x86 chipsets in a whole lot of diverse markets and they see that is their pathway forward towards monetary success.   Intel is being run by its head bean picker right now and believe me, it shows  ......  ABSOLUTELY no foresight and no vision for the future are showing at all right now ......

AMD is having success and a lot of fun taking over the Consumer PC market place using modified ARM technology.
Lisa Su is flat having a blast right now ......

ARM is busy putting out a brand new set of 5nm and 3nm reference designs for Automotive, Phone and PC/Rack space.    ARM believes that NVIDIA has piloted the use of GPU "extreme massively parallel processing" tech in the compute side of things and that NVIDIA is seeing some very good success in the Automotive marketplace using NVIDIA GPU tech for compute, machine learning and AI duties.   ARM can do that too, and is busy going about doing it.

AMD agrees wholeheartedly, and is busy doing the same things in their conjoined CPU/GPU designs.

ARM totally agrees with what its vendors are busily doing, and ARM is busy making brand new reference designs that do the same things even better, reference designs that anybody can use (i.e. fueling a documented revolution in CPU/GPU parallel processing conjoined computing).

LENARO (Linux hardware standards group) is right there helping everybody succeed by providing Linux drivers and getting it all organized inside the Linux kernel just as fast as the cutting edge firms up and develops.   Servers all run on Linux, remember ?

So, Intel isn't paying any attention to any tiny little bitty servers and thus Intel is busily missing another boat that is sailing right on past them even as as we speak.

Watch the little 5 watt 1 ghz 24 core LENARO "Banana Pie" server from Foxconn (the same people who build iphones for Apple) ---- watch the next computing wave of the future roll out on the beach for the very first time.  

Easy to miss, certainly not threatening to anybody at all, much less to that totally huge fat 'ol Chipzilla Lizard lazily sunning itself on the beach .....

Shrink the thing to 5nm or 3nm lithography and give it some more cores, an extra ghz or two in throughput speed and enough of a heat sink to support 10-15 watts of power consumption at that tiny tiny lithography level and suddenly you have a right little ass kicker of a fully developed ARM standard PC / Server level wall socket powered "low end to mid-point" fully LENARO standards backed PC / Server competitor.

It could run off a battery if it had to, but ARM has other designs for that lithography level that do battery/cell phone duty even better.

This really is a tiny low power Server / PC type design that runs on Ubuntu (and can run on Linux Mint too, by extension).    IT DOES NOT DEPEND ON BRUTE POWER, BIG COOLING AND MAXIMUM SINGLE CORE SPEED, IT IS AN EFFICIENT PARALLEL PROCESSING SOLUTION AT A SLOWER MAXIMUM SPEED HIGH EFFICIENCY POINT.  This is what the new wave is about ...... BALANCE.

      Lots of folks will buy one of these little servers for Linux software development work as that is its main forte at the moment.    If it gets cheap enough, I might buy one, too as something that can run Linux Mint Mate at twice the throughput using around half the power appeals to me.   Plus, this may wind up actually being Banana Pi priced, i.e. very inexpensive, once it is produced in volume and sold as part of a group FOSS effort.


AHA !!!  So they snuck up on you while they were sitting right out in front of you, huh Intel?  

You ever ever looked down at your own feet and you never ever took out your magnifying glass to take a good close look at that little bitty server chip, now did you Chipzilla, you lazy stupid grossly oversized lizard you ???

Intel, it wasn't hard to sucker you in, them LENARO boys simply stayed quiet and simply allowed you to snooze on peacefully ..... until they got good and ready, then they slapped right in your kisser with a sweet miniature wee little bitty "Banana Pie"  ---  right in the middle of your oh so arrogant face.  Cruel huh?      





Yep, that's Bill Gates after being banana pied in a hallway in front of the press on the way to a big conference meeting ..... <grin>



A bit of personal historical context to properly frame this new ARM based 24 cores of 64 bit processing at 1 ghz speed drawing only 5 watts of power ........  

My original AMD Athlon processor was the very FIRST 64 bit processor.   It ran at a 1.1ghz processor speed and pulled circa 89 watts while energizing a 1 megabyte systems memory space and a 80 gigabyte hard drive.    

It cost $2,499 to purchase from the Gateway cow box people, delivered through the mail.   I ran that cow box for over 10 years before it croaked out on me ......

Now this next parallel is CRUDE and not totally accurate (the ARM server actually performs better than the comparison made here) ...... but the little Banana Pi server that is going on sale in a week is easily 24 times as much machine with 8-16 times the systems memory and with several dozen multiples of the hard drive space and speed.  

And it will sell for HALF the cost of my old single core Athlon 64 machine ......   and it will run my favorite OS installed new in the box, too.




Yep, I can have a 24 core server for the price of an extra large Apple cell phone ......



Yes, I realize that AMD's lower end Ryzen 3 units coming out next week will actually price/perform better than this, but that is why they are going to take over the world, (or at least the first 25% of it next year).

https://liliputing.com/2019/01/intel-demos-10nm-ice-lake-chips-teases-upcomin...

Intel has now presented at CES ---- they only talked about "late in 2019 releases to production" as they have no current anything worth talking about.   Certainly they have nothing to demo, or nothing that is really real at this time, just some more "this is how we will compete going forward" vapor talk plans.

Intel's new vapor products are all daughter boards mounting MULTIPLE old style existing Atom plus Ice Lake chipsets (14nm and "10nm" (really 11-12 nm) chipsets, some of which won't run at all right now without large production failure rates.


Ice Lake from Intel


Lakefield package, does the same job as an AMD SoC chip shown at the bottom of this post, has 4 large chipsets on it and requires support chips on the motherboard to get full functionality.

These are "laptop class" products that will compete against AMD for the majority of 2019.   AMD is running fully integrated graphics in a real SoC package while all Intel has got is new ways of putting multiple chipsets on daughter boards.

FOVEROST (the towering inferno) Intel CPU chip stacked on top of CPU chip on top of CPU chip ..... the new Intel CPU "towering inferno" stacking technology was also mentioned, but the FOVEROST technique was not shown as it really really really isn't ready for prime time yet.

Timing of all of this is very suspect, as Intel says nothing is going to be real about any of this until fall of this year.   In another section (same presentation with a different person) they claim their 9th generation chipsets which range from top to bottom will come out in Fall 2019.  


===================================================




Intel will be trying to compete against four AMD CPU chiplet cores plus 4-6 cores of good AMD graphics on the same chunk of silicon.  AMD processors that will cost a lot less money than Intel.

These AMD processors will be built by Global or TSMC on processes that can really do it.   Or else you can go buy a Qualcomm 8 core "ARM for windows" chipset built at 7nm at TSMC and get even more processing power for yet larger money (but still cheaper than Intel).

Point is that Intel now has to compete from the technological underdog position in laptops going forward ......
and that is the exact same thing that happened to Intel in phones and it is happening to them AGAIN in laptops starting this year.



....... and yep, that means Intel price supports are gonna make a come back this year, paying builders to use these daugherboard monstrosities using rebates and special pricing just to keep an active Intel toe in the low end laptop market place.

I just spent a little over an hour watching Lisa Su put major gaming house development leader after rack space technical head after video headset industry leader out on her stage so THEY could tell you about what Epic and Ryzen 2 (3rd generation Ryzen) means to their industry or their business or their function.

What is clear is that AMD isn't doing all this stuff by themselves they are in constant communications with the various people who DO LEAD those segments of computing and that the new CPU/GPU/FPGA blends involved in the new 7nm AMD products all work together and ARE THE EXPRESSION OF THE NEW INDUSTRY STANDARDS that all these folks built together.

Next, AMD and their industry leading partners are going to continue to roll out new computing standards and products at a fast pace, a pace Intel can't even keep their BS mill going fast enough to even talk to, much less do.

FOR EXAMPLE, Mickey walked out on the stage in support of AMD, not Intel.   Why?  Xbox runs on AMD now-a-days, not Intel.

Lisa did not even address Intel other than to state she ran her comparisons as shown on the big stage against Intel's very best processor part numbers (run at factory settings, not overclocked or cheating/tweeked in the many ways that Intel so loves to do).   It is clear that the new AMD is 25% faster and saves 50% in energy cost and costs only 1/3 to half as many $$$$ as Intel products cost right now (if you can actually find one from Intel, that is).

AMD has an advantage in lithography, in core count, co-compute ability and in I/O BANDWIDTH, things that have not been reflected in any of the current benchmarks (benchmarks that were built by Intel, BTW).   This explains why AMD products that finish 15-50% sooner doing tasks still get rated as being slower than Intel products using the existing Intel biased benchmarks -- the benchmarks need to be redone to suit the new realities of computing.

Co-Compute is real now, GPUs can be used for compute duties and the FPGA units and the AI blocks can be used for compute duties on current AMD socket products.   The benchmarks are all blind to co-compute speed increases at the moment ...... totally blind because Intel can't do that yet.

Lisa did not bash Intel, she didn't even talk about Intel at all except to state which processor was getting compared in her comparison numbers (and it was always Intel's latest and greatest, BTW).   And in the server tests, she did mention that Intel uses TWO $8,000 processors on the same board to try to compete against one (1) $2,000 7nm AMD Epic 2 processor, she did this to explain why the Epic 2 used only 1/3 the power compared to the "competitor's best processor set".

In the rest of 2019 you will see AMD pull further and further ahead of Intel.   It will get way past embarrassing by the end of the year as Intel is already fairly far behind already and is still losing ground rapidly.