Since years back, the Intel Inside sticker has been tacked onto millions of computers because decades ago, the chip maker hitched its fortunes to IBM and Microsoft, and rode the PC revolution into what seemed like an unassailable market position.
The processor market is worth billions and billions of dollars, and others want a slice of the action.
Over the years, Intel has had its market leadership for chips based on its own design nibbled away by minnow Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) in all customer segments with fast, value-for-money parts.
Coming up with better-performing processors built with billions of transistors is massively difficult and expensive, and Intel has stumbled here which in turn has annoyed its computer manufacturing customers.
As a processor designer, you can’t just rev up the chips to make them go faster. Do that and the energy consumption becomes chip-meltingly high, requiring big noisy fans or even liquid cooling.
Efficiency, as in not wasting Watts and using as little energy as possible is where it’s at nowadays. This is where Intel has looked increasingly like the souped-up petrol V8 owner turning up at an EV driver’s rally; if you wondered why there are no smartphones or tablets with “Intel Inside” on them, there’s your answer.
In that area, the competition for Intel isn’t coming from Silicon Valley but from British chip designer arm Holdings.
The company grew out of the success of the BBC Micro and Acorn Computers in the 70s and 80s and ended up owning the smartphone and tablet processor market that Intel failed to capture.
There’s even a Kiwi connection at arm in the form of computer scientist and University of Canterbury alumnus Dave Jagger, who was instrumental in optimising the instructions in the processor design.
Fast forward to 2023, and Arm designs are everywhere, in smartphones, smartwatches, TVs, digital cameras (remember those?).
Tech giants such as Samsung, Amazon, and Qualcomm produce billions of arm-based chips annually, but importantly, three years ago Apple moved away from Intel chips for its Macs.
That kind of transition is lengthy, expensive and painful, but Apple was fed up with Intel’s missed deadlines and hardware bugs so it was time for the two tech giants to break up. Intel ignored the obvious warning signs, including Apple having had a long prior relationship with arm that included owning a large part of the UK company.
The result is Apple Silicon, an arm-based range of fast and energy-efficient chips based on the processors used in iPhones and iPads, now in its third iteration in MacBook laptops.
Apple’s silicon success hasn’t gone unnoticed by Microsoft which too has dabbled with arm-based devices that didn’t make an impact. Microsoft now wants the cachet of Apple Silicon for devices running its Windows operating system, and to reduce its dependence on Intel at the same time.
In what must be a nightmare scenario for Intel, competitor Qualcomm has announced its Oryon Snapdragon X chipset. This is arm-based and designed by Nuvia, a startup Qualcomm bought in 2021 with former Apple employees on board.
Add to that graphics and artificial intelligence hardware giant Nvidia now eyeing up the retail PC and enterprise data centre markets with arm-based chips.
The arm chip ambitions of competitors is just one headache for Intel chief executive Pat Gelsinger. Intel missed the boat on AI as well, and it can’t make arm chips for other companies in its fabs, should the worst come to the worst.
Could all this mean the “Intel Inside” PC stickers will be replaced by “arm Inside”, to the delight of dad-joke afflicted nerds? It seemed unlikely not so long ago, but Intel’s chickens are coming home to roost so anything is possible.
