Intel: Winning and Losing
10 comments
·May 10, 2025AnotherGoodName
deaddodo
> I'd love some discussion on why Intel left XScale and went to Atom
I thought it was pretty obvious. They didn't control the ARM ISA and ARM Ltd designs had caught up to + surpassed XScale innovations (superscalar, Out-of-order pipelining, MIPS/w, etc). So instead of further innovating they decided to launch a competitor of their own ISA.
KerrAvon
Intel at the time was clear about it: they wanted to concentrate fully on x86. They thought they could do everything with x86; hadn’t they already won against their RISC competitors by pushing billions into x86? Why would ARM be any different? Shortsighted, in hindsight, but you can see how they got there.
dash2
These are the years when Intel lost dominance, right? This article doesn't seem to show much insight as to why that happened or what caused the missteps.
ianand
The site’s domain name is the best use of a .fail tld ever.
ashvardanian
The article mostly focuses on the 2008-2014 era.
igtztorrero
The Atom model was the breaking point for Intel. No one forgives them for wasting their money on Atom-based laptops, which are slower than a tortoise. Never play with the customer's intelligence.
Demiurge
I've always wondered, how do some smart companies, or smart film directors, or smart musicians can fail so hard? I understand that, sometimes, it's a matter of someone abusing a project for personal gain. Some CEOs, workers just want to pitch, pocket the money, and move on, but the level of absurdity of some of the decisions made are counter-productive the 'get rich quick' scheme too. I think there are self perpetuating echo chamber self dellusions. Perhaps this is why an outside perspective can see the painfully obvious. This is probably why having some churn with the outside world, and also understanding what is the periphery of the outside, unbiased opinion is, is very important.
iwontberude
I could tell they were cooked when they bought McAfee.
jbverschoor
Their domain name is probably most of their market cap
I'll give a viewpoint that the article reads like a listing of spec sheets and process improvements for CPUs of that era and not much else. Not really worth reading imho.
I'd love some discussion on why Intel left XScale and went to Atom and i think Itanium is worthy of discussion in this era too. I don't really want a raw listing of [In year X Intel launched Y with SPEC_SHEET_LISTING features].