Intel for the past 2 decades has live by one motto, "make faster x86 cpus" Eventually you can only improve/tweak something you invented 35 years ago before you hit a point of diminishing return. I thought it might take a bit longer before Intel can no longer throw money at the problem and brute force beat everyone with the best x86 cpu money can fab, but I really think it's going to be the next couple of years.
Intel was not the first to 64bit, not the first to hit 1ghz(Despite their fab advantage), and not the first to make a dual core. If anything, Intel has a proven track record of marching in a straight line(although they certainly good at doing it) They made 32-bit processors until AMD kicked their butt with the Athlon. Intel happily made single core cpus until AMD came out with the first dual core and Intel was force to super glue a couple of P4s together in response. Intel happily made cpu clock speed faster and faster until the P4 almost became a nuclear reactor. If history is any indication, Intel is more reactive than proactive.
Given Intel's past problems with the mere 4lb chimp AMD, is it any surprise to anyone that the mobile revolution caught Intel off guard once again?
With all the revenue coming in at such a fat margin, what Intel should have pursued is the next big thing that might force consumers to want more powerful processors so they can continue what they do best. The CPU battle might have ended 10 years ago had the demand for speed not been there. Bloated internet content, facebook, youtube, and HD playback drove demand for the casual users in the past decade. But just about all that can be achieved with the cheapest low end $350 laptop today. Sites like Anandtech runs these productivity benchmarks and media encoding/decoding benchmarks but seriously how relevant are they to the casual user? I ran all Microsoft office ware happily 12 years ago with my pencil overclocked Duron(man that thing screamed) and you'll have a hard time convincing me that the powerhouse call Excel demands that much more horsepower these days. Heck, my old 450mhz Celery actually did all that just fine too! 80% of your PC users will not be converting movies and ripping Mp3, we'll just be looking at stupid cat pictures on the internet. Bottom line is for the typical consumer, the cpu demand is just not there anymore.
Intel needs to either find the next big thing that will drive consumer demand for faster cpus or take all their expertise and wealth they have from the x86 market and start building something else we all want, like a giant cat robot.
