So, today’s news gave me a chuckle. Many years ago I was fortunate enough to be present for a keynote speech by an upper echelon individual with Intel who confessed (or boasted) that there was no competition for Intel in the CPU business, that they had several years of future tech waiting to be introduced but that it would not be introduced until the appearance of competition was met. She went on to explain how Intel always managed to have processors that were always 6 months or a year ahead of anything the competition could produce.
Now, step ahead a decade or two, and a new CEO takes charge at Intel and proclaims that he will get the chipmaker back on track and begin releasing new technologies as they are developed and production techniques and resources made available. In today’s news, I see a production spokesperson for Intel saying they won’t meet the new deadlines proposed by the CEO, and advances that he had promised for this year may be released next year, sometime.
One scenario I see is that the new CEO learned a lot more about how Intel profits after he gave that speech and is dialing releases out a bit later to allow current products to sell enough to cover development costs and targeted profit for the company. Another possibility is that the competition really has caught up and Intel has lost its supremacy in this facet of the tech industry. In neither case do I see any potential that supposed chip shortages from other manufacturers are having any impact on Intel being able to deliver the next generation of CPUs for servers (today’s announcement) or general-purpose computing devices. Intel has long held firm control over the supply lines required to bring its products to market.
Regardless of what is happening behind the curtain at Intel (and AMD and ARM), new CPUs, support chips, controller chips, memories, and storage devices are being released on a regular basis to provide a continuation of ever bigger, faster, physically smaller devices as demanded by this society. Recent moves by Microsoft and Google have guaranteed that non-Intel chips will enjoy equal support in the operating systems and apps made available to the public. This is a huge win for the consuming public, enjoy!