The Tough Road Still Ahead For Intel In The Datacenter
The Next Platform, Friday, January 26th, 2024
A few years back, when Intel went up on the rocks with its CPU and GPU designs largely because its chip research and manufacturing did not keep pace with the manufacturing and packaging advances made by foundry rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co, we said that we were rapidly moving towards a world where Intel might have 40 percent of the CPU market, AMD might have 40 percent, and Arm and RISC-V would fight over the remaining 19 percent and 1 percent remaining for other exotic datacenter compute engine chippery.
Nothing we heard on the call with Intel's top brass yesterday going over the company's fourth quarter of 2023 financial results and nothing we see going on in the market leads us to believe this scenario is not the most likely new equilibrium point.
And with Nvidia having great control over the HBM stacked memory market and the advanced 2.5D packaging used in these devices thanks to its newfound, Gilded Age class wealth, we don't see a world where Nvidia won't command somewhere between 85 percent and 90 percent of GPU revenues over the next four years - no matter what AMD, Intel, and others do to create matrix math accelerators to run AI and HPC workloads.