> they have turned down various console makers

The problem is, console manufacturers know precisely how much of their product they anticipate to sell, and it's usually a lot. The PlayStation 5 is 80 million units so far.

And at that scale, the console manufacturers want to squeeze every vendor as hard as they can... and Intel didn't see the need to engage in a bidding war with AMD that would have given them a sizable revenue but very little profit margin compared to selling Xeon CPUs to hyperscalers where Intel has much more leverage to command higher prices and thus higher margins.

> they turned down Apple on the iPhone

Intel just was (and frankly, still is) unable to compete on the power envelope with ARM, that's why you never saw x86 take off on Android as well despite quite a few attempts at it.

Apple only chose to go for Intel with its MacBook line as PowerPC was practically dead and offered no way to extract more performance, and they dropped Intel as soon as their own CPUs were competitive. To get Intel CPUs to the same level of power efficiency that M-series CPUs have would require a full rework of the entire CPU infrastructure and external stack, that would require money that even Intel at its best frankly did not have. And getting x86 to be power effective enough for a phone? Just forget it.

> Clearly the threat of an Arm or RISC-V finding itself fused to a GPU running AI inference workloads has woken someone up, at last.

Actually, that is surprising for me as well. NVIDIA's Tegra should easily be powerful enough to run the OS for training or inference workload. If I were to guess, NVIDIA wants to avoid getting caught too hard on the "selling AI shovels" train.

▲

philistine 7 days ago | parent | next [-]

Apple did not want their x86 chips, they wanted their Xscale stuff. Apple went to Intel to get chips, the power envelope was appealing to Apple. Intel was the one to say no.

▲

tmzt 7 days ago | parent [-]

Right. But of course, intel was busy spinning off their Xscale business to Marvell. If they had seriously invested in it, they could have owned the coming mobile revolution.

They did push hard on their UMPC x86 SoCs (Paulsbo and derivatives) to Sony, Nokia, etc. These were never competitive on heat or battery life.

	▲	dcassett 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		> Paulsbo You probably meant Poulsbo (US15W) chipset

▲

burnte 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> And at that scale, the console manufacturers want to squeeze every vendor as hard as they can... and Intel didn't see the need to engage in a bidding war with AMD that would have given them a sizable revenue but very little profit margin compared to selling Xeon CPUs to hyperscalers where Intel has much more leverage to command higher prices and thus higher margins.

And so that gave AMD an opening, and with that opening they got to experiment with designs, tailor a product, get experience and industrial marketshare, and they were able to continue to offer more and better products. Intel didn't just miss a mediocre business opportunity, they missed out on becoming a trusted partner for multiple generations, and they handed market to AMD that AMD used to be a better market competitor.

▲

mschuster91 6 days ago | parent [-]

> and they handed market to AMD that AMD used to be a better market competitor.

AMD isn't precisely a market competitor. The server and business compute market is still firmly Intel and there isn't much evidence of that changing unless Apple drops M series SoCs to the wide open market which Apple won't do. Intel could probably release a raging dumpster fire and still go strong, oh wait, that's what they've been doing the last few years.

AMD is only a competitor in the lower end of the market, a market Intel has zero issue handing to AMD outright - partially because a viable AMD keeps the antitrust enforcers from breathing down their neck, but more because it drags down per-unit profit margins to engage in consoles and the lower rungs and niches.

	▲	burnte 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		> The server and business compute market is still firmly Intel and there isn't much evidence of that changing This is not true anymore, as it IS changing, and very rapidly. AMD has shot up to 27.3% of the server market share, which they haven't had since the Opteron days 20 years ago. Five years ago their server market share was very small single digits. They're half of desktops, too. https://www.pcguide.com/news/no-amd-and-intel-arent-50-50-in...

▲

mrheosuper 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>To get Intel CPUs to the same level of power efficiency that M-series CPUs have would require a full rework of the entire CPU infrastructure and external stack, that would require money that even Intel at its best frankly did not have

Intel, at one of its lowest low, still come up with lunar lake, which is not as efficiency as Apple M, but still, quite impressive.

I bet if they were focus on mobile when they are at their peak, they could come up with something similar to Apple M

▲

JustExAWS 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> The PlayStation 5 is 80 million units so far.

80 million in 5 years is a nothing burger as far as volume.

	▲	mschuster91 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		Estimates are at 1M Xeons a month [1], so there have been more units of PS5 and thus CPUs sold to a single customer in the same timeframe than units of Xeon CPUs over all customers. NVDA sold 153 million Tegra units to Nintendo in 8 years, so 1.5M units a month. That's just as comparable. [1] https://www.servethehome.com/on-ice-lake-intel-xeon-volumes-...