Ask HN: Intel is on the ropes and has given up competing – what is its future?

Most companies would dream to be "on the ropes" the way Intel is. Why is that?

1. Intel Foundry generated $17.5B in revenue in 2024. Intel's chipmaking abilities are on the path to outproduce both TSMC and Samsung. Microsoft is purportedly going to use Intel Foundry to produce their ARM chips.

2. Intel has over 214,000 patents globally and Intel has been aggressively monetizing those patents - to the tune of billions of dollars.

Those are some problems to have!

What's missing of course is chip design, but who cares? Everybody and his brother are designing chips these days. The issue is they can't manufacture them and building a foundry is capital-intensive: billions of dollars capital-intensive. Intel is investing and expanding in that area. Their future is fabbing chips - and they're making billions of dollars in annual revenue doing so.

See what happened to IBM. They have been doing it for decades. Are they still big? Sure. Are they here to stay for decades? Jawohl. Are they irrelevant too? Yup.

They are a shadow of their former self.

I expect to see the same screenplay with Intel. Actually it started a while ago also, but many were in denial about it.

AMD keeps serving the needs of x86 users for time being, ARM will get more competitive, maybe an opportunity opens for RISC-V.

Intel's decision that they're only going to make chips that are crazy profitable is a corporate suicide pact -- they won't make enough chips to be relevant.

30 years from now we'll see Intel's trademarks bought up by a nostalgia play like the current Commodore.