- At the annual Credit Suisse technology conference, Intel CEO Bob Swan said that the company is no longer going to overly focus on its 90% CPU market share
Intel CEO Bob Swan has a new goal. The company no longer wants to focus on protecting its 90% CPU market share. During a presentation at the annual Credit Suisse technology conference, Swan said that he believes the 90% share focus limits the company’s thinking.
“We think about having a 30% share in a $230 billion silicon total available market (TAM) that we think is going to grow to $300 billion (silicon) TAM over the next 4 years. And frankly, I’m trying to destroy the thinking about having 90% share inside our company because I think it limits our thinking. I think we miss technology transitions. We miss opportunities because we’re… in some ways… preoccupied with protecting 90 instead of seeing a much bigger market with much more innovation going on, both inside our four walls, and outside our four walls. So we come to work in the morning with a 30% share with every expectation over the next several years that we will play a larger and larger role in our customer’s success” said Swan at the event via Wccftech.
Going forward, Intel will be shifting more attention towards AI and FPGAs. And the company will be looking into more investments like 5G at autonomous and acquisitions like Altera.
One of the biggest reasons why Intel has to diversify away from CPUs is due to the intense competition with its rivals. For example, AMD’s Ryzen 3000 has been setting a new standard for high-performance processors.
In some of the new markets Intel has been exploring, there have been some successes and some flops. For example, the Optane storage and memory devices were popular. But the company’s modem business has been struggling. And the company has also been dealing with CPU shortages as well.
“The scar tissue really started with Moore’s Law. Two times scaling factor every two years, and that’s kind of the simple rule of thumb. That’s worked for a very long time. And the transition from 22 to 40 nm and then 14 to 10 nm we decided that despite the fact the physics was getting more challenging, we decided to set a higher bar for ourselves in terms of performance,” added Swan via Wccftech. “So, the 22 to 14 is not a 2 times density, it was 2.4 and it was bumpy along the way. But it worked and that working gave us the confidence that for 14 to 10 – why don’t we take the scaling factor up to 2.7?”
Swan’s business strategy is expected to mitigate some of the risks associated with depending too much on one of its businesses. Finding alternative ways to generate substantial amounts of revenue from different products in the silicon market will be essential for Intel to remain competitive in the long-run.
