Intel CEO No Longer Interested In Chasing Majority Market Share In CPU, Talks 10nm Problems, 7nm Roadmap And More

A featured concept image of Intel Xe GPU. Image credits: Cristiano Siqueira (@CSiqueira97) Just like AMD, Intel also presented at the annual Credit Suisse technology conference and Bob Swan, Intel’s CEO, had some very interesting thoughts to share about his vision for Intel. For what I believe is the first time, Bob frankly admitted that he is no longer interested in chasing a majority market share in the CPU side of things, as he believes that to be detrimental to the growth of the company. In what is one of the most honest and candid conversations we have heard, Bob laid out his plan to make Intel a company beyond CPU. Intel’s Bob Swan blames being focused on 90% CPU market share as a reason for missing opportunities and transitions, envisions Intel as having 30% of all-silicon TAM instead of majority CPU TAM Just a few years ago, Intel owned more than 90% of the market share in the x86 CPU market. Many financial models used Intel’s revenue as a proxy for the Total Available Market of the CPU sector. With a full-year revenue of $59.4 billion in 2017, you can estimate the total TAM of the CPU side of things at roughly $66 billion (2017 est). Bob Swan believes that this mindset of protecting a majority share in the CPU side has led to Intel becoming complacent and missing out on major opportunities. Bob even went as far as to say that he is trying to “destroy” this thinking of having a 90% market share in the CPU side and instead wants people to come into office thinking Intel has 30% market share in “all Silicon”. Here is the complete conversation, transcribed by yours truly: “We think about having 30% share in a $230 [silicon] TAM that we think is going to grow to $300B [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 pre-occupied 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 customers success, and that doesn’t just an CPUs. It means GPUs, it means Al, it does mean FPGAs, it means bringing these -technologies together so we’re solving customers’ problems. So, were looking at a company with roughly 30% share in a $288 silicon TAM, not CPU TAM but silicon TAM. We look at the investments we’ve been making over the last several years in these kind of key technology inflections: 5G At autonomous, acquisitions, including Altera, that we think is more and more relevant both in the cloud but also ai the network
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