On Friday afternoon, The Wall Street Journal reported Intel had been approached by fellow chip giant Qualcomm about a possible takeover. While any deal is described as “far from certain,” according to the paper’s unnamed sources, it would represent a tremendous fall for a company that had been the most valuable chip company in the world, based largely on its x86 processor technology that for years had triumphed over Qualcomm’s Arm chips outside of the phone space.
It would also be a massive coup for Qualcomm, which reentered the desktop processor market this year as a part of Microsoft’s AI PC strategy after years of dominance in mobile processors.
Intel, meanwhile, is arguably in its weakest position in years — while many of its businesses are still profitable, the company announced substantial cuts, shifts in strategy, and a 15-plus percent downsizing of its workforce this August after reporting a $1.6 billion loss.
At the time, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger said the company would stop all nonessential work and has since announced it will spin off its chipmaking business, a part of the company that it had long touted as a strength over rival AMD and the many fabless chipmakers that rely on entities like Taiwan’s TSMC to produce all of their actual silicon.
Intel, too, recently had to partially rely on TSMC to produce its most cutting-edge chips as it continues to rebuild its own manufacturing efforts (the costs of which are responsible for most of Intel’s recent losses). And its own 18A manufacturing process reportedly ran into some recent trouble.
While Intel’s chief rival, AMD, also had hard times over the years and had to claw its way back, gamers helped AMD every step of the way. Aside from the Nintendo Switch, whose processors are made by Nvidia, every major game console for the last decade has featured an AMD chip — and Intel reportedly lost out on a chance to change that with the future PlayStation 6.
Intel also recently lost some faith with PC gamers after two generations of its flagship chips were found vulnerable to strange crashes, though Intel has since agreed to extend the warranties by multiple years and issued updates that could prevent damage.
Many of Intel’s woes are about silicon leadership, not just manufacturing or profits — the company isn’t a big player in AI server chips yet as Nvidia dominates, nor even necessarily a notable small one like AMD. Even its attempts to produce its own GPUs for gamers and creators have yet to impress.
And while Qualcomm, AMD, and Apple are all still smaller players in laptops, Intel has now twice overhauled how it makes flagship laptop chips to combat the growing threat of their seeming battery life and integrated graphics advantages. We’re waiting to see if its new Lunar Lake chips succeed in October and beyond.
(Originally posted by Richard Lawler)