Realistically speaking, Intel is an industry juggernaut with extremely valuable IP up the wazoo, extremely lucrative contracts with major partners, etc. the number of extremely good Intel chips, the number of consumer and business use cases where an intel chip is the best choice.
I really don’t forsee them going out of business, and I don’t see them ceasing production of x86 processors. The lead time on new processor development is almost a decade, so the next several generations of Intel Processors are too far into production to be prudent to cancel (and probably will be perfectly worth releasing and selling assuming these microcode and fabrication issues are limited to 13th and 14th gen)
I think the biggest shift would come if there’s significant flaws in the 15th & 16th gen processors. That would certainly be enough to need to significantly alter their business model away from x86 processors development, because that would be about 3 years of horrible sales and tarnished reputation and that would be more than enough time to pivot existing IP that isn’t affected by this into workable new products, even if it’s just “let’s run the E cores at 3x the power budget” or “drop the voltage to nothing and sell only mobile chips” or even “let’s drop the process node on 12th gen and play with that for a few years”
Realistically speaking, Intel is an industry juggernaut with extremely valuable IP up the wazoo, extremely lucrative contracts with major partners, etc. the number of extremely good Intel chips, the number of consumer and business use cases where an intel chip is the best choice.
I really don’t forsee them going out of business, and I don’t see them ceasing production of x86 processors. The lead time on new processor development is almost a decade, so the next several generations of Intel Processors are too far into production to be prudent to cancel (and probably will be perfectly worth releasing and selling assuming these microcode and fabrication issues are limited to 13th and 14th gen)
I think the biggest shift would come if there’s significant flaws in the 15th & 16th gen processors. That would certainly be enough to need to significantly alter their business model away from x86 processors development, because that would be about 3 years of horrible sales and tarnished reputation and that would be more than enough time to pivot existing IP that isn’t affected by this into workable new products, even if it’s just “let’s run the E cores at 3x the power budget” or “drop the voltage to nothing and sell only mobile chips” or even “let’s drop the process node on 12th gen and play with that for a few years”