At the very best case you'll get 265-280 million when the economy recovers, and things go back to 'normal'. That is probably going to be 2025 at the earliest, if there's not another war or some other unexpected factor. But you're never getting back to 2020-2021 300+ million levels, ever. It baffles the mind that he continues pounding on this in every conference call. Guess that's what you get with a religious zealot.
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Remember netbooks?
They were the India / China solution until ARM smashed that business to zero with a flood of cheap tablets.
PCs are used in enterprise, small business and education. General home PC usage is in chronic decline due to smartphones and tablets replacing and exceeding most common home PC use cases.
This will be no surprise to Pat or anyone else inside Intel because there was always an understanding the smart phones with great compute powe would result in many consumers, esp in developing countries, buying smart phones and bypassing PCs entirely.
Now if you could get all the people in India and China to purchase PCs instead of phones, you could get back to 300 Mu TAM... but betting on such a strategy would be the level of risk of saying you will enter the Fab business and beat $TSM. Unlikely.
IFS is a moonshot for sure. I'm going to say this again for the caviar crowd in the back of the room. Why would someone contract chips from a company that is behind on technology and never gets its own chips out on time?
There was never an Intel/Iphone project. The sale of Xscale long before Paul’s meeting with Apple sealed the fate of Iphone’s CPU.
Intel was early adopter of arm via DEC strongARM acquisition, the into XScale application processors for phones... No staying power in that segment at all. Billions and billions wasted. Not on the same scale as this IFS moonshot... but not chump change either.
"Please stay in your lane". Those words haunt me. That's exactly what Intel leadership told us when we begged them to continue with the Intel/iPhone project.
Please stay in your lane...
- Kristoph
The IFS investment of spread over 10 years starting ten years ago would have been more affordable in hindsight
Intel has an open door policy, yes?
Tell ‘em yourself.
Reality distortion at its worst. When your leaders have clue to reality then the company is totally phucked.
It is tragic and sad ending to what was a great company.
He has to stick with the 300 Mu TAM because if he doesn't you cannot get anywhere close to the cash margin needed for cash burn required for the IFS moonshot spending.
Dave on the call says Intel is going to run at a 30% of sales going into fab cap ex spend... and spend in advance for the fab shells and spend for equipment JIT as the IFS orders come in.. This is absolutely bat sh^t crazy talk... especially going into a second half recession and facing higher cost of capital.
This strategy redefines the meaning of the phrase, 'going all in'.