I am halfway through Tae Kim’s The Nvidia Way, and it’s the 2007 to early 2010s. Nvidia has introduced CUDA and worked with companies like Adobe and Autodesk to enable parallel computing to massively make their applications faster. And I just can’t stop thinking — Oh my god, how is Intel letting this happening. It’s absurd that it’s Intel’s Andy Grove coined the term Only Paranoid Survive, and 1 CEO later that’s all down the shitter.
Needlessly to say, Intel had another giant miss during the same era — iPhone. The most common version of the Intel’s iPhone story is Apple has approached Intel to design a iPhone chip and Intel passed/not winning it. Apparently, according to Tony Fadell . This narrative was not true at all, Apple never considered Intel since their chips were so inefficient. But the point still stands, Intel happily stand on the sidelines and let Samsung then TSMC took this one.
Here what happened, Intel saw they had deep moats in CPU for decades. So they ignored all the emerging market segments that had lower profit margins and niche addressable market. And when those segments become too big to ignore, they wrongfully believed they can easily integrate new capabilities (integrated graphics) or easily scale down. They allowed their competitors to survive and strive from below. Ironically, the exact same thing happened to Intel in the 80s. When the Intel had to withdraw from their then main business DRAM and focus on logics. Intel forgot Only Paranoid Survives, and proceeded to getting killed in Mobile, GPU, PC, Cloud, and AI.