This is mostly mypoia, based on the technology you see every day and think is important. CPU cores aren't remotely all of Intel's business, just as ARM Ltd. gets no revenue from semiconductor manufacturing. Intel has hands-down the best process technology out there, and gets insane margins on their parts (average of $2/mm^2 or something like that). They aren't going anywhere. The PC market is stable, but not shrinking. The server world is booming.
Intel clearly wants to be a player in the consumer SoC market. And they've had... let's say rather mixed success there. But they'll keep trying. Similar challenges were seen in the early 90's vs. the RISC world and '99-02 years vs. AMD. They reworked, adapted, and clobbered the competition.
As someone else posted, their death has been predicted so many times over the years that it's almost a running gag in the industry.
Lynnfield is the 45nm Core 2 Duo, kind of old to make a comparison. Intel doesn't sell anything as big as 300mm^2 in their current line except for $2k monsters like Westmere EX.
I honestly don't know where I got that number from. I was thinking something like $200 average for the 2-core Sandy Bridge die, which is 90mm^2 I think. I'm obviously not privy to sales volume numbers nor to what their wholesale prices look like. So feel free to apply a factor of N to that intuition.
And obviously I meant revenue, not margin. Apologies.
But then you have things like the Core i7-980, which is also about 300 mm^2 but retails for up to $1200. I don't know what the average is, but $1-$2/mm^2 is in the right ballpark at least.
Proof that it is myopia: Those cell phones everyone loves, that are bringing the future? They depend on the cloud, the other darling herald of the future. What drives the cloud?
Yes, in exactly the same way that Intel is "making" SoC chips for consumer electronic devices. Having a part that boots and runs isn't the same thing as having a competitive product in the market.
Intel clearly wants to be a player in the consumer SoC market. And they've had... let's say rather mixed success there. But they'll keep trying. Similar challenges were seen in the early 90's vs. the RISC world and '99-02 years vs. AMD. They reworked, adapted, and clobbered the competition.
As someone else posted, their death has been predicted so many times over the years that it's almost a running gag in the industry.