After the difficult Pentium 4 era, Intel has experienced a renaissance with the Core processor architecture, an era which corresponds to the migration of Apple to their architectures. Since Core, the company has rolled all over the competition. Transmeta threw in the towel, AMD keeps posting losses, and VIA now fears its processors will be subject to competition from Intel's ultra-low-power platform, ATOM. While this competition causes a problem of staying afloat and not losing a fortune by selling its processors at a loss, Intel continues its forced march towards innovation. In two years, they have rapidly decreased their engraving from 90nm to 65 and are now manufacturing at 45nm, meanwhile AMD has not even begun to produce mass qualitities of processors this size. The figures speak for themselves. Intel, today, produces 100,000 45nm CPUs every day! By the third quarter, more than half of their production will be this size. Obviously, this advance does not suffice. Now that this production technique is developed, they focus their next radically different architecture, Nehalem, which is expected in only a few months, aiming to breach 32nm in the course of 2009. Intel seems to want to seek technical KO and, with it, sees limited competition for a long time, giving them the opportunity to broaden their horizons. Their next targets are the manufacturers of high-performance video cards. Intel has settled on this market with its Larrabee products - expected to arrive at the end of the decade - with an similar approach to their CPU line: multiple cores. They will not offer graphics chips as we know them today, but video processors containing a multitude of cores and a huge memory bandwidth. The concept is attractive, because if the foundations are sound, it would be very easy to change by increasing people's cores, then chips on the graphics cards. It should now be asked who can stop them. The only way to counteract the future is no longer fight on the same field, but to revolutionize the very concept of processor in a profound sense. The Power PC could have at one time claimed that status, but it failed. With further evolution, the Cell could claim this title, but it would take an enormous amount of work to adapt it to operate effectively in computers, and certainly won't be seen in the near future. One thing is certain in light of Intel's healthy existence: if Apple had not jumped on their train, the Mac would have been left in the dust. [translation by CliveAtFive]

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