Just as Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) CEO Brian Krzanich opens the regular staff meetings before a dramatically reduced IDF2015 Shenzhen conference, it is a good time to review how government and enterprises don’t see eye to eye when it comes to strategic business.

China’s Tianhe-2 supercomputer is world’s fastest supercomputer, at 33 PFLOPS demonstrated and 55 PFLOPS theoretical performance.

Remember the Tianhe-2 machine at Guangzhou Supercomputer Center, the current World’s number one according to Top 500 Supercomputer list? Unlike some other China supercomputers – Tianhe-2 is fully Intel based machine,  the world’s largest assembly of Intel Xeon CPUs and Xeon Phi accelerators.

Even after Intel ‘opened the kimono’ and gave a nearly 70%  discount on its processors and accelerators, it has given Intel, and therefore US technology sector a major foothold in China and Asian region as such. Over the course of past two years, we were involved in a lot of discussions with Intel staff who were not privy to see the financial impact of the deal — and even argued our undoubtedly solid information. We’re not here to report how things should be, or are in marketing and investor presentations to its numerous staff, but how things really are.

During 2015, the Tianhe-2 supercomputer was supposed to be doubled in its size, up to 110 PFLOPs peak, again using the very same Intel processors and accelerators. Since now these are mature products with lower real manufacturing cost for Intel, they could finally make some real money.

Well, it was not to be: our tweety bird from the window chirped to us that Uncle Sam has put this supercomputer centre, together with National University of Defense Technology in Changsha, the system’s creators, and Tianjin centre, among others, on so a so-called “Denial List”, which prevents any high technology from the USA to be sold to these sites. Our sources used even harsher words.

Knowing that these several sites alone are expected to order some 250+ PFLOPS of compute in the next few years (around 500,000 top-end Broadwell-EP Xeon E5v4 processors, or  approximately $1 billion high margin list price) and they were THE Intel friendly ones, this is quite a loss to Intel, thanks to Uncle Sam.

But, what’s worse strategic loss in time is that, based on this decision as an excuse, indigenous China high end processor architectures can now push the government to gradually remove any dependence on US. This means just one thing: an AMD or Intel x86 processor technology is increasingly becoming errata non grata. Should the Chinese government react in force, it will give the Chinese vendors the blank check support to go all the way a developing their Alpha, POWER and MIPS processors for both the government and the mainstream commercial use.

You may think they are not up to the mark, but remember how fast British ARM architecture became the dominant processing architecture in the world. And this group doesn’t need to worry about the antiquated x86 ISA, worry about satisfying the dumbed down shareholder masses, or overpaying their marketing and sales staff, as well as the fat check, golden parachute-protected CxOs.

They have taken the best that the USA has developed (some of key Alpha, GPGPU and MIPS architects left US over the course of past four years, a lot of them due to non-renewed visas) and discarded due to corporate shenanigans, and the continued developing it much farther than anyone expected both on hardware and software side.

Five years ago, ShenWei showed a CPU that performed faster than the fastest GPUs of the time. Now, fifth generation is approaching, slotting between Tesla and FirePro GPGPUs and next-gen Xeon Phi accelerators. However, this is not an accelerator or a GPGPU – this is a CPU.

So, thanks to Uncle Sam, China might not have a 110 PFLOPS Intel based supercomputer but it definitely will launch a 100 PFLOPS system based on upcoming 64-core, TFLOPS-class ShenWei Alpha, with true blue CPUs possibly faster per socket then even the next generation Xeon Phi or Volta/Pascal-based Teslas.  Next, of course 100 PFLOPS Chinese POWER8 or 9 — (thank you IBM) and then possibly even Loongson MIPS – -it may come back into the high end field with renewed government support because of this Uncle Sam move. All are clean, elegant, scalable high end RISC architectures.

So who are the winners and losers from this?

NUDT and Tianhe may be the losers for now, but only short term. They will simply speed up their HPC ARM plan.

Intel comes out the big loser from this and a lot: who will want to do a phased deployment large x86 machine in China now, and worry about future phases? Then comes Uncle Sam himself: they lost even that little bit of influence on the high end China HPC. How is that for “cutting your nose to spite your face?”.

VR WORLD’s  Analysis: US government moves accelerate the Chinese CPU roadmap while curtailing juiciest sales for Intel and other US vendors.

The post Uncle Sam Shocks Intel With a Ban on Xeon Supercomputers in China appeared first on VR World.

Apple’s (NASDAQ:APPL) Macintosh desktop and notebooks will be using Intel’s (NASDAQ: INTC) chips for the foreseeable future, according to Intel CEO Brian Krzanich.

Krzanich was on CNBC’s Earnings Central late last week responding to a report by analyst Ming-Chi Kuo from KGI securities that Apple was considering ditching Intel’s chips for ARM’s (LON:ARM) A-Series SoCs for future desktop and notebook releases. Krzanich dismissed the claims saying the relationship between Intel and Apple was “strong.”

“Apple is always going to choose the supplier who can provide the most amount of capability in innovation to build on,” he said on the show. “They’re a company based on innovation.”

“I wake up every morning making sure that across the board, whether it’s Apple or Lenovo or Dell or any of our customers, we have the most competitive parts,” he continued.

While moving to ARM-based chips may be a tempting move for Apple’s low-power Macbook Air or superthin iMac, a broad across the board divorce from Intel would cause too many problems in the long run. Apple’s Mac Pro high-margin workstation business, which is virtually ubiquitous in the digital publishing and creative industry, relies on the horsepower that only an Intel Xeon can provide. Furthermore, the software ecosystem from Adobe (NASDAQ: ADBE) and the like which many rely on for their work is strictly Intel-based and optimized. A transition to ARM would be unthinkable.

For now rumors and reports along this train of thought should be dismissed. But that’s not to say that an ARM-powered Macbook Air would be out of the question.

The post Apple is Not Going to Embrace ARM on Desktop appeared first on VR World.

The growing “blurred lines” between mobile devices and PCs is grounds to fold Intel’s mobile chip making division into the mothership of its PC unit.

That’s according to Intel spokesperson Chuck Mulloy, who is quoted in a Bloomberg story responding to a report that Intel will merge the two divisions. News first broke of this merger in a memo sent by CEO Brian Krzanich to employees.

“The lines are blurring between PCs, tablets, phablets and phones,” Mulloy is quoted as saying. “The idea is to accelerate the implementation and create some efficiency so that we can move even faster.”

The new combined unit will be led by Kirk Skaugen, who currently heads up the company’s PC division. The fate of Hermann Eul, who currently is in charge of the company’s mobile division, is unknown but a new position will be announced for him in the first quarter of next year.

Why the change?

An Intel insider that spoke to VR World said the point of the change is simply to make Intel’s internal organizational structure more efficient. There are more similarities between a tablet with a keyboard and a notebook than a tablet and a Xeon chip. Intel’s upcoming Broadwell and Skylake have TDPs for their respective notebook chips that would be appropriate for a tablet. Greater efficiency comes from merging these two teams.

The other reason for the reorganizing is the fact that Intel’s mobile division has been deeply unprofitable since its inception. In order to earn hardware wins the company has had to engage in an aggressive contra-revenue strategy — effectively paying vendors to take the chips. The cost of this strategy has been absolutely staggering: the division posted a loss of $1.04 billion in 2014’s third quarter while revenues declined from $353 million in the third quarter of 2013 to $1 million this year.

Intel has not announced any change in its goal to ship 40 million tablet processors this year.

The post Intel Planning to Merge Mobile and PC Groups appeared first on VR World.