Maybe they see their revenue decline (because of CPU department), need the funds somewhere else?

Yeah, that's what I think as well. After all, that's quite a lot of people working on a product that will not see a light of day for many years to come or possibly even ever. On the other hand, I don't think that Intel has any problems with finances, even with the recent AMD gains. They had, until ZEN, pretty much a monopoly on the desktop CPUs, so some decline cannot be so much felt.

Well it depends on what Intel things the outlook is... if they see their desktop CPU segment breaking away (because AMD might get some foothold with the OEMs), it might mean some money missing, as well as supercomputers etc.

That sucks. I was looking forward to it.

Backstabak:

Yeah, that's what I think as well. After all, that's quite a lot of people working on a product that will not see a light of day for many years to come or possibly even ever. On the other hand, I don't think that Intel has any problems with finances, even with the recent AMD gains. They had, until ZEN, pretty much a monopoly on the desktop CPUs, so some decline cannot be so much felt.

back in the day I did some financial calculations on intel. And how much they can afford to cut prices if Zen proves to be really good. But in the end Zen was really good. Got extra sales. Put AMD at line between Red and Black. Intel did not only reduce price, it increased its cost as now you have 6C/12T even on standard desktop platform. On other hand, large portion of intel's PC revenue does not come from desktops. It comes from mobile, where they sell mobile variant of desktop-i3 at higher price than desktop-i7. So, their revenue did not exactly suffer, it went up in 2017. Which was helped by PC market growth as whole. On top of that in comparison to 2016, they saved $2,5B on marketing and restructuring.

But noes I want them to bleed 🙁

i have a completely different take. i believe this was done for safety. there is a hell of a lot of optical engineering to provide a light source with an acceptable dynamic range. the easiest way doesn't work as you cannot increase the frequency of the carrier. and you cannot use lasers (at this time). the only obvious answer is the amplitude... and therein lies the problem.

fantaskarsef:

Maybe they see their revenue decline (because of CPU department), need the funds somewhere else?

Desktop/Enthusiast CPU sales are only a rather small part of their revenue. Enterprise is where the money is at, be it for servers or just Dell/HP/etc OEM boxes for workstations. Intels revenue in 2017 did not exactly go down. Decisions like this one are not done based on some petty factor like the PC CPU area selling a few less CPUs.

Perhaps they're about to focus on that GPU development?

nevcairiel:

Desktop/Enthusiast CPU sales are only a rather small part of their revenue. Enterprise is where the money is at, be it for servers or just Dell/HP/etc OEM boxes for workstations. Intels revenue in 2017 did not exactly go down. Decisions like this one are not done based on some petty factor like the PC CPU area selling a few less CPUs.

I am fairly aware that the main of their earnings does not come from the little CPUs we buy here, but from data centers and the likes, as well as Internet of SH*T, but that's exactly where they might expect some dropping revenue in 2018, since the whole issues with their vulnerabilities is a thing of 2018 if you didn't notice, it didn't become common knowledge until January. They maybe won't feel much of it because they suddenly have a "secure" architecture at hand for 2019 latest, what a surprise, but AMD's on the rise, maybe it makes competition a little more interesting in that big field of data centers.