analyst_9

Why wouldn't they do this? Intel is a fab company, architecture second. The main reason they bought Altera was EMIB. EMIB frees them from spending huge amounts of resources on cutting edge Architecture and Microarch, freeing them to focus on pushing the boundaries on their foundries (which are falling behind). Using EMIB enables Intel to incorporate whatever IP will sell in the market, theirs or somebody else's. The alternative for Intel is to drop their foundries and use GF or TSMC (don't see that happening). I can see Intel using Arm, AMD, Nvidia (if they'll let them, Nvidia seems to be pushing the discrete path hard...that'll fail given high latency of PCIe). Arm has already arrived in the HPC market, SC in Denver's unofficial theme was Arm (both Cavium and Qualcomm). There are even awesome desktop machines now (https://www.avantek.co.uk/store/avantek-32-core-cavium-thund...). HPC is the vanguard for server, already Arm compatible chips are providing perf greater than Skylake Intel server parts at a cheaper price point...why pay for Intel when you can have a Qualcomm Centriq or Cavium Thunder X2? IBM Power is yet another option, but hugely expensive. Definitely useful for GPGPU accelerated applications, but like Intel, IBM is going to be given a run for its money by AMD in sheer number of PCIe lanes.