Change is the only constant in life as Heraclitus might have said. Even then if you've followed the semiconductor sector it's mind-boggling that Intel has stumbled so badly that Qualcomm is now plotting a takeover of what used to be the world's number one chip maker.
Intel is synonymous with the personal computing revolution with its x86 architecture chips, and was founded in 1968. The name the founders Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce (who is credited as the co-inventor of the integrated circuit or IC) settled on is an abbreviation of "Integrated Electronics".
Qualcomm is younger, being founded in 1985 and didn't even start in semiconductors, focusing instead on cellular technology for mobile phones.
Intel rode the PC boom for a long while, with the chips it made eventually finding their way into cheap servers for business networks and data centres. It's a huge ecosystem that allowed Intel competitor Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) to flourish, along with Nvidia which started off building fast graphics card add-ons for video gamers.
Qualcomm, meanwhile, eyed up the mobile market with smartphones and modems for wireless radio communications. The Snapdragon processor family of systems on a chip (integrating central and graphics units, and modems) didn't appear until 2007 but are now found in Android mobile phones, and appear in notebooks and servers.
Smartphones was a market Intel was keen on as well, but the company wasn't able to come up with a competitive chip for it, one that was both energy efficient and powerful. Like, Qualcomm's ARM-based chips.
Intel then spectacularly lost Apple as a customer for the same reason it didn't get anywhere in the smartphone market. Apple had been an investor in chip designer ARM for years, and eventually gave up on Intel, which couldn't deliver the technical advances Cupertino needed to produce competitive devices.
Although Intel's processors have been the go-to parts for building powerful gaming PCs, the chip maker's forays into graphics cards were neither here nor there.
Nvidia's graphics chips are good at doing many operations in parallel, which is what crypto currency miners want and now, artificial intelligence developers. Again, Intel was left behind with no effective response to capitalise on the AI boom which is hoovering up investor dollars at a huge rate - for better or for worse.
While all that is happening, Intel is losing money and having to cut costs and shed staff in colossal numbers while its share price is down almost 53%, year-to-date. It used to be the world's most highly valued chip maker. Painting itself into a loss-making corner in a world that can't get enough of semiconductors is quite a feat in itself by Intel.
We'll see how it ends, but important Intel partners like Microsoft now seriously diversifying into Qualcomm made chips for prestige products (like the one in the Surface Laptop 7 reviewed here) isn't a vote of confidence in the chip maker.
In other words, we could be looking at a chip maker merger with the size of the GDP of a medium-sized nation some time soon.
We welcome your comments below. If you are not already registered, please register to comment.
Remember we welcome robust, respectful and insightful debate. We don't welcome abusive or defamatory comments and will de-register those repeatedly making such comments. Our current comment policy is here.