Corona, COVID-19, came under a lot of attention for most of the world’s population. Without doubt, the coronavirus crisis is one of the most significant disruptions since the 911 and the subprime 2008/2009 recession. At the same time, for the first time in recent history, it resulted in an enormous drop in business travel and a stay at home initiative for most of humanity.
While doctors, nurses, supermarket employees, and people who help us run and save our lives, we have home office people to thank and we like to think of them as silent heroes who let you work from home.
Intel is just one of the large companies that stood behind a lot of the "stay at home" effort. Let’s address some of the workloads that are heavily fueled by Intel.
Data Center
Let’s start with the less obvious one. Intel rules the data center with more than 95 percent of market share. Every time you touch your phone, you most likely interact with Intel data center CPUs and infrastructure. Your iPhone runs an Apple processor, and your Android runs Qualcomm, Samsung, or MediaTek processor. Still, every time you want to access any data, you reach a data center that has a 95 percent chance of running Intel data center/servers. Every time you touch Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or your cloud-based pictures, you use Intel.
Microsoft teams, Zoom, Skype, FaceTime, Duo, WhatsApp, Cisco Webex, or Viber, have helped people keep up with friends and coworkers. Working from home office works, and I have close to 20 years of experience from the home office, planes, and hotels, and it can work, because, for some industries and jobs, this is the only way.
Now the world has stopped traveling, and we still have to do our work. We still are using all the tools mentioned above to keep up the contact with people in different zip codes, countries, or continents. The harsh reality is that it works quite well. It opened eyes to many other industries that things can be done via Video link and save a lot of time and money on not always necessary travel.
Your favorite hyperscalers, including Microsoft Cloud, Amazon AWS, Google, Alibaba, IBM, QTS, Oracle, and Facebook, use Intel for the most part.
Every time you use G suit or Office 365, you use a Intel data center. Yes, not all is intel AMD and ARM Neoverse ecosystem have breadcrumbs, but they deserve to be mentioned too. They fight for the remaining five percent of TAM.
Home Office
Most businesses on a PC and especially on the notebook side, run Intel-based products. The use case is the obvious one as most laptops that people brought home from the companies to keep their home office going run Intel CPUs. Excellent battery life in the last few generations powered by massive compute power is the right combination. WiFi 6 is also something that you can get with the latest and greatest Intel-based notebooks, and they are on top of the game.
Desktop machines are also mostly powered by Intel, at least in the corporate environment. Do it yourself guys in some segments prefer AMD based CPUs, but corporate accounts mostly get Intel based machines. This is the hard reality that is not appreciated by AMD fanboys.
Some innovative form factors such as NUCs (small form factor desktop 12x12 cm or 4.6″ x 4.4″ ) will offer incredible performance and still fit on the VESA mount behind your monitor. It's invisible computing with a lot of firepower.
Most industries, especially travel, and hospitality have taken a big hit. Still, there was a big spike in computer purchases driven by shelter in-home, stay at home initiative for more than a billion people across continents.
It looks like millions of people will continue at least a partial home office work and save a lot of time and CO2 on the hard commute.
5G and network infrastructure
The 5G and network is a silent and non-obvious one. Intel creates a lot of solutions for the 5G infrastructure and plans to play a significant role. It did the same for 4G infrastructure as many solutions are running Intel-based hardware from FPGAs to server clusters on the edge of the network.
Services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus, or your bellowed streaming platform wouldn't be possible without Intel-powered infrastructure on both wired and wireless.
Cloud computing, as well as Edge computing, is where Intel shines. Most services are using their servers and infrastructure, that is just a harsh reality.
Unifying software to OneAPI will only help this dominance further as it looks like Intel is investing in the right areas. Innovative memory technologies such as Optane certainly help.
While many other companies do play in this notebook, PC, edge, cloud, server, 5G, and infrastructure, it doesn’t look that any have as a complete portfolio compared as Intel. We mentioned just a piece of "the stay at home" puzzle as companies like Intel help you do your work and staying at home with your kids, entertained by video content and home video schooling.
