Intel should have been spending that money not just on SSDs, but also on memory. What memory brand does Intel own? Monitor brand? They need to be more focused on integrating themselves into daily living in a much bigger way.
Well, they've been kind of doing that but, not exactly in the way you described. Intel CPUs have been getting pushed (albeit slowly,) towards being more SoC-like where "everything you need" is on the CPU. We've seen this with several generations of Intel CPUs and now we're seeing SoC 8c/16t Xeon parts which are certainly interesting in and of themselves. So while I understand what you're saying, I don't think discrete components is really what is going to make Intel the most money (aka, holding on to the market they have while accomplishing that goal.) More money comes from miniaturization and consolidation of discrete components. We all know that Intel's iGPUs are "meh" at best but, it has evolved to the point where most
regular users don't need more than one of Intel's iGPUs on chip.
So consider one of those Broadwell Xeon D SoCs, it has a whole lot of stuff in one package; such as ethernet (up to four 2.5Gbe links iirc), sata, pci-e, and the memory controller. It's not unrealistic to think that going forward Intel might consider using stacked memory on their CPUs which would reduce the footprint of embedded systems even further than it has already. We already know that Intel can do most of this, the eDRAM on Iris Pro-based CPUs is an example of that. So instead of having several different products that have Intel's name on it, you have a small set of products that already contain most of what you needed. Imagine if you could buy an Intel CPU with 8GB of memory on the CPU? People like us might want more but, people who simply want a laptop won't even think about needed additional memory. A little bit of a price hike and they've cut out memory manufacturers from a segment of the market.
Intel has played their cards well. They already control the market, it's a matter of holding on to that control and leveraging what they already have to improve profits.
) of DDR4 in varying speeds, and the Crucial sticks are going back into my Z170 DELUXE after I finish testing these 3200 MHz sticks, simply because of how the Crucials look.
