Intel seen losing to Nvidia amid ‘tectonic shift’ in technology — from marketwatch.com by Jeremy Owens

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

Computing is undergoing a massive shift, and the company known for making the brains behind many of the world’s computers and servers has not shifted as fast as competitors.

Jefferies equity analyst Mark Lipacis came to that conclusion Monday, reporting in a note that Intel Corp. stands to take a hit in its data-center business amid a move to a new computing paradigm focused on artificial intelligence and connected devices that he believes represents a “tectonic shift” in technology. Instead, Nvidia Corp. is best-positioned to be the chip leader in the new landscape, Lipacis wrote.

Lipacis’s thesis on the semiconductor industry is that computing paradigms undergo dramatic shifts roughly every 15 years, with mainframe-focused technology giving way to minicomputers and then personal computers, and later to mobile phones and cloud data-center architecture. While Intel was a dominant player in the second and third epochs of the computing era, with its chips finding a home in PCs and data-center servers, Lipacis believes the current shift to parallel processing and the so-called Internet of Things will belong to different chip makers.

“We believe we are at the start of the fourth tectonic shift now, to a parallel processing/IoT model, driven by lower memory costs, free data storage, improvements in parallel processing hardware and software, and improvements in AI technologies like neural networking, that make it easy to monetize all the data that is being stored,” he wrote.