英特尔又有啥大麻烦了

When you have 97% share of the market, you're always looking for where the competition may come in, … As long as I can give the cloud service providers the best technology, I believe [customers] will continue to rely on us based on the investment that we make.".

Qualcomm (NASDAQ:QCOM) announced in mid-January that it had entered into an agreement with the Chinese province of Guizhou to create a joint venture called Guizhou Huaxintong Semi-Conductor Technology Co. Qualcomm plans to enter the server CPU market that Intel dominates, with a customer processor chip built using the ARM architecture, which is less expensive and may also consume less power.

Intel immediately fired back several days later with an announcement of a new joint venture to design chips through a research partnership with Tsinghua University and Montage Technology Global Holdings. Intel will put $100 million into the venture.

Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) announced in January that they had started volume shipments of its "Seattle" Opteron A1100 ARM processors, designed for high-density server systems. The Opteron A1100 chips will power web servers, networking appliances and storage arrays. So far, analyst views on the new AMD 64-bit ARM chip have been mixed.

Chip companies, including Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO), Applied Micro (NASDAQ:AMCC) and Cavium (NASDAQ:CAVM), could soon try to take a bite from Intel's near-monopoly market share with their Vulcan 64-bit ARM server processor, X-Gene family of ARM server chips and ThunderX ARM processor, respectively.

In our opinion, a real threat to Intel's data center market may be still years away since large scale data centers still mainly run on x86 chips. A change in an infrastructure from x86 to ARM will be quite an undertaking due to enormous investment in hardware and software.

Overviews of Intel and Its Competitors

Intel - The acquisition of Altera by Intel was completed in early fiscal year 2016 and Altera has emerged as a stand alone unit called the Programmable Solutions Group. Intel once said that the company had a plan to create a hybrid Xeon-FPGA chip that will plug into a single processor socket. As competition in the data center business is heating up, it is highly critical for Intel to convince Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) and others to switch from the graphics processor unit, GPU, chips to the Intel hybrid Xeon-FPGA chip to power their artificial intelligence tools, including speech recognition, image recognition, and natural language processing.

Intel Tehnical Chart

Technically, INTC was under selling pressure earlier this year, but is on the rebound, as analysts had raised concerns over PC and notebook sales during the first-quarter 2016. Rumors that Google would start designing their own chips will not support Intel shares much either. The stock is trading in a symmetrical triangle chart pattern, as well as under the major moving averages, meaning the stock could pull back to the retest the lower trendline support of the symmetrical triangle at around $28 a share. If the stock breaks out, the projected price would be $34 a share. As of March 1, Intel is the largest holding in the Market Vectors Semiconductor ETF (NYSEARCA:SMH), with a weight of 17.93%.

Qualcomm - Qualcomm recently released its fiscal 2016 first-quarter earnings report, which came in well above expectations, but a license dispute with LG surfaced and fiscal 2016 second-quarter guidance disappointed due to the impact of a challenging macro environment.