Intel, in 2015 I do not seeing any major change, except pushing harder in the biggest competition in decades, and one that they do not have the competitive advantage or even market advantage, like they did with AMD's Athlon, in the 90's. In 2014, Google announced that they have licensed the Freescale PowerPC, this will most likely dent in the couple of thousand processors purchased annually to replace the processors. The second biggest hit, occurred earlier with both Microsoft and Sony deciding on using AMD processors for their gaming platform. Intel is also competing more head on with ARM in the Mobile market place, and even in all of the other areas of computing. A great deal of Intel issues is related to their licensing, and this along my come back to haunt them, as it has with Google.
AMD, will have an interesting year, they are still behind Intel in the x86 arena, but 2 areas that are helping AMD from their problems. Gaming consoles, have given a breath of life to AMD with the Fusion based processors and the idea of blurring the distinction of the General Processor with Graphic Processors. This will move further, but I don't see the big pay off this year. But with bringing back the people involved with AMD's earlier success and rebuilding their x86 lines from scratch, I see that in the coming year there'll be major inroads against Intel in this area. The area I can see a bigger hit on Intel's processors would be in the Server arena, with their new Operteron series that is socket compatible with AMD's ARM offerings. The ARM offerings could actually be the saving grace for AMD, and hopefully it will move forward to the highend clustering offerings.
VIA, has one of the more interesting products for years on the x86 market they were aimed at the mobile computing markets, such as Car Video, or Video Signage. These were for a long time faster then the Atom Processors, Cheaper, and required lower power. The problem for VIA is that development has stagnated, between VIA and Centaur, the processor line hasn't seen a major overhaul in 6 years, and this was at one point a leader in one area that Intel and AMD have both emulated, which is the on-die encryption, with the chipset, you also had hardware video encoding and decoding, well before AMD and Intel, and this all goes back to 2003. VIA has recently taken on the ARM world, but their ARM offereings are also very lackluster as well. I do hope to see more, as I have actually liked their products for a long time, but it's hard to watch a company that seems to have a lack of desire of working for their customers.
ARM and Freescale, both have liberal licensing methods going for it, this allows for partners to join up and develop products that use the Intellectual Property and to develop specialty products, becauses of these licenses, a great deal of products have been generated in the past year, from Network Switches and Routers to Mobile Phones. These all have both the Processing IP from the ARM or Freescale, but also includes a great deal of vendor specific IP, that is not publically available. Examples of this would be Qualcomm's processor lines include Cellular radio's. For the ARM processors, I do see that there will be improvements in speed, and a reduction of power requirements, but I also see that there will be even more fragmentation, like there is now, with no one single "ARM" platform that can have a standardized OS. For Freescale, I have one word, GOOGLE. Google has licensed to both manufacture and design their own PowerPC based processor, and has even released their own motherboard. People might wonder why Google has gone away from their hundreds of thousands of Intel servers, to build their own processor, and it's customatization, if they could offload some of the work for their Map Reduce to the CPU it will speed up their services and reduce the power required to operate their globally distributed system. Beyond this Freescale's PowerPC basically coasts this year as well.
The biggest changes will not be the processors, but with what's around them, improving memory, faster/larger storage, graphics all will see more changes then the processors. But I have been wrong before, so we will see, either way this will still be an intresting year.
