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Intel Ditches Mobile Phone Processors
An anonymous reader writes "Intel is planning on selling off their XScale applications processor and 3G processor businesses for around $600 million to Marvell. From the article: 'Marvell is best known for its NIC (network interface card) chips, including wireless chipsets, and for other embedded, network infrastructure, and storage processors. The company has not previously competed in the market for mobile phone chipsets. However, it says it knows how to produce chipsets for high-volume consumer applications, which it has done for 11 years. Marvell earlier this year acquired a UT Starcom business unit in China that is working on mobile phone processors.'"
XScale is not, repeat not a "mobile phone processor" although I'm sure it's used there. In fact they specifically sold the PXA line, which includes the processor in my iPAQ.
It never ceases to annoy me when someone is so lazy that they can't even write their own headline - especially when it's wrong. If you're going to plagiarize, why not copy something that's actually correct?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Intel has lost billions of dollars since late 90s on this. EE-times gives some more details http://www.eetimes.com/news/semi/showArticle.jhtml ?articleID=189602065
During the course of the past decade Intel invested between $3 billion and $5 billion in the assets it sold to Marvell, says Will Strauss, an analyst for Forward Concepts. Intel spent nearly $2 billion on a single acquisition to bolster those communications chip efforts. It was a major rat hole of unparalleled magnitude.
RIM is also using the Intel Xscale chips in the Blackberry.
From TFA on red-electronics.com, Intel will keep making the chips for Marvell until Marvell finds another manufacturing solution - probably TSMC or the like, my guess is.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Intel really just pulled a Pentium IV with XScale. It was basically a StrongARM core jacked up in mhz. The new ones run like 700 mhz, but they're the same architecture as the 100 mhz StrongARM they ran a decade ago. Very poor integration, power consumption not that great, just not a good chip, except if you look at the mhz. Like you say, they kind of got their pants beat.