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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.'"
Many mobile phone producers have their own completely adequate chipset solutions. I'm not sure how many cellphone producers rebrand chips they use though. I am sure that if a phone provider needed Intel hardware for whatever reason, they could simply buy and or rebrand the chips or rights from Intel if the need arises.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
Have another drink, drinkypoo, and make more blather about nothing. H/L is accurate. Intel also sold baseband phone processors to Marvell. Though PXAs are used in PDAs, mobile phones are probably 95 percent or more of their volume, I'd guess. Intel did not sell the whole XScale line... just the xscale's that go into phones.
I'd hardly call a super-low power consumption embedded processor without a floating point unit a "standard CPU chip."
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
And to sign our lives and first born children away just to get the programming specs!
Everyone makes fun of the Itanium, but it isn't like all of the money that was thrown into it was wasted. First and foremost, it did its job: it got rid of many competing companies. Sure, that was before it was actually released - but damn, it looked good on paper. Various companies decided that they could never compete with Intel, and they cancelled their equivalent product lines.
Second, it isn't like all of the money that was thrown into the chip's design is wasted. Itanium was effectively a testbed for many new technologies that are now found in standard Intel chips, be it the P4, their mobile lines, or the new Core 2 Duo.
Certainly, the Itanium is not a standard "we made money" success - but it isn't as bad as its made out to be (at least, in terms of Intel's use of it. For the actual consumer, it wasn't a good thing)
This quarter's fashion seems to be divestment.
Anyway, Intel were not making much money (??were making a loss??) on their PXA line. The PXA plays in a highly competitive market with a lot of players (TI, Samsung,...) and very little brand loyalty (No Intel Inside message). Intel has never held up well to that sort of competition and have got out of many businesses when things got hot (RAM, 8051, USB chipsets,...).
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Now, we see they're not.
Hm. Lots of eggs going into only one basket. Is this because they took a financial hit on Itanium?
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Marvell just isn't marvelous when it comes to providing documentation. Just try to get any information on any of their chips in the cheap consumer routers.
DaVinci is Texas Instruments single chip solution for mobile phones and multimedia rich embedded devices. They mixed a TI DSP chip in with the ARM core( anyone remember OMAP ) for a high performance single chip solution. Prior to this, smartphones used one processor for the radio and one processor for the GUI/applications. The holy grail here is one processor for everything significantly reduces cost. Intel DSPs are not near as popular as TI's and so it's a no-brainer to use TI's stuff in this case.
1 /05/163242&from=rssp roducts.html?DCMP=DSP_DaVinciCatalog&HQS=Other+PR+ thedavincieffectpr
http://hardware.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/0
and
http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/landing/davinci/first
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
This is pretty weird news, pretty unexpected. Intel's been trying to make inroads on embedded for years, they know there's huge volume there. StrongARM and XScale were kind of their front line warriors in that battle. Presumably, they're going to be relying on convincing people to use low voltage Core's in the future. Continuing an ARM based line would only draw attention away from their amazing x86 market. It still seems flaky though, given that x86 hasnt been used as a SoC in a long time; 80186 or so. Cell phone with a north bridge, anyone?
On the other hand, while StrongARM was a reasonable contender in the ARM market, the initial XScale models provided virtually no real enhancement over StrongARM, and often increased power consumption in the process. This was a long time ago, but I remember some rather tempermental items on the Errata sheets. Intel simply wasnt cracking heads like the silicon giant it wanted to be. It just wasnt an impressive processor in any respect. Its probably three or four years old now, and Intel's decided the experiment has come time to wind down.
All this as newer faster better ARM cores keep showing up.
I really want to see what Intel's next move is. I am certain they're not going to drop the embedded sector, I know they realize how big it is, how massively its growing. What they're next heading is after this move, that should prove quite interesting.
-LM
Xscale was one of the better product lines from a small hardware
developer perspective - good docs, good cast of supporting tools,
resonably inexpensive parts that could do a lot. Now it's going to
Marvell, whose tight assedness about documentation and NDAs makes
even Broadcom look like a bunch of free-love hippies. sigh...
-- All that's left of me, is slight insanity, whats on the right, I don't know. -- Bob Mould