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.'"

Comments

Re:lost billions of dollars

[Short Circuit]

It was a major rat hole of unparalleled magnitude.

How much did they spend on Itanium, again?

An event all too familiar...

[mantar]

Interesting... I also heard that Intel is looking to off-load their telecom subsidiary, Dialogic. I wonder what's going on with these guys?

Re:What Happened to Diversification?

[automatix]

Spending the last couple of years working for a consumer of XScale processors, I can tell you Intel's XScales are severely lagging behind Freescale, Samsung, and others. The Intel chips are slower, have less features, and are more expensive than the Freescale and Samsung offerings. Large consumer electronics customers are dropping them, especially as Samsung will offer better deals on processor+flash+ram offerings than Intel can. Because they're all based off the same ARM cores the application-level software shouldn't need to change much, and it is a viable choice when creating new hardware platforms. Intel does have nice marketing agreements where they pour 10s of millions into companies each year to put 'Powered by XScale' on the packaging, advertising, and software.

Re:this probably has to do with DaVinci

[HoserHead]

Further, I've heard a lot of people griping about (for example) the OMAP processor in the Nokia 770, which runs at 220 MHz -- saying "My xscale runs at 400 MHz, this is seriously underpowered." Sadly, this is far from the case.

The fact is that Intel royally screwed up the xscale processor - in a past life, I worked at an embedded Linux company, and once we'd switched from a 200 MHz OMAP chip to probably a 300 MHz XScale, our performance went way down. I/O, in particular, was atrocious on the XScale.

Add to that the fact that TI is legendary in the industry for low power consumption, and you end up with the net result that TI tends to win embedded sockets more often than not.

Re:this probably has to do with DaVinci

[Locutus]

I don't yet know about the Nokia 770 but I think you might have run into the PXA255 fiasco. A PXA250 running at 206MHz ran circles around the PXA255 running at 400MHz. Intel screwed up that chip so bad that cache had to be turned off in many cases and I think there was one other bug in it which also greatly reduced its speed.

Simply amazing how Intel has blown not only the desktop CPU market but also the handheld/etc market.

LoB