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Intel Ditches Mobile Phone Processors

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the putting-blinders-on dept.

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.'"

23 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. In other news by Eightyford · · Score: 5, Funny

    DC just bought AMD.

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    1. Re:In other news by Fordiman · · Score: 2, Funny

      Naw. Instead, he dropped a joke grenade. Wait ten seconds, THEN laugh.

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  2. Headline is stupid by drinkypoo · · Score: 4, Informative

    ...and cribbed directly from the article - where it was also stupid.

    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?

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    1. Re:Headline is stupid by nerdyH · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  3. Doesn't seem like a big deal. by celardore · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Doesn't seem like a big deal. by treeves · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

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  4. What Happened to Diversification? by ewhac · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Wow, that Pentium basket must be awfully durable for Intel to be putting all their eggs in it. Or maybe Intel prefers not to be in a market in which there are about a dozen players (namely, providers of ARM-based system-on-chip products).

    Schwab

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    1. Re:What Happened to Diversification? by automatix · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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.

    2. Re:What Happened to Diversification? by LordMyren · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

  5. Marvell? by theheff · · Score: 2, Funny

    I thought cell phones powered by standard CPU chips was only something you see in comic books...

  6. lost billions of dollars by vivek7006 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:lost billions of dollars by Short+Circuit · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It was a major rat hole of unparalleled magnitude.

      How much did they spend on Itanium, again?

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    2. Re:lost billions of dollars by DAldredge · · Score: 5, Informative

      Between 7 - 12 Billion USD.

    3. Re:lost billions of dollars by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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)

  7. Cute joke, but... by Valdrax · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I'd hardly call a super-low power consumption embedded processor without a floating point unit a "standard CPU chip."

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  8. An event all too familiar... by mantar · · Score: 4, Interesting

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

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  9. Wallstreet fashion driven by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Most/many decisions are not driven by a sane business plan, but by the latest Wall St fashion. If you're not doing "it" (whatever "it" is), then you get punished on Wall St, particularly if your stock is looking a bit stagnant/down. So industries follow these trends: diversification, refocussing on core business (divestment), off shoring, sigma 6, whatever.

    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,...).

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  10. OK forget what I said... by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 2, Insightful
    In a story here a month or so ago about Intel abandoning their embedded business (which I can't find because the search function isn't working), I wrote that they were doing no such thing as long as they held on to ARM (XScale).

    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

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  11. this probably has to do with DaVinci by Locutus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    http://hardware.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/01 /05/163242&from=rss
    and
    http://www.ti.com/corp/docs/landing/davinci/firstp roducts.html?DCMP=DSP_DaVinciCatalog&HQS=Other+PR+ thedavincieffectpr

    LoB

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    1. Re:this probably has to do with DaVinci by HoserHead · · Score: 2, Interesting
      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.

    2. Re:this probably has to do with DaVinci by Locutus · · Score: 2, Interesting

      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

      --
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  12. Strange but not Incomprehensible by LordMyren · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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

  13. Too bad by scatterbrained · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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...

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