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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.'"

11 of 104 comments (clear)

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

    DC just bought AMD.

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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.

  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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  5. 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.

  6. 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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  7. 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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  8. 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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