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

In other news

[Eightyford]

DC just bought AMD.

Headline is stupid

[drinkypoo]

...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?

Re:Headline is stupid

[nerdyH]

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.

What Happened to Diversification?

[ewhac]

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

lost billions of dollars

[vivek7006]

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.

Re:lost billions of dollars

[Short Circuit]

It was a major rat hole of unparalleled magnitude.

How much did they spend on Itanium, again?

Re:lost billions of dollars

[DAldredge]

Between 7 - 12 Billion USD.

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?

this probably has to do with DaVinci

[Locutus]

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