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Intel To Buy Smartphone Chipmaker Infineon For $2B
sylverboss writes "Intel Corp., the world's largest chipmaker, is close to an agreement to buy Infineon Technologies AG's wireless business, three people with direct knowledge of the discussions said. When it comes to desktop, laptop and server chips, Intel's pretty much got a lock on the market but everyone can see the writing on the wall: mobile chips and architectures are the future of computing thanks to the popularity of smartphones, but Intel doesn't have anything to offer in that regard. Don't know Infineon? You should: they are the guys who have supplied Apple with their iPhone baseband chips since 2007."
"they are the guys who have supplied Apple with their iPhone baseband chips since 2007."
Does that really mean they're important, though?
Buying the Infineon RAM chipmaker will directly place Intel in competition with it's once best friend RAMBUS...
Intel's Atom chips are low power. They're not good for putting into smartphones?
Are there some Infineon chips now used for only smartphones that will show up in netbooks? Do they run Linux? Do they run x86 instructions? And if not, will Intel sustain a product line that splits its main CPU culture away from x86?
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make install -not war
Atom is maybe a 2W chip at best.
Whereas the ARM CPUs used in phones are under 0.5W.
In a device like a smartphone, you simply cannot find room to make the battery larger to make up for the extra power used. Not to mention the cost of the larger battery.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Contrary to what the headline suggests, Intel is not buying all of Infineon: they are negotiating to buy the wireless division.
The deal with Rambus was a purely business one. Rambus paid them a good deal of money to use Rambus technology. Also, at the time, it really WAS faster. Wasn't faster enough to be worth the money and of course scaled like shit, but a Rambus P4 was quick. So Intel made the decision to use RDRAM. However it turned out to be a bad decision as DDR-SDRAM quickly eclipsed it speed wise, which helped AMD with the edge they had at the time. So, when the deal was up, Intel chose not to continue using RDRAM, and still does not to this day. Rambus does make new RAM products, XDR RAM is their current thing and the PS3 does use it. However Intel decided it was in their best interests not to.
Companies generally aren't buddies or anything, they just have interests that may match up. Intel though RDRAM was the way to go, especially since they made a lot of no-cost money on the deal. I mean $100 million is nothing to sneeze at. If someone is willing to pay you that to use their technology, and their technology looks like it works, then great. However that doesn't mean it was "BFF for life," or whatever. It didn't work out, the arrangement ended, that is that.
2 billion dollars for a bunch of chips and antenna components? I guess we know the true value of an ARM and a leg.
Be relentless!
I'd be surprised if Apple didn't have the key IP in Third-party escrow, so if they
go belly-up or get bought by Microsoft Apple can still get the chips they need.
If Infineon doesn't ring a bell to someone, the name Siemens surely does. Infineon was the semiconductor division of Siemens, before being spun off into a separate company.
Infineon's current market cap is around 5B, so Intel is rumored to buy about 1/3 of the company (assuming some premium over the stock price).
It'll go back to being named Candlestick\\\\\\\\\\ Sears Point...
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Atoms are low power, and despite what the ARM fanboys like to say, they do a lot given their power budget. However they are still higher power than you want for mobile devices. They are targeted at low end PCs, like netbooks, or perhaps some higher end embedded applications. ARM chips (most of them at least) use far less power. When you are talking the tiny batteries in cellphones, this matters. Going from a half a watt chip to a 2 watt chip means 4x the power draw. Given that the CPU is one of three major components that draw power (the LCD and radio being the others) you don't want this.
For example my BlackBerry has a 4.3 watt-hour battery. That means just what it sounds like: It could provide 4.3 watts for 1 hour. Ok so a CPU that uses 2 watts could drain the battery by itself in 2 hours, even if the screen was off (which of course it wouldn't be). A Half watt CPU would last 8 hours on the same battery. Big difference for a small device.
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Server market is a different ball game. Xeon are only in the low end server. IBM has lead in middle and high end servers with their P and Z systems. P and Z chips are custom designed for IBM systems only.
Right. History is littered with dimwits who thought x86 wouldn't impact _their_ market.
I don't think TPM-on-Die is something that Intel would've needed to shell out $2B for. It's a straightforward device designed to be implementable with as little cost as possible. Intel has done far more complex things in house and adding TPM on-die would probably take them a trivial amount of time if they cared to do so. Putting aside that, I don't see that as a huge differentiator in the market. First, because even if people by large explicitly cared, then AMD could easily do it too, and even if they didn't, I'm told that TPMs are dirt cheap, so having them on a system board is trivial. Secondly, there are some who care, but by and large this stuff is simply flat out ignored by the vast majority of the market. TPMs are nearly ubiquitous as they are mandated by certain industry standards, not due to overwhelming explicit customer interest. Finally, for those that do care, it's a boolean, does it exist, or does it not. There's no comparison of any performance metric (TPMs can be slower/faster, but no one cares today), so the only metric a system vendor cares about is price, i.e. for TPM market it's a race to the cheapest. Intel's MO has not been about investing huge amounts to get into a market that by definition is anti-margin.
However, DIMMs are even more ubiquitous and also have the room to differentiate on latency, throughput, power consumption, and capacity and extract a certain premium.
Ultimately though, I have to concur that having traction in mobile devices is almost certainly the key. 'Apple' tie-in may have been superfluous, but it does show that Infineon has share in the mobile device arena, whereas Intel has nearly none. Intel sees mobile devices displacing much of their current target market, so they have to do something.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Seems like most FABs cost about $1bn to build. You would think a between manufacturing infrastructure and IP portfolio they would fetch more than $2bn.
Low power has different rules. The people at the top thought that they could keep charging a premium for faster chips and that Intel couldn't catch up because of the extra complexity of producing an x86 chip. The same thing that made them wrong work against Intel now.
Once you get past the instruction decoder, there isn't much difference between an x86 chip and any other CPU. Remember the marketing claims about the Pentium being 'RISC internally'? The front end decodes x86 instructions into micro ops and then these are run by the rest of the chip. There are some weird side effects and interactions between instructions that people implementing an ISA not designed by drugged-up monkey don't have to deal with, but aside from those the back end is similar. The front end, however, is much more complex. Decoding an instruction set like ARM or SPARC is significantly easier than decoding x86 instructions.
As you scale up the die, this matters less. The decoder goes from being a third of the chip to being 5% or less, and having a decoder 2-3 times more complex than the competition doesn't matter. In fact, it becomes an advantage because the variable-length instruction coding means that you get better instruction cache usage.
When you try to scale in the opposite direction, however, you have problems. The decoder complexity remains relatively constant, but your total transistor budget goes down so it increases in proportion to the rest of the chip. Worse, the decoder is a part of the chip that is always on as long as you are executing instructions[1]. Something like a SIMD unit can be powered down when not in use, but the instruction decoder can't.
Worse, the competition has also moved on. The instruction set density is no longer an advantage. A modern ARM chip supports ARM and Thumb-2 instruction sets (and often a couple of others). The Thumb-2 instruction set is at least as dense as x86 and so can be used to reduce cache pressure. It is a fixed-width 16-bit instruction encoding, however, so (unlike x86), the cost of decoding it is very simple. Even better, because the ARM and Thumb-2 instruction sets are separate, only one decoder needs to be powered up at once. ARM gets the benefit of a variable-length instruction set, without the associated hardware cost.
[1] Some recent Intel chips cache micro ops and power down the decoder, but they still need to keep the micro op decoder powered, and this is about as complex as an ARM instruction decoder, which is why this gives a power saving in the server, but has not been used in Atom.
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You're forgetting something fairly obvious. Intel has fab and process advantages other CPU makers don't have.
For the very lowest power devices, x86 probably won't be a good fit. Smartphones? MIDs? Tablets? Hell yes, wait until you see Medfield. Why do you think Intel just bought part of Infineon? Integration. Anywhere you see a high end ARM you'll see x86 competitive at worst.