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Intel Shifts Might To Mobile
CWmike writes "After years of dominance in computer chips, Intel now is chasing the mobile chip market and trying to redefine its future. During Intel's financial analyst meeting Monday, CEO Paul Otellini announced that he is refocusing the company, moving its 'center' from PC processors to processors for the burgeoning mobile market. 'I think Intel recognizes that they absolutely have to get a win here,' said analyst Rob Enderle. 'All the activity is in mobile. A post-PC era would be a post-Intel era if they don't get a beachhead established.' Earlier this month, Intel made a move in this new direction when it unveiled its new 3D transistor technology that is expected to position the chip maker to grab a piece of the mushrooming tablet market."
Quite possibly too late to x86-ize the market, and capture the sort of margins that they have historically enjoyed; but being the man with the best fabs in town doesn't sound all bad when the rest of the town is guys cutting each other's throats over generic ARM SoCs fabbed on assorted unexciting processes...
So why did they sell XScale off a few years ago? I mean this is the same CEO that pulled the last refocus off and obviously missed so I wonder why the board and investors think he'll be able to pull this one off without seriously missing the mark again?
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Rob Enderle of "SCO's gonna win!" fame.
People think Intel's purpose is to impose the x86 instruction set and also that the only culprit that keeps them from making a successful product is the overhead of that very x86 instruction set. I don't believe it.
The interpretation and translation of instructions is some constant number of transistors, the rest of the architecture is moving ahead. There will be a moment when brute force alone, the supremacy of the fabs, will win the race.
Another factor is that when you license ARM you can customize it. You can't license and customize Atom CPUs. Intel is at the moment kept back by a combination of factors
-- http://bashrc.sourceforge.net
Traditionally Intel didn't really pursue this market because of the low margins. Also ARM was far better at power consumption/cost whereas x86 was better at performance/cost. They can't ignore the market anymore. Tablets are predicted to sell 40-50 million units this year. And every one of them whether iPad, Xoom, PlayBook, whatever will not use an ATOM chip. While tablets can't replace laptops outright, they can replace enough functionality where a person buys a tablet instead of a 2nd computer.
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Considering the power savings a couple hundred ARM cpus might make for a decent server.
Not just tablets. I have an ARM-based laptop. It's painfully slow on big compile jobs (LLVM takes over 5 house to compile - ouch!), but for FireFox and OpenOffice it's fine. It's cheap, light, and has a decent battery life. I absolute terms, it's much slower than x86 machine, but for a lot of users it would be fast enough.
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You forget, perhaps, who Intel is, and what they have.
Everyone and their grandmother may be ordering ARM-based chips from the contract fabs, but Intel does its own design and fabrication.
Their economies of scale and vertical efficiencies are not something that the ARM world can stay ahead of for very long.
If Intel has decided that there's enough profit in this sector to make it their major focus, their monthly spending on it could outstrip everyone else's annual expenditure.
BTW, they've been in mobile before. It just wasn't big enough for them to make real money at it. Now is a whole new situation. Mobiles are a lot more like computers than they are like phones, so putting more computer-like CPU cores into them is a logical idea.
ARM needs to start playing catch-up just to stay in the race, even though it's ahead in the early laps.
A couple hundred ARM CPU's still can't deliver decent single-thread performance, which is more important for servers than a lot of people seem to think. If that wasn't true, the Oracle Niagara chips (128 threads @ roughly 200MHz) would be doing great right now instead of bleeding market share.
They've been putting a little attention on mobile, and playing a little poker with the market. Now, clearly, they see that desktop is about to become a lower tier, and mobile will be the major sector, and server will be the hidden half of the mobile sector.
Their ability to work at low power and small form-factor is improving to competitive levels, and they can work past any deficiency they have in those areas.
So now they're actually putting their major focus on mobile. The 800-lb gorilla just entered the room.