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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...
Rob Enderle of "SCO's gonna win!" fame.
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.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
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.
The interpretation and translation of instructions is some constant number of transistors, the rest of the architecture is moving ahead
Not really. One of the things the VirtualPC team at connectix discovered was that a large number of x86 instructions have side effects (e.g. setting condition flags) that, 90%+ of code ignores. In a hardware x86 implementation, you have to burn energy computing these.
There are lots of other things that make x86 harder to implement efficiently, for example the lack of predicated instructions. ARM can do short conditional statements without needing branches, which means that it can get away with a simpler (and therefore less power-hungry) branch predictor.
It's not just a case that you translate x86 or ARM into more or less the same RISCy set of micro-ops and then run them on similar hardware - the ISA forces certain design decisions all the way along the pipeline.
You can't license and customize Atom CPUs
Yes you can. You've been able to for over a year. Intel will even fab the customised SoC for you. As yet, I don't know of any company that has chosen to do so, however.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.