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Is Intel Selling Bay Trail Chips Below Cost?
edxwelch writes "An analyst at Bernstein Research has found that Intel is selling their tablet Bay Trail chips to OEMs below cost, concluding that after end rebates, Intel's tablet revenues are likely to be "close to zero," while profits will be negative. Intel has responded that the 'special costs' Intel is incurring are not pushing down gross margin. Intel needs to offer the subsidies to OEMs building $199-$299 devices to bring the bill of materials down and make them competive with cheaper chips from the likes of MediaTek and Rockchip."
Let's face it. Intel is desperate for their chips to still be used in things.
As people are moving to different forms of computers and different kinds of chips, Intel is getting squeezed -- the sales of desktops are down, and increasingly it's stuff like ARM processors which are running things.
I'm betting Intel is doing this to try to ensure they still have a market share, otherwise things are going to start looking pretty bleak for them in the consumer market.
Of course, I worry this is just going to have the effect of trying to foist power-hungry desktop/x86 CPUs onto people who want lower-power stuff for mobile devices.
What we don't want is just a transplanted x86 which hasn't been updated to try to account for lower power devices and getting away from a platform with almost 40 years of baggage.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
We certainly don't take it very well when foreign manufacturers do this...
Yes, but Intel is an American corporation which only manufactures outside of the USA. Well, that and design. And test. And packaging. But aside from design, manufacturing, test, and packaging the only things that Intel does outside of the USA is sales and marketing. So it's OK.
As for the implied complaint regarding predatory pricing, the good news there is that (per Judge Posner, in particular) there is no such thing. Anything to bring down consumer prices is by definition good.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,