Slashdot Mirror
Intel Pushes Into Tablet Market, Pushes Away From Microsoft
jfruh (300774) writes "The Wintel cartel appears to be well and truly dead, as Intel chases after ARM with grim determination into the rapidly growing world of Android tablets. 'Our mix of OSes reflects pretty much what you see in the marketplace,' the company's CEO said, a nice way of saying they see more potential growth from white-box Chinese tablet makers than from Microsoft Surface. Intel managed to ship 5 million tablet chips in the first quarter of the year, although plunging PC sales meant that company profit overall was still down."
ARM compatibility is why Intel can't win. ARM is the defecto standard upon all software that is mobile. What an ironic twist? As much as when phone stores decided to dump Windows Phones because there was not enough marketshare and software.
The PC is the mainframe.
I really wished Android apps being similar to java would be compatible with intel android? Without marketshare developers are compiling their apps for ARM only or using c++ code mixed in that is not portable.
I do not like seeing monopolies more than I wished we could see more non intel. AMD last decade was the only time we had choice before they turned too shit again with its nwer products as fast as pentium IVs.
http://saveie6.com/
Looking at their stock, it never required from dotcom, and has been on a slow decline since (but up from 1 year ago).
I can't imagine mobile CPUs will ever have the margin or profit of desktop CPUs. Or even close.
Sure, there are a bunch of cheap PCs. But apple or samsung comes out with a phone, that's just the same cheapish cpu several millions of times over with no variation.
Is this just another case of a company chasing elusive profits once it's market has been commoditized? In a way, Intel isn't important once Microsoft isn't important anymore.
No need to run x86. So why push x86 into the portable space?
ARM is the defecto standard upon all software that is mobile.
How so? Android apps are written in Java that compiles to Dalvik VM. Free apps that use NDK, such as those on F-Droid, can be recompiled by anyone. Proprietary apps that use NDK can be recompiled by their publisher if the publisher wants sales on the other platform. How big is the remaining set of apps that 1. use NDK, 2. are proprietary, 3. whose publisher is unwilling to take the money from Android/x86 users?
Still in bed, the two of them. Just like two old lovers, they push away but then relent and then the old in-out continues.
No need to run x86. So why push x86 into the portable space?
So that you can have x86 apps that work in touch-based mode while away from the desk and switch to mouse-based mode when the user pairs a keyboard and connects an HDMI monitor.
My limited experience with Android Arm and Android X86 indicates that Android X86 seems to be a 2nd tier platform with limited support. It seems to be less-reliable.
ARM:
Android: multiple phones, Galaxy Tab II tablet
- reliable, work well, tons of apps most that just work
Other: Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black, multiple embedded systems
- strong, reliable, generally works well (except for Rpi network issues)
X86:
Android: Google TV (Logitech), Galaxy Tab III tablet
- flaky apps and limited selection on Google TV
- charging and power consumption issues on Galaxy Tab III
- feels like a 2nd tier platform in beta or version 1.0
Other: laptops, desktops, and servers
- Linux ROCKS for standard x86 netbooks, laptops, workstations, servers
"The Wintel cartel appears to be well and truly dead
We're in the process of revamping my company's IT infrastructure: About 30 Wintel PC's, 3 Wintel Servers, and 0 *pads.
Unfortunately for my company's employees, we don't make money from watching Netflix or playing whatever this week's hot game is on tablets. We have to do work to earn money, and we can't do work on tablets or phones.
I don't respond to AC's.
For years MS had a near monopoly on drivers. Basically every device manufacturer made a driver for MS and maybe, kind of, sort of, possibly got around to a Mac driver, and then occasionally made a Linux driver. Thus anyone wanting to take on Windows would have had to reverse engineer and make a whole slate of device drivers. As an example, by Mac OS X making the switch to Intel it allowed hardware companies to more easily port their drivers so a few more did.
But over time Linux did managed to do just that, but being open source those drivers are then much more portable to entire other architectures such as ARM. This is then combined with the fact that few people hook devices up to their tablets makes for a near perfect environment to completely overtake the Wintel monopoly on drivers.
So for the first time in decades a consumer does not worry or even know about any driver issues and can choose their device and OS based upon features that are genuinely meaningful to themselves; such as price, app availability, and quality of the hardware.
So with the playing field is now much more level it is not surprising that the former Wintel monopoly is losing market share.
But there is a second and very critical issue and that is of CPU power. Quite simply a Raspberry Pi is around the minimum power that a typical Browser surfing, youtube watching user needs to have. Thus most people don't need the latest and greatest CPU to power their needs. So a halfway good arm inside a device is well enough for the vast majority. Also most people don't need to do much on their computers. A few simple games, some surfing, some video, some messaging. Thus a mobile device is becoming most people's primary portal to the world. Again this does not need to be a powerhouse; it just needs to be reasonably price, work well, and have a good battery life.
But lastly there is the way that ARM is structured. From what I can tell, if you want to buy 10 million arm processors then you buy 10 million arm processors. But if you want to buy 10 million Intel processors then Intel wants to make it complicated and have you enter into a "relationship". The same with the android OS vs the Microsoft OS. Personally I would be very wary dealing with either Intel or MS in that if suddenly my product was somehow incompatible with some corporate vision they had then they would cut me off or otherwise strangle my company. But ARM and Android just want you to buy/use their products.
I suspect that neither of these companies are going to adjust well to actually having competition who aren't even playing the same game meaning that neither Intel or MS will be able to squirrel the rules. Does anyone remember the phase Dell went through where they were Intel only? Can you imagine the angry conversations when Dell, HP, or anyone like that started to ship Linux machines? Do you think that anyone shipping ARM devices even wonders what ARM thinks?
Does any ARM tablet have any of that?
Seriously, if you value openness and hackability, I do not see why would you ever consider an ARM tablet....
Intel are determined to sell 40 million of their tablet chips, but they certainly aren't going to make any profit, because of "contra revenue".
"Intel is charging customers about the same as Allwinner and Rockchip for tablet CPUs â" $5 a pop, reports Digitimes"
http://www.electronicsweekly.c...
No surprise that their mobile group lost nearly $1 billion last quarter.
'Nuff said.
Intel looks to Android for growth in tablets
Oh God no!!
"x86 is now ancient, and unless things have changed a lot in the last few years, tend to be pretty power hungry."
Yes, they've changed. My five year old i5 laptop used to have the fan running all the time. My new i5 laptop doesn't even seem to use the fan in normal use; while web-browsing, I only hear it run when I go to Youtube or a similar video site.
Also seems to get at least 2x the life from a similar sized battery.
Still don't understand why you'd want an x86 in a tablet, though.
I'm not seeing what Intel marking bay trail etc to Chinese tab makers has to do with their use by Microsoft (or anyone else for that matter).
Microsoft and Intel should be best friends. They are each others main hope for relevance. Intel competing against the horde of ARM vendors on even ground is not going to end well for Intel's margins no matter how much share they hypothetically get. In much the same way that MS is nothing without the momentum of decades of x86-only applications, Intel isn't much without MS applications. Well, Intel's products are a bit respectable in their own right, but the primary driver of their large margin is the x86 ecosystem where MS is ubiquitous.
Intel may be hedging their bets to try to assure they aren't completely left behind in an Android-centric world, but I wager they are strongly hoping for MS to provide a software platform experience on x86 that is too compelling to overlook. I will say that even the 'best' Android apps I deal with are pretty crappy ( having to mysteriously be killed because it hangs, sometimes needing their persistent storage wiped because it has no idea how to work back to working state from whatever state it stored persistently). Even chrome randomly decides 'I'm just going to stop being able to render certain pages altogether'. It's bizarre, since on Windows and Linux desktops I don't see nearly as much wonkiness from many of the exact same application vendors doing about as equivalent a product as can be imagined. For a given price, I'd honestly prefer an x86 tablet so long as secureboot can be disabled to run platforms I have a great deal of familiarity with.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Though both are hedging as you say, I think both desperately want the other to overwhelmingly succeed. MS on ARM is not competitive due to a complete lack of support for legacy x86 applications and an otherwise uninspired design, so MS wants the world to run on x86 where they have home court advantage. Similarly, while Intel still has mostly better offerings, they cannot extract the desired margins out of such a highly competitive market like ARM where people will go without the very latest semiconductor process and gobs of performance. They want a software ecosystem that demands x86, which only Microsoft really has.
So yes, each has some 'worst case' contingency intended to keep them in the market. Those contingencies are both such long shots and will forever reduce margins even if they are 'successful'. That's why Intel has double downed on engineering with MS about platform sleep states and such without giving Android nearly as much attention (basically just token attention).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Ok, so Intel is finally turning out chips that match ARM on performance/watt. But how much do they cost? Intel runs off a model where they have the best process tech because they spend so much money on it, and they can do that because their prices and profits are so high, and so much higher than ARM.
I am guessing in the next year or two we are going to see a market split between, say, 20% expensive Intel tablets and the rest cheaper and running ARM.
I'm still waiting for an ARM laptop, preferably with a WACOM-grade touch screen.
-- hendrik
Any vendor that doesn't cross compile risks losing market share to one that does.
Unless the vendor that doesn't cross compile sues one that does for patent infringement or nonliteral copyright infringement. Or unless the vendor that doesn't cross compile benefits from a strong network effect among its users.