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Intel Announces Major Reorg To Combine Mobile and PC Divisions
MojoKid writes: For the past year, Intel has pursued what's known as a "contra-revenue" strategy in its mobile division, where product is deliberately sold at a loss to win market share and compete effectively. This has led to a huge rise in tablet shipments, but heavy losses inside Intel's mobile division. Today, the company announced that it would take steps to fold its mobile and conventional processors into a single operating division. While this helps shield the mobile segment from poor short-term results, it also reflects the reality that computing is something users now do across a wide range of devices and multiple operating systems. Intel may not have hit anything like the mobile targets it set out years ago, but long-term success in laptops, tablets, and smartphones remains integral to the company's finances. Desktops and conventional laptops are just one way people compute today and Intel needs to make certain it has a robust long-term presence in every major computing market.
Seems like they want to conceal how well/poorly they are doing in the mobile sector. Makes a certain amount of sense most people see the mobile market as the hot new future.
Given the fairly lame update to the Mac Mini caused mainly by the lack of choices in Intel's mobile CPU offerings (and Apple's refusal to design and stock a separate motherboard just for quad core), I'm wondering just what would it take for Apple to make yet another CPU transition. They must hate being dependent on the release schedules of Intel for when it comes to putting out Macs, and the A8X is nearly the performance of a couple years ago MacBook Air.
It tends to be; but I think regulatory authorities only get nervous if it shows signs of being dangerously effective, or if there is reason to believe that the pockets behind it are deep enough to ignore losses almost indefinitely(as with international dumping/tariff slapfights, where a mixture of xenophobia and the fact that a nation state can typically afford to keep dumping longer than a company can afford to keep competing).
In the case of Intel trying to break into tablets, my understanding is that it's a known matter of fact that Bay Trail parts are being practically given away(along with a nontrivial amount of Intel software work, including an emulator to handle ARM NDK stuff and general porting and polishing to make the x86 Android not look like, say, the blasted hellscape that is MIPS Android); but it is less clear whether Intel has been able to dump hard enough to actually damage competition.
The one product line that they definitely helped bury was Windows RT (which was mostly an unloved bastard child anyway, even before you could cram an x86 into the same chassis, and definitely had no reason to exist afterwards); but that didn't hurt MS much, since the quality of Windows tablets went up. In the wider ARM ecosystem, ARM Ltd, themselves seem to be riding high and unbelievably cheap SoCs continue to pop out of the woodwork.
Their Bay Trail pricing has definitely made x86 Android something you might actually see in the wild, and tablet-Windows something you might actually consider at a sub-Windows Surface price point; but it doesn't seem to have crushed the ARM market very much.
Phones, tablets, laptops, all is mobile. The days of tower rigs are over.
Given that a 'tower rig' is basically a server turned on its side, with fewer 40mm fans and some of the classy reliability features cut, that category will take a great deal of killing. On the other hand, the CPU in a server or tower is almost certainly using nearly as many of the power gating, adjustable clock speed, and various other thermal protection and power saving strategies as the mobile CPUs are. Overall efficiency is still going to be lower ('eh, we're on AC, just keep the PSU energized so a USB peripheral can wake the system!' isn't god's gift to brilliant standbye power numbers); but 'mobile' and 'desktop' have been on something of a collision course ever since the P4 flamed out, almost literally, and Pentium M derivatives took over.
This is Intel basically admitting defeat in the mobile space. It's good they don't feel so cocky anymore. Competition is good for everyone.
That might be marginally true, but only for consumers. The people who actually make the shit everyone consumes still need those tower rigs. Try running MSVC, Photoshop, Max, CRYENGINE and other DAW tools, all at once on your phone or tablet. You could run it on a beefy laptop, but that would seriously cost several times more than a standard PC and still be worse at the job.
So sure, over for the people who's only real need is a web browser...still going strong for the rest of us.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Intel is the world leader when it comes to silicon advancement, there's no doubt of that. Their quite real and appropriately named 14nm process starts shipping incredibly soon, and TSMC/Global Foundries, now seemingly their only competition, don't even hope to have their inappropriately named "16nm" process shipping in products for two years out, a process not actually much to any denser than the just now shipping TSMC 20nm process.
Intel's Core technology is also excellent in terms of silicon to performance. The problem comes in at the cost of that world leading silicon. TSMC has concentrated on costs, and while 20nm process might be a day late and a few dollars short in terms of performance and density, in terms of cost TSMC can make a profit at the same price Intel can produce chips at, let alone sell them.
And with mobile products being relatively cheap, and their prices coming down for the most part, its that profit at a low cost to consumers and high volume that's selling. Intels Atom products are actually perfectly competitive for performance. They just cost Intel too much to produce at their super fancy fabs and that just have to be cutting edge instead of cost efficient.
Technically yes.
It's not very effective though. Android x86 tablets are basically garbage as they can't run Android ARM Native binaries, and have extremely weak GPU's compared to the ARM parts.
Intel's Android platform has a ARMv7 translation layer called houdini, and their mobile parts use the same GPU's (PowerVR) as ARM parts, so I'm not entirely sure where you're getting that 'information' from.
This. My core i7 laptop with AMD graphics and maxed out on memory, is only marginal for use doing electronic design, eCAD and PCB layout. It's OK for software compiles; but, all my projects target smallish embedded processors. Time is money... If I have to wait for something then I'm pissing away money. I have the laptop because I needed a portable machine to carry with me to customer sites.
Isn't that also called dumping?
Strictly speaking no it is not dumping. Dumping is the act of charging less in a foreign market than you charge in your domestic market. That isn't what Intel is doing. What Intel is doing might be considered a form of predatory pricing but it isn't dumping. All dumping is predatory pricing but not all predatory pricing is dumping.
Venn Diagram:
1. People who claim that x86 can't run Android.
2. People (like me) who actually own Baytrail Android Tablets and have seen what they can do first hand (hint: for $150 I got a tablet that's flat-out better than an iPad Mini. I also get the warm & fuzzy feeling of supporting the only Android hardware vendor in the world that supports Linux with both money, developers, and gobs of GPL compliant driver code).
3. Overlap between the two circles: Empty Set.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Intel needs to get behind an organized effort to bring us a business-grade mobile device. That's the only low hanging fruit left. Take the following excerpt I pulled from an article:
Let's rewind to 2007. RIM owns the mobile space for business, while consumer devices are primarily "dumb phones". In comes Apple, flush with iPod money, and looking for the next evolution of it's highly profitable device. The solution is simple: why carry an iPod and a phone? Thus, the iPhone is born.
In a single generation the iPhone brings massive innovation to the market. The device is targeted at Apple's primary demographic: the consumer, but the features are so beyond what is currently available that this type of smartphone doesn't take long to become a favorite in the business commnuity as well.
The large touch screen destroys the conventional track ball/pad, allowing the user to display more text, and use multi-touch to navigate more efficiently. The full webkit browser completely destroys the WAP-based dinosaurs giving the user a desktop grade browser at their finger tips. The user can carry all forms of media with them and display it at their whim. And, finally, and most importantly, the design of the operating system is centered around a robust API which doesn't take long to bloom into a wealth of independent applications that let the user do things they never before thought possible.
The response at RIM is unforunately short-sighted. RIM sees the device as a "toy". It sees it as a consumer-grade flash in the pan that will eventually collapse in the face of the established security and familiarity of their Enterprise Server platform, and BBM. RIM does opt to borrow some of the innovations - like the touch screen - and implement it their own, poorly advised ways but, ultimately, things at RIM continue as usual.
Now let's fast forward to 2013. The market has spoken. Blackberry market share is down to single digits and the company needs to do something quick to turn things around. They've been working for years on something that is supposed to change our lives and we're finally going to get to see it. What they unveil is astonishing: a consumer-targeted device.
The playing field in consumer-grade devices is now beyond saturated. We've had Google, Apple, and even Microsoft all battling each-other for the last 5 years. Innovation year-over-year is staggering. Why blackberry decided to try to compete in this market is baffling. What's worse, is they released an inferior product, on their own independent platform, that - of course - is going to gather no developer support in an already saturated market.
So here we are, 2014 and - still - no business-grade device in the mobile market. We have a dizzying amount of consumer-grade choice, but nothing properly designed with business in mind. In response I would like to say the following to the entire tech community involved in mobile device development:
We're here. We have money. We have a lot more money than all these teenage kids. Please, please, I want to spend it. Someone give me a business-grade mobile phone and tablet. Important things to me are: checking my email, security, centralized device management, and integration with existing business technologies. Reward: see Microsoft's stock price in the 90's.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
I'm not trying to be a troll or flame here, so please don't take it like that. But, you may be comparing AMD processors and Intel in the same price range. Because the highest passmark bench results for laptops certainly belong to the 4th generation Intel mobile processors.
You must also work in an area of the country that is either really ahead, or really behind. I'm Sr sysadmin for a medium sized company and I haven't encountered a single person - outside of a geologist or engineer that needs real power - who prefers a desktop to a laptop in many years.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.