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Intel Announces Major Reorg To Combine Mobile and PC Divisions

Posted by Soulskill on from the goes-together-like-peanut-butter-and-motor-oil dept.

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.

2 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Looks like they want to hide their loss in mobile? by Crashmarik · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  2. The problem is cost per mm of silicon by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.