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Intel Cuts Atom Chips, Basically Giving Up On Smartphone and Tablet Market (pcworld.com)
Intel, the marquee PC chipmaker, has long struggled to get a foothold in the smartphone market. The company, which was late in joining the mobile platform, is still playing catchup with Qualcomm and MediaTek. And it appears it's finally giving up on this ambition. The company is "immediately canceling" Atom chips, code-named Sofia and Broxton, for mobile devices, reports PCWorld, citing a company's spokesperson. The publication reports:Intel's mobile chip roadmap now has a giant hole after the cancellation of the chips. Intel's existing smartphone and tablet-only chips are aging and due for upgrades, and no major replacements are in sight. Sofia is already shipping, and Broxton was due to ship this year but had been delayed. Intel is also discontinuing its Atom X5 line of tablet chips code-named Cherry Trail, which is being replaced by Pentium and Celeron chips code-named Apollo Lake, aimed more at hybrids than pure tablets. Many PC makers are already choosing Intel's Skylake Core M processors over Cherry Trail for hybrids and PC-like tablets.The announcement comes days after its CEO outlined the company's future vision, and a week after the chipmaker let go 12,000 people.
Intel was caught napping by the mobile revolution, and they were late to the party. Thanks to iPhone and Android devices, ARM is the standard for mobile.
Now, that by itself doesn't force out Intel. But ARM is very inexpensive, and available from multiple vendors. Intel's business model is to make chips that you need, that you can only get from Intel, and then charge a very profitable margin on those chips. Intel does not want to compete on price in a commodity market; that's not what they do.
So now Intel was trying to carve out a share of the mobile chip market, and it was competing against a chip design that is available from roughly six different companies. Their desired end game would be for the mobile companies to buy Intel chips, get locked in so they depended on Intel chips, and pay a profitable margin to Intel for those chips. But none of the mobile manufacturers wanted that... why would they? Why not just keep using ARM, which is getting more and more powerful anyway?
Intel basically had to pay companies to use the Atom. A few took Intel up on it, but those devices did not shake up the market at all. Basically a mobile device with an Atom was about as good as a mobile device with an ARM chip.
The only way this could possibly have worked would have been for Atom to be better than ARM, and not just a little better; it had to be so much better that it was a clear slam-dunk win, such an amazing chip that it would be worth the risk of entering into an entangling agreement with Intel (and being on the hook for Intel raising the prices on the chips). I see no evidence that Atom was really better at all than the ARM chips, let alone that much better.
So Intel is now going to stop paying companies to build with Atom, and is giving up on that whole market.
P.S. I would love a small form-factor PC running a 64-bit ARM chip with completely passive cooling and running Linux. I'd buy that. I might even buy it if it was called a "ChromeBox" and came with Chrome OS pre-installed, but it would be an easier sell if I could get drivers for plain Linux for all the hardware.
x86 looks pretty safe on the desktop for now, but give it a few years and we'll see if that's still true.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I don't think it will take over Desktop, but Server is quite a distinct possibility. Microsoft is in fact making Windows Server for ARM, and probably won't do the stupid shit they did with what was supposed to be Windows on ARM. If ARM servers can show dramatically reduced cost for energy and cooling, you bet your ass it will replace x86.
But that's not where Intel is going wrong. I think Intel is making a mistake in throwing their eggs into the IoT basket. In fact, a lot of tech companies are. I fully expect IoT to flop after a generation because nobody has solved or even attempted to solve the fundamental IT security problems it presents. The solution I hear from the talking heads when I've asked them is "well, after a device is EOL, you'll need to buy a new one to avoid future threats" which is really dumb. Nobody, anywhere, is going to replace shit when it still works and does what they need it to do. They'll only do that once when they realize the problems inherent in IoT, after which they'll just forgo it completely because it's more trouble than it's worth.
Besides, I still have yet to figure out exactly what kind of business problem IoT is intended to solve, and I really don't think consumers have enough money to buy on the scale that Intel needs.