Slashdot Mirror
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.
My first impression is that this does not look like a good day for Microsoft. Is this back to Windows RT? That worked so well last time.
My prediction of Intel becoming IBM is coming true much faster than I expected.
Oligopolies and monopolies typically lose their competitive edge once they reach the top of the hill.
They get fat, happy, and entrenched in their ways and cannot undo the bad habits until things are so bad that they have no other choice but to change. By that time the company is usually too deep to be saved.
It's kind of like somebody not changing their bad diet until they have a debilitating stroke. However, the equivalent of a stroke in Big Co-ville is bankruptcy.
Rinse, die, repeat.
IBM was very lucky to have a decent second life in the late 90's. But it was largely because their consulting side was a mostly a new team, who were still fresh and hungry. Whether they'll get a 3rd chance will be interesting to see...
Table-ized A.I.
Intel doesn't view tablets as a standalone market any longer, with form factors quickly merging.
Maybe Intel is right. The market for phones is saturated (Apple knows this) and low profit margin. Tablets are a passing fad. The future is somewhere else.
for some things, at least.
for audio, it was great. an x86 platform with a proper network interface, proper sata interface, expandable memory to reasonable mounts (for its application) and often there was onboard atx psu parts so you gave it a laptop 18v dc brick and that was your whole psu. totally silent, with an ssd.
otoh, the recent (last year or 2) of i3 has been so cool running, you can just use the fanless i3 variant on an itx board and have more fun.
still, the atom on the board was low cost, often fanless (more than the i3 was) and good enough for some video and any audio you could throw at it. it could be a nas server, as well.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Yeah, saying Skylake and Apollo Lake are not aimed at the tablet market (I'm sorry, "pure tablet market") is kind of silly - and they were never in the phone market at all, for all practical purposes.
They trimmed a growing, obfuscated product line because there was redundancy, and worse, redundancy with inferior parts. Intel is going for the high-end of the market, focusing efforts on money makers, which also allows them to downsize staff
It's not a bad strategy, the only question is why they didn't to it sooner.
Is it that difficult to make a low-power 80x86 ISA chip to compete with ARM manufacturers? I know the legacy instruction decoding is always going to take space, but I thought at this point the transistor count compared to the rest of the chip was small. I figured Intel with their leading edge fabs would be able to pull it off.
Having seen the bloom of CPU architectures in the 80s and 90s, and the effective monoculture we have now on the performance end of things, it would be interesting to see competing models and new attempts start popping up here and there. Everyone points to Apple's A-series as possibly moving to the desktop, but why just them? The world worked just fine when there was competition â" x86 vs 68k, PPC vs Alpha vs x86, etc. etc. Good things could grow if Intel would no longer be the 500-lb beast.
brwski
"Because without beer, things do not seem to go as well''
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
x86 requires more power than ARM which requires bigger batteries and produces more heat.
It's a fundamentally different architecture. ARM will never be able to compete with x86 in terms of computing power and x86 can't compete with ARM in terms of efficiency and low power.
You can never do more for the same cost of doing less.
Intel is making a good decision to just focus on what they're good at. If they want to compete in the mobile market they need to try to come up with a better ARM chip.
Work Safe Porn
Well, they haven't lost them yet. 3 of my neighbors are Intel employees (some at Intel's flagship semiconductor plant) and one of them told me yesterday that they haven't yet decided who all they are going to let go, but the ones they do let go will get a pretty good severance. They set a benchmark goal of 10% of the workforce, and the specifics are still being sorted. Some they've immediately let go (business segments that they're closing completely) and in business segments that they want to downsize, they're notifying teams that their members can voluntarily get laid off or retire early (with full severance.) After that, if they don't get enough volunteers, they're going to do forced layoffs.
I mean, Windows doesn't have very good tablet integration still, even with Windows 10
Ok... Ill bite. I gave my daughter an Asus T100Chi with an Atom CPU as an ultraportable for school (she has access to a regular deskop, and laptop as well.)
She spends literally oodles of time with it, in tablet mode.
... ever try to close those tiny close buttons for your non-metro programs?
She doesn't much use those when she's using it as a tablet. And the detachable bluetooth keyboard and trackpad are right there when she needs desktop features.
Secondly, battery life is complete shit.. 3 hours or less I got out of my Surface.
That's the main reason we went with the t100chi for a school portable she gets 10+ hrs easily on the battery doing basic web browsing and ms office etc.
Thirdly, you still have to run anti-virus, and all that other crap just like a desktop or laptop computer.
We use windows 10 built in A/V which is pretty lightweight. And her documents are sync'd to a cloud service. If it were to get infected, deleting the user profile or even an OS wipe would be a fairly minor inconvenience.
And lastly, you pretty much still need a keyboard with Windows.. which makes you think, why didn't I just buy a laptop instead?
It has one. Its there if she needs it. For chatting on skype (video) or watching various streaming services, she doesn't need it. I was surprised at how often she elected to use the onscreen keyboard in tablet mode vs using the bluetooth one.
If you want or need a tablet for the portability, you're still better off with an iPad or Android tablet.
If you want a tablet sure, get a tablet. This is for people who want an ultraportable laptop, that can also do double duty as a tablet.
The surface pro is going gangbusters at work. Our outbound sales teams and managers love it. Its smaller and lighter than the laptops they used to carry around. It runs our point-of-sale/retail software which is windows only. They can do presentations in powerpoint etc with it at client sites. Its connected to our domain; they can run reports, they can save them as PDF, or print them because the company network printers are all setup same as any other computer, they can send them as email attachments -- with none of the usual tablet weirdness about hiding the file system or making printing funky etc.
A tablet, by comparison is worthless. Even Windows RT tablets were worthless. There IS a lot of value to the surface series stuff. It seems to fill a real niche.
The surface pro series isn't going to be affected as they're already further upmarket than the atom. The surface (non-pro) and asus transformer books etc that are atom based... I'm guessing will move into the m3 stuff.
Its really the phone to 8" tablet market that might be screwed by intel's exit... but i don't think anybody but windows phone fans care.
It does raise some questions though; a lot of people think that maybe our computer will 'become' our phone... we'll just set out phone next to our desk and our dual monitors, and desktop keyboard light up and we use the phone as the processor. That "dream" seems a bit further away if intel isn't going to be there.
Maybe ARM will go there... but I wouldn't discount the amount of influence intel and windows have.
As usual, people see the name of a specific flavor of an SoC and think that the entire line is being spoken about.
An SoC has a number of process cores of a given types and then a bunch of other units that are specific to the application. A different application may call for a different set of units which will have a different product name.
The older example of this when people mention the sale of StrongARM as if that were the entirety of ARM development, when in reality is was just a specific ARM-based part that today no one talks about. There are plenty of other ARM products being sold.
Today we have word-salad about some x86 SOC parts being discontinued/not discontinued. Cherry Trail is being discontinued... because it is old and crappy and its replacement is now ready. The replacement is "Pentium and Celeron chips code-named Apollo Lake"... except the "Pentium and Celeron" cores are actually Atom-based. Pentium and Celeron are currently just brand names that carry no technical detail about the core they are applied to.
It's entirely possible to restructure without laying off. Restructuring and laying off would be orthogonal things is management was competent.
No, Intel is a pretty big company that is having to deal with a pretty big industry shift. No matter how you slice it, the reduced desktop sales IS a problem that Intel can't fix with the marketing BS it used to pull years back (and believe me, they tried that already.) When you're in Intel's position, you can't just hold on to your existing expenses and expect things to work out. This isn't a management problem, rather it's a changing business landscape that they need to adapt to. The people who lose their jobs over this are dealing with frictional unemployment, which invariably happens at some point.
It's not all bad though, and this is actually a good time to get laid off because the economy is still in a growth period. I myself just got laid off from a really big tech company (who happens to be an Intel partner, by the way) only two months ago, and I just got hired by another company (in the health care industry, but still doing tech work) for almost twice what I was getting paid before. With the severances that Intel is giving their employees, they shouldn't have any difficulty sustaining themselves while they find new work.