Intel To Manufacture Rival ARM Chips In Mobile Push

An anonymous reader writes: Chip maker Intel has entered an unlikely partnership with British semiconductor firm ARM in an effort to boost opportunities for its foundry business. The licensing agreement, which was confirmed at the Intel Development Forum in San Francisco, means that from 2017 Intel's Custom Foundry will manufacture ARM chips -- used by smartphone giants such as Apple, Qualcomm and Samsung. On the announcement of its latest earnings report, Intel was clear to highlight a shift in focus, away from the traditional PC market, to emerging areas such as the Internet of Things and mobile -- a sector dominated by one-time arch rival ARM. It seems that Intel has now decided to surrender to the latter's prominence in the field.

Comments

Makes sense for Intel

[AmiMoJo]

Intel doesn't just make CPUs, they make whole systems. A PC with an Intel chipset has Intel NICs, Intel SATA controllers, Intel PCIe bus controllers, Intel USB controllers etc. They actually do a whole lot more, including cellular modems, flash memory controllers and all sorts stuff that gets integrated into smartphone SoCs.

So even if the CPU core is ARM instead of Intel Atom, the rest of the system will be Intel custom hardware. Getting that accepted and widely used is even more important than getting their CPU ISA used in mobile devices.

Shouldn't have sold XScale...

[dlenmn]

This is amusing in part because Intel made ARM processors from 1997-2006 (branded StrongARM and later XScale), but decided that ARM processors were silly and sold their ARM processor business in 2006. In hindsight, that was the worst possible timing since the mobile market started to take off shortly thereafter (the first iPhone was 2007. Oh well. At least they're no longer wasting their time trying to cram x86 processors into phones.

Robotics

[sjbe]

Robotic assembly lines make it relatively easy and quick to switch on production of just about anything requiring mass quantities. Scaling up is easier with robotics.

Speaking as someone who has spent a fair bit of time working with robotic assembly lines, I think you are overestimating the plug-and-play nature of them severely. Mass production does not require robots nor is it particularly made easier by their presence. The advantages of robots are that they can work in hazardous environments, they can lower unit costs in some (not all) cases by reducing labor costs, they can produce repeatable products, and they sometimes can work faster. Downsides include: High up front tooling costs, less flexible than humans, require substantial programming time/expertise, too expensive for low-medium volume, maintenance and repair, and high setup costs.

As a general proposition scaling up is not any easier with robotics than with people and generally not any faster either. In some cases it can actually be more difficult. There are advantages to automation but ease of scaling is generally not one of them.

Re:Mobile!

[dj245]

I am not sure the concept of "emerging market" has much relevance any longer...mainly due to "time". Manufacturing has gotten so fast and mimicry so entrenched as a business plan that anything emerging this year won't be emerging next year. It will either be fully emerged or, worse, stale. Companies look at what Apple did to some markets and are now determined not get Appled by Apple or anyone else. There is an article on NYT about how companies are evading anti-trust laws by buying any startup that looks like it might become a competitor.

Every smart phone looks like an iPhone to me, there's no differentiation that regular customers could care about. Self-driving cars seems like a hot new area. Except no car company of any reasonable size is not working on them. There will be no emerging market for these, it will be created fully merged. Robotic assembly lines make it relatively easy and quick to switch on production of just about anything requiring mass quantities. Scaling up is easier with robotics.

I see this as a consequence of global supply chains, subcontracting, and little if any vertical integration. All the little details that used to be trade secrets of a vertically-integrated company are now quite transparent. You open up the device, see who made all the different components, and call them up and ask for a quote. We have come a long way from the days when a company manufactured most of their core products in-house. Just as one example, GE has been subcontracting out the manufacture of steam turbines, to their own competitors, since at least the 1970s. You could argue that they were simply divesting themselves of "mature" technology in order to focus on the more profitable cutting-edge stuff, but I would argue that steam turbine technology only became fully mature because they gave away (licensed) the technology to Hitachi, Toshiba, Doosan, and Ansaldo and let them run with it.