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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.
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.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.