Apple and Samsung are engaged in a knives-out smartphone war, most infamously in the courts but, more importantly, in the marketplace. In its latest ad campaign, Samsung has cleverly “borrowed” a page from Apple’s own marketing playbook, posturing the iPhone as the choice of autumn-aged parents and brainwashed queue sheep.
But when it comes to chips, the two companies must pretend to be civil for the sake of the children: Samsung is the sole supplier of ARM-based processors for the iPhone.
Since no one sees Samsung getting out of its booming smartphone business, the conclusion is that Apple will assume full custody, it will take its iDevices processor business elsewhere.
But where? There are rumors (which we’ll get to), and none of them so much as hint at Intel.
Except for the rare cameo appearance, Intel is nowhere in the Post-PC world (or, as Frank Shaw, the literate and witty head of Microsoft’s corporate PR obdurately insists, the “PC Plus” world). Becoming Apple’s ARM source wouldn’t just put the Santa Clara company in the race, it would vault them into the lead.
They’ve been there before: Intel scored a coup when Apple switched to the x86 architecture for its Macintosh line in 2005. An iDevice encore would mark an even bigger score as smartphones and tablets have already reached much higher volumes and grow much faster.
So… Why hasn’t Intel jumped at the chance?
The first explanation is architectural disdain. Intel sees “no future for ARM“, it’s a culture of x86 true believers. And they have a right to their conviction: With each iteration of its manufacturing technology, Intel has full control over how to improve its processors. They can reduce x86 power consumption by using smaller building blocks (they’re already down to 22 nanometers wide). They can micro-manage (literally) which parts of a complex chip will be turned on, off, or somewhere in between, in a kind of hibernation.
A further problem is that Intel would need to change roles. Today, the company designs the microprocessors that it manufactures. It tells PC clone makers what these chips will do, how many they will get, when, and for how much. Its development model (called Tick Tock in industry argot) essentially defines the schedules and finances of hardware makers.
This dictatorial model won’t work for iDevices. Apple crossed the border into Intel’s chipset empire back in the Macintosh era, but, today, it has far too much invested in its ARM design to again surrender complete control. As evidenced by the A6 processor running inside the iPhone 5, Apple goes to great lengths to customize the basic ARM cores, adding graphic processors, memory, and large amounts of support logic, and even resorts to aggressive hand-optimization of the silicon layout — as opposed to just letting CAD software tools do the job.
Intel would have to accept Apple’s design and “pour” it into silicon — it would become a lowly “merchant foundry“. Intel knows how to design and manufacture standard parts, it has little experience manufacturing other people’s custom designs…or pricing them.
Which leads us to the most likely answer to the Why Not Intel question: Money. Intel is a sophisticated business entity that expertly balances both terms of the profit equation. On the one hand, they use brand identity, marketing incentives, and a little strong-arming to keep prices “acceptable”, while on the other, the Tick Tock technology and product development pushes its costs down.
The company meticulously tunes the price points for its processors to generate the revenue that will fund development as well as the Intel Inside campaigns that have cost hundreds of millions of dollars over the years, to say nothing of the more recent $300M Ultrabook fund.
One way to visualize Intel’s money pump is to think of what the industry calls a Wafer Start. Here, “wafer” refers to the basic silicon “galette” that will go through the manufacturing steps and emerge with thousands of chips ready to be diced out. For Intel, profit comes from the difference between the cost of running a wafer through the $5B manufacturing unit (a “fab” in our argot) and the revenue that the marketplace will grant each chip.
Intel’s published prices range from a “low” $117 for a Core i3 processor to $999 for a top-of-the-line Core i7 device. Of course, these are the publicly advertised price tags, so we can assume that Acer, Lenovo, and HP pay less… but compare this to iSuppli’s estimate for the cost of the A6 processor: $17.50.
Even if more A6 chips could be produced per wafer — an unproven assumption — Intel’s revenue per A6 wafer start would be much lower than with their x86 microprocessors. In Intel’s perception of reality, this would destroy the business model.
In the meantime, the rumor of the day is that Apple will use TSMC, a well-regarded Taiwanese foundry, the world’s largest. TSMC is known to have made test runs of the A4 last year, and is now reportedly doing the same for the A5 processors that power the new iPad. Furthermore, “industry insiders” have reported that Apple attempted to secure exclusive access to TMSC’s semiconductor output but were rebuffed. (Qualcomm tried, as well; same result.)
This raises a big Disruption question for Intel: In the name of protecting today’s business model, will it let TSMC and others take the huge mobile volume, albeit with lower profit per unit? Can Intel afford to shun ARM?
For all of Intel’s semiconductor design and manufacturing feats, its processors suffer from a genetic handicap: They have to support the legacy x86 instruction set, and thus they’re inherently more complicated than legacy-free ARM devices, they require more transistors, more silicon. Intel will argue, rightly, that they’ll always be one technological step ahead of the competition, but is one step enough for x86 chips to beat ARM microprocessors?
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47 Comments
Intel is in no win situation. Even if they succeed in mobile (a big very big if), it won’t bring the monopoly margins of the x86 PC business. So at best, they are looking to replace an great business with mediocre one.
Intel used to offer ARM chips branded XScale, which were derived from DEC’s StrongARM design. It sold that business to Marvell to concentrate on Centrino chips and then the Atom.
I asked Sean Maloney about this when I interviewed him in The Guardian:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/jun/11/intel-culv-sean-maloney
Quote:
Maloney says that with the Atom “we knew we were going to make lower margins than ever before, so we had to design it that way, using different people, with a different culture. We made a decision to go that way, so that’s what we did. If we can’t make money in high-volume, low-cost markets, we’re doomed anyway.
“That’s not to say it wasn’t an emotional discussion,” he says. “It was. It still is.”
I think this article overplays the x86 complexity overhead, and overestimates how far Intel has to go to “catch up”.
Anandtech recently did an in-depth iPhone5 review. Only one phone consistently beat the iP5 on CPU benchmarks.
Motorola Razr i – Powered by an Intel Atom SoC, with comparable battery life.
They have already caught up.
Next year brings the first Atom core redesign in 4 years, and a shift to 22 nm. Atom SoCs will likey be ahead then.
It is going to be a tough decision for Intel. If it agrees to make chips for apple, then I believe X86 lost the race against ARM in mobile world. On the other hand, Intel will sure make mobile chips better than ARM in both power and performance in couple of years, there won’t be any ecosystem to support it.
Intel came to profitability because of Microsoft’s operating system and the ecosystem that grew up around Windows. The ecosystem lent weight to Intel crushing its competition.
With smartphones, tablets, and other small-form-factor devices, Intel has ZERO ECOSYSTEM. There is no compelling reason to use Intel’s processors in smartphones, tablets, or other small-form-factor devices. There simply isn’t software to support it.
Thus, Intel risks the market moving away from it if it doesn’t get into ARM.
If it still had the StrongARM business, no doubt Intel would have had Apple’s business.
PeterScott, I’m curious what you mean by “comparable”, because that review shows the iPhone 5 a good 20-30+% better life in most tests (and the one where the Razr did beat it, it was pumping out 30 fps. vs. 8 for the Razr). The iPhone 5 also has a relatively smaller battery, in size, to most of the competition, so it’ll be interesting to see this progress.
@PeterScott,
NO it didn’t. Intel Atom was running at 2.0 GHz vs 1.3 GHz.
Atom used more wattage. It was pathetic in Graphics. When Intel
puts 2 core instead of 1 core the Atom will be in the same boat.
Even the voltage comparison is flawed go look closely at the graphs.
Apple will not be switching at i386 ever not even with perfect virtualization.
————
The reason Samsung won the chip fabrication business is because they
low balled in order to learn the secrets of Apple but even then A6 will
be much better than A16 type processors.
Especially interesting as Apple and Intel worked together on the StrongARM series – ARM chipsets but over a decade ago.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM
And used in the ill-fated Newton.
Are Intel totally committed to x86 as a blind faith article or would they follow business?
@RD.
I didn’t say Apple was going to switch away from ARM to x86.
Just that the ancient Atom core currently produces one of the fastest smartphones with competetive battery life. It is no where near as bad as some people go on about.
Next year will bring the biggest jump for Atom since it was introduced. It should be a very interesting chip.
@Matt
“Are Intel totally committed to x86 as a blind faith article or would they follow business?”
have you been sleeping thru the 90s and onward or do you not realize
that Microsoft was making 85% margin on Windows and Intel around 65% margin
on chips. This is monopoly power. WinTel Tax.
But I guess since you were paying for cheap pc boxes with OEMs making 5% margin, you thought you were getting a good deal.
So now you know why Intel can’t get off the crack into meat and potato diet.
Intel start with just cpu then moved to north bridge, south bridge, motherboard, GPU, everything integrated. Now they have run out of thing to capture in order to make 65% margin.
You’re ignoring that intel used to make arm chips – Some of the best available at the time.
Also, comparing the cost of an A6 vs an intel desktop chip _without_looking_at_the_size_difference_ is a bit bonkers.
Happy starbuxing,
Ben
Jean,
This is a great article but was confused by the lack of a clear conclusion as you normally provide.
I have read that Apple is planning to move away from Intel for Macs. It seems they intend to use ARM based SOC to further increase the battery life and reduce the design complexity that goes with an Intel chip on the motherboard (I believe the iPhone5′s design was only possible due to the reduced size of the A6 chip and the Macs can greatly benefit in design and portability if they used a more powerful version of A6/A7).
Do you think Apple will ever make such a move?
Also, do you think Steve had something to do with Apple planning to move away from Intel. I know the biography mentions Steve saying something liken “we didn’t want to teach these (Intel) guys how to make great chips……” (from what I remember)
@rd
You didn’t answer my question, you clarified it. Intel used to do more than x86 and now they have market pressure to actually do more than x86. And they seem to be doggedly pursuing only x86. So is it “NIH” diehards or are they right?
It rather seems like one of the companies has to give in. Intel wont bend to Apple’s rules easily but Apple has demonstrated some really good chip design and processor producing capabilities with A6. And Intel is not Foxconn. But it would be great if Apple and Intel joined hands for the mobile platform. They’re doing wonders in the recent MBP series.. they would nail it for mobile only if they “collaborate” instead of merely do business.
ARM disrupting Intel is one of the most classic cases of disruptions that have happened in the past 2 decades. Everything is happening by the book (the Innovator’s Dilemma book, that is) – meaning ARM is winning exactly as it should, and Intel is doing exactly the type of mistakes you would expect an incumbent to do when disrupted.
Intel has tried ARM before, but the conflict of interest is too high, and it’s why they failed before with it, and would fail again if they try now, unless they accept ARM is the future, and x86 is not. But of course they won’t do that, and therefore you won’t see them even trying to adopt ARM again.
Intel can’t bring itself to change its cost structure, which is something Clayton Christensen talks about in his book, too. And this is something Intel has admitted in their latest earnings reports, too. They can’t bring down the cost structure of their entire company in a way that would support a profitable ARM business for them. Their business is made on lover volume (relative to ARM) and high profit chips. And that’s why it’s not sustainable for them to compete against ARM in the long term, nor use ARM for its own business. Intel, therefore is doomed, and their mistakes have been and still are very predictable.
AMD seems to be moving more and more towards ARM, and will apparently use ARMv8 cores in 2014 in their chips. That’s smart for AMD, but I think they should’ve started doing it years ago, and they should also buy the OMAP division from TI if they can, to get their ARM engineers.
Intel will have another problem in the future. Starting with 2014 as well, Apple will be using ARM chips in their Macbook line-up, too.
I’m afraid we may already be beyond the point where a technological advantage matters in the mobile space. In the 80s and 90s, a number of “superior” chip architectures came out (the “RISC” movement), and many predicted that they would displace the then-already-aging x86 lines. However, the world had already invested in x86 software, and so the incentive for moving to a better-performing system was nullified.
With the average iPhone owner now having over a hundred apps, how likely is it that they’d be willing to switch to a different architecture for the sake of higher performance (or better battery life)? They’d have to re-download (and often re-purchase) all the apps they care about.
@rd
> Microsoft was making 85% margin on Windows and Intel around
> 65% margin on chips. This is monopoly power. WinTel Tax.
These are both businesses with very high up-front R&D costs (program development; building fabs) with relatively low mass production costs. In Microsoft’s case, it’s a licensing business, so with online delivery, the gross margin should be very close to 100%.
If you compare with similar software businesses such as Adobe, Oracle and IBM’s software division, you’ll find Microsoft’s margins are not out of line. It’s not monopoly power so much as the normal business model.
@David V
What you say is absolutely true. However, it remains to be seen how much the investment in iPhone apps is actually worth.
With Windows and other business platforms, companies might have thousands of in house programs that would cost a fortune to redevelop. Business PC users may have spent far more on software than on hardware (Office, Adobe CS, AutoCAD or whatever).
I suspect that for most Apple iPhone and Android users, the cost of apps is a tiny fraction of the hardware cost, let alone the very high running costs. If your phone is costing you $1,000 a year, do you really care about $100 worth of apps?
If you look at the games console business, Sony/Nintendo/Sega etc owners have repeatedly thrown away much larger investments in software when they have moved on to new hardware.
Apple is clearly going for a proprietary hardware/software/ecosystem lock in, but we’ve yet to see just how strong the jailbars are.
Intel has 60% gross margin on x86 logic silicon.
Think about that.
Can you name another silicon vendor that’s churning out chips that deliver 60% GM?
You can’t. The reason for Intel’s 60% GM is the x86 IP monopoly (AMD is always at Intel’s mercy for survival and Intel needs AMD just as much as AMD needs Intel).
You can thank IBM for requiring Intel to share x86 designs with AMD in perpetuity so IBM could have a second source back in 1981.
No mobile hardware OR software manufacturer is going to put themselves in x86 straitjacket while giving up so much business freedom to operate in ARM architecture. Not even at the cost of a good deal of performance.
Least of all Apple.
With every passing day, the software ecosystem in favor of ARM is getting bigger. Intel has failed to gain traction in mobile for the simple reason that no one wants to give up CPU design and fabrication freedom.
I doubt Intel could get a foothold in mobile if it was selling CPU chips for $1 a pop.
Apple will likely own/co-own a fab, probably the GlobalFoundries upstate NY fab in less than two years.
The complexity of x86 will be less as ARM gains needs more transistor for performance. And most of that complexity has to do with older instruction like MMX or older SSE that aren’t required on Mobile. You could very much have a new type of x86 instruction with software that needs older instruction translated to be using newer AVX. Low Power 22nm with New Atom Design is going to make ARM Mobile SoC and Intel Mobile Atom on the same ground. Except for may be bigger die size and slightly more expensive. I still dont expect many Phones or tablet will be using it. It will be the 14nm that truly offers an advantage on Intel Side. But we would have to wait and see if end of 2014 or 2015 will be too late for that. Since the whole Mobile and Tablet market are booming already.
Not that it will affect Intel’s overall revenue much, but as other posters have already mentioned, Apple could easily transition the “consumer” Mac lines to ARM within a few years. This will require only one thing: 64-bit quad-core ARM CPUs running at reasonable clock speeds.
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The first step, finalizing the 64-bit instruction set, was done almost a year ago when the ARMv8 spec was published. The next step, 64-bit data and addressing in hardware with quad-core configuration, hasn’t been shipped by anyone yet. But it’s a near-certainty that Apple is working on it. Maybe dual-core for the 2014 iPhone and iPad, and quad-core for 2014 or later MacBook Air and iMac.
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Switching to ARM-based CPUs in MacBook Air and iMac would let Apple cut their hardware costs significantly. And it would give Apple control over their own destiny in the way they control their destiny in the mobile world. And really, how many consumer need to run Windows on their MacBook Air or iMac anyway? Not very many, I’m sure.
@ED you’re wrong about Intel gaining an advantage at 14nm. Intel has been caught up in slight delays that add-up to their process cycle, which was already just half a generation ahead of ARM (one year).
By the time they get to 14nm, it looks like some ARM foundries will be able to make 14nm “3D” chips as well, and in the same year:
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/blogs/david-manners-semiconductor-blog/2012/10/14nm-is-the-equaliser-says-glo.html
@rd-
“The reason Samsung won the chip fabrication business is because they
low balled in order to learn the secrets of Apple but even then A6 will
be much better than A16 type processors.”
This is satire, right? Apple’s super secret chips have been stock cores and stock third-party PowerVR GPUs (of the sort that anyone can integrate if that’s their concern). They have only moved *slightly outside of the painted lines with the A6, however even still it’s like a Snapdragon S4 and essentially blends a hybrid A8/A15.
Samsung learned nothing by manufacturing chips for Apple. Quite the opposite, the A4 was mostly designed by Samsung directly.
@JackSchofield “If your phone is costing you $1,000 a year, do you really care about $100 worth of apps?”
In theory one shouldn’t, but those apps were bought over years in some instance, and moving them all at once is different than buying one or two each year. Having said that, there are two points to consider, namely 1) most apps get used a couple of times, not more, and apps like games—even if used a lot—have a limited lifespan for users and 2) Apple already has the technology in place to enable a seamless (as those things can be, anyway) transition for the users, as seen with their move from PowerPC to x86. And iOS development happening on a more abstracted level than desktop app development does only means the transition for developers will be easier.
Regarding Apple moving their desktop line to ARM, it really will depend on how good the CPU performance of desktop ARM CPUs will be. Again most people think a move to ARM is unreasonable as Intel’s CPUs are actually very good performance-wise. The thing that will be interesting is just how much of the real “high performance” computation can be offloaded to the GPU. OpenCL is one more step towards abstracting hardware away and if Apple’s ARM solution is good enough for “light” use like word processing and web browsing while heavy computation is taken over by a math coprocessor in the form of a GPU, Apple wouldn’t even need to compete with Intel’s CPUs in terms of per-CPU performance, as their overall system would compensate in areas where ARM is lacking.
@Ben Calvert – Sandy Bridge i3 at $117 per chip is a 118 mm^2 on a 32nm process. A6 at $17.50 per chip is 96mm^2 on 32nm – a 20% difference in area, and even though small differences in area have disproportionate impact on yield, that’s nowhere near enough difference to make it worthwhile for Intel to manufacture ARM chips for Apple. The only play that makes sense for them is to aggressively work on optimizing the Atom family to the point where it can start taking business away from ARM manufacturers – and I doubt Apple will be the first to switch.
@PeterScott wrote, “Next year brings the first Atom core redesign in 4 years, and a shift to 22 nm. Atom SoCs will likey be ahead then.”
No doubt, Intel has the culture, people, IP, machinery to make great chips, but also no doubt, the number of full-fledged PC sales have ALREADY peaked, so sales of their high-profit items are capped.
Further, for many of us the CPU speed is almost irrelevant; most of my delays are network or disk issues. I mean most of the delays not caused by waiting for my fingers to hit the next key or my mouse to click on some icon. So the benefit of faster processors is very low for the majority of desktop users; they will increasingly opt for the lower-power devices.
No doubt the server marketplace will continue to grow and be very profitable for Intel, but the other 98% of their potential sales have ALREADY been disrupted by low-cost, low-capability processors—sometimes, lower-cost Intel chips, sometimes ARM.
If Intel wants to transition to current demands, they need to compete against devices that are much lower-priced. They can continue X86-only, or they can switch to ARM. But they’ll never be able to continue the same margins on either architecture.
Your point about the fungibility of chips is well taken—most Android programs run well on either CPU with NO changes, and Apple is the master of multi-CPU transitions—but this also cuts against Intel, as the Windows RT transition shows. (I have VERY modest expectations for that platform near-term, so it hardly matters.)
All in all, Intel will be facing sharp competitive pressures as others continue the race to saturate user needs on mobile devices.
It is and has been TSMC for some time. They have been in talks for years and are building new fabs to handle the capacity.
well, it should be evident that X86 can’t last forever. the only question is when it will be superceded by the next technology, and with what economics.
and product-optimized chips of whatever type have to be the wave of the future. Apple is doing is first with ARM tech, that’s all. the benefits are huge. in 5 years it will be the norm.
the old days of Intel decides and OEM’s follow are fading fast. the handwriting is on the wall – or the die, in this case.
I wonder what kind of battery life the atom chip would get if the Razr i matched the iPhone 5′s acreen (with 40% more pixels) and weight (13% less).
Intel is missing Andy Grove … “only the paranoid survive”
It would seem, to me, that Intel still has a nuclear arsenal of manufacturing facilities that are better than anybody’s – built with x86 margins. They have huge capital investment, talent, and know-how.
Secondly, whether they go to ARM or continue with Atom, it will have to be price competitive with ARM.
At this point pushing Atom just so they can extend the x86 monopoly into the mobile space seems like a foolish plan. It’s not going to happen, nobody is going to pay an x86 tax when there are no benefits, only downsides.
I therefore think Intel will get back into ARM manufacturing. Why they don’t team up with Apple to at least make all of Apple’s chips is beyond me – it seems like there is no reason not to. What makes me optimistic is that Intel is at its heart a pragmatic company – they’ve run dual strategies before. I don’t see why they can’t do it again. Maybe they’ll even buy ARM?
Intel’s strategic position has been eroding since 3DFx came along 15 years ago. From that point on, every PC sold included a bunch of transistors that were paying off the amortization on someone else’s big fab investment. Intel is finally clawing some of that territory back, but I have my doubts that it is going to be enough.
The bottom line is that Intel’s competitive position depends in its ability to invest ahead of competitors in next gen fab technology. It can afford to do so because of its dominant position in desktop and server CPUs and the healthy margins that brings.
The problem for Intel is that each new fab generation is more expensive than the last, and doubles the number of transistors they can produce. Together, this more than doubles the number of transistors they have to sell to maintain their margins. History suggests that this has been a long term challenge. Their average selling price has declined over the last decade in order to balance the supply/demand equation.
They’ve been clever about maximizing their ROI. They use lower margin CPUs to keep the latest generation fabs full, underwriting the cost of fabbing their higher-margin server CPUs. They maximizing the productive life of their older fabs by using them to build support chips (this is why Intel made incursions with x86 chipset makers in the mid-2000s). Unfortunately, this model has its own limits. One of the ways they’ve been managing to schlep transistors is by integrating more and more features directly onto the CPU die, but by doing so, they undermine their own support chip business, cutting in to opportunities to continue to extract revenue from their older fabs.
Which brings us to mobile. Mobile devices can drive a lot of volume, but they don’t drive a lot of revenue. Apple’s new A6 SoC is roughly the same size of one of Intel’s low end i3 CPUs, but intel sells the i3 for 5-10x what Apple, or any other mobile vendor, is likely to pay for a cutting edge ARM SoC.
It appears that Intel may finally have achieved the power/performance ratio needed to play in mobile phones, but it will probably be at least another year before they even have a chance of having design wins that pay-off in significant volume. And even if they do, their growth is limited. Samsung is a major player in phones, and they tend to favor their own SoCs. Apple is the other big player, and they have obviously made their own bet. That leaves Qualcomm’s market share for Intel. I expect that will be a tough fight. Qualcomm will integrate the SoC with the baseband, and they have a lot of patents to bring to that fight. And then there are all these ARM licensees. It is crazy looking at the evolution of ARM SoCs going into cheap Chinese Android tablets.
I just don’t see a big opportunity for Intel. They have a narrow window to gain any sort of real foothold, and the territory they can gain is unlikely to be enough to hold back the tide of ARM licensees which will start eating into their server revenue.
Intel is vertically integrated around the design, fabrication and marketing of CPUs and related components. The advantages of that strategy are in decline. For chips, that seems to be giving way to merchant fabs, which can get the best ROI on their fab investment by leaving the design and marketing of chips to other companies, like Apple, who are vertically integrated around their end-user, and for whom designing their own SoC allows them best serve their customers and drive economies of scale.
Someone above noted that the switch from Arm to Atom would be expensive in that they would have to repurchase their apps. That is not necessarily true. Also, moving apps from one architecture to another is fairly simple these days. It is a bit time consuming for the very low level functions that are arch dependent (like SMP atomic handlers, inline assembly optimizations, etc), but for the most part it is fairly easy. Ubuntu proved that when they released the Ubuntu Desktop on Arm (TI OMAP 3/4, FreeScale iMX51/53, nVidia Tegra, etc). Currently, there are only about 100-200 apps in their pool of 15k apps that haven’t been ported, largely due to the specific use cases these apps provide (wine on arm doesn’t make sense, neither does all the virtualization software or high end server raid configuration utilities, as a few examples). The fact that they were able to do this in one cycle speaks volumes. They did it again when they introduced armhf support, and their arm server efforts have been very good (enough for other Linux distributions to take notice). Granted, a lot of the leg work was also done in Debian and had been for years, a lot of optimization was done by Ubuntu.
Interestingly enough, doing some benchmarking between Atom and Omap4, graphics should be close to on-par, given that they use the same underlying graphics IP from PowerVR. That leaves the cpu cores for comparison. Granted, in a lot of areas, the Intel architecture will run circles around todays arm cores, but seriously, who needs to compile OpenOffice from source on their cell phone? Leave that to the server farm (where arm is making major inroads into).
@ David V.:
> I’m afraid we may already be beyond the point where a technological advantage matters in the mobile space. In the 80s and 90s, a number of “superior” chip architectures came out (the “RISC” movement), and many predicted that they would displace the then-already-aging x86 lines. However, the world had already invested in x86 software, and so the incentive for moving to a better-performing system was nullified.
I do wonder what happened to Advanced RISC Machines, the makers of the RISC PC and supposedly doomed competitors to x86…
– Chris
A late comment for anybody reading through all the interesting thoughts like I was: When talking about Intel doing something extreme and brute-force to protect their hefty profit (like @nik’s comment about buying ARM), it’s worth keeping in mind the scale of the company. Intel is a very big, rich company, but Apple is a lot bigger, and even richer–they could literally buy Intel at its current market cap–and they’re not likely to let Intel muscle them out of a strong processor position.
Intel havent really made any major mistakes its just that the market has moved on.The move to smaller mobile devices has been inevitable with improvements in technology with components shrinking and getting more powerful.And its not the case that mobile is high volume low margin,tell that to Apple shareholders..its just that the profit wedge now goes to the hardware manufacturers instead of to Intel.They have been cut out the loop because poweful chips are getting smaller and cheaper.The only option for Intel to keep its high margins is to move into hardware and try and compete with Apple and Samsung which they are already trying to do with the Intel branded phone.
@John Williams wrote, Intel havent really made any major mistakes its just that the market has moved on.”
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You make some excellent observations, but I think it fair to say that Intel foresaw the rise of ARM-class CPUs, but badly underestimated how quickly that market would evolve into one that would compete with it. If ARM had tried to attack the PC marketplace, Intel could’ve easily pushed back with low-cost parts; as it is the lower-power devices developed a whole independent ecosystem in which Intel doesn’t play.
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In other words, Intel has been disrupted.
.
I’ll guess at this point, all the ARM CPUs sold each year have more transistors — are a bigger market — than all the X86 chips were just a few years back, and that parity is not far ahead. It’s surprising for a major producer to sit back and watch the market transform, especially as they had such fine visibility of how it has been evolving.
Today, I went to the beach with my children. I found a sea shell and gave it to my 4 year old daughter and said “You can hear the ocean if you put this to your ear.” She placed the shell to her ear and screamed. There was a hermit crab inside and it pinched her ear. She never wants to go back! LoL I know this is entirely off topic but I had to tell someone!|
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Today, I went to the beach front with my children. I found a sea shell
and gave it to my 4 year old daughter and said “You can hear the ocean if you put this to your ear.” She placed the shell
to her ear and screamed. There was a hermit
crab inside and it pinched her ear. She never wants to go back!
LoL I know this is completely off topic
but I had to tell someone!
Intel can only blame their current state by being myopic asses. They had least THREE years to develop a mobile strategy since the iPhone came out in 2007. But instead they chose to double down on making double-digit wattage x86 processors and it completely backfired by giving the average consumers WAY more CPU power than they will ever need in PCs, while Moore’s law propelled ARM performance with exponential increases generation after generation so much that the “good enough” performance for $10 a chip had long sailed for ARM.
Can’t compete for performance, because they have too much of it, and can’t compete for price with ARM. Rock and a hard place, really.
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[...] Apple, ARM, and Intel | Monday Note [...]
[...] Apple, ARM, and Intel | Monday Note. [...]
[...] Apple, ARM, and Intel, Monday Note, October 21, 2012 – Intel’s published prices range from a “low” $117 for a Core i3 processor to $999 for a top-of-the-line Core i7 device … but compare this to iSuppli’s estimate for the cost of the A6 processor: $17.50. Share this:TwitterFacebookLike this:LikeBe the first to like this. October 23, 2012 by Henry | Leave a comment [...]
[...] Apple, ARM, and Intel, Monday Note, October 21, 2012 – Intel’s published prices range from a “low” $117 for a Core i3 processor to $999 for a top-of-the-line Core i7 device … but compare this to iSuppli’s estimate for the cost of the A6 processor: $17.50. Share this:TwitterFacebookLike this:LikeBe the first to like this. October 21, 2012 by Henry | Leave a comment [...]
[...] was posted as a comment on a recent post by Jean Louis Gassee on the subject of CPUs and [...]
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