bakaneko (nyan.delete@this.hyan.wan) on January 29, 2013 2:18 pm wrote:

> Sorry, I got hotblooded and gave you a wrong
> answer to a misunderstood question:
>
> (there was more in my posts, but meh, too lazy)

Yup, I enjoyed the rant :-)

> The question is why would you replace Intel with
> a group of ARM based suppliers if the price is
> the same for similar products?

If we widen the definition of price to "total cost of
ownership per unit of throughput", then the answer is,
you wouldn't change. It just seems likely that the
people who are building low-power quad-core ARM SoC's
to go into tens of millions of sub-$200 tablets will also
have a chance at making some neat cheap ultra-dense low-
power servers.

> Alternatively: why wouldn't they need the high
> margin (not want, NEED) and could lower the
> prices?

They wouldn't *need* the kind of margins Intel has because
a) they have businesses designed to survive on the high
volumes and razor-thin margins of the smartphone/tablet
business, b) the ARM ecosystem works by having fab
expertise developed by foundries, "standard" core designs
and various other useful IP by ARM plc, a bunch of free
or cheap software (gcc, linux etc). So the barriers to
entry are rather low.

> And if they need it, why would they have lower
> production costs and thus could lower the prices?

They wouldn't have lower production costs. Intel has the
best fabs; and on top of that the foundries want a profit.
But most (maybe all) ARM SoC vendors would be willing to live
with much lower margins than Intel currently gets for server cpus, which
could translate into lower prices.

I don't believe that Intel is selling server cpu's at the marginal
cost of production. Do you ?