Richard Cownie (tich.delete@this.pobox.com) on January 31, 2013 7:36 pm wrote:
> Richard Cownie (tich.delete@this.pobox.com) on January 31, 2013 7:16 pm wrote:
> > > Other competitors also need to sell it at a healthy margin if they are supposed to generate
> > > enough gross profit to be able to invest in competing with Intel in mfg and design.
> >
> > Qualcomm and Samsung are doing pretty well.
>
> Qualcomm made $1.9B profit in the last quarter. I'd think you could fund a
> pretty good ARM-based server development for $500M or so (in the same ballpark
> as Apple's internal ARM core/SoC effort). That seems quite feasible in relation
> to the profits being made by Qualcomm and others; and possibly worthwhile to
> get a chunk of a rapidly-growing $10B/year market for server cpus.
>

Sure, probably you can. But what you are seeming to say is there is a large amount of gross profit in the ARM markets that can be invested to rival Intel design and manufacturing. That may be so, but then you assert that Intel cannot take any of that market share, which is just wrong.

If x86 does not work out, they could design their own ARM cores, they could fab cortex cores like Samsung, they could fab Apple's, etc. There are plenty of ways they could get a slice of the market without x86.