anon (anon.delete@this.anon.com) on February 1, 2013 5:56 am wrote:
> They have been trying with x86, not ARM yet.

Which indicates that they don't have sufficient advantage from their
non-cpu design expertise, plus their manufacturing, to make a dent
in the market. Why would substituting ARM for x86 fix that ?

> You seem to be saying that other companies could make good profits, but Intel >inherently cannot.

I think it's a big challenge to make good profits in the phone/tablet SoC
market against the current, very competent, winners. Even for Intel.
And apart from manufacturing, I don't think Intel's expertise is particularly
well matched to that market. They haven't done much with SoC's; they haven't
done much with handheld devices; they're not great at GPUs; they seem to
operate on long-term product cycles which may not match the fast-moving
mobile market (the same problem they had with GPUs).
>
> >
> > > If x86 does not work out, they could design their own ARM cores, they could fab cortex cores like Samsung,
> >
> > There's more to a good phone/tablet SoC than the ARM cores.
>
> Yep, and Intel seems to be more than capable of producing such devices on a technical level today.

I think they've demonstrated the ability to make something functional.
They haven't demonstrated the ability to make something clearly superior.
And "clearly superior", on some dimension, is what you need to grab
market share from strong incumbents.

> Neither is *anything* in these ARM markets, for *any* player,
> a way to get the kind of huge profits that x86 generates.

Correction: that x86 used to generate. Last quarter Qualcomm alone made
$1.9B profit; Intel made $2.5B. Not a big gap. And Intel's desktop/laptop
business shrank a lot YoY (a gap which was partly made up by strong growth
on the server side).

> However it's growing of course, and every bit they take can add to their bottom line,
> and take away from TSMC, or Samsung, or nvidia, etc. So the assertion that the ARM ecosystem
> will grow to threaten Intel with no recourse for Intel to take is just flawed.

Well, I started out on this thread with the suggestion that *either* ARM-based
products would take server share, *or* Intel would have to cut server-product
margins to fight them off. And either way would be a big change in the
server business (and good for consumers). So I've accepted all along that Intel
has "recourse to take" - it's just that the form of that "recourse" is a major
restructuring into a business with lower margins in a more competitive market.