Doug S (foo.delete@this.bar.bar) on September 23, 2013 5:22 pm wrote:
> Michael S (already5chosen.delete@this.yahoo.com) on September 23, 2013 4:27 pm wrote:
> > Intel views itself not as x86 shop foremost and not as the best fab on earth foremost.
> > Intel views itself as a company that gets the fattest margin on every mm^2 of the silicon they make.
> > Fabbing in-house-designed high-performance x86 CPUs just happens
> > to be the best way, known to Intel, to get the margin they like.
> > Fabbing Applle-design SoCs is not a good way to get here.
>
>
> Doesn't that depend on the price they charge? The A7 is 102 sq mm. Look at the Intel G3220,
> which is 177 sq mm and Intel sells it for $64. That implies a price of about $36 for 102
> sq mm. Given that the A7 is made in 28nm, it would be smaller in Intel's 22nm process, so
> maybe in the ballpark of $25-$30/ea. I can't find any estimates for the production cost
> of the A7, but the A6 (at a similar 96 sq mm) was estimated to cost Apple $17.50.
>
> Would Apple be willing to pay an extra $10 or so per SoC to get access to Intel's
> 22nm process, which would presumably offer better performance, lower power usage,
> or both, compared to the 28nm HKMG Samsung process? I think they might.
>
> Intel is going to have to do something to fill its fabs when they convert to
> 450mm wafers. They sure as hell can't rely on an ever-expanding PC market
> anymore, and so far their efforts in mobile haven't met with much success.

Here's some uninformed speculation for you: Intel's biggest design advantage over their ARM competition is their skill in memory controllers. Iris Pro 5200 shows that one trick Intel can pull off is eDRAM designed for high performance; if Intel can sustain that performance, but offer low power consumption, you get the following speculation:

Intel will offer a future phone/tablet chip with eDRAM on package replacing external memory completely (2 GiB, 4 GiB, 16 GiB, whatever is appropriate to the market at the time). This chip will be expensive for the performance level it provides, but will always win power consumption measurements (and thus battery life benchmarks), by a large margin for applications that make heavy use of GPU and CPU, and a small margin for applications whose power consumption is dominated by other system components such as the screen.

By being lower power consumption while having comparable performance to competing chips, it gives Intel-based phones and tablets a power consumption advantage. This, in turn, gets Intel design wins in high-end Android devices, as they can either design a nicer case with a smaller battery, or use the same battery size as a competing design, but with a longer battery life.

All speculation, and it turns on Intel being able to offer low power, high performance eDRAM to make the sale.