How's that big mobile push going, Intel? Oh a million dollars. In 3 months? Wow (sarcasm) Intel is desperate to reduce its reliance on PCs and servers and break into the markets for mobility, wearables, and the Internet of Things. But its latest earnings report shows it's still struggling to make progress in those areas. How struggling? Sales for the company's Mobile and Communications group, which makes smartphone …
Spin back almost 10 years, and Intel was probably the leading global ARM chip supplier, through the torrid history of Compaq and DEC and a lawsuit which ended up with Intel owning and flogging StongARM and XScale ARM chips - found in Compaq iPaq,s Dell AXIM;s, Sharp Zaurus, assorted Palm's, early Kindle's etc...
About a year before the iPhone came out, they flogged the ARM unit to Marvell for next to nothing (around $600m) to push laptop Atom down to mobile, and that has pretty much went largely no-where into mobile (I think there is a Motorola, Huawei and Vodafone handset running), with a small foothold in tablets (Samsung Tab 3, Tesco Hudl 2) - due to power consumption until relatively recently - though ARM have moved towards them with Big.Little on performance.
Somewhere between d'oh, and Schadenfreude.
Mobile and Communications posted an operating loss of $1.04bn in the third quarter
And the company as a whole still managed better results than a year ago! At this rate Intel can easily afford to spunk 1 bn a quarter subsidising this but it might worry whether the kind of competition, and the associated lower prices, are a taste of things to come in the data centre, if/when a 64-bit ARM ecosystem becomes available.
At least they don't suffer from a delusional strategy that steadfastly refuses to face facts like several other big tech players. If nothing else, they understand where they need to go and while their execution is lacklustre they have deep enough pockets to buy them time.
Besides, now that AMD hit the rocks they are practically on their own so they can focus on breaking into where they need.
As an aside, as power and brawn requirements evolve the headway that ARM designs have on Intel is diminishing.
"as power and brawn requirements evolve the headway that ARM designs have on Intel is diminishing"
There's another way of looking at the current market.
As Windows becomes increasingly irrelevant, so will x86.
Obviously already true in the embedded market - who owns an x86 Smart TV, or an x86 router, or ...
Started to be true in the netbook market first time round, till Wintel realised what was at risk and applied a little bit of 'pressure'.
Netbook has transmogrified into tablet. How well are Intel doing in the tablet market?
As power and brawn capabilities evolve, the headroom that x86 designs have on ARM is diminishing.
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