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Intel's Changing Future: Smartphone SoCs Broxton and SoFIA Officially Cancelled
- Everlag 10y agoGiven that they address it in their statement, I'm interested to see how their FPGA offerings develop in the next few years. FPGAs have a brutal learning curve but sit in a yet unscaled power efficiency niche. Could we see FPGA VPS in the future if Intel's backing them? Then again, that mention is probably just to respond to concerns regarding layoffs ~immediately after the Altera purchase.
- petra 10y agoXilinx and IBM are doing an FPGA cloud: http://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/xilinx-and-ibm-put-big-data-fpga-design-in-the-cloud-2016-04/ http://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/xilinx-and-ibm-put-big...
- vvanders 10y agoUsually I don't associate FPGAs and power efficiency. I know about lattice's offerings or is there something I'm missing?
- wtallis 10y agoIt sounds like you're thinking of power consumption in some absolute sense (ie. FPGAs suitable for mobile/battery-powered use) rather than power efficiency. For the right workload, FPGAs can be much more efficient than general-purpose CPUs. But FPGAs aren't the only thing occupying the middle ground between general-purpose CPUs and ASICs; DSPs and GPUs also compete in that space.
- akiselev 10y agoRelative to custom silicon, yes, FPGAs are way more power hungry. However, there are many things you can do much more power efficiently in an FPGA than on CPU or GPGPU like video decoding/encoding, crypto, digital signal processing, and many other real time critical systems. FPGA sits in a price/performance niche that has high unit costs and power requirements but little upfront investment compared to custom silicon and a little more than general computing but with the benefit of throughput/latency
- kps 10y agoWhere do FPGAs sit for running neural networks? Or, does it make sense to manufacture Field Programmable Node Arrays rather than Field Porgrammable Gate Arrays?
- akiselev 10y agoI think that GPUs are already basically field programmable node arrays. Maybe for certain instances FPGAs would be better but the neural network would have to be designed at the logic gate level so it'd be significantly more costly in engineering time than a algorithm running on the GPU or CPU. FPGAs are for relatively simple logic running at incredibly high throughput with very low latencies. It's extremely common to move more complicated logic to a "soft" CPU on the FPGA that runs C code compiled to ARM/SPARC/POWER etc. and controls the low level hardware.
- striking 10y agoGPUs are getting closer to being math- and draw-optimized FPGAs. I don't think they'll be separate products too far in the future.
- CamperBob2 10y agoAt the desktop/server level, I agree, which is why I don't get the whole Intel/Altera synergy thing. But in more specific embedded cases -- meaning the vast majority of FPGA applications -- they are nothing alike. If I need to run a multichannel digital downconverter on a power budget of 1 watt, no GPU available in the foreseeable future is going to handle that role as well as an FPGA will. Perhaps someday a hypothetical I/O-optimized GPU will be able to do the jobs that are currently done on FPGAs and ASICs, but definitely not now.
- PhantomGremlin 10y agoI don't get the whole Intel/Altera synergy thing Let's recall a previous acquisition, one that I totally didn't understand. An analyst had a really good quip about it: JPMorgan analyst Christopher Danely upgraded Intel to overweight following the company's earnings, although he still struggles to reconcile Intel's recent acquisition spree. "Intel might as well have bought Whole Foods," he said of the McAfee deal.[1] Compared to McAfee, acquiring Altera was brilliant. As a public company Intel is always facing scrutiny from Wall Street. They need to constantly increase both revenue and earnings. What better way than via a strategic acquisition? Instant growth. And Altera was a logical target. Altera sells high-margin silicon. Intel sells high-margin silicon. Intel was even fabbing some of Altera's parts, so they were quite familiar with the company. And maybe some smart people could eventually think of some synergy. E.g. once upon a time Intel made the IXP1200, a "network processor". What if, instead of designing custom silicon for something like that, perhaps a CPU + FPGA on a single die would be sufficient? Makes much more sense than Intel acquiring McAfee. [1] http://www.reuters.com/article/us-dealtalk-intel-idUSTRE73K7ZZ20110421 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-dealtalk-intel-idUSTRE73K7...
- educar 10y agoSimilar discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11599468 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11599468
- dbcooper 10y agoThe Anandtech article linked here is better.
- StillBored 10y agoAs I mentioned elsewhere I have a baytrail tablet, and that thing is amazing. But this is the usual corp thinking that got Intel into the trouble they are now in. Ceding the market because they can't currently make billions from it pretty much guarantees they won't ever make any money from it (see POWER giving up the desktop too). Meanwhile as ARM struggles building servers they will have all the time in the world to figure it out, as they now have an uncontested market to fund that work. I don't understand why intel haven't learned the history lessons from all the other processor manufactures. As soon as you stop competing in low end markets the low end guys build better and better products until they build a higher end product that makes them the top dog. I guess its because Andy Gove isn't around to kick them in the pants.
- manc_lad 10y agoI just finished reading Andy Goves book "high output management" it was really quite good. It's also Zucks favourite business book as well apparently.
- ris 10y ago"Ceding the market because they can't currently make billions from it pretty much guarantees they won't ever make any money from it" Are you kidding? Intel has spent the last decade and billions of dollars trying to push their x86 designs places they really don't belong. It's amazing they didn't give up years ago.
- kogepathic 10y ago> As I mentioned elsewhere I have a baytrail tablet, and that thing is amazing. Really? How? I bought a Dell Venue 8 Pro, and the only advantage I can see that it has over any ARM part is the ability for me to play x86 Steam games from 10 years ago on it. The sleep power consumption sucks. While I can leave an ARM-based Android tablet with the screen off for a week, and it will still have enough charge to be useful, my Venue 8 Pro is dead after about 24 hours in sleep mode. Linux is still broken on Bay Trail-T. None of the wireless drivers are in mainline, and modesetting doesn't work, so enjoy using only frame buffer graphics. This is ~2 years after Intel launched the platform! I haven't found any manufacturer making a Bay Trail-T tablet with dual band WiFi, while loads of ARM based tablets are including it. I've been looking into Cherry Trail, since the X5-Z8500 has a pretty decent GPU, but user forums all over the internet are talking about how it goes into thermal throttling because the fanless cooling solution that Intel has touted to OEMs doesn't work when the chip is under heavy load for extended periods of time. Again, compare to pretty much any ARM based tablet (not Snapdragon 810 based) and you won't have thermal throttling issues crippling your performance. So, yes, Intel's tablet chips are alright for running x86 apps. I can definitely run Office on my Venue, but then I need a mouse and keyboard to do any real work, so why wouldn't I just buy a laptop which has longer battery life, more RAM, and a CPU which doesn't cripple itself under load?
- watersb 10y agoOh man, the Austin TX design group...
- williadc 10y agoSofia was primarily done by the formerly-Infineon team in Germany, though the Austin team was merged with that group. Broxton was designed in Oregon and Malaysia.
- osivertsson 10y agoGeographically seperated teams, is that normal when developing successful smartphone SoCs? Or does it in general work as good as developing software at multiple sites? I remember working with ST's IPTV chips that were designed all over Europe, and bugs that involved the interaction between muliple hardware blocks were a disaster to get support on.
- williadc 10y agoI've never worked on a successful smartphone SoC, so I couldn't tell you. I have worked on successful client parts (Haswell, Broadwell, Apollo Lake) that were similarly separate and we were able to divide the work sufficiently to make the multi-geo effort work.
- shrewduser 10y agoa shame, i own a zenfone 2 and it's a great device. i was looking for more from intel.
- nowprovision 10y agoMe too, had this device for 12 months now, and it just flys, always put it down to the intel cpu given how I only paid ~160usd for the device. New samsung devices at higher price points, j5, j7 are slow dogs in comparison. so does this mean a dead end for x86 android? Ill stick with Asus thougj given the frequency of firmware updates, and all round solid hardware.
- mtgx 10y agoIntel subsidized that chip. It was more like seeing Snapdragon 805 or whatever was the high-end ARM chip at the time, on a $200 device, when everyone else could only afford to put a Snapdragon 400 in such a device. It's anti-competitive (selling chips below cost - imagine if say the meat industry used its profits to sell milk under cost - it would take out the "pure" milk companies), and very costly to Intel. It was losing a $1 billion a quarter back then doing stuff like that. It's not going to do it anymore. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-16/intel-s-4-21-billion-mobile-loss-would-have-sunk-most-rivals http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-16/intel-s-4-...
- nowprovision 10y agoI thought that may of been the case, that could explain why the same phone is 50% higher in price now than 12 months ago, at least in BKK. I wont lose sleep over Intel selling chips below cost.. On the mention of diary.. milk these offers when they come along..
- kyriakos 10y agoGood phone for the price. Makes me wonder if the soc was subsidised though.
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- ksec 10y agoBut What will happen to Intel's modem business? I would love to see some competition to Qualcomm. Broadcom have disbanded their 4G Modem and WiFi business as well, leaving the market with very little choices.
- williadc 10y agoIn the article it mentions Intel is investing in 5G wireless, so the modem team will have plenty of work.
- jaxondu 10y agoIt's rumor that Apple is using Intel modem chip for iPhone 7.
- TimPrice 10y agoThey are focusing on 5G > 5G will become the key technology for access to the cloud and as we move toward an always-connected world. https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/brian-krzanich-our-strategy-and-the-future-of-intel/ https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/brian-krzanich-our-str...
- hyperpallium 10y agoLinked statement https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/brian-krzanich-our-strategy-and-the-future-of-intel https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/brian-krzanich-our-str... tl;dr Moore's law remains important, not because of speed or power improvements, but cost improvements. The cloud [servers] will grow; the internet of things [clients] will grow. So we'll do that. He doesn't say this, but the smartphone soirée is over. Imagination laying off workers, iPhone sales down, samsung galaxy s7 sales down. Flagship smartphones are obviously way more powerful than needed for common usages. A $40 smartphone is now so good, it's good enough. What's the point in intel chasing a ship that has not only sailed, but sunk?
- SixSigma 10y ago> The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. not speed, not power
- wycx 10y agoWill Intel spin out the fab side of the business? The large volume segments of the processor market seems headed towards nothing but low margins.
- StillBored 10y agoBecause people will still be buying phones/tablets in 10 years. And no, they aren't yet good enough. Just browsing the web can often be quite painful as they struggle with javascript. Plus, there are a ton of devices with embedded mobile phone tech (tv's, etc) that have been dragged into the ARM camp. The 4.1 billion ARM devices sold last quarter should scare the pants of Intel. The very hungry ARM partners that drool over the fat margins Intel is making will steam roller them in the server space if they don't figure out how to compete.
- ansible 10y agoJust browsing the web can often be quite painful as they struggle with javascript. You mean... browsing the web can be quite painful with a crap-ton of advertisements. Lots and lots of Javascript, auto-play video advertisements... ugh.
- ChuckMcM 10y agoWow, and ouch. I give them credit for ceding the ground for now but this is another sign of how much ARM has been encroaching on Intel's space. Scott McNealy said early on that retreating to the Data Center was where companies went to die. And at the time was selling workstations on desks and crushing DEC, then when that business got eaten away by Windows the data center was where Sun was going to make its stand. And then it died. I think a lot about what the fundamental principle is here. How do seemingly invincible forces in the market get killed by smaller foes? Christensen's Dilemma doesn't really explain it, it describes it, but it doesn't tease out the first principles behind it. At this point I think it is a sort of Enterprise "blindness" which was something Steve Kleiman at NetApp shared with me. A company can be so good at something that they focus all their energy on it, even when it is vanishing beneath them. Consider a fictional buggy whip company when automobiles came on the scene, right up until the last day they made buggy whips they could be the best whip you could buy, all the secrets to making a great buggy whip where mastered by this company, all the "special sauce" that made them last longer, work in a wide range of conditions, and yet the reality was that the entire reason for buggy whips existing was evaporating with the loss of carriages. By focusing on what the company was the undisputed leader in doing, they ride the wave right into the rocks. When the company is so stuck on what used to work for them, even after the technology has moved on, they become blind to the dangers. Challenging to watch, even harder if you feel like you can see the train wreck coming. And of course soul crushing if nobody driving the bus will listen to the warnings. The next sign I'm waiting for is Apple to ship a Macbook laptop with their own 64 bit ARM processor in it. Then it gets really really interesting if AMD can pull off an ARM server chip, going where Intel won't.
- PhantomGremlin 10y agoHow do seemingly invincible forces in the market get killed by smaller foes? Back around 2009 I had a little visibility into Intel's mobile efforts. My information is way out of date, but unless Intel management changed drastically, my hunch is that this explanation is still valid. At the time Intel had already introduced some mobile silicon, but there was little uptake. So they were iterating; they wanted to improve for each succeeding generation. But they had a kind of design-by-committee process. One person or group wanted a certain feature, another group wanted something else, a third group though that yet another thing was important. And so on. Sorry if that sounds vague, I won't write anything more specific. The end result was a chipset that had a lot of features. A LOT OF FEATURES. Gold plated features. But that meant higher power consumption than the competition, higher cost, larger form factor, longer time to market. At the time, there was nobody like a Steve Jobs running Intel mobile. Nobody had the intuition and the gravitas to say: "we want A, B, C, but not D, E, F. Quit wasting time and build the fucking thing! I need something that's competitive!" This is similar to something that an Intel chip design manager told me about 30 years ago. His view was that there were really only two ways to motivate engineers: 1) show them a path to lots and lots of money. This is the path that startups take. Focus, build something quickly, get rich or die trying. or 2) engineers will "play in the sand", they will add in all sorts of neat features that they think are really cool, that they want to implement, that they are convinced are important. But all that crap isn't very useful to the average user, it just results in complex designs that miss their market window in so many ways. Intel probably continued to choose path 2 for their mobile efforts. Intel didn't fail because of any variation on The Innovator's Dilemma. They understood that mobile was the future, that it was very important. They expended tremendous amounts of capital trying to "win" in mobile. They just didn't have the organizational structure that let them execute.
- raverbashing 10y agoI wonder how much of Intel's pain in mobile is due to the pains of the x86 platform, especially all the overengineered and legacy stuff around it (BIOS, ACPI, chipset and bus logic, etc) ARM has some equivalent components (bootloader, power mgm) but they're much, much simpler.
- fallous 10y agoIntel has a long and unfortunate history with promising initiatives into new markets outside their core, and then promptly cutting and running when there's obstacles to those efforts... and I say that as a former (long ago, circa 2000) Intel employee. Intel saw the explosion of graphics chipsets and decided to try its hand with the i740. After initial teething pains, they designed the i752 and i754 to address these concerns but renewed competition from AMD started to cut their x86 margins and rather than continue on the broader product path, they ejected the graphics business and ran back to Mama x86. In 1999 and 2000, Intel made several substantial acquisitions in the networking space regarding routers, load balancers, etc. They aggressively tried to move into these markets (I know, I was a sales engineer for that line at the time) but between AMD's Sledgehammer and the dotbomb they promptly fled those markets as well in order to run back to x86. I can't argue that those were poor business decisions, but I can say that anyone depending on hardware initiatives from Intel that aren't directly x86-related are skating on some mighty thin ice.
- m_mueller 10y agoWhat does this mean for Microsoft's idea for a unified Windows 10 platform? Will they have to bury their x86 Windows 10 Smartphone plans as well?
- stesch 10y agoAnd what about the HoloLens?
- m_mueller 10y agoAccording to [1] the HoloLens chip continues to be supported. [1] http://www.pcworld.com/article/3063672/windows/the-death-of-intels-atom-casts-a-dark-shadow-over-the-rumored-surface-phone.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/3063672/windows/the-death-of-...
- stesch 10y agoAll I can see is "Microsoft uses a Cherry Trail chip inside of the HoloLens, but it's unclear whether or not that will be affected."
- m_mueller 10y agoSorry, I read > "The company said it will continue to support tablets with a 3G derivative of the SoFIA chip, the older Bay Trail and Cherry Trail, as well as some upcoming Core chips." that it will be supported, but reading this source again this indeed doesn't make it clear whether that's actually the chip used in HoloLens. I'm sure they will find a solution, but it will be a shame if HoloLens gets much worse battery life because of this...
- hga 10y agoThat appears to be the case, see e.g. http://www.pcworld.com/article/3063672/windows/the-death-of-intels-atom-casts-a-dark-shadow-over-the-rumored-surface-phone.html http://www.pcworld.com/article/3063672/windows/the-death-of-...
- beagle3 10y agoIntel has been selling mobile chipsets at loss for the last few years, because no one would touch them at break even price (and don't even think of profit. And still hardly anyone touched them..) So they basically cut the subsidy (which is understandable) and didn't wait for their market segment to die as it surely would - they just killed it immediately.
- mariusmg 10y agoDoesn't that means that CoreM is finally ready to replace Atom ? Why all the gloom ?
- ekr 10y agoCore M is in a different price bracket, it certainly can't compete price-wise with cheap ARM counterparts.
- int0x80 10y agoI really think they are going to come up with something to get into the mobile/embedded market. It is a very important market. With their experience, fabrication process and tech they can totally rip the competence.
- gcc_programmer 10y agoThis is an empty statement. Let me nit pick it for you: > With their experience In mobile/tablets? Did you read the article - there have only been a handful of intel devices (and less cores) out there that intel has had a part in. Virtually every mobile phone and tablet out there has been ARM (including Nokia from the past). > fabrication process You don't need to own a fabrication process to be competitive in mobile, since in that market cost and power efficiency matter more than performance, so OEMs will stick with a process that is good enough for now and then they'll al move to a newer one. This is not what the market competes on. > tech Yes, their tech is very performant. Yes, if I want to crunch numbers I will buy an Intel chip. But if my mobile phone has a Xeon, it will run out of batery in 30 minutes. Even Atom chips are an order of magnitude less power efficient than cores of other companies in mobile. So, no, they can't 'rip the competition' in mobile easily.
- blibble 10y ago> there have only been a handful of intel devices (and less cores) out there that intel has had a part in. and I think nearly every one of these Intel has had to pay the manufacturer to use Atom over ARM
- int0x80 10y agoI know it's a generic statement. My point is that Intel, the most important chip vendor in the world, knows very well how to make ICs. If they know how to make the best desktop and server CPUs, it's only a matter of will and time to translate that knowledge and expertise to the mobile market. They also have more and better resources (money and engineers).
- nimish 10y agoInteresting that this brings up aicha evens who recently left Intel after heading up their mobile comm chip division
- based2 10y agohttp://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/14/intel_takes_aim_at_arduino_with_us15_breadboard/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/14/intel_takes_aim_at_a... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/21/xpoint_is_intels_exit_from_nand_production_hell/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/21/xpoint_is_intels_exi...
- mentos 10y agoIs the future of computing in q-bits?
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoOh dear, is this the death of the Windows tablet already? Microsoft had to make a stripped-down ARM-only version of Windows, Windows RT, because Intel's CPUs just weren't there. Then they abandoned that in favour of full x86 Windows once Intel's CPUs got there. But now Intel is gone. This means Windows will now only be on larger, more laptop-like devices, I would assume? No more 7" tablets.
- rchowe 10y agoIt probably just means more i3/i5-based tablets, which will probably end up being a good thing anyway, since the push to optimize for weak processors that there was on the iOS/Android side wasn't really there on the Windows side, since a lot of testing happened on developer workstations.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y agoPossibly, or even m3/m5-based tablets. I have an Atom-based Windows 10 tablet and it seriously struggles with browsing some websites without an ad blocker installed. It can use Twitter.com or play Solitaire fine, though.
- wslh 10y agoWhy doesn't Intel just buy ARM?