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No it was a both a huge mistake and a symptom of underlying problems. Making smartphone SoCs is a huge profitable market that would have given Intel massive vol
by klelatti 2y ago
No it was a both a huge mistake and a symptom of underlying problems. Making smartphone SoCs is a huge profitable market that would have given Intel massive volumes to support R&D etc and slowed TSMC. The fact that they couldn’t manage it with every apparent advantage is very telling.
- talldayo 2y agoFeels like you're rewriting history, to me. Smartphone SoCs are not hugely profitable, and a big point of the past 10 years were Chinese manufacturers entirely ignoring ARM IP to increase profits. The only people that make money off ARM hardware are the export-officiated manufacturers that don't pay per-unit licenses; which is exclusively Apple. Nobody else has a more permissive ARM architecture license, not even Nvidia. Intel at the time was fabless, would have needed to license or design a RISC architecture, and would have ended up just as squeezed as any other part of Apple's supply chain. And if Intel made a serious profit, Apple would have replaced them anyways. It's an all-risk-no-reward scenario.
- soulbadguy 2y ago> Making smartphone SoCs is a huge profitable market that would have given Intel massive volumes to support R&D etc and slowed TSMC. Not quite, and that's the core of the "innovator" dilemma. The reason why intel passed on making SOC, is the same why nvidia decided to pass on getting into xboxss and playstations. Those market have much lower margin than server side business. AMD, and TSMC can operate in those space because they are much more efficient companies, intel is not. Intel got addicted to fat server CPU margin, grew inefficient...