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There is no war to be had until Intel seriously considers operating on much lower margins. Their problem is not just idle power & heat dissipation, their real p
by sami36 14y ago
There is no war to be had until Intel seriously considers operating on much lower margins. Their problem is not just idle power & heat dissipation, their real problem is cost/ unit. Whatever Intel does going forward, their fat days are over.
- ricw 14y agoIndeed. Their business model needs changing. It's not just price, it's also the fact that they don't offer as many flavours of SoC, aka with different basebands or integrated encoders, to even compete closely with the ARM ecosystem. Technically they may now be able to compete, from a business perspective: not!
- EwanToo 14y agoExactly, I think you're 100% right. The real "war" is a price one. If Intel are willing to cannibalise their own per-CPU margins, they'll sell bucket loads of mobile chips. If they're not, then they won't - it's not much harder than that to understand. I can see why they wouldn't be willing, once you get a relatively high performance Atom chip then the use case for a highly profitable Xeon chip becomes much narrower.
- yk 14y agoIntel is producing Atoms on an ancient process, while they are one generation ahead of every body else in cutting edge process. So this is Intel getting its feet wet, not Intel trying to compete. And atop of this, I am pretty sure there is a market for really high powered smart phones above the current price range. [Edit: reformulated last sentence]
- WatchDog 14y agoI'm curious as to what will be the applications that drive the need for more phone performance. I am pretty happy with the performance of my S3, if it were four times faster, I don't see how it is going to noticeably improve my user experience.
- yk 14y agoActual desktop replacement. Think about a phone with similar specs as a three year old desktop. You can then carry your desktop around, do actual work wherever you find a reasonable screen and keyboard and you do no longer need to sync several devices. Apart from this, any real augmented reality application can easily burn any excess computing power you may carry.
- mitchty 14y agoMy only worry about having my phone be my entire computing infrastructure is it getting stolen. Not sure I'm up for that future possibility just yet.
- tjoff 14y agoFull disc encryption and, obviously, a serious backup solution should take care of most issues. Also, using it more as a thin client would also minimize the risk.
- mitchty 14y agoI think I'd still want them to be more akin to Sun's original vision of network appliances. The phone acting more as a session token to an external system and a thin client. Just noting the size and always present aspect makes security a different problem.
- wmf 14y agoAnd yet Atom is on 32 nm while Tegra 3 is on 40 nm. And Intel announced plans to catch up Atom to the latest process.