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Comment by dkrich | Hacker News Reader

I’m not so sure that not choosing to produce ARM based chips for the iPhone was such an obvious miss for Intel. Why would they want their business subject to the whims of a single company over which they exert zero control?

Just as an example, a couple of months ago Apple seemingly out of the blue, announced they would no longer be using Intel chips in future laptop models and the markets barely noticed. Were they more reliant on PC sales that would not have been the case.

Perhaps they are way behind AMD with respect to the latest chip designs, but even that is far from proven.

I think this article is attempting to make a company with a very complex history and product lineup sound simple.

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- 260 509 000 products with ARM (iphone + ipad)

- 19 251 000 products with Intel (macs)

These are the numbers for 2017 from http://investor.apple.com/secfiling.cfm?filingid=320193-17-7...

Apple sells twice as many ipads as they sell macs. And more than 10x as many iphones as macs.

Revenue wise it's a little bit closer.

- 160 541 000 000 $ for iphones + ipads

- 25 850 000 000 $ for macs

I think you’re missing the point. It’s not about the decision to do ARM mobile chips instead of PC chips, it’s about the decision to go for data center dominance instead of consumer electronics dominance.

They had a mobile-dominance strategy -- it was Atom. They even partnered with Google/Android. (Maybe you're saying the execution was lacking?)

The article points to (if only by implication) x86 not being a great design for low power processing.

Intel makes ten to hundreds of dollars for each x86 processor they sell. They would make pennies to dollars manufacturing chips for other companies. If Intel made their own mobile chips they would have to similarly dramatically reduce their enormous margins.

In any discussion about Intel this is the point that really reigns supreme -- Intel was in the enviable state where their primary concern was always putting their own profits at risk. In the long term of course they should to move to new, growing markets (e.g. mobile), but from a closer term perspective they knew that such products, if not seriously crippled, would start chipping into their higher-end processors.

Hence why their mobile processor offerings were built on laughably dated processes, using very obsolete designs. If Intel made them better they knew that someone would figure out a way to drop 32 of them on a motherboard with a shared memory controller, etc.

> Hence why their mobile processor offerings were built on laughably dated processes, using very obsolete designs. If Intel made them better they knew that someone would figure out a way to drop 32 of them on a motherboard with a shared memory controller, etc.

Interesting... Would you care to share a reference for this? Thanks.

> Hence why their mobile processor offerings were built on laughably dated processes, using very obsolete designs.

I thought the various Airmont-based chips were made on the same 14nm process as everything else they made at the time?

Airmont came after Intel gave up on mobile, and they targeted the premium market (e.g. Microsoft Surface), thinking they could eek out a niche there with their compromised solutions.

Oh, right. Apparently they still made phone SoCs with it, but the vast majority of the push was earlier.

Well, according to the Innovator's Dilemma, if you're Intel now you throw 1-2 of those billions of dollars of yours into a totally separate startup that you fully own.

That startup is free to make ARM chips or whatever the markets wants. It's better long term if you cannibalize yourself than if other companies do it.

If you do that, as a public company, don't investors come along and say "hey, you really need to spin that off"? I mean, I see there are quite a few companies that just seem to have a grab-bag of random stuff they make, as though they were a mutual fund of different tangentially related businesses. And it certainly occurs that people decide they are more valuable broken up.

From the larger perspective of society in general, why should a company be eternal; why does it need to always have a way to pivot?

>a couple of months ago Apple seemingly out of the blue, announced they would no longer be using Intel chips in future laptop models

Clarification: this was a (likely true) rumor, not an official Apple announcement.

Even if those apple arm chips were low profit, two reasons:

1 - volume over which to amortize process investments;

2 - a chance to be the dominant vendor in a new, albeit lower-profit, market.

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