Orange San Diego: Intel brings the x86 vs. ARM smartphone war to Europe

extremetech.com

20 points·ukdm··9 comments

The problem with Intel is the lack of ability to customize the SoC. Intel has run NVidia out of the chipset market and has incentives to do the same in the mobile market.

You can't customize the SoCs from nVidia/Samsung/TI/Qualcomm either.

but NVidia, Samsung, TI, Qualcomm, and Apple can build custom ARM SoC.

And thousands of other companies too, right down to little-old 90 person Ember where I work.

there's not really a war at all, is there?

ARM are completely dominant in this market.

ARM are completely dominant .. currently. If Intel does manage to execute on their roadmap, then I wouldn't be so sure.

Intel is getting pretty close. in a benchmark of a medfield phone, battery capacity for web browsing was just 20% lower than the best android phone benchmarked[1].

And medfield still uses 32nm process,not the latest finfet 22nm process intel is so proud of.

And the orange san-diego is also priced reasonably at $300.

So this looks like a fair fight.

[1]http://hexus.net/mobile/news/android/38501-intel-based-smart...

The real question is "How little are Intel willing to sell the CPU in this phone for?".

A fairly up to date Cortex-A8 ARM CPU can be had for under $5 [1] and as impressive as Intel's manufacturing base is, their profits are based on selling CPUs at 50-100x higher prices than this.

Whatever happens, I think the coming battle between generic ARM chips and x86 is going to slash Intel's profitability.

[1] - http://www.ti.com/lsds/ti/dsp/arm.page?DCMP=TIHeaderTracking...

Don't underestimate the value of Intel's manufacturing dominance.

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