They should start producing ARM chips. They could finally get a piece of the smartphone market, which would not cannibalize their x86 sales (which I assume is the reason why they have refused to use ARM since the sale of xScale).
> The StrongARM is a family of computer microprocessors developed by Digital Equipment Corporation and manufactured in the late 1990s which implemented the ARM v4 instruction set architecture. It was later acquired by Intel in 1997 from DEC's own Digital Semiconductor division as part of a settlement of a lawsuit between the two companies over patent infringement. Intel then continued to manufacture it before replacing it with the StrongARM-derived ARM-based follow-up architecture called XScale in the early 2000s.
However, after developing and manufacturing these for nine years, Intel exited this business by selling their ARM unit to Marvell. Intel was developing its own “low power” x86 chip, the Atom, and decided to put all its mobile eggs in that basket, which unfortunately was never as low power as comparable ARM designs. I suspect Intel also saw that the number of licensees in the ARM market was growing and competition along with it, their value-add wasn’t that great, and their margins were necessarily smaller due to the ARM licensing fees.
Intel can't compete in that market. The margins are too low: they're organized and staffed to a higher margin business. They're used to the high operating margins of x86. Now that their competition (mainly AMD) has become competent in the past ten years and x86 is decreasing in importance, they're losing their main competitive advantage.
If you mean ARM… then they’d be helping the competition
If they can’t build decent x86 chips when they only have a single competitor switching to an inferior architecture (in the sense that it would require massive investment for it to catch up with x86) with no entry barriers for new competitors would be one of the most absurd things they could ever do.
There is a reason Intel Foundries is belching red ink while the rest of Intel is getting Gelsinger'ed to stave it.
Intel has a massive fab capacity problem right now, in that their fabs aren't being utilized. Doing manufacturing of a high-volume product is exactly what they need, and if that high volume product is their own - all the better.
[1]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/retard
[2]: https://www.techpowerup.com/323700/tsmc-begins-3-nm-producti...
Does Intel have a competitive microarchitecture in Pc chips at the moment? Arguably, no, they stay afloat with brand recognition and OEM deals.
Because?
Their last gen laptop chips seem to be pretty competitive both with AMD and Qualcomm. They moved some of the manufacturing to TSMC though…
Intel seems to be pretty decent at designing chips but not very good at making them these days.
It’s also symbolic - Intel’s goal is to outcompete ARM (and AMD, Nvidia) in personal computers and the datacenter market. Divesting from ARM Holding sends a signal there is no upside for Intel coming from ARM’s progression up the processor chain.
Yeah, they had the chance to dominate the ARM market with XScale but that ship has long sailed.
Also how is having a small, insignificant stake in ARM itself related to this anyway?
But did you know there are many new core designs every year, and that very few of them are from ARM?
Second, it's very likely that your smartphone won't be ARM starting in the next few years. You'll notice when your battery suddenly lasts longer.
What will be replacing ARM in smartphones in the next few years?
If you’re going to say RISC-V, what leads you to believe that huge performance and power leaps will take place from what RISC-V is today?
Do they though? Anything to back this up?
They seem to last 10-20% than Meteor Lake chips with somewhat better CPU performance and worse GPU.
Really? It took years for Qualcomm to become competitive with ARM’s cores again. Besides them and Apple what else is there? (Ampere I guess, but they are still insignificant and in an entirely different segment)