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Comment by lotsofpulp | Hacker News Reader

Mobile phones were picking up a lot of steam by the mid 2000s, and it doesn’t seem like Intel bothered to even investigate developing more power efficient chips.

Seems like the leaders just lost the stomach for taking risks, a long time ago. No forays into mobile or GPUs, at least not in the billions of dollar and many years scale that was needed. No stomach to pay the competitive salaries necessary to compete with Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, Netflix, etc for talent.

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They did as recently as 2016 and then gave up on it: "Intel could be on the verge of exiting the market for smartphones and standalone tablets, wasting billions of dollars it spent trying to expand in those markets. The company is immediately canceling Atom chips, code-named Sofia and Broxton, for mobile devices, an Intel spokeswoman confirmed." (https://www.pcworld.com/article/414673/intel-is-on-the-verge...)

Yeah, Otellini famously turned down Steve Jobs' request to make the chip for the first iPhone, thinking the market wouldn't be big enough. When he got pie in his face, he tried to correct course. By the time he needed to retire, the board wanted to give up on mobile, thinking they would never catch up, and double down on data center.

AFAICT, this was a self-serving bit of reverse myth-making from Otellini. If there really had been a single binary decision Intel got wrong—saying no to Jobs when they might have said yes—then their collapse looks like bad luck: Nobody bats 1.000.

But the way Apple insiders tells this story, there was no way Intel was even being considered in the (short!) window when the original iPhone was being built. Intel was in the middle of selling Xscale, and even that design was too power-hungry.

Intel missing mobile was a long history of poor strategic and tactical choices, not one bad call.

Jobs had two iPhone teams working in secret against each other, and was setting up things on the side. He likely approached Otellini before either team was far along.

They did more than investigate. Nokia, at that time still market leader in mobile phones, wasted a lot of time and effort because management wanted them to move to Intel. Nokia engineers did not believe that Intel would ever reach the required power efficiency. Whether it was self-fullfilling prophecy or just technically impossible is anyone's guess. (No, Nokia did not fail because of Intel, but that miss certainly made the disaster more complete.)

Intel connection was not the sole reason for Nokia's demise in phones, but it contributed on the failure of their effort to recover from the tailspin. Symbian their old mobile platform was clearly due to be replaced and they had a pretty viable in-house Linux platform, Maemo, that already shipped with N900 in 2009. Instead of iterating on that, they decided to "join forces" with Intel and merged Maemo with Intel MobLin to create MeeGo. They wasted at least a year on that and not with a lot to show for it as the Intel chips they planned for never materialized.

Obviously it was going to be very difficult to compete as a third platform with the behemoths iOS and Android become during those years. At least the MeeGo and Windows Phone cards were not the winning ones.

That's the software part of the story, which became fully public in form of MeeGo.

But there was also a hardware story how Nokia would start Intel silicon. I don't think anything of that has ever been publicly annouced before it failed. Wasting a year seems to be massive underestimate. I believe it must have been much longer. After Nokia started to fail Intel hired former Nokia engineers. I have no reliable insights what they did there, but I believe at least in the beginning they still worked with phone hardware on low-level software.

You forget networks and atoms, and the horrible failure that was x86 android.

They did Atom. They just didn’t beat ARM.

Apple was an interested customer, but rumors are they perceived Intel extremely arrogant. The chip would have been to iPhone.

Atom has always been a laptop chip. They tried to shoeshorn it to handhelds but it sucked for obvious reasons. Think Apple's chips started in iPhone, then iPads and finally very recently ramped up to Macbooks. Even Snapdragon has only very recently released a laptop worthy chip because of the design they've acquihired from Nuvia.

Basically agree.

Well, it did good enough in netbooks. It could probably have been good in tablets if they kept trying (and if non-iPad tablets really caught on).

"didn't beat" puts it mildly. Every attempt Intel made at entering the smartphone business was doomed because they were years behind ARM. Paul Thurrott confirmed this with HP when discussing the Elite x3 smartphone:

https://www.thurrott.com/hardware/64677/elite-x3-hp-takes-wi...

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