Intel's CEO says its costly tablet chip strategy has paid off | Hacker News Reader

Intel's CEO says its costly tablet chip strategy has paid off

reuters.com

39 pointsarms7717 comments

I think he meant "Intel paid off a lot of Chinese manufacturer to make them start using Atoms", and it only cost them $2B so far.

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/186367-intels-mobile-divi...

http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/intel-sel...

Their biggest success is some fly by nights nonames announcing one off $65 tablets.

>> Their biggest success is some fly by nights nonames announcing one off $65 tablets.

How about the Dell Venue 8 Pro?

"its costly tablet chip strategy paid off" ...

> "the company's mobile and communications group's second-quarter revenue fell 83 percent to $51 million, and the unit had an operating loss of $1.12 billion"

He is saying it payed off in terms of market share, not income.

Ah, so the old dot com strategy: we'll lose money on each one, but make up for it in volume!

It worked for Amazon

Revenue fell because they're paying for market share.

"Krzanich set a goal for Intel's chips to be used in 40 million tablets in 2014, up from 10 million the previous year."

They're pretty clear in the article that by "paid off" they're referring to the market share they're buying. Intel is attempting to force its way into the market, leveraging its wildly profitable traditional processor division and $17 billion in cash. With $10.2b in net income the last four quarters, it makes perfect sense to vaporize a few billion dollars if necessary to grab a piece of the mobile market and build forward.

Bingo. That's the money quote. If you hadn't posted it first, I was going to. They're spending/subsidizing nearly $22 for each $1 of revenue.

Intel is taking lessons from Microsoft in how to waste billions of dollars in futile endeavors.

It's not necessarily futile. If Intel can grab enough of a slice of the Android tablet market that developers of Android apps that use significant native code start caring about x86 Android... all sorts of opportunities open up for them.

You think Shenzhen Cheapo Tablet Co., Ltd. will keep using them when they start charging them the full price? Hahaha!

I think Intel underestimates the level of churn and ruthlessness of the market. This ain't no Wintel meal ticket.

I recently saw a billboard here in Melbourne for an Asus tablet with an Intel CPU: https://twitter.com/john_e_barham/status/492146297416077312.

What struck me as bizarre was although the billboard had the "Intel Inside" slogan repeated at least 3 times, nowhere did it mention what OS the tablet ran, and the screenshots were basically generic stock photos with no apps in sight. As it happens the tablet runs Android but I can imagine that some of the people suckered into buying it will be annoyed that it can't play many of the games on Google Play since they'd be developed with the ARM NDK.

The whole thing struck me more as an effort to extract money from Intel's marketing budget than as a sincere effort to sell the actual tablet.

Intel has a horrible horrible architecture, I really dont want to see it win over ARM Architecture which is open and superior, and wastes a lot less DIE area just for instructions that Intel Does.

I wouldn't call ARM open. Sure, you might be able to negotiate a license to one of ARM's designs. You need an architectural license to do your own implementation though.

Shouldn't we care about efficiency and end result, rather than die space?

The real issue is if Intel will be able to buy dominance through deep pockets. On a even playing field then the better arch would win.

ARMs business model might allow them to weather the initial storm while advancing their core architecture; their 2013 balance sheet was good, with low liabilities and high earnings. Not even Intel can keep buying market share indefinitely.

If Intel is buying market share by making superior products using fancy transistors, expensive fabs, and clever designs.... its not exactly bad for us consumers.

Yes. ARM is shaking in their boots. The Atom will dominate all. It will happen right around the time Slackware destroys Windows 9.

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