Intel Corp (INTC)

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Unkwn,

really don't know what to make of it. If true, it is kind of a "giving up before you even tried" mentality.

Why should Intel release products in the market if they don't have any design wins? Merrifield had zero smartphone wins, Moorefield basically had the ZenFone (and I doubt this was won on merit; Intel probably provided some financial support, if you catch my drift).

Merrifield did show up in one Dell tablet, I believe.

Broxton would have suffered the same fate, so it's better to not bother wasting the wafer starts.

As far as SoFIA LTE goes, do you really think a quad core, stripped down Silvermont with a mediocre Mali GPU and an ancient category 4 modem (OK, they did have plans to upgrade it to category 6, but that still puts it behind the low-end/mid-range chips from QCOM, MDTK, etc.) would have done well in late Q2/early Q3 2016?

It wouldn't have sold. And SoFIA LTE2 on 14nm? Intel never gave out the specs, but something tells me that a product aimed for launch in late 2015/early 2016 but pushed to mid-2017 wouldn't have been competitive.

So no, they "tried" but the products didn't make it out of the chute in time for it to be worth actually trying to sell.

Would they really let an analyst participate and/or share information of such internal roadmap reviews?

Yes, they absolutely would:

Today, 4/27 we attended a small group lunch with Intel’s CFO. Intel appears to be moving very rapidly to inform its employees of their status with regard to the restructuring plan. The largest portion of the cost cuts will be to improve efficiency and effectiveness across the company. Some specific projects will be impacted, primarily in the Client Computing Group (CCG). Within CCG Intel plans on scaling back its investment in tablet and smartphone SoCs (system-on- chip) – we assume this refers to a reduction in investment in the SoFIA product line.

http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2016/04/27/intel-to-reduce-investment-in-sofia-chip-line-says-wells-fargo/