Intel Corp (INTC)

[morrowinder]

bor: I think you wouldn't like the context of that comment...

What the phone carriers want is commodity phones. And the phone carriers pretty much determine who the winners/losers are in phone hardware. Yeah they will go along with uber luxury phones but they don't want Intel to make a ton of money selling just the CPU or MS getting a big cut with an operating system. ARM insures that they have very cheap chips. And that makes sense because touch screens and flash and all the other sundry sensors and cameras add up and make the damn things almost a thousand dollars at the high end. Intel in the PC market garners a lot more significant chunk of the PC BOM revenue. A decent phone CPU is what 20 to 30 bucks? A Core i5 6500K is $200 bucks. Memory is commoditized and is pretty cheap. Hard drives/SSDs are the same. The only real competitor for BOM dollars is graphics card manufacturers. But those are limited to gamers and workstations and integrated covers most everything else. The other main player in the PC BOM is MS. OS isn't really worth any significant revenue in phones AFAIK. So the markets are very different and phones are a real problem for Intel because their share of the BOM is nothing like in PCs. So its hard to justify a ton of development for a measely $30 bucks(and that is probably an optimistic goal). Thats why Qualcomm doesn't make a ton of money off the CPUS themselves. And neither does Samsung.