Dmcq,

This is just another part of your assumption that Intel doesn't have what it takes to compete in the mobile SoC market. Basically, you think that x86 has no hope in that market, and that the only way is ARM.

Tenchu

Ibc,

I really don't think Intel is spending what it spends on CapEx just to be a foundry. I think Intel really wants to own the market for mobile devices.

All this talk about Intel becoming a foundry like Samsung or TSMC is capitulation, IMO.

Tenchu

Ibc, this is why I conclude that Intel isn't being aggressive enough in pursuing the SoC market. But that's a fault that's easily correctable, if the executive leadership dares to.

It's not like Intel is lacking the resources. Just the drive. Contrast this with QCOM, who IMO has the resources but is just coasting on their laurels, or with MediaTek, who has the drive but not really the resources or knowledge. (Apple of course has both the drive and now the resources.)

Tenchu

Ibc,

On leading edge technologies, yes Intel does have a cost-per-transistor advantage. This is because Intel's yields are better, period.

On process technologies that are one to two generations behind Intel, the Asian manufacturers have the advantage because at this stage, they will have caught up to Intel's yields and drive down costs with their inherent advantages.

Intel's big bet is that they remain at least a generation ahead in process technology. This may prove to be tougher and tougher to maintain below 10nm (my WAG), but until it becomes too tough, Intel will (and should) milk its process advantages.

Tenchu

Dmcq,

You're making several false assumptions about the current state of the market:

a) Intel doesn't have what it takes to compete in the mobile SoC market.

b) Samsung and TSMC are able to challenge Intel in the high-end market.

c) Everything is commoditized. "Parts is parts."

I disagree with all three assumptions. First of all, Intel does indeed have what it takes to compete in the mobile SoC market. I have no idea why it's taking Intel so long to break in, but on paper, Intel has the resources to win.

Secondly, Samsung and TSMC do not compete against Intel in the high-end. Else they would not only make chips that dominate smartphones, but they'd also make chips that can challenge Intel's dominance in PCs and servers. They can't, nor do they have the volume to spare. I'm sure they would love to, given the better profit margins, but instead they seem more willing to bring the entire market down to commodity margins.

Finally, "parts is parts" is a favorite theme among INTC naysayers. They were wrong before back when sub-$1,000 PCs emerged, they were wrong when AMD reached mid-20 percent in market share only to see it disappear, and I suspect they will be wrong today as they continue to overestimate Samsung and TSMC's manufacturing capabilities.

Tenchu

Dmcq, the reason why this is a losing game for Intel is because of Intel's history in the early 80's.

Back then, Intel was making memory chips, but they had to compete against Asian manufacturers. Memory was quickly becoming commoditized, and Intel could not compete against the lower cost structure of Asia. That led to Intel's difficult decision to exit the memory market (although the IBM PC design win at the time helped).

A lot has changed since then, but some things remain the same. Asian fabs still enjoy a lower cost structure than Intel's fabs. If Intel entered the volume foundry market and directly competed with Samsung and TSMC, any price wars will be more damaging to Intel's profitability than Samsung's or TSMC's. Plus I believe Samsung and TSMC are more than willing to hurt themselves and swim in red ink for as long as it takes to defeat Intel.

The counter to this is Intel's engineering prowess. Intel needs to maintain a process lead and leverage that lead using its own designs in order to maintain profit margins. That is how Intel has stayed one step ahead of the commoditization curve, even in the face of many challenges including from Cyrix and AMD. Other semi companies with fabs started falling away, including IBM and AMD, because they could not match Intel's strengths nor compete against the Asians.

This is why I don't believe Intel can survive as a volume foundry. Any foundry relationship Intel pursues should be a strategic one. Only in that context would a foundry deal with Apple make sense. However, I don't think Apple wants to be tied down to Intel's fab roadmap, and Intel doesn't want to give up trying to win the SoC market by itself just yet.

Tenchu

Herb and others, I don't see what the big deal is over Intel fabbing Apple's chips.

I said this before, and I'll say it again. Intel doesn't want to make chips for Apple. Rather, Intel wants to sell chips to Apple.

The minute Intel starts becoming a high volume foundry for OEMs is the minute that Intel will start playing a losing game vs. Samsung and TSMC.

Tenchu

Thank you Mas. EOM

FPG,

I don't consider the ability to edit a document in a pinch to be a replacement for the capabilities of a PC or laptop.

Either you do, or you misspoke. Either way, it's not my job to figure out that you didn't really mean what you said.

Tenchu

Andy,

Why not just have two computers, i.e. a PC and a smartphone, rather than cripple yourself by dumping the PC and trying to prove you can use the smartphone to do everything?

PCs are cheap enough and come in more convenient form factors than ever before.

Tenchu

FPG,

There you go again with your straw men.

No one is arguing against choice. That's silly.

What I argue against is the notion that a mobile device plus keyboard plus mouse can REPLACE (your words) traditional PCs and laptops for many lightweight productivity tasks.

It's an option, but I'm pretty sure it won't be one that will become very popular.

Of course, maybe one day it will be. Ten years is a long time to evolve the mobile device usage model.

Tenchu

Borusa,

Right now, most people prefer to have both a PC and a smartphone.

Those who "make do" with just a portable device either can't afford a PC, or they want to try and "prove" to the world that the PC is dead dead dead.

The usage model of portable devices will have to drastically change before it can even be considered a viable replacement for PCs.

Tenchu

Borusa,

I've got news for you. Windows 8 already tried to bridge the gap between mobile and desktop.

What makes you think Android will succeed where Windows failed? Because ARM is now 64-bit? LOL ...

Of course, I'm sure one of these days, someone will figure it out. Maybe Jony Ive at Apple? There's a reason why MacOS continues to exist.

Tenchu

FPG,

What's the point of docking a smartphone? Better to just sync it to your desktop or laptop.

Docking a tablet makes more sense, but it still isn't as good at "real work" compared to a desktop or laptop.

Have you completely dumped Windows, MacOS, and maybe Linux from your life? If not, why?

Tenchu

FPG,

No, your "argument" is that Michael has some sort of Intel-biased double-standard.

In any case, "real work" is ideally done on either a Windows PC, Mac, or Linux platform, all of which are dominated by x86. Android and iOS (i.e. the two platforms that ARM dominates) are less than ideal for this sort of stuff. You can do it, but you have to jump through hoops to make it viable.

Tenchu

FPG, there is plenty of room in this market for all form factors. Like I said before, even the boundaries between tablets and laptops are starting to blur.

Only problem is that, IMO, convertible laptops don't exactly represent the best of both worlds. But they will evolve, just like all form factors are evolving.

As for that straw man you're arguing against, I'll continue to ignore it.

Tenchu

FPG,

You're still pretending that tablet+mouse+keyboard is a viable replacement for a laptop? Somehow, I can just imagine you jumping through hoops trying to make this "viable" for your needs.

Meanwhile, I'll stick to my laptop for work, desktop for gaming, and iPad for convenient web surfing and video watching. No need to replace anything. Plenty of room for all form factors.

Tenchu

Ibc,

Apple charges that much more for a MacBook with an upgraded processor.

Obviously some people are willing to pay that much.

Tenchu

Dmcq,

Exactly.

Apple is trying to move away from Samsung's foundry business for strategic reasons, not because they fear Samsung is learning anything from fabbing their chips.

Tenchu

CS,

Exactly.

I was amused when Qualcomm tried to advertise their Snapdragon processors. They were probably thinking that they could create the same sort of brand recognition that "Intel Inside" once enjoyed.

As for the ecosystem, Microsoft has a lot of heavy-lifting to do. I see they're trying to advertise the fact that their devices have MS Office. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing.

Tenchu

wthdik2,

Thanks for confirming my theory.

Now go play in traffic.

Tenchu

Chipguy,

Then how about we just come up with an Angry Birds benchmark? Just integrate some sort of benchmarking feature into the game itself.

Then if Samsung or Apple or whoever wants to cheat on that "benchmark," they will have to screw over millions of users who actually want to play the game and don't care about this e-peen contest.

Tenchu

BQ,

Whatever happened to the fact that Samsung is cheating on the benchmarks?

Tenchu

Whatever you say, wthdik2, whatever you say.

I don't know why you think Intel, or its investors (activist or otherwise), has anything to gain by leaving the mobile market.

I don't know why you are arguing that anyone with a brain would want Intel to just sit comfortably on its traditional PC and server businesses. This is a company whose former CEO coined the phrase "Only the paranoid survive," and whose current CEO continues to live by that.

I don't know why you think all of this will lead to INTC reaching the 40's by year's end with a doubling of the dividend. That's crazy talk for everyone but the most rabid of INTC bulls.

I have a theory, but I'll wait for you to respond first.

Tenchu

wthdik2,

This is just wrong on so many levels, and it's leading me to believe that you're just making this stuff up.

Look at Goldman Sachs, for example. They've maintained a Sell rating on INTC for years now, with a price target that has never risen above the high teens.

INTC hasn't been below 20 since late 2012. Even now INTC is within striking distance of its 52-week high.

Yet Goldman Sachs continues to come up with every excuse imaginable to justify their permabear status.

Now you tell me. Should their opinion not be taken lightly, because they supposedly risk Intel going to GS' competitors for their investment banking business? LOL ...

Tenchu

wthdik2,

I hear Microsoft loses money on Internet Exploder.

See what I did there? This whole "break even" conjecture is nonsense. OF COURSE Intel isn't in it just to "break even." That's just an ANALyst's brain fart.

Tenchu

VeeCee,

The majority here would be right.

Giving up on mobile chips just to "unlock 50 cents of EPS" is stupid, especially when the entire digital world is either going mobile or is benefitting from the side effects thereof.

That JPMorgan "analyst" sounds like yet another Wall Street "activist investor" like Carl Icahn or Bill Ackman. They have no interest in the long-term welfare of a company. All they want to do is cash out.

Tenchu

Ibc,

Not to mention the lighter weight, which can really help when you're jet-lagged and you have to bring along all your carry-on crap through the airport.

Tenchu

Saturn,

TLDR (Too Long, Didn't Read) version: Probably a rogue app, keep your iOS and apps up-to-date.

I'm not exactly sure what's going on, but one of the iOS 7 updates, a lot of people were reporting heavy battery drain.

It happened to me one time. I "fixed" it by cycling the power on my phone, but of course, I shouldn't have to.

It's likely some rogue background process that is slurping up all of the juice like there's no tomorrow. Not sure who's responsible, though.

Anyway, I haven't seen this happen for a few weeks now. I do a lot of running (on the order of 1-2 hours per run), and my phone's power consumption is just fine.

Tenchu

Michael, I've got an iPad 3.

Every application on it ran seamlessly ... until I downloaded the game Hearthstone on the iPad:

http://us.battle.net/hearthstone

Now I gotta get myself an iPad Air.

Tenchu

Ibc,

Unplugged?

After five hours, all of them.

After 12 hours, none of them.

Tenchu

Jokerman,

Congratulations, you successfully trolled him.

Now move along ...

Tenchu

Dmcq,

I don't know where you're getting this straw man, but it doesn't matter.

The software, or more specifically the OS, that is required to run supercomputers is vastly different than the software required to run smartphones.

Just because both can multithread and distribute tasks efficiently between processing does not make them the "same." For supercomputers, the algorithms to distribute tasks are highly complex and depends greatly on the workload, which I guarantee you does NOT look like the workload of a smartphone.

As for smartphones, all you have so far is an OS kernel grouping adjacent processing cores together and assigning tasks based on these groups. Whoop-dee-doo. If that's all you need to develop a supercomputing OS, then tens of thousands of software engineers can go home now.

Tenchu

P.S. - What's this all about, anyway? To prove that I'm carrying a "supercomputer" in my pocket? LOL, I should use that with the ladies ...

Dmcq,

Very rudimentary, several levels below that of supercomputers.

All you get from this so-called "NUMA" support is the grouping together of certain threads into nodes.

Tenchu

Spaarky,

I hear iOS and Android both support multithreading, a feature also found on supercomputers, LOL!

Dmcq must be from the era when the PowerPC G4 was called a "supercomputer on a chip." Remember that?

Tenchu

Unkwn,

Where are you guys getting this nonsense?

Even servers and other high-end computers care about power consumption. Even the high-end Xeons, the highest being the 15-core IvyTown, have to be carefully architected to fit within a 150W power envelope.

You can ask yourself, "Well why doesn't Intel just raise the power envelope to 250W or something crazy like that?" The answer, of course, would be that it would be too expensive and too low volume to be worth it. Even the high-end 150W IvyTown is going into a portion of the server market that only amounts to 10% of it, AFAIK.

So tell me again why Intel should even bother making a POWER8-like processor? And how would that be any more successful than, say, another Itanium like Kittson?

Tenchu

FPG, if someone who wants to run Win7 on a phone is a "dinosaur," I'd hate to see what those old geezers running Win7 on a (gasp) desktop computer resemble.

Tenchu

Ibc, I see a surge of Mac sales in Q1 2014. I expect flat sales going forward, maybe even a slight gain as more people switch over from Win8.

The PC is not dead. Even Tim Cook was surprised at the resilience of his Mac business.

Tenchu

Dmcq,

LOL ...

Tenchu

IBC,

It sure doesn't look like a decline to me. In an era where the PC is supposedly "dead," Mac sales continue to show resilience.

As for me personally, I will NEVER plug a keyboard and a monitor into a smartphone. I would rather just have a separate computer and sync my data between the two.

Because think about it. If you can squeeze an entire computer into a smartphone, you can also squeeze an entire computer into a monitor. Oh wait, that's called an iMac.

How about squeezing an entire computer into a monitor and keyboard combo? Oh wait, that's called a Macbook.

Pervasive computing means we can have smartphones, tablets, laptops, and desktops all interacting with one another. And all of this will be easily affordable.

So no, the smartphone is not the computer because the concept of a single "THE computer" is stupid.

Tenchu