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Article about Intel's issues in mobile technology. Though I don't share all of it, it is worth reading in my opinion. I guess Intel management knows very well about these issues but it may be much more difficult to solve than this article makes it look like.
Short review of the Dell Venue 8 7000. Nice hardware. Performance and battery lifetime seems to be fine. Some lags in games - I guess Intel needs to still work on that with the game engine and game developers.
Intel should press the manufacturers to bring all Android updates in the future. The Dell uses a pretty plain Android impelementation, which is good. Customers will select Intel when they know they get a good update policy with it.
Microsoft Holo Lens said to use Cherry Trail. Seems like Microsoft embraces Intel again.
First pictures of rumoured 12" Macbook Air. Said to come with Core M and almost as slim as the iPad Air! A gorgeous device. So much about the rumours of Apple going ARM for their Macs. Who needs to hassle with an iPad when you can get a full computer at almost the same dimensions? Ok, the price is going to be higher, maybe battery lifetime will be lower (due to smaller battery), but it brings better performance and a keyboard.
It may even be of the same size as the Macbook Air 11" which has quite a large bezel around the screen. That's an extremely portable device which brings everything a productive device needs with the mobility of a tablet! That really shows why Intel needs to keep on its effort in mobile.
Now we have at least some design wins for phones. The Lenovo P90 (there are talks of a second one from Lenovo), the Asus Zenfone 2 and the Asus Padfone.
Especially Lenovo is a very important customer for Intel. With Motorola, it is at third place worldwide at smartphone sales. Lenovo and Motorola both had an early Intel Atom based phone design (the K900 and the Razr I).
In general, the 64 bit Android 5.0 might give a nice push for Intel, especially when they take care of a decent x86 port and future updates, customer might see a benefit in buying Intel instead of Mediatek, Rockchip etc. In addition, I think the current LTE modem from Intel will make it into many budget phones which are not powered by Qualcomm SoCs with integrated modems.
What is still missing is the announced SOFIA chip. That was due end of last year and nothing mentioned yet. More important will be the LTE variant early this year with 64 bit support. That may make it into many cheap phones and start a price war with Qualcomm and Samsung. Intel will not make any profits, but they are clearly an important player in the Android ecosystem by now.
As a side note, I was at my local electronics seller recently and at least 1/3 of the tablets there were Atom based, most of them Android based (basically all Windows 8.1 ones, but there were only a few). All seemed to perform nicely and I couldn't see a performance hit when compared to the higher end Qualcomm 801 ones. So, finally, Intel kept its promise and they are finally there to stay in the Android camp. I think it was worth the high price of contra revenue and lets hope they can leverage their 14nm process for mobile asap with reduced losses at toughest competition.
@biginvestors
What comes up, must come down - and some companies never come up again. AMD most likely is such a case and instead of putting your money at risk you should rather consider to short that stock. It might have some ups here and there, but in the longer term, AMD is in deep trouble.
The reasons for this have been discussed on this board quite often. AMD gets squeezed by Intel in its last remaining PC domain - low cost CPUs. Since AMD has nothing to offer in the higher performance compute space, which is entirely dominated by Intel, they can only compete in price. That was working reasonably in the past and Intel let AMD take that business. But since PCs were in decline and Intel had very price competitive solutions with its mobile based CPUs (BayTrail based Celerons), there is really nothing left for AMD in the PC business. Intel takes it all. Ok, AMD has graphics cards and the console business, but graphics cards are under strong competition from NVIDIA with decreasing market share for AMD. The console business is nice but the margins typically get worse the higher the volume. This year, AMD has sold more than 20 million of those chips to Sony and Microsoft, which certainly will lead to lower ASPs going forward. AMD won't go bankrupt soon I think, but they will suffer a lot from their weak technological position. A turnaround seems pretty impossible since AMD doesn't have the manpower anymore to achieve it.
Rumours about Xiaomi using Intel for its upcoming tablet. I know, contra-revenue and all that, but it certainly is important that Intel has a foot in the door of those device sellers like Xiaomi, Lenovo, Acer, Asus etc. I expect them to dominate a big part of the smartphone business in the future as these become more and more commodities.
Sofia could already mark the beginning when it goes into the low and mid range, which is a huge market in the emergings.
Migh have understimated Intel's ace regarding IoT infrastructure:
Latest IoT moves by Intel.
They may not be making much money out of the controllers, but they can through the infrastructure, from servers to security and services. It might be a nice addon to Intels business and definitely an area where ARM lacks available resources.
It's certainly too early to tell and there's not really anything IoT in the market yet that could be called a "big thing" (smartwatches definitely not).
Just as a side note: I'm on Mac OS now. I picked a MacBook Air 11" since I want something ultramobile with full OS. No need for tablet crap when I go traveling. The device is just great, with very good performance and very long battery lifetime (much longer than 10 hours easily). It shows well how far you can get with a well balanced design on current Intel hardware. There just isn't anything comparable at the same price with the same build quality, reliability, performance and battery lifetime running Windows. But well, who cares, Windows 8 is crap anyway. It's time for software that simply works ...
Comparison of ARM and x86 instruction set efficiency.
The bottom line (not surprising actually):