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@Tenchu
Brian Krzanich already clearly said that they would be willing to open their fabs for customers that Intel doesn't directly compete with and whose business they can't get otherwise with their own designs. To me that clearly sounded like they want Apple as foundry business since they will never make it into iOS devices with their x86 chips.
To me it seems clear that Intel wants that business. But the question remains: Is Apple willing at all and if so, at what terms. Intel is likely not accepting the average foundry chip price for its high-end processes.
I can see one hell of a business case here: Once Intel is able to integrate its modem with its 14 or 10 nm process, they could sell it to Apple as package (including the die packaging btw). That would leave more than enough business for Intel and Apple could overtake Qualcomm regarding the most integrated and bleeding edge ARM SoC. Good for both, win-win.
Apple won't use Intel's chips unless it would provide them significant benefits - what it doesn't at the moment and most likely won't in the years coming (if ever). One has still to consider the performance penalty x86 emulation would cause on iOS due to the missing virtual machine/just in time compilation when compared to Android.
What Apple may be interested in is using Intel's fab lead for their own SoCs. Especially if the Finfets are looking to be late next year by the foundries. Intel's 14nm process is a safe bet there and would help Apple to position the iPhone way ahead of all the others performance-wise. A destinction Apple desperately needs to make people continue to pay prices up to 1000$ for a phone. The rumor of reactivating Intel's mothballed fab fits perfectly into that picture. Maybe that's part of the reason Intel's share price did rise so much in the last weeks. Recovering PC business simply isn't enough to justify it in my opinion.
FPG,
you do know that logic designed for very high frequencies, like the Broadwell core, takes significantly more area for the design than lower clocked, density optimized ones, don't you? Same goes for high speed caches.
Intel already mentioned that their high density mobile process is not ready yet and Intel already released figures for density, e.g. SRAM cell size and logic cell size for 14nm if I remember correctly. Those looked much better than TSMC 20nm (and 16nm won't be much better in that regard either, according to TSMC).
Has this been posted already? Dell Venue 8 7000.
That looks like a great design. I guess the PC crowd is about to dominate the tablet and maybe soon also the smartphone space. Good for Intel, as long as they deliver the right hardware for the right price. Reference platforms and guaranteed updates, as announced recently by Intel, are a very good start. These guys like hassle free platform bases where they can build several device categories around.
Rumour about a Lenovo x2-TO smartphone with Merrifield. That would be a great device with nice specs. 5" is too large for me though. This model is said to come also as an ARM octacore version - so we'll probably see which one sells better in China. The fast one or the specification one. Will be very interesting.
Asus Fonepad 7 with Moorefield is available at 1st September.
Probably China only, which makes sense since nobody else in the world would talk with a tablet - something I don't get about the chinese actually.
Anyway, the platform seems to be ready. Not sure what the modem is - I couldn't find reference to whether it is using XMM7260. If so, the platform would be complete and actually pretty high end. Considering that an official 64 bit version of Android is going to be released soon by Google, Moorefield could still be the only high end 64 bit platform available in the market. Taking the first real worldwide capable LTE modem from Intel and competitive pricing, this could be quite a surprise for the ARMy. Still no phones announced with it which bothers me a bit - it should be perfectly fine for that, at least in phablets. And Merrifield should be great for smaller phones - something I would definitely prefer performance wise instead of those wimpy ARM SoCs used in normal sized (up to 4,5") smartphones.
I really wonder about the power consumption of the high end Moorefield. According to what Intel claimed when introducing BayTrail, it should be much better suited to go into smaller phones, which would make it the first high-end platform that can go into the mass segment of medium size smartphones - and that at a competitive pricing. Where's the catch?
Anyone realizing that Moorefield is still not in the market and there are rumours that XMM7260 gets delayed - again? Intel's execution in mobile is just plain horrible and that's what you get when people become lazy from being a monopolist in another market segment. As nice as the recent run up in share price is, Intel mobile still is such a weak spot it's just unbelievable. So many promises and none delivered.