Intel’s ‘Medfield’ Has no Edge on QCOM ‘Snapdragon,’ Says Nomura
By Tiernan Ray
Nomura Equity Research‘s Romit Shah today reiterates a “Reduce” rating on shares of Intel (INTC), and a $19 price target, writing that the company’s “Atom” smartphone chips are trailing offerings from Qualcomm (QCOM), Nvidia (NVDA), and other companies that license the chip designs of ARM Holdings (ARMH).
Shah takes as his point of departure remarks by Intel management to the effect that the “Razr i” smartphone from Google‘s (GOOG) Motorola Mobility unit, running Intel’s “Medfield,” offers superior performance and battery life to phones using Qualcomm’s “Snapdragon” family of chips.
Writes Shah, his firm’s comparison of phones, specifically the Razr i versus the “Razr M” using Snapdragon, suggest Intel is not factoring in the greater drain on battery of the “long term evolution,” or LTE, 4G wireless radio in the Qualcomm models:
The battery life comparison for RAZR-I versus RAZR-M does not factor in the difference in cellular radios. LTE radios can consume 25-30% more power than 3G radios. And it’s our understanding that all of Intel’s offerings lack LTE support. This difference could explain the 10-15% better battery life for the RAZR-I. In addition, when looking at aggregate performance benchmarks, Medfield doesn’t seem to be ahead in performance. Furthermore, the current OEM design pipeline is based on next generation ARM SoCs, which are two times better in performance than Medfield.
As for performance, some benchmarks show there’s no advantage for Intel outside of raw Web browser speed on phones, he writes:
Some of most frequently used JavaScript based benchmarks include SunSpider, V8, and Octane. These benchmarks are generally useful when optimizing the JavaScript engine and making them run faster generally leads to better performance for many of the web applications. These benchmarks’ results are often available from various third-party sources such as AnandTech. While Medfield appears to have superior performance on SunSpider (50% better than Snapdragon), it scored below Snapdragon and Tegra 3 on the other two benchmarks. We also note that Intel has always fared better in browser speed based benchmarks like SunSpider. If we look at the aggregate performance across these three benchmarks, Medfield doesn’t seem to have performance advantage versus Snapdragon.
Shah expects Intel will continue to make progress as it moves its chips to 22-nanometer feature sizes, but he thinks Intel faces other obstacles, including “vertical integration, convincing OEMs to essentially use a single source for x86 chips, and likely unwillingness from customers to split
R&D resources between ARM and x86 based designs.”
Intel shares today are up 10 cents, or half a percent, at $20.75. Qualcomm shares are down 60 cents, or 1%, at $63.75.
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