Intel Corp (INTC)

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Let's start in 2010, where Intel should have seen the mobile wave coming.

It's now 2014. Where does that fit into your 5-year timeline of expectations? How much market penetration should Intel have at this point?

We can walk through it if you want. Here's my reconstruction and speculation of what happened at Intel over the last half-decade:

Roadmap #1: likely developed ~2007



This roadmap showed Intel's phone roadmap, and had to have been developed even before the iPhone data showed it to be a disruptive force in the market. The main issue that caused it to go off the rails was when Nokia dropped support for Medfield and Meego, and Intel needed to shift their phone roadmap to support Android. I think Intel's internal roadmaps would have had Silvermont as a "tock" following Medfield, which would have put it in 2012, but obviously the Nokia reset had an impact.

Roadmap #2a/2b: ~2011




This roadmap calls out Clovertrail and Clovertrail+ as middle-products to bridge the gap. It also clearly calls out Bay Trail in 2013 and 14nm products in 2014. The phone roadmap does not have dates on it, suggesting it was potentially more at risk in terms of schedule.

Their mistake was prioritizing Windows for tablets, when Android would have been a better ecosystem to drive first. The execution issues on the phone roadmap (including 7160 delays) resulted in the second course-correction, outlined below:

Roadmap #3a/3b: ~2013



This roadmap shows congestion in the 2014 portfolio, with many phone and tablet SOCs offering multitudes of design options: Bay Trail, Merifield, Cherrytrail, Moorfield, and SoFIA. That's enormously complex and difficult to execute to, so I have to hand it to Krzanich on leaving no stone unturned.

As for Broxton in 2015, that would be roughly on schedule to a tick-tock cadence starting in the 2011 version of the roadmap (i.e. Saltwell in 2011-12, Silvermont in 2013-14, Goldmont in 2015-16). The roadmaps illustrate the course-corrections Intel took in the meantime, but they don't show a systemic delay in the long term solution.

All they've done is manage the extra work that the Nokia issue caused, as well as the multiple Android reprioritization actions. The roadmaps seem rational, and tell a story in retrospect.

Unless you see something different....