Intel Corp (INTC)

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and in a year or two the ARM foundries TSMC, GloFo, Samsung, etc will have fully depreciated 28 nm lines ready and willing to crank out really cheap chips that make for perfectly good sub $75 emerging market smartphones. It will be a great time to be a fabless chip company shopping around a decent size order.

Agree the market is setting itself up for transitioning to a commodity device. $75 phones are like Twinkies, and now that vendors have shifted their products to 28nm, there may be no incentive at all to ever leave it. Even ARM acknowledges that foundry costs per transistor do not get better after 28nm.



But if you think that Intel is investing $10B in capital per year to maintain a technology lead that's moot, then feel free to bet against them.