Gotta love Imagination Tech.
Yes but a big part of your Merrifield concerns pre-launch was that they would put an inferior PowerVR6 gpu variant to the one in A7 when in fact they have done the complete opposite and put a better one in.
To me, Merrifield looks an excellent modern phone chip fit for purpose. Everything about it says that Intel have balanced correctly the conflicting requirements of phone form-factor cpu performance, gpu performance, power consumption into the smallest die possible at 22nm. The engineers have done their job well. I certainly would have no qualms about making this my first smartphone purchase eventually as technically it ticks all the boxes for me and I know there will no performance/power/heat surprises under load unlike all the other quad-cores out there.
Now you may argue that's not what is required for marketing purposes but Intel does not have a tinier phone chip core than Atom (Quark too under-powered) to make a cheap quad-core and I also believe there will be enough discerning customers out there eventually to correctly ascertain the technical superiority of a powerful dual-core (e.g. Merrifield, A7, Denver) against a weaker quad-core (e.g. A7, A9, A53) in a ~2W limited phone form factor. Moorefield will address these marketing concerns shortly anyway when timed with XMM7260 release it can achieve the maximum impact.
So where's all the design wins you shout ? Well, unlike you I never believed established mobility OEMs would rush to put Intel chips into their designs even if they were say 20-30% better. Why would they rush to increase Intel's strength in mobility like they have in PCs and Servers ? No, Intel will have to win mobility from the bottom up using customer power and using established PC OEMs like Asus and Lenovo wanting to become major new mobility players too. Intel has given them a good phone chip in Merrifield, now it is up to them to design a good phone chassis around it that highlights its performance/power ability over the competition.
Finally when your Broxton hero chips are released in 2015 Intel will still need a very cheap phone/tablet chip to put into sub $200 devices and it is better then for margin/cost reasons that it is a purpose built dual-core like Merrifield rather than a disabled larger die Moorefield quad-core.
