Scale, basically. Intel is also the only one in the mobile market who can develop really differentiated products instead foranother me-too ARM SoC.
No, no, no!
You can't race speed boats around a slalom course of buoys in a
500,000 ton displacement supertanker.
Intel is really good at designing super high performance MPUs. But it
uses intensively engineered uarch, circuit, and physical design to
achieve it. This is a long, cumbersome, and expensive development
pipeline. It only makes sense when the market:
1) is large, monolithic, and valuable (high ASP and high volume) for
individual masksets.
2) slow moving (designs starting now mostly hit market opportunities
that will exist 5 years from now)
3) predominantly values the general purpose computing characteristics
of the product (i.e. its all about the CPUs baby!)
Intel excels mightily in this realm as dozens of dead computer and
MPU companies can attest.
The market ARM swims in is virtually the opposite - slap together
any old craptastic core with all sorts of other things in thousands of
combinations and permutations and get it to market niches ASAP to
enjoy its 6 to 12 month window of sales. Rinse and repeat and live
on bare bones profits or die and have a dozen competitors fight over
your former customers.
Intel failed in mobile because it isn't all about the CPU core, It is a
question of having the right checklist of features at the right time
not promises for next year. To do that you have to turn on a dime,
churn out good enough crap fast, and hope you guessed right.
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