Replies to post #98577 on Intel Corp (INTC)

[The Duke of URL]

I just don't know why, but the phrase, "Buzzword Gobbledygook" leaps to mind. Color me insouciant.

[chipguy]

ARM's business model is a very interesting one to me. I don't see it requiring near as much overhead as Intel's.

Low overhead but also a tiny share of revenue. ARM gets ~1%
royalty for chips sold with its processor cores in it. That $20
processor in an iPad is $19.80 for Samsung (the guy with the
fab!) and 20 cents for ARM. OTOH the $34 Atom in a netbook
is a full $34 to Intel for a chip with a marginal cost likely under
$5. How about them apples? :-)

ARM thrives in nascent markets where no one in sure there how
big the market really is and what features are really needed and
which are useless costs. OEMs can try different things with ARM
based SoCs and see what sticks. But if a new market is real
enough, big enough, well defined enough, and where compute
performance is a important differentiator then look out for Intel.
Intel's two core competencies are designing high performance
processors with a lot of arcane custom circuit and physical
design content, and having the fastest, 100% MPU oriented
logic processes and fabs to build them in. Intel's model is too
expensive and has too long a lead time to make fully dedicated
chips for markets that suddenly appear or are unproven but
once the market is shown to be real and persistent then it can
bury competitors with a pipeline of ever better products.

[mas]

However, because ARM allows companies like NVidia to ValueAdd, unless Intel greatly improves it's Graphics, NVidia's greater GPU capagilities will begin to erode whatever performance differences Intel's CPU might have. This would put pressure on margins.


AMD's Fusion products will show early if that is going to be a serious problem going forward.

[smooth2o]

ARM doesn't need anywhere near the marketing and sales force that Intel needs.

Well ARM doesn't market smart phones and server products either. ARM markets ARM. The power of marketing comes from all those who use ARM. That, in itself, won't do much good if the products don't meet user's needs. And, that's the issue. If Intel can come out with smart phone chips that exceed the power requirements of ARM products and perform much faster than ARM products and there is a demand for faster performance that users can see and use, Intel will be a big winner in the smart phone market. My biggest fear is that the ARM chips will not be noticeably slower than the Intel implementations (it ain't just the processor). Also, there are extenuating circumstances like to what the market will evolve in the next two years and has Intel anticipated that move?

There's also a disadvantage to ARM chips in that just as Apple has designed their own CPU, so will others over time. That basically fragments the architecture. You also have many different software teams working on different hardware designs. That's always been proven hard to do. Not to mention that each design has to be designed and processed separately at potentially lower volumes per OEM. Basically, these smart products are computers, not just phones anymore.

As for the server market, that's quite a few more years out, but I would expect some change to that market as well, as lower power,many multi cores come into use. There's definitely some market share to lose there, but, as you mention the market greatly expands at that point.

much like Android has done for Cell Phones.

The jury's still out on this one per the latest reports that show that a lot of these "Androids" may come from the "other" category.

Smooth