Replies to post #128115 on Intel Corp (INTC)

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Intel most certainly understands the issues. You know the BoM problem that Intel had with Bay Trail? Well,if you read VERY carefully in the most recent call, you will see the following,

Sure. This isn't a price reduction as normal price reduction would be; it's not where you are just simply reducing. It's truly a BOM cost equalizer and remember a lot of our 40 million tablets in ’14 will be based on Bay Trail. Bay Trail was originally designed for Atom-based PC segments and the upper end tablet. And so it’s what we are doing here is doing a BOM cast delta relative to the, what the mid and lower end tablets require.

You have to stop and ask yourself the following,

But Broxton is designed for high end tablets, too? Why doesn't it suffer from this bill-of-materials problem?

The answer is this: when Bay Trail was first conceived back in 2009, there was no iPad. Bay Trail-T became a "thing" only later, and as a result, you had a platform originally designed for netbooks (you know, these were hot back in 2008/2009) now being aimed at tablets. You can also see Bay Trail's netbook legacy in the tidbits that I've dropped about BYT's GPU.

Broxton, on the other hand, is a tablet/smartphone oriented SoC through and through (development likely started in 2011/2012).

I also have more to share later about Intel's "density" issue, but I will say that DavidA2 is correct in saying that Intel did not optimize its designs for density. This, I have been told, is corrected in every 14-nanometer design (Broadwell, Cherry Trail, and Broxton).