
Intel cuts Atom chips, basically giving up on the smartphone and tablet markets - Ivoah
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3063508/components/intel-is-on-the-verge-of-exiting-the-smartphone-and-tablet-markets-after-cutting-atom-chips.html
======
grizzles
I might be biased but I think this is a maybe looks good on paper decision but
a terrible long term strategy decision. Just because they can't compete on
price doesn't mean they can't compete on features.

It was only two months ago that they were showcasing their android platform
and practically begging for customers. [1]

I've wanted to do a phone for awhile. I'm sure I'm not the only one. In the
last few months I contacted people at Intel but I had no response whatsoever
to my multiple inquiries (to you know, become a customer). And I have some of
the company's most senior management in my LinkedIn. Now I know why.

This is kind of pathological behavior on Intel's part imo. The big players
were never going to come to their platform. Huawei, HTC, Samsung, LG etc have
no reason to change from ARM. They are content to keep doing their cookie
cutter thing while fighting a brutal price war in a staid market.

On the other hand, the startups out there, those of us who want to do
something really out of the box and grow new markets can't get a word in
edgewise. It's disappointing. As a technologist, I really hope someone manages
to ship an open source handheld one day. That will be the catalyst for the
next iteration of smartphone evolution.

[1]
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/23/move_over_continuum_...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/02/23/move_over_continuum_intel_shows_android_smartphone_powering_bigscreen_linux/))

~~~
marssaxman
Why would you use Intel products if you wanted to build an open-source
handheld?

I'm looking forward to the not-very-distant day that we no longer need to use
Intel products so that we can build open-source laptops.

~~~
grizzles
I just want to be able to call all the shots on the design of my product.

Intel has historically been very open on the desktop. Linux and computing in
general wouldn't be where it is without that openness.

~~~
marssaxman
I suppose we have different ideas about what "open" means. In my view, Linux
and computing in general have gotten where they are largely _despite_ Intel's
efforts at rent-extraction.

~~~
pjmlp
If it wasn't for the likes of IBM and Intel, with Linux developers on their
payroll, even though they also do lots of patents and closed source stuff, GNU
would still be looking for a kernel.

~~~
pyre
> GNU would still be looking for a kernel.

Linux came about before there was commercial interest. Linux (or GNU/Linux if
you will) would have existed. Whether it would be in the same place it is
today is another story.

~~~
pjmlp
I was there. We just wanted to have a free UNIX clone at home, to be able to
do the work from there instead of expensive connections over the phone line to
corporate and university servers.

~~~
kayamon
If that was all you wanted, you'd still be running MIMIX.

------
rbanffy
This is a path that must be followed with great attention. Giving up on low-
end, entry-level parts often looks great in short term results but may doom
the company in the end.

One of the reasons we deploy to x86 servers now rather then SPARC, POWER or
MIPS is that we develop on x86. When Sun and IBM chose to exit the low-end
space and pursue only large clients, they doomed their platforms to the legacy
of those clients who already had their systems running on their platforms.

How many fresh applications are designed with SPARC or POWER in mind? How many
are designed for zSeries mainframes?

------
PaulHoule
I think that's a misunderstanding.

Atom chips have always been crippled to keep them from cannibalizing more
expensive chips.

Skylake is a fine tablet chip, in fact, that's really what Skylake is good
for. They are probably producing them in high enough numbers now that they can
give up on Atom.

~~~
cfallin
Atom isn't crippled so much as it's developed from a very simple (small, low-
power, in-order execution) baseline and so hasn't had the time to reach the
level of performance maturity and sophistication that the "big cores"
(Haswell, Skylake, etc) have. If Intel had the ability to get Skylake
performance in an Atom power envelope, they would.

------
rayiner
Gotta love an article that leads with sunk cost fallacy. Anyway, axing Atom
doesn't mean the end of Intel targeting tablets. Core M is fitting into
fanless tablets thinner than an iPad.

~~~
nkurz
Separately, the title is misleading when it says "Intel cuts Atom chips".
While "cuts" may be technically correct, Intel isn't giving up on Atom, just
canceling the smartphone SoC's that were planned to use it. Silvermont (the
basis of the soon to come out new Knights Landing Xeon Phi) and (so far as I
know) it's successor Goldmont are still going forward as scheduled. From the
(significantly better) AnandTech article titled "Intel's Changing Future:
Smartphone SoCs Broxton & SoFIA Officially Cancelled":

 _Also not discussed in greater detail is Intel 's future plans for their
overall Atom lineup. With Apollo Lake announced just earlier this month, it's
clear that Intel's Atom efforts have not been cancelled entirely. We will
still see the new 14nm Goldmont cores appear in low-cost PCs under Apollo
Lake, most likely in several 11-to-13 inch high volume devices._

[http://www.anandtech.com/show/10288/intel-broxton-sofia-
smar...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/10288/intel-broxton-sofia-smartphone-
socs-cancelled)

------
mappu
Anandtech coverage: [http://www.anandtech.com/show/10288/intel-broxton-sofia-
smar...](http://www.anandtech.com/show/10288/intel-broxton-sofia-smartphone-
socs-cancelled)

------
iamgopal
Could not they just use their superior manufacturing capability to make e.g.
24 core arm that use less power then competition ? If not for them, it will
atleast bite the market share from competitor. This is quite analogous to
"Nokia should have embraced android much ago."

~~~
andrepd
Shamelessly stolen from the comments at
[http://anandtech.com/show/10288/intel-broxton-sofia-
smartpho...](http://anandtech.com/show/10288/intel-broxton-sofia-smartphone-
socs-cancelled)

"The short answer: margins.

The long answer: Intel could absolutely build a killer smartphone SoC on the
14nm process. However it would need to be Core based; the Atom CPU line isn't
performant enough. They may need to go back to Ivy Bridge or strip down
Skylake a bit to get there, but they could do it.

The issue is that smartphone SoCs have very low margins. MediaTek, Rockchip,
etc are crushing the market. Atom is designed for margins, not performance. If
Intel built a winning Core smartphone SoC, then they'd have to sell it for
significantly lower margins than what their other Core parts sell for. And
that in turn would put pressure on the rest of their chip stack; why should an
OEM pay $250 for Core-M when you could get a similar smartphone SoC for $30?

For what it's worth Apple faces a similar challenge. But being vertically
integrated means they don't have to share with others, and the total profit
off of iPhones/iPads can offset the higher costs involved in developing and
fabbing the A-series SoCs. However Intel doesn't have that luxury, and Asus
would never let Intel have all of the profit.

Smartphone SoCs are a race to the bottom. And Intel as a business has nothing
to gain from taking part in that race. The winner is the guy who got badly
hurt but didn't die; a Pyrrhic victory."

~~~
yuhong
PCs were also a race to the bottom. I wonder what would happen if Intel or AMD
bought Compaq or another PC manufacturer maybe in the 1990s and dominated the
PC market by the mid-2000s.

~~~
hga
Intel probably wouldn't have been able to sustain the DNA required to also be
successful in that market, and they would have had severe antitrust problems.
AMD would have had the same first problem (but probably worse since they've
historically had much poorer management), and would have likely lost a lot of
their business selling to other PC manufacturers they'd now be directly
competing with.

------
igravious
fta: > but Intel failed to unseat market leader ARM.

Intel should, if anything, license ARM designs and make the best slices of
silicon out there for ARM. What I'm saying is, talking about unseating is the
wrong way to think about ARM.

~~~
kps
Intel is an ARM architecture licensee.

~~~
igravious
Ah, I should have checked. I did read through the ARM architecture page† on
Wikipedia and it does not mention that fact. It does say,

"In 1994, Acorn used the ARM610 as the main central processing unit (CPU) in
their RiscPC computers. DEC licensed the ARM6 architecture and produced the
StrongARM. At 233 MHz, this CPU drew only one watt (newer versions draw far
less). This work was later passed to Intel as a part of a lawsuit settlement,
and Intel took the opportunity to supplement their i960 line with the
StrongARM. Intel later developed its own high performance implementation named
XScale, which it has since sold to Marvell."

I'm not sure how much sense it makes for Intel to be both an ARM licensee and
develop Atom.

†
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Core_licence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_architecture#Core_licence)

------
fiatmoney
Wow, this is really surprising. Atom chips were steadily increasing their
value from generation to generation and were within spitting distance of ARM
in terms of mojo / watt and power consumption. Intel's process advantage
should really let them dominate that market.

I wonder if this implies we'll see ARM chips built in Intel fabs?

~~~
StringyBob
Probably not the type of chip you meant, but as an example here's an ARM CPU
on the Intel 14nm process:
[https://www.altera.com/products/soc/portfolio/stratix-10-soc...](https://www.altera.com/products/soc/portfolio/stratix-10-soc/overview.smartphone.highResolutionDisplay.html)

------
api
I don't necessarily think this is a bad decision. Intel currently dominates
high performance computing and data center chips, and if they lose that edge
they will really lose.

Maybe it makes sense for them to instead double down on that and try to
maintain their lead in those areas. Mobile markets are high volume but lower
margin.

------
cageface
It seems like with Intel's superior process and production scale they could
easily enter into the ARM market. Is it just not profitable enough for them to
do this? Or are their fabs too committed to producing x86 chips? Missing out
on mobile entirely seems like a pretty big strategic mistake.

~~~
alrs
Intel bought DEC's ARM business in 1997, tried doing ARM, and then gave up.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM)

~~~
toyg
To be fair, it was a different world (almost 20 years ago... I feel old).

It doesn't matter anyway -- after several years concentrating their immense
muscle on battery savings and integrated graphics, they have caught up a lot.
CoreM / Skylake can fit most use-cases where ARM stuff would be called for, at
least in the high-margin market.

------
educar
This is a little puzzling given their 5G investment at mwc -
[https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/intel-
accelerates-p...](https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/intel-accelerates-
path-to-5g/)

------
joezydeco
So is Edison still on?

~~~
hga
That or an article linked in a side bar said they were still chasing the IoT.

~~~
melling
Edison is based on Atom?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Edison](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Edison)

~~~
kps
No, the Quark SoCs are 486ish cores, not Atom.

~~~
Narishma
Edison has both Atom and Quark cores.

------
turnip1979
Dumb question ... Broxton = Atom? So Atom will be no more?

~~~
Sanddancer
No. The Atom core's going to be used pretty heavily, just not as a
tablet/phone core. It's just been moved to pretty much solely the entry level
laptop/desktop market.

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stesch
Isn't the HoloLens using an Intel Atom processor?

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pier25
Isn't Core M a tablet chip?

