
Intel's Changing Future: Smartphone SoCs Broxton and SoFIA Officially Cancelled - dbcooper
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10288/intel-broxton-sofia-smartphone-socs-cancelled
======
ChuckMcM
Wow, and ouch. I give them credit for ceding the ground for now but this is
another sign of how much ARM has been encroaching on Intel's space.

Scott McNealy said early on that retreating to the Data Center was where
companies went to die. And at the time was selling workstations on desks and
crushing DEC, then when that business got eaten away by Windows the data
center was where Sun was going to make its stand. And then it died.

I think a lot about what the fundamental principle is here. How do seemingly
invincible forces in the market get killed by smaller foes? Christensen's
Dilemma doesn't really explain it, it describes it, but it doesn't tease out
the first principles behind it.

At this point I think it is a sort of Enterprise "blindness" which was
something Steve Kleiman at NetApp shared with me. A company can be so good at
something that they focus all their energy on it, even when it is vanishing
beneath them. Consider a fictional buggy whip company when automobiles came on
the scene, right up until the last day they made buggy whips they could be the
best whip you could buy, all the secrets to making a great buggy whip where
mastered by this company, all the "special sauce" that made them last longer,
work in a wide range of conditions, and yet the reality was that the entire
reason for buggy whips existing was evaporating with the loss of carriages. By
focusing on what the company was the undisputed leader in doing, they ride the
wave right into the rocks.

When the company is so stuck on what used to work for them, even after the
technology has moved on, they become blind to the dangers. Challenging to
watch, even harder if you feel like you can see the train wreck coming. And of
course soul crushing if nobody driving the bus will listen to the warnings.

The next sign I'm waiting for is Apple to ship a Macbook laptop with their own
64 bit ARM processor in it. Then it gets really really interesting if AMD can
pull off an ARM server chip, going where Intel won't.

~~~
PhantomGremlin
_How do seemingly invincible forces in the market get killed by smaller foes?_

Back around 2009 I had a little visibility into Intel's mobile efforts. My
information is way out of date, but unless Intel management changed
drastically, my hunch is that this explanation is still valid.

At the time Intel had already introduced some mobile silicon, but there was
little uptake. So they were iterating; they wanted to improve for each
succeeding generation. But they had a kind of design-by-committee process. One
person or group wanted a certain feature, another group wanted something else,
a third group though that yet another thing was important. And so on. Sorry if
that sounds vague, I won't write anything more specific.

The end result was a chipset that had a lot of features. A LOT OF FEATURES.
Gold plated features. But that meant higher power consumption than the
competition, higher cost, larger form factor, longer time to market.

At the time, there was nobody like a Steve Jobs running Intel mobile. Nobody
had the intuition and the gravitas to say: "we want A, B, C, but not D, E, F.
Quit wasting time and build the fucking thing! I need something that's
competitive!"

This is similar to something that an Intel chip design manager told me about
30 years ago. His view was that there were really only two ways to motivate
engineers:

1) show them a path to lots and lots of money. This is the path that startups
take. Focus, build something quickly, get rich or die trying.

or 2) engineers will "play in the sand", they will add in all sorts of neat
features that they think are really cool, that they want to implement, that
they are convinced are important. But all that crap isn't very useful to the
average user, it just results in complex designs that miss their market window
in so many ways.

Intel probably continued to choose path 2 for their mobile efforts.

Intel didn't fail because of any variation on The Innovator's Dilemma. They
understood that mobile was the future, that it was very important. They
expended tremendous amounts of capital trying to "win" in mobile. They just
didn't have the organizational structure that let them execute.

~~~
_yosefk
The thing is, it's not gonna help to have a "Steve Jobs" nor will any degree
of understanding the competition help if you're used to ship an expensive
high-margin product and along comes a low-margin competitor. Neither ARM nor
TSMC attempt to make the kind of profit that Intel is used to making and this
is the real problem for Intel; even if it wins 75% of the mobile market by
shipping adequate chips at adequate prices, the profits won't be anywhere near
what it gets in the PC market. (Of course this is just as true about Apple as
it is about Intel, and I think their latest quarter results testify to it just
as much as Intel's. Actually, the surprising thing about Intel (which is not
true about Apple, Steve Jobs and all) is the degree of their dominance in the
market for anything resembling a PC - a computer where you can get work done;
one might expect both AMD and non-x86-based workstation products to do better,
certainly Android is a bigger threat to iPhone/iPad than any competitor ever
was to Intel in the PC space.)

~~~
petra
Something about margins I don't get: Intel's Gross margin is about 80%. In the
fabless ecosystem, the fab usually gets 50% and quallcom is usually above 50%
, something even 65% .

So the total combined margin is as high as Intel or more. So why does Intel
fail?

~~~
_yosefk
All of these companies sell many different products and I'd guess that their
reported overall gross margins will be different from the margins of any given
product. For instance, I rather doubt that either TSMC or Samsung get 50%
margins when making Apple's chips.

~~~
petra
In Apple's case it makes sense to lower margins to increase profits.Just
common sense. But why not in general ? why does Wall Street hates that so much
?

------
fallous
Intel has a long and unfortunate history with promising initiatives into new
markets outside their core, and then promptly cutting and running when there's
obstacles to those efforts... and I say that as a former (long ago, circa
2000) Intel employee.

Intel saw the explosion of graphics chipsets and decided to try its hand with
the i740. After initial teething pains, they designed the i752 and i754 to
address these concerns but renewed competition from AMD started to cut their
x86 margins and rather than continue on the broader product path, they ejected
the graphics business and ran back to Mama x86.

In 1999 and 2000, Intel made several substantial acquisitions in the
networking space regarding routers, load balancers, etc. They aggressively
tried to move into these markets (I know, I was a sales engineer for that line
at the time) but between AMD's Sledgehammer and the dotbomb they promptly fled
those markets as well in order to run back to x86.

I can't argue that those were poor business decisions, but I can say that
anyone depending on hardware initiatives from Intel that aren't directly
x86-related are skating on some mighty thin ice.

------
StillBored
As I mentioned elsewhere I have a baytrail tablet, and that thing is amazing.
But this is the usual corp thinking that got Intel into the trouble they are
now in. Ceding the market because they can't currently make billions from it
pretty much guarantees they won't ever make any money from it (see POWER
giving up the desktop too). Meanwhile as ARM struggles building servers they
will have all the time in the world to figure it out, as they now have an
uncontested market to fund that work.

I don't understand why intel haven't learned the history lessons from all the
other processor manufactures. As soon as you stop competing in low end markets
the low end guys build better and better products until they build a higher
end product that makes them the top dog.

I guess its because Andy Gove isn't around to kick them in the pants.

~~~
kogepathic
> As I mentioned elsewhere I have a baytrail tablet, and that thing is
> amazing.

Really? How?

I bought a Dell Venue 8 Pro, and the only advantage I can see that it has over
any ARM part is the ability for me to play x86 Steam games from 10 years ago
on it.

The sleep power consumption sucks. While I can leave an ARM-based Android
tablet with the screen off for a week, and it will still have enough charge to
be useful, my Venue 8 Pro is dead after about 24 hours in sleep mode.

Linux is still broken on Bay Trail-T. None of the wireless drivers are in
mainline, and modesetting doesn't work, so enjoy using only frame buffer
graphics. This is ~2 years after Intel launched the platform!

I haven't found any manufacturer making a Bay Trail-T tablet with dual band
WiFi, while loads of ARM based tablets are including it.

I've been looking into Cherry Trail, since the X5-Z8500 has a pretty decent
GPU, but user forums all over the internet are talking about how it goes into
thermal throttling because the fanless cooling solution that Intel has touted
to OEMs doesn't work when the chip is under heavy load for extended periods of
time.

Again, compare to pretty much any ARM based tablet (not Snapdragon 810 based)
and you won't have thermal throttling issues crippling your performance.

So, yes, Intel's tablet chips are alright for running x86 apps. I can
definitely run Office on my Venue, but then I need a mouse and keyboard to do
any real work, so why wouldn't I just buy a laptop which has longer battery
life, more RAM, and a CPU which doesn't cripple itself under load?

------
hyperpallium
Linked statement [https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/brian-krzanich-our-
str...](https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/brian-krzanich-our-strategy-and-
the-future-of-intel)

tl;dr Moore's law remains important, not because of speed or power
improvements, but cost improvements.

The cloud [servers] will grow; the internet of things [clients] will grow. So
we'll do that.

He doesn't say this, but _the smartphone soirée is over_. Imagination laying
off workers, iPhone sales down, samsung galaxy s7 sales down. Flagship
smartphones are obviously way more powerful than needed for common usages. A
$40 smartphone is now so good, it's good enough.

What's the point in intel chasing a ship that has not only sailed, but sunk?

~~~
mtgx
PC sales have also sunk. Maybe Intel should quit the PC business, too. It
seems hard to imagine they would do that now, but if 1) Microsoft didn't have
such a strangehold on PCs, and 2) if Windows wasn't so dependent on x86, we'd
be seeing ARM competition creeping up on low-end Intel chips in notebooks
already by now.

Intel is _lucky_ to have a lock-in on PCs thanks mostly to old programs being
x86-specific. Hopefully Microsoft can change this with Project Centennial, if
it's too late for Windows RT.

[https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2016/B829](https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Build/2016/B829)

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/download/details.aspx?id=516...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/download/details.aspx?id=51691)

~~~
claudius
I think even if Windows was not dependent on ARM, Intel would continue to own
the PC/notebook market for a long, long time to come. As soon as your device
is large enough to fit even a 30-Wh battery in, you can already afford to use
Intel CPUs power-consumption wise. Cost-wise, they’re still more expensive,
but so are all the other components in notebooks such that they don’t make
that big of a difference. Consumers are also okay with higher prices for
longer-lasting notebooks as opposed to smart phones which are replaced every
2-3 years.

All in all, ARM still sucks performance-wise. Yes, you can run a decent-ish
desktop with it, but you really don’t want to do anything that takes any
amount of CPU time (development, typesetting, gaming, even browsing the web
thanks to today’s JS craziness).

------
Everlag
Given that they address it in their statement, I'm interested to see how their
FPGA offerings develop in the next few years. FPGAs have a brutal learning
curve but sit in a yet unscaled power efficiency niche. Could we see FPGA VPS
in the future if Intel's backing them?

Then again, that mention is probably just to respond to concerns regarding
layoffs ~immediately after the Altera purchase.

~~~
vvanders
Usually I don't associate FPGAs and power efficiency. I know about lattice's
offerings or is there something I'm missing?

~~~
akiselev
Relative to custom silicon, yes, FPGAs are way more power hungry. However,
there are many things you can do much more power efficiently in an FPGA than
on CPU or GPGPU like video decoding/encoding, crypto, digital signal
processing, and many other real time critical systems. FPGA sits in a
price/performance niche that has high unit costs and power requirements but
little upfront investment compared to custom silicon and a little more than
general computing but with the benefit of throughput/latency

~~~
kps
Where do FPGAs sit for running neural networks? Or, does it make sense to
manufacture Field Programmable _Node_ Arrays rather than Field Porgrammable
_Gate_ Arrays?

~~~
bogomipz
Can someone explain the "intersection" of neural networks and FPGAs/GPUs. I
feel like I'm seeing this referenced a fair amount but haven't heard a good
explanation on why this hardware is attractive for these workload.

~~~
danielvf
Because neural networks use "simple" math that is massively parallelizable.
Your computer's CPU may have eight cores, but my older, mid range graphics
card has over a thousand cores.

If your work can be broken down into a thousand peices that can be computed
independently, than using a GPU can get you ludicrous speedups.

~~~
lucaspiller
This is a bit of an over simplification, because the 'cores' of a GPU aren't
really comparable to a CPU core. It's more like scaling up a factory - at a
single point on the production like you go from 1 person doing a job to 100
people doing the same job with the same tools. It means you can do more of the
same thing, but can't do 100 completely different things.

Here is a good overview:

[http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/a/17255](http://gamedev.stackexchange.com/a/17255)

------
raverbashing
I wonder how much of Intel's pain in mobile is due to the pains of the x86
platform, especially all the overengineered and legacy stuff around it (BIOS,
ACPI, chipset and bus logic, etc)

ARM has some equivalent components (bootloader, power mgm) but they're much,
much simpler.

------
m_mueller
What does this mean for Microsoft's idea for a unified Windows 10 platform?
Will they have to bury their x86 Windows 10 Smartphone plans as well?

~~~
hga
That appears to be the case, see e.g.
[http://www.pcworld.com/article/3063672/windows/the-death-
of-...](http://www.pcworld.com/article/3063672/windows/the-death-of-intels-
atom-casts-a-dark-shadow-over-the-rumored-surface-phone.html)

~~~
m_mueller
Boy, I think this is the final blow for Microsoft's smartphone ambitions.
Whatever technological advantage they would have had is now gone. Their
strategy was all over the place in terms of platform - pretty much every
version of Windows Phone AFAIK required a rewrite because of constantly
shifting grounds.

~~~
pjmlp
Not necessarily, all mobile phones are ARM based and continuum is already
here.

Yes, the rewrites were shitty.

Apple and Google also do it, but they can allow themselves to push the
developers through them.

~~~
hga
Smartphones are all about ecosystems, and as the various Microsoft efforts
there have shown, Apple and Google now have that locked up. However they don't
do the x86/Windows ecosystems in phone space and not Apple in tablet space,
and now no one will find out how much demand there was for x86 Windows smart
phones.

~~~
pjmlp
Agree, and I would actually gladly exchange my Android devices by WP ones,
given the developer experience. I really don't get where do all those PhDs at
Google work, surely not on Android dev tools.

But Microsoft might still win the space of productive tablets, as I am yet to
find one as good as the Surface.

------
ksec
But What will happen to Intel's modem business? I would love to see some
competition to Qualcomm. Broadcom have disbanded their 4G Modem and WiFi
business as well, leaving the market with very little choices.

~~~
williadc
In the article it mentions Intel is investing in 5G wireless, so the modem
team will have plenty of work.

------
watersb
Oh man, the Austin TX design group...

~~~
williadc
Sofia was primarily done by the formerly-Infineon team in Germany, though the
Austin team was merged with that group. Broxton was designed in Oregon and
Malaysia.

~~~
osivertsson
Geographically seperated teams, is that normal when developing successful
smartphone SoCs?

Or does it in general work as good as developing software at multiple sites?

I remember working with ST's IPTV chips that were designed all over Europe,
and bugs that involved the interaction between muliple hardware blocks were a
disaster to get support on.

~~~
williadc
I've never worked on a successful smartphone SoC, so I couldn't tell you. I
have worked on successful client parts (Haswell, Broadwell, Apollo Lake) that
were similarly separate and we were able to divide the work sufficiently to
make the multi-geo effort work.

------
shrewduser
a shame, i own a zenfone 2 and it's a great device. i was looking for more
from intel.

~~~
nowprovision
Me too, had this device for 12 months now, and it just flys, always put it
down to the intel cpu given how I only paid ~160usd for the device. New
samsung devices at higher price points, j5, j7 are slow dogs in comparison. so
does this mean a dead end for x86 android? Ill stick with Asus thougj given
the frequency of firmware updates, and all round solid hardware.

~~~
mtgx
Intel subsidized that chip. It was more like seeing Snapdragon 805 or whatever
was the high-end ARM chip at the time, on a $200 device, when everyone else
could only afford to put a Snapdragon 400 in such a device.

It's anti-competitive (selling chips _below cost_ \- imagine if say the meat
industry used its profits to sell milk under cost - it would take out the
"pure" milk companies), and very costly to Intel. It was losing a $1 billion a
_quarter_ back then doing stuff like that. It's not going to do it anymore.

[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-16/intel-s-4-...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-01-16/intel-s-4-21-billion-
mobile-loss-would-have-sunk-most-rivals)

~~~
nowprovision
I thought that may of been the case, that could explain why the same phone is
50% higher in price now than 12 months ago, at least in BKK. I wont lose sleep
over Intel selling chips below cost.. On the mention of diary.. milk these
offers when they come along..

------
mariusmg
Doesn't that means that CoreM is finally ready to replace Atom ? Why all the
gloom ?

~~~
ekr
Core M is in a different price bracket, it certainly can't compete price-wise
with cheap ARM counterparts.

------
based2
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/14/intel_takes_aim_at_a...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/14/intel_takes_aim_at_arduino_with_us15_breadboard/)

[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/21/xpoint_is_intels_exi...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/21/xpoint_is_intels_exit_from_nand_production_hell/)

------
educar
Similar discussion at
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11599468](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11599468)

~~~
dbcooper
The Anandtech article linked here is better.

------
TazeTSchnitzel
Oh dear, is this the death of the Windows tablet already?

Microsoft had to make a stripped-down ARM-only version of Windows, Windows RT,
because Intel's CPUs just weren't there. Then they abandoned that in favour of
full x86 Windows once Intel's CPUs got there. But now Intel is gone.

This means Windows will now only be on larger, more laptop-like devices, I
would assume? No more 7" tablets.

~~~
rchowe
It probably just means more i3/i5-based tablets, which will probably end up
being a good thing anyway, since the push to optimize for weak processors that
there was on the iOS/Android side wasn't really there on the Windows side,
since a lot of testing happened on developer workstations.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Possibly, or even m3/m5-based tablets. I have an Atom-based Windows 10 tablet
and it seriously struggles with browsing some websites without an ad blocker
installed. It can use Twitter.com or play Solitaire fine, though.

------
beagle3
Intel has been selling mobile chipsets at loss for the last few years, because
no one would touch them at break even price (and don't even think of profit.
And still hardly anyone touched them..)

So they basically cut the subsidy (which is understandable) and didn't wait
for their market segment to die as it surely would - they just killed it
immediately.

------
nimish
Interesting that this brings up aicha evens who recently left Intel after
heading up their mobile comm chip division

------
int0x80
I really think they are going to come up with something to get into the
mobile/embedded market. It is a very important market. With their experience,
fabrication process and tech they can totally rip the competence.

~~~
gcc_programmer
This is an empty statement. Let me nit pick it for you:

> With their experience In mobile/tablets? Did you read the article - there
> have only been a _handful_ of intel devices (and less cores) out there that
> intel has had a part in. Virtually every mobile phone and tablet out there
> has been ARM (including Nokia from the past). > fabrication process You
> don't need to own a fabrication process to be competitive in mobile, since
> in that market cost and power efficiency matter more than performance, so
> OEMs will stick with a process that is good enough for now and then they'll
> al move to a newer one. This is not what the market competes on. > tech Yes,
> their tech is very performant. Yes, if I want to crunch numbers I will buy
> an Intel chip. But if my mobile phone has a Xeon, it will run out of batery
> in 30 minutes. Even Atom chips are an order of magnitude less power
> efficient than cores of other companies in mobile.

So, no, they can't 'rip the competition' in mobile easily.

~~~
int0x80
I know it's a generic statement. My point is that Intel, the most important
chip vendor in the world, knows very well how to make ICs. If they know how to
make the best desktop and server CPUs, it's only a matter of will and time to
translate that knowledge and expertise to the mobile market. They also have
more and better resources (money and engineers).

------
mentos
Is the future of computing in q-bits?

------
wslh
Why doesn't Intel just buy ARM?

~~~
jokoon
Good question, my first guess would be antitrust laws/monopoly. Intel already
got bitten because they played dirty against AMD.

