

Orange San Diego: Intel brings the x86 vs. ARM smartphone war to Europe - ukdm
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/130201-orange-san-diego-intel-brings-the-x86-vs-arm-smartphone-war-to-europe

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protomyth
The problem with Intel is the lack of ability to customize the SoC. Intel has
run NVidia out of the chipset market and has incentives to do the same in the
mobile market.

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ConstantineXVI
You can't customize the SoCs from nVidia/Samsung/TI/Qualcomm either.

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protomyth
but NVidia, Samsung, TI, Qualcomm, and Apple can build custom ARM SoC.

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Symmetry
And thousands of other companies too, right down to little-old 90 person Ember
where I work.

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blibble
there's not really a war at all, is there?

ARM are completely dominant in this market.

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ippisl
Intel is getting pretty close. in a benchmark of a medfield phone, battery
capacity for web browsing was just 20% lower than the best android phone
benchmarked[1].

And medfield still uses 32nm process,not the latest finfet 22nm process intel
is so proud of.

And the orange san-diego is also priced reasonably at $300.

So this looks like a fair fight.

[1][http://hexus.net/mobile/news/android/38501-intel-based-
smart...](http://hexus.net/mobile/news/android/38501-intel-based-smartphone-
lava-xolo-news-update/)

~~~
EwanToo
The real question is "How little are Intel willing to sell the CPU in this
phone for?".

A fairly up to date Cortex-A8 ARM CPU can be had for under $5 [1] and as
impressive as Intel's manufacturing base is, their profits are based on
selling CPUs at 50-100x higher prices than this.

Whatever happens, I think the coming battle between generic ARM chips and x86
is going to slash Intel's profitability.

[1] -
[http://www.ti.com/lsds/ti/dsp/arm.page?DCMP=TIHeaderTracking...](http://www.ti.com/lsds/ti/dsp/arm.page?DCMP=TIHeaderTracking&HQS=Other+OT+hdr_p_arm)

