One year ago, anand said the ARM vs x86 war had begun, now?

[R0H1T]

No, they will use their process lead to their advantage. Their process lead gives them higher performance, lower power consumption and higher performance/watt. On top of that, transistor cost is much lower, meaning they can put more of those faster transistors than the competition at the same price.

So Intel can offer a product at a much lower price than the competition (Qualcomm) that performs vastly superior. That's how they'll gain a huge market share. After the market has consolidated and the price wars stopped, the smartphone and tablet market will become very profitable for them (e.g. look at the HDD and RAM markets). I don't think there's anything stopping them from executing this strategy.

And here I thought they'd finally turned a corner but no apparently somethings never change, except this time I see the EU or even China stepping in if one of their major competitors goes bankrupt due to Intel's "contra revenue" tactics!

Also their "vastly superior performance" is vaporware at this point in time, the (mobile) market is not interested in 2x the lead Intel has over their nearest competitor in geekbench or 3dmark scores & certainly no one with a phone cares what 1x node their SoC runs on, display (ergo GPU) & LTE is what they're more interested in.

 

[Abwx]

@Abwx Their process already gives them leading performance/watt. Wafer costs are offset by density improvements:

For TSMC on the other hand (low density improvements + worse yields + higher wafer costs).

From the AMD AM1 review we know that all things being equal a 22nm Bay Trail has not better perf/watt than an AMD s Kabini manufactured with GF s 28nm process, granted tablets are another matter but i suspect that AMD s soon to come Mullins is using GF s 28nm as well and that it could expand in this market the good impression of the DT current variant and give a run for its money to Intel s tablets dedicated BT if it wasnt for the abnormaly and indeed sold off price of the latter , that s for the X86 products, as to know if those X86 will be competitive in respect of ARM that s another debate, Intel has decided that it s not the case hence their pricing agressivity, we ll know better for its X86 competition in one or two months.

 

[PPB]

tPR;dr

Well, I did read a bit but it was far too one sided to take seriously.

Sorry witeken.

Fixed for you.

 

[Roland00Address]

So according to digitimes Intel is pricing the lowest quad core sku at sub $5 dollars. (Bolded parts below are supposedly from the digitimes source, the non bolded part is digitimies)

Pretty much if this is true, the lowest sku is priced at wafer cost, while the higher skus will be the one ones intel makes its money on. Correct me if I am wrong, the lowest immediate upcomming sku is the Z3735 which has a 1.33 ghz clock speed, 1.58 ghz quad top turbo, 1.83 ghz dual core turbo which should put it comparable to the z3740 that you see in things like the Asus T100 and Dell Venue 8 Pro.

Intel aggressively promoting tablet CPUs in China
Cage Chao and Monica Chen, Taipei; Steve Shen, DIGITIMES [Monday 14 April 2014]
Intel has resorted to an aggressive pricing strategy to promote sales of its tablet-use processors, particularly in China, a move which apparently will take on Qualcomm and MediaTek, while ramping up its market share, according to industry sources.

Prices of Intel's mainstream quad-core tablet CPUs have dropped to below US$5, which are almost on par with those offered by China-based chipset suppliers such as Rockchip Electronics and Allwinner Technology and even below those available from Nvidia, Qualcomm and MediaTek, said the sources.

Consequently, the number of Intel-based tablets is likely to expand in a great proportion as more and more China-based brand and white-box tablet vendors are expected to use Intel's tablet CPUs to develop new products, the sources revealed.

Intel's new policy also focuses on deepening its relationship with the supply chain in China, highlighting by its recent announcement of establishing an Intel Smart Device Innovation Center in Shenzhen and a US$100 million Intel Capital China Smart Device Innovation Fund, commented the sources.

To encourage China-based tablet makers to use Intel's CPUs, the chipset vendor is offering assistance in terms of design, technology and marketing, the sources indicated.

Intel's offerings will be particularly attractive to white-box tablet makers as they can optimize low-priced chipsets and advanced technologies to roll out competitive models for the entry-level segment, added the sources.

Intel aims to ship 40 million tablet CPUs in 2014, including entry-level Bay Trail family and SoFIA 3G platform products, the sources noted.
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20140414PD201.html

Call out to anand on the podcast that brought this to my attention.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Digitimes is a terrible source tho 😛

 

[Roland00Address]

Digitimes is a terrible source tho 😛

You are correct, quite possibly this info is not accurate, but I have seen no other sources.

 

[tempestglen]

Intel suffering a lot loss according to 2014 1st season in mobile market.

 

[Vesku]

I'd say Intel paying out $100s of millions, "contra-revenue", to get their Atom chips in tablets is the business version of fighting a war.

 

[Homeles]

I'd say Intel paying out $100s of millions, "contra-revenue", to get their Atom chips in tablets is the business version of fighting a war.

Well Silvermont is basically a netbook processor. It wasn't built with the highly competitive tablet SoC market in mind, and its cost to implement is higher as a result.