Why is intel getting destroyed by Qualcomm in ARM? why only snapdragon in top phones?

[Roland00Address]

Intel fixated on destroying AMD and didn't pay enough attention to mobile. By the time they had largely finished AMD off ARM was dominant in mobile and Intel was playing catch up.

Let me correct this for you.

Intel fixated on shareholder value, destroying AMD devastating AMD with better performing processors some years and cheaper prices / oem rebates in other years and superior volume to sustain market demand in all years and didn't pay enough attention to mobile. By the time they had largely finished AMD off they had left AMD wounded but purposefully kept alive so they can charge higher prices and maximizes shareholder value ARM was dominant in mobile and Intel was playing catch up did not realize how big mobile was going to be and how mobile would change computing paradigm and thus threaten intel's business model.

AMD was always the runt of the litter, it never started off with enough raw capital to compete with intel for intel even in the best years Intel Market Cap was 7x larger than AMD and often it was 10x larger or 15x larger. It was the Harlem Globetrotters vs the Washington Generals, it was theater. The only reason the AMD we know today was given birth was that IBM and other people who bought intel chips wanted two suppliers for security and for cheaper chips by them competing against each other. Sure AMD was founded in 1969 but it future was sealed when it entered in a cross license agreement with intel in 1976 and this business relationship between two competitors further expanded with the IBM 1982 deal with sharing x86 rights.

 

[ponyo]

From what I've read, it's cheaper to use Qualcomm Snapdragon LTE than your own due to the cost of LTE licensing. Qualcomm gets paid either way because they own the patents.

 

[Dribble]

Intel is all about huge profits, it does that by having huge margins which it can do by locking down x86 and forcing everyone to use the chips it wants them to use at the price Intel wants them to pay. Obviously there are limits to what Intel can charge, but they get away with charging a lot. In addition because they control the whole market they can effectively keep their fabs running at 100% all the time, this efficiency leads to lots of extra money.

ARM is almost completely the opposite - it's a tiny company that charges fractions of a dollar to use one of it's cpus, it licenses its designs to everyone who can do what they want with it and lets other actually build them. This means in mobile Intel can't control the market, can't charge huge margins, and it can't run it to Intels benefit so it's fabs always stay at 100%. Simply Intel can't make the huge profits in mobile they require to keep their share holders happy so it's not a good market for them. In mobile all the money is made in the end device (e.g. iPhone) not in the chips in it (e.g. A8), in desktops/laptops all the money is in the parts (e.g. the Intel cpu + nvidia gpu) not so much in the end device which gets a small markup.

The real danger to Intel is ARM is seeping into other markets (e.g. servers) which breaks Intel's strangle hold, and hence their ability to make excessive amounts of money.