Going 28nm dosn't mena you "beat" anyone on process technology...fo them to do that...they would have to have gone 22nm.
Which is waht Intel is doing...and going 3D trigate at the same time.
They (Intel) are at leat 1½ years ahead the competition.
Yes, I stipulated process tech "for smartphones" because I knew Intel would also have 22nm Ivy Bridge out 1H 2012.
One thing that impresses me about Qualcomm is that they are able to justify the most expensive 28nm TSMC wafers before any other ARM smartphone chip designer. I am not exactly sure why this is? A pure guess would say Qualcomm's market position and overall demand allows this to happen?
In contrast, Intel appears to be delaying their cutting edge nodes for smartphone SOCs and other lower margin products (eg, Ivy Bridge celeron won't debut until 2013).
Maybe this will change in the future? But in order for this to happen I'd imagine Intel will have to build up demand for their Smartphone SOC. How this will happen I have no idea. It appears to me x86 is not a strength in this regard and therefore I have theorized non-CPU SOC techs would allow Intel to flank ARM. However, I have no clue what those non-x86 techs could be?
Maybe integration could be one of Intel's major selling points?
Take for example this iphone 4S logic board-->
http://www.ifixit.com/Teardown/iPhone-4S-Teardown/6610/2 <----That has a lot of chips on there! I count fifteen, in total, front and back. I'd imagine being able to consolidate that mess into one chip (or perhaps stacked chips in 3D configuration) would allow for a larger battery in the smartphone chassis....this in turn could enhance the run time metric (all other things being equal).
It would be interesting to see what Intel could put together at 14nm FinFET with Airmont. But like I said, what will their strategy be? How will they get developers to build up apps when I read posts claiming the Android Dalvik Virtual machine is optimized for ARM/Neon? Native Development Kit for x86 would help with performance, but where will the handset volume come from?
The way things appear to me, this whole story appears to be a classic "chicken and the egg" one. Intel needs volume to get developers interested, but volume won't happen unless developers are onboard. I guess they could throw money at the problem and sign developers, but isn't too much of that counter-intuitive to the process of making money?