Intel's tablet CPU share to DROP: analyst Researchers at Taiwan's Digitimes have bad news for Intel: it just isn't going to sell many chips for mobile devices. Intel's thrown a lot of time, money and effort at mobile devices, but its efforts have resulted in red ink, a re-org to combine mobile and desktop products, and rumours of imminent layoffs. Digitimes now says …
Embrace, extend...
Put ARM logic inside your x86 silicon and use power management to switch off the x86 bits when you want to run in tablet mode. Switch to x86 when you need x86 apps which can do heavy lifting.
That would help slow demand for ARM to grow larger-power chippery.
That's the only reason they had showed some success there. Go look up "contra revenue", that's how Intel represented it on their books. Basically they charged people the normal price, but had rebates that made the chips essentially free. That way they could claim to be selling tons of mobile SoCs for tablets and hoped that by forcing app writers to port to x86 Android it would eventually become self-sustaining. Guess they were wrong, and just threw away a few billion dollars of their shareholders money.
Just promote/build PC-like tablets where you can install any operating system you'd like and you'd have a competitive product. There is no market for x86 Android devices, the advantage of the x86 platform always has been that you can get whatever OS you want. You buy an x86 device and can be sure that, since it's nearly 100% documented, you can install whatever operating system you want for the next 10 years.
Intel did have some interesting tablet experiments, but those had proprietary graphic chips inside... which meant that the only advantage of having a x86 tablet was gone and you were limited to a very narrow band of versions of Windows to run on that device.
Intel has spent Way too much effort trying to make Windows on a tablet be a thing. It is not going to be a thing, and it isn't in Intel's best interest to try to push this stone up the hill. Microsoft is not a loyal partner, and spending on this disproportionately to its promise is expending Intel capital for the benefit of Microsoft shareholders. That is not the purpose for that money.
People want Android tablets and devices. 1.7 billion of them this year alone. Intel needs to quit treating Android like it's a temporary fad or a niche market, with second class gimped platforms that are basically defeatured Windows devices, if they want to move volume.
Christmas is coming, so they had best step lively. It only comes once a year.
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