Intel sets out tablet stall for Atom In reporting its third quarter financial results, Intel placed the emerging tablets device category far higher up the agenda than in previous quarters, indicating the importance of new form factors in driving growth, as PCs and cellphones both start to mature. The same trend was highlighted by the latest figures for the …
Intel may surprise me, but I can't see a x86 architecture getting close to ARM in the most important area and that is power consumption. They will certainly reduce it but the x86 architecture is a doubled edged sword for Intel. While it gives huge sales and profits in PC's, so far it has shown itself incapable of scaling down to mobile devices and unfortunately that is the growth market.
Due to its archaic CISC architecture the Atom will never match ARM's efficiency. They would need to change the architecture radically and then kiss goodbye to compatibility and wait for many people to rewrite the base software (OS, compilers...) Ain't gonna happen. Intel will just pull some tricks that will increase efficiency a bit and spin the figures. Stupid analysts, they think Intel just needs to "work on it" and somehow in their parallel universe the laws of physics don't apply but they DO.
"We will use all of the assets at our disposal to win this segment,"
Will that include continuing to strongarm (sic) your volume PC/server customers to stay in the Wintel fold, even when ARM/Linux is a better fit for a particular market segment which might be of interest to those customers (say, for example, HP or Dell)?
Will that include continuing to massively and illegally bribe companies such as Dell to stay away from AMD?
Will that include the death of chip-independence at now-Intel-owned embedded OS supplier VxWorks?
Intel are up against the wall, their toolbag has nothing valuable except desktop and server x86 and privately they know it, they've already been caught pretty much blackmailing their big customers (Dell), and it needs Intel to be watched very very very very carefully.
Snippets from
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/26/after_the_dell_settlement/ :
"Intel's rebates amounted to 38 per cent of Dell's operating profit in the fiscal year 2006"
"Intel prized Dell exclusivity so highly, it was losing its grip on reality."
"Dell was keeping competitive products away from its customers, in order to meet short term quarterly financial targets. It's remarkable how the needs of the Dell customer came way down the priority list."
These guys have got form.
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