Analyst: Intel Should Buy An ARM Chip Company
According to RBC Capital Markets analyst Doug Freedman, Intel’s current mobile strategy isn’t working, since most OEMs and device customers don’t seem to be too interested in Intel’s x86 chips for mobile. One solution that could see the company owning a significant portion of the mobile chip market quickly would be to buy an ARM chip maker such as Mediatek.
Mediatek has been a rising star in China’s mobile market over the past few years. It saw its market share double from 7.3 percent in 2007, to 14.4 percent in 2013, and it doesn’t show signs of slowing down.
In fact, Mediatek represents an increasing threat to Qualcomm globally, and it's already dominant in China because of its lower-priced processors for low- and mid-range mobile devices. Qualcomm has had to sell stock CPU cores from ARM just so it can match Mediatek's prices; otherwise, Qualcomm’s low-end chips would likely not be very competitive at that level of the market.
If Qualcomm is having a hard time pushing back on Mediatek’s growth, Intel's x86 CPUs -- which are barely present at all in the mobile market -- stand no chance at the low-end. Intel is used to higher profit margins on its chips, and having a low chip volume in the market also means its R&D costs are high compared to the revenue the company gets in return for it.
"Instead of Intel continuing to spend $4 billion-$6 billion a year to enter the market (higher end of spending range as it achieves success), hypothetically, an acquisition of MediaTek may reallocate Intel's best-in-class under-utilized fabs and financial resources to a rising star in the SoC world, solidifying MediaTek's market position," Freedman said.
Doug Freeman thinks that Intel could use the billions of dollars it spends every year to gain small percentage of the mobile chip market to acquire Mediatek instead and thereby could potentially get 30 percent of the market within another seven years. That doesn’t sound like a very exciting goal for Intel, given the expected timeframe, but it’s probably the best Intel could hope for right now.
The only problem is Intel is not particularly fond of the idea that it should be making ARM chips because the company thinks that will seriously undermine its still very profitable x86 business -- which could be a well-founded fear.
As Intel would need to keep raising the performance of its ARM/Mediatek chips to stay competitive with others in the market, it would also slowly make its x86 chips less and less relevant in more product categories (tablets, slim notebooks, low-end PCs, etc) where those ARM chips could be used.
Intel could also intentionally try to keep its ARM chips at the low-end of the market, just as it tried for years with Atom, so that it doesn’t get into low-end notebooks and cannibalize its Core i3 series of chips. However, that would be a mistake, as it would only make Intel's ARM chips less sought after in the market, and the competition would take Intel’s place in those products, anyway.
The idea that Intel should buy an ARM chip maker like Mediatek is certainly one that Intel should seriously consider, and indeed the company may well have already. But Intel also needs to remember that it owned an ARM division before (XScale), and that didn’t end very well. Before it goes ahead and buys yet another ARM company, Intel needs to figure out a strong strategy and how it can avoid repeating the mistakes that led to the failure of the Xscale division.
Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.
The ATOM is better than ARM garbage. When will people learn.
The ATOM is better than ARM garbage. When will people learn.
on straight out performance its currently equal to high end smartphone socs, but battery life is miserable compared to arm socs.
The IGPs in Intel's current SoCs are still horrible jokes though and Intel will not have anything worth writing about in that department until late-2015.
Once Intel stops slacking off on the IGP, things could definitely get scary.
Not only does it own part of Rockchip, it has signed agreements that is making Rockchip design and create Intel based x86 SoCs for future release.
So Intel is already stepping up its mobile plans, but besides that if it had to buy an ARM company it would be Rockhip not Mediatek.
Tell that to Intel's 2-3W Atom chips.
Intel has managed to bring x86 down to power budgets nobody though x86 would never fit into and Intel's ultra-low-power x86 chips perform about on par with same-power ARM chips in CPU-centric benchmarks.
The biggest problem for Intel is the large number of non-portable popular Android apps compiled using the Android/ARM NDK instead of the portable Android DK... if you buy an Intel-based Android phone or tablet, about two thirds of the most popular games are unavailable because they are ARM-NDK builds.
Not only does it own part of Rockchip, it has signed agreements that is making Rockchip design and create Intel based x86 SoCs for future release.
So Intel is already stepping up its mobile plans, but besides that if it had to buy an ARM company it would be Rockhip not Mediatek.
Oh yeah, I thought I heard something about that. Rockchip cpu's are actually pretty awesome. The RK3188 is a dirt cheap little tv box/tablet chip that does a great job. You can get little quad-core 1.6ghz RK3188's with 1GB of ram right now for $65. The RK3288 is even better, but it's pretty new to market, so prices are still a bit higher. $130 will get you a beast of a RK3288 tv box though. Rockchip is great.
Not only does it own part of Rockchip, it has signed agreements that is making Rockchip design and create Intel based x86 SoCs for future release.
So Intel is already stepping up its mobile plans, but besides that if it had to buy an ARM company it would be Rockhip not Mediatek.
Oh yeah, I thought I heard something about that. Rockchip cpu's are actually pretty awesome. The RK3188 is a dirt cheap little tv box/tablet chip that does a great job. You can get little quad-core 1.6ghz RK3188's with 1GB of ram right now for $65. The RK3288 is even better, but it's pretty new to market, so prices are still a bit higher. $130 will get you a beast of a RK3288 tv box though. Rockchip is great.
Yes indeed it is, shop around you can do better on Amazon. $50 will get you an RK3188, a quad core A9 1.8Ghz little beast with a Mali-400MP4 clocked at 600Mhz, backed by 2GB RAM and 8GB internal ROM.
There new stuff is cool, but it will be a while before this seems too slow for video streaming and web browsing. But Intel I think only cares about getting Rockchip to put Intel into tablets, don't think they care too much about the mini-PC market. Its too low end for most companies to directly target.
This is a classic case of disruptive technology: Intel can see the writing on the wall, but it is simply incapable of responding to it rationally.
Not only does it own part of Rockchip, it has signed agreements that is making Rockchip design and create Intel based x86 SoCs for future release.
So Intel is already stepping up its mobile plans, but besides that if it had to buy an ARM company it would be Rockhip not Mediatek.
Oh yeah, I thought I heard something about that. Rockchip cpu's are actually pretty awesome. The RK3188 is a dirt cheap little tv box/tablet chip that does a great job. You can get little quad-core 1.6ghz RK3188's with 1GB of ram right now for $65. The RK3288 is even better, but it's pretty new to market, so prices are still a bit higher. $130 will get you a beast of a RK3288 tv box though. Rockchip is great.
Yes indeed it is, shop around you can do better on Amazon. $50 will get you an RK3188, a quad core A9 1.8Ghz little beast with a Mali-400MP4 clocked at 600Mhz, backed by 2GB RAM and 8GB internal ROM.
There new stuff is cool, but it will be a while before this seems too slow for video streaming and web browsing. But Intel I think only cares about getting Rockchip to put Intel into tablets, don't think they care too much about the mini-PC market. Its too low end for most companies to directly target.
Yeah, I got my RK802II for $54 back in November 2013; its Mali-400MP4 pumps out about 20 gigaflops with is faster than a Tegra 3 - so it can handle pretty much most 720p encoded videos I throw at it. I wouldn't expect it to handle compressed 1080 or 4K videos. For web browsing, its zippy; I use it with a little air-mote that works quite well. I think I'll wait a bit for the RK3288's to drop to $60 or so and buy one of them. They have a Mali-T760 MP4 and produces 80 gigaflops, so will be able to handle higher quality 1080 videos, and higher if you wanted.
My two little 7" cheap Chuwi V17HD tablets use the RK3188s, and are great for having around the house for occasional surfing/streaming/movies. I can't complain for $65.. 1GB ram, 8GB storage, 1024X600 screen, 3000mah, RK3188
License GPU and CPU cores and fight back ARM.
They always can deliver more truth manufacturing technology. Why not make money?
Intel mised smartphone & tablet market. After five years of loses they will only become relatively competitive in tablet market with new gen of atoms bat not thanks to architecture bat huge engineering effort & manufacturing process. This won't help them in smartphone market and they will again totally miss wearables. To put it simple as it gets a x286 (16 bit) its bigger than cortex M4 (With DSP, full 32 bit). The x86 cores will never be competitive to ARM or ever RISC. If some smart ass wants to remained me that M series are for microcontrollers I would just remind them that x286 is not good for anything this days and its still bigger.
I don't care for Intel, I want to see fight.
Fight will bring progress & will be beneficial to users.
They have Atom Z3770/3740 now - way more perf./watt than any ARM SoC. The GPU is weaker than the ones in high-end ARM SoCs, though.
Still, you can even play games like Starcraft 2 or Xenonauts on them at 30+ fps, office work is (of course) no problem and even working in Visual Studio is fine (if you plug a display in) - that's what I use my ASUS T100 for when I'm away from my PC.
1) Intel's new SoCs kick a lot of ass (just read some Notebookcheck reviews of devices with them) and are used in many new tablets and phones, especially Lenovo and Asus. Intel doesn't need ARM, it just needs to improve x86 more like it's already doing and ARM will squeal. A few years ago people were saying that Intel won't be able to release chips that can compete with ARM on power efficiency and performance - right in your face with Bay Trail. What people don't get is that besides having tons of money, Intel has some of the brightest minds in the world working for them. And beating ARM is just a challenge for them, one that I'm confident they'll win. Just wait for Broadwell-Y and Cherry Trail. At some point current ARM makers will go bankrupt unless they're smart like nVIDIA with its K1 (especially Denver version).
BTW:
Nonsense. Their current Atoms use scaled-down Ivy Bridge GPU that performs a bit behind Adreno 320 and their new Moorefield Atoms will use PowerVR G6400 (dual core models) and G6430 (quad core models). That's the same one as in Apple A7 chip in iPhone 5S. Moorefield is coming out in Q4 this year.
And if ARM poses a real threat, they will. People tend to forget this too.
... right. So you are saying that code and compiler optimization is bad. Are you an Android developer by chance?
First Atoms failed because of poor quality of the boards they came on (had to throw away about twenty of them at work in the last two years) in case of desktops and bad form-factor in case of laptops, combined with rapid increase in hardware requirements that Windows Vista and 7 brought (primarily RAM, those damn chips always came in devices only with 1-2 GB of RAM). Windows XP worked fine on my Asus Eee PCs, but I got rid of them both because they were too small and eventually, too slow. Rome wasn't built in a day, first Atoms were a good start and Intel has learned well. They are STILL ahead of ARM, in fact even more than ever before, because there are now actual mobile devices that use Intel chips, a lot of devices. MS got tired of Windows RT and asked Intel to make chips to run x86 Windows 8 on tablets, Intel delivered
2) Mediatek is a steaming pile of garbage. Their chips might cost less than what customers perceive as Qualcomm equivalents, but perform worse, heat up more, consume more energy and have worse graphics. Moreover, they're buggy, search for "Mediatek SMS attack". Just messaging an = sign to someone with Mediatek based phone will cause it to reboot. MOREOVER, that <expletive> company refuses to release source code necessary for 3rd party ROMs like Cyanogenmod to be made for devices with their chips. It's despicable, because most stock ROMs - even pure Android, as I found out after buying a Moto G (can't even change Quick Tiles order and contents, what the heck) - are garbage and most companies abandon their devices after 1-2 years. Samsung refused to release KitKat for S3 and S3 Mini (except LTE version) because TouchWiz UI needs more than 1 GB RAM to run on KitKat. FYI: pure KitKat needs 512 MB. I'm running it on my Galaxy S1 (thanks, Cyanogenmod team) and it's smooth and stable. The only hangups I get are because of the CPU, but that's to be expected. On my GT-P6200 tablet with a stronger dual-core CPU that already doesn't happen.
TL;DR - Intel laughs at your underestimation of its potential and misinformed opinions; compared to Qualcomm, Mediatek chips run hotter, consume more power, are buggy and they won't release source code.