Mobile is proving to be pretty big business and with Apple’s latest chip, the A7 already deployed in the latest round of iDevices, Intel will be facing some stiff competition in that space. Even so, Intel’s new CEO Brian Krzanich, stood behind his company’s products yesterday when fielding questions from analysts.
“If you take a look at things like transistor density and you compare, pardon the pun, apples-to-apples and you compare, say, the A7 to our Bay Trail, which is a high density 22 nanometer technology, then our transistor density is higher or more dense than the A7 is.” Krazinich said. ”It's a good product...but we do see the Moore's Law advantage from 28 to 22 nanometer as an example, when you compare dense technologies to dense technologies.”
That may be, but Apple’s A7 chip is the first 64-bit processor in a consumer smart phone, and that’s also an ecosystem where, despite some market share losses to Android, the Cupertino-based tech giant has had little trouble competing. By producing their own silicon instead of buying from one of the other fabs, Apple's been able to tailor their hardware and their software and cut out more than a few middlemen.
While it's unlikely that the latest line of Intel Atom chips or their low-power Haswell processors will be convincing Apple to convert from producer to consumer anytime soon, the fight is still on for general market share for tablets and Ultrabooks.
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