Marvell Technology Group and Intel Corporation have signed an agreement for Intel to sell its communications and application processor business to Marvell for a purchase price of USD 600 million plus the assumption by Marvell of certain liabilities. Intel’s communications and application processor business develops and sells processors for handheld devices including smartphones and PDAs.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marvell_Technology_Group
Geekfact: Marvell Discovery II (MV64361) is the system controller used on the Pegasos II by Genesi.
AMD has a similar emdedded-oriented business with the MIPS archicture.
AMD has the Geode, which is x86.
They also have the Alchemy, which is Mips
No, AMD just sold the Alchemy product line to RMI.
http://www.linuxdevices.com/news/NS2039891367.html
It’s good that Alchemy has found a home that appreciates MIPS.
The XLR chips look sweet. Up to 8 cores with 4 threads each.
http://www.razamicroelectronics.com/products/xlr.htm
Well it makes sense that Intel sold the XScale to Marvell, now their slogan can be “From XScale to X-Men”!
That’s just great. Just what we need, more control of the domestic semiconductor market by those damn Chinese foreigners.
American corporations can only afford to do hard business (read: goods as opposed to services) in high-margin markets. Intel was losing money hand-over-fist in the general-purpose embedded market even as they were realizing design wins.
Marvell can translate these existing products and customers into profit because they are better positioned in high-volume, low-margin markets. The fact that they have manufacturing assets in *various* Asian countries (and actually not in China as far as I can tell) is one of the primary reasons why they can do this successfully.
Selling off low-margin businesses is an attractive way for American corporations to cut expenses without the long-term headaches associated with outsourcing.
Of course, Hannibal over at Ars will have to explain how this impacts his grand theory on The Switch… and lone behold, he refuses to believe that Intel is out of the embedded market for good:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060627-7142.html
I fail to see how a 45nm Core-based embedded part for 2008 was a key factor in Apple’s decision, because they want to move uphill in the gadgets market today. Could it be that Apple and/or Intel didn’t see this coming when they negotiated the deal?
>> Selling off low-margin businesses is an attractive way for American corporations to cut expenses without the long-term headaches associated with outsourcing.
EXACTLY… Just look at IBM for a company that’s done that for ages… Lenovo, Delphion, 14 South, Omnicluster, Hitachi’s entire HDD division… Hell, even Lexmark was once part of big blue.
Not like this is new practice for Intel either… Tarari, LanDesk… Sometimes it just helps to cut the cord to see if something sinks or swims WITHOUT being propped up by a mega-corporation. If it swims, you can always buy it back.
Oh, and that’s “Lo and behold” (Olde english slang for look), not ‘lone behold’, not ‘low and behold’… Next thing you’ll be posting about ‘mute points’ and ‘oh the humanity’.
Sorry, pet peeves, really a moot point… hell, my posting it is almost inhumane.
“That’s just great. Just what we need, more control of the domestic semiconductor market by those damn American foreigners.” – Me, after Intel got it’s hands on the Acorn Research Machine’s IP.
I know the Chinese (I mean China Chinese) are a headache, but generalising them like that is very bad image for you.
And I can celebrate that Americans are losing their strongholds in everything.
I hope that this comparison would serve to explain why Americans are not exactly welcome. Same goes for all those that go so far out to worship their homeland. And also hope that OSNews don’t turn into a sink for these messages.
So much for my theory that part of Apple’s deal with Intel included deep discounts for embedded processors…
– chrish