“It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini’s voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. ‘The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I’ve ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,’ he said. ‘My gut told me to say yes.'” The world would’ve been a much different place – Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would’ve meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.
Thom, of all the things to extrapolate, an anti-Samsung “Wouldn’t the world be a better place without it” point rather than “What would Apple’s iPhone have actually been like with Intel chips?” speculation.. Did you have a bad K-Pop experience or something? ^^
You’re the one who said “better place”… Thom merely said “different”.
Well, maybe Thom wants to say what kind of ‘different’ he meant, then. Not a million miles away I still suspect from Samsung being in a less advantageous position, given the imagined ‘consequences’ if it hadn’t been able to develop its Galaxy range.
My point still stands; from a very long and wide-ranging interview, this bit of *extrapolation*, not so much regarding Intel itself but rather Samsung, is offered as part of the blurb for the article.
Would Thom himself care to unpack what stood behind the statement?
Orf.
Come on, they previously had been dependent on Motorola for the PowerPC, which ended into choosing Intel as their CPU provider. It should have been obvious to choose Intel as well for their mobile offering. Oh, sorry, had they something relevant in that matter 6 years back ? Nope.
Imagine Apple switch to Intel for it’s iPhone 6+ lineup, after all Sony do the same architectural transition to x86-64 with its PS4. Now Intel decide do raise its lineup price. How should respond Apple ? How can they ?
Putting all the eggs in the same basket is not a sane strategy either. Kudo to Apple for selecting the right options at the right time, otherwise, I guess, they wouldn’t be where they are right now.
BTW, Apple has selected the A5 and A6 CPU path, its not without foresight, I guess.
Kochise
Not 6 years back.
But 7 years back, when the negotiations would’ve occurred, Intel was still producing the XScale series of ARM chips. Had they gotten into the iPhone, Intel would probably not have sold XScale later that year.
Was the XScale strong(ARM) enough at that time ? I mean, if I recall correctly, there was no suitable GPU bundled (beside the veteran PowerVR) so perhaps many aspects were probed before selecting the right hardware platform to develop on.
Kochise
The negotiations for selling StrongARM had started way back before 2005. The original acquisition from DEC had been a rocky one, and most of the talent that came with that group had left for other companies/startups. So Intel couldn’t get rid of StrongARM fast enough.
Intel had made it clear that they did not intend to go into a low margin business like SoCs (Systems on Chip) at that time. Intel’s own road map did not have anything at the power/performance levels for mobile/phone applications until 2010 (and in fact they are still 3 years behind some of those goals).
Intel grossly miscalculated the market, as they did not expect it to explode until past 2010. They spent basically half a decade without anything to target it, and now it may be too late.
But who knows, competition is always good.
Edited 2013-05-18 16:59 UTC
Normally, yes. But now think about Intel dominating the mobile market. First more and more high end phones are using x86 chips. Intel develops software to make it easier and faster for developers to make software for x86. Now Intel has the fastest software, the fastest chips and the best transistors. Because of this even 250 dollar phones begin to use x86. Software is being developed less and less for ARM and it quickly returns to being a simple low low power chip provider. Giants like Qualcomm, Samsung and Apple stop producing CPU’s. As Intel is the only supplier of high performance chips they slow down innovation to crawl.
Same could be said about the opposite: ARM’s complete dominance.
And how would they do that? This is not meant to be rhetorical I just can’t think of a way.
Could it happen that the arm v7 instruction set becomes a monopoly? If that happens would it be as difficult to move to a new architecture as x86 to arm? Are Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple and AMD just stupid to build on arm v7 when it could all disappear after the contract runs out? I imagine at least Apple would demand a perpetual licence. What does it matter then that arm v7 has a monopoly when everybody including Intel can use it for a fair price?