It's better than that. Intel was an ARM licensee for a brief period after they acquired StrongARM from DEC and developed Xscale. If they had any vision that could have been leveraged into a best in class low power mobile platform.
Intel can sell x86 with 50-80% margin + 80-90% market share.
Or sell arm compete with TW, China ARM licensee at 10-25% margin for 5-15% market share. And you don't have any competitive advantage like Qualcom with IP on CP.
>If you're Intel CEO, how are you going to choose?
Both. There is no reason why it is one or the other. And this is not just in hindsight, I said this even before BK becomes the CEO.
In the short term, or at leats in the terms of CEO thinking, it is the best to concentrate on the money making platform. In the longer term, this will come back and haunt them.
> Both. There is no reason why it is one or the other.
Oh, now that's just not true.
Intel fabs were at 90+% capacity (it's why they outsourced a lot of the support chips). You would have to bump an x86 in order to produce an ARM.
This is one of those Innovator's Dilemma moments. Even IF we concede that ARM will eat x86 (and I don't concede that without a lot more evidence), there is no moment where switching from making x86's makes sense until Intel is almost near death.
That is their fault for delay in the 10nm Fab not online in Israels, not building more capacity in existing Fabs, and not doing better Forecasting. All of these happened during BK's tenure.
Intel Custom Foundry was a little late, but that was 2012, they have achieved little to nothing during its 5 years of existence. The point is, if you do not have a product offering that is inside those 1.5B annual shipment of Tablet / Smartphone SoC, Modem Baseband and WiFi, at least offer to Fab those product line since Intel and x86 is not competing in that segment. Instead Samsung and TSMC got that market volume and is now able to sustain the leading edge R&D.
20 years ago they could have beat Qualcomm who was still just doing phone backends. They could have bought them too. Maximizing profit on all the things can leave exposed when you ignore emerging markets you could have been the dominant player on.
