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Intel has exited the smartphone System-on-a-Chip business, at least temporarily, with the cancellation of Broxton and SoFIA products:
Given the significance of this news we immediately reached out to Intel to get direct confirmation of the cancelation, and we can now confirm that Intel is indeed canceling both Broxton (smartphone and tablet) and SoFIA as part of their new strategy. This is arguably the biggest change in Intel's mobile strategy since they first formed it last decade, representing a significant scaling back in their mobile SoC efforts. Intel's struggles are well-published here, so this isn't entirely unsurprising, but at the same time this comes relatively shortly before Broxton was set to launch. Otherwise as it relates to Atom itself, Intel's efforts with smaller die size and lower power cores have not ended, but there's clearly going to be a need to reevaluate where Atom fits into Intel's plans in the long run if it's not going to be in phones.
[...] Thus Intel's big wins in the smartphone space have been rather limited: they haven't had a win in any particularly premium devices, and long term partners have been deploying mid-range platforms in geo-focused regions. Perhaps the biggest recipient has been ASUS, with the ever popular ZenFone 2 creating headlines when it was announced at $200 with a quad-core Intel Atom, LTE, 4GB of DRAM and a 5.5-inch 1080p display. Though not quite a premium product, the ZenFone 2 was very aggressively priced and earned a lot of attention for both ASUS and Intel over just how many higher-end features were packed into a relatively cheap phone.
Meanwhile, just under two years ago, in order to address the lower-end of the market and to more directly compete with aggressive and low-margin ARM SoC vendors, Intel announced the SoFIA program. SoFIA would see Intel partner with the Chinese SoC vendors Rockchip and Spreadtrum, working with them to design cost-competitive SoCs using Atom CPU cores and Intel modems, and then fab those SoCs at third party fabs. SoFIA was a very aggressive and unusual move for Intel that acknowledged that the company could not compete in the low-end SoC space in a traditional, high-margin Intel manner, and that as a result the company needed to try something different. The first phones based on the resulting Atom x3 SoCs launched earlier this year, so while SoFIA has made it to the market it looks like that presence will be short-lived.
Here is a previous story about the SoFIA program.
Related:
Intel Skylake & Broxton Graphics Processors To Start Mandating Binary Blobs (only Broxton story on the site)
Intel to Cut 12,000 Jobs
(Score: 1) by Francis on Sunday May 01 2016, @01:17PM
I think cell phones got away with that in large part because desktop applications don't really work very well on handhelds without modifications anyways. They had a huge opportunity when the various OS manufacturers were starting the handhelds to write something that wouldn't be bound to a specific processor.
They're also decades further down the road when they started, so they've got a much better idea about what's going to be possible in the future. 3D, Virtual Reality, various sensors, projectors, you can do a lot of really cool stuff now, it's largely just a matter of figuring out how to do that stuff in a phone.
Whereas when Intel designed the x86 instruction set, a lot of that stuff was so far off in the distance that I doubt they planned for that to be done on a related processor.
The other thing is that Intel has grown to depend upon antitrust violations at key points when they fall behind in order to keep up. I doubt very much that they'd still be in business if they hadn't been paying system's integrators to not use AMD products and hadn't otherwise interfered with competition to their benefit. It's kind of interesting how every time AMD is well ahead of Intel, that Intel finds some illegal way of preventing them from getting much out of it.