As the "big brother" on the PC side, Intel finally made up its mind last year to enter the mobile field again. However, in the face of the mobile market that has been occupied by the ARM camp, Intel is still somewhat "unacceptable." A few years ago, Intel Empire had already suffered a loss and ended by selling the mobile processor business; this time, in the face of the declining PC market, the Empire began to attack the mobile market. In terms of technology and function, Intel has overtaken ARM, so what if the market is not a technical indicator war, can the entire product model gain a firm foothold in the mobile market? Hang!
It is rumored that TSMC and Samsung Electronics are competing for orders for Apple's A7 chip. Institutional investors believe that Intel may obtain 10% of Apple's A7 chip orders.
After catching up in 2012, Intel has already caught up with rival ARM in technology, function and energy consumption. However, the mall has never been a simple battle for technical indicators. Intel, which has lost its lead, is still not optimistic in the face of ARM, which already has billions of smart device markets and has formed a complete ecosystem. Choosing to be an Apple foundry may be one of the important means by which the Intel curve saves the country and seeks to revitalize the mobile market.
From the auto-cut mobile processor business in 2006, and its re-entry into the mobile communications market in 2012, Intel, the "PC overlord", did not go well in the mobile field-taking advantage of Intel ’s fierce battle with AMD, it developed rapidly. The mobile Internet market has been divided up by ARM architecture chip makers such as Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Texas Instruments. According to relevant information, in the mobile application processor market, Intel's share is less than 1%.
In 2012, Intel launched 10 X86-based smartphones worldwide, and the market response was flat. This is not a good start.
However, for the ARM camp, the energy of Intel, or the energy of X86 architecture, is still not to be underestimated for more than 40 years in the PC world. Faced with shrinking demand in the PC market, Intel, which has huge production capacity, is also inevitable for mobile shifting. Although giants such as Apple and Samsung are designing their own ARM architecture chips, Intel will still attack the mobile market. For Intel, this is a war that must be fought and can not afford to lose.
But, when mobile giants like Apple and Samsung do n’t play with Intel, how can Intel win?
No longer inferior to ARM chips
In May 2013, Intel CEO Otellini is about to retire. It is said that the new CEO may be selected from outside, including Motorola ’s former CEO Sanjay Jiha has been listed as one of the candidates. During Otellini's period, Intel completely ruled the PC market, and because of Otellini's businessmen and short-sightedness, he lost the mobile market.
When Apple made iPhones and iPads, Jobs first hoped to cooperate with Intel, and the father of iPod, Fader, firmly protested because Intel chips consume too much power, and Apple finally chose ARM chips. This move caused Intel to lose the mobile market.
Compared with Intel's X86 architecture chips, ARM's biggest feature is that it uses a streamlined architecture and strives to maximize performance at a certain power consumption. Striving for the optimal ratio of performance and power consumption is always the goal of mobile devices. However, in the case where this problem cannot be solved perfectly, people choose to sacrifice performance to ensure the endurance of mobile devices. It can be said that the emergence of the ARM architecture makes portable smart devices possible: its performance can meet people's diverse content needs; its energy consumption is also low enough to ensure the endurance of mobile devices.
At the same time, ARM's profit model also provides strong support for its occupation of the mobile market-ARM does not produce chips itself, but authorizes chip design solutions to other chip manufacturers. Using this "development-authorization-design-subcontract production-assembly production", ARM quickly completed market occupation. Intel, determined to enter the mobile chip market, must first face such a situation: almost all its opponents are ARM partners.
And Intel insists on a closed product development-production process, from chip design to product delivery, completely completed by itself. Following Moore's Law, relying on tremendous investment and unremitting efforts, Intel has made a bloody path among many chip manufacturers and unified the PC chip market with the X86 architecture, becoming an unshakable giant in the PC world. In this process, Intel has two secrets, one is advanced technology, and the other is "forward compatibility".
Each of the chips that Intel has introduced and succeeded in the market is almost one generation ahead of its competitors in technology; at the same time, they all have the characteristics of "forward compatibility". The so-called forward compatibility means that the new version of the assembly can run in the old version. This ensures that even if they are updated quickly, old customers can try new content. In this way, the "Wintel" empire achieved unprecedented success. It is precisely through the cooperation of forward compatibility and process update that Intel has left competitors such as DEC, SUN and IBM far behind, unifying the PC and server fields.
However, following forward-compatible Intel also makes its chips more and more complex-it requires an additional number of transistors to ensure forward-compatible implementation. This is still easy to solve in the field of PCs and servers, but as far as mobile devices are concerned, extra transistors mean extra power consumption.
The biggest difference between ARM and X86 is that the former has a simple architecture but low energy consumption; the latter has strong computing power but is very energy-intensive. Now, if Intel wants to enter the mobile market, it will inevitably encounter energy consumption problems. As long as the energy consumption problem is resolved, depending on its computing advantages and forward-compatible features, Intel may also cause considerable trouble to ARM
Intel ’s approach to energy consumption is straightforward: process and technology.
Through the continuous advancement in wafer technology, Intel has brought chip manufacturing technology into 22nm, 14nm and 10nm process technology will also be available in the next few years. Even, Intel has a crazier idea: through the continuous demand for the process, so that "meaningful computing" is approaching zero energy consumption. And the timetable given by Intel shows that if there are no technical obstacles that are difficult to overcome, this technology will be implemented in 2020-with zero energy consumption and high performance, what could be more exciting than this?
At this year's MWC, Chen Rongkun, general manager of Intel Mobile Communications China, announced the new mobile platform solution "Clover Trail +". In terms of power consumption, "Clover Trail +" can already be compared with ARM, and the next-generation Atom series chip "Bay Trail" is also under development and will be available at the end of the year.
With the new mobile platform solution "Clover Trail +", Chen Rongkun is very confident: "Our mobile product line must be successful in China."
How to persuade users to change the court?
Can Intel, which has overcome energy consumption barriers, win in the battle with ARM? At the beginning of the year, Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs mentioned to reporters, "Intel is just getting started in the mobile market, it has manufacturing advantages, and these have not yet fully played out in the mobile field." Indeed, for the ARM camp's big brother Qualcomm As far as Intel is concerned, the threat may not be as good as MediaTek.
Compared with Intel, ARM is a veritable "little brother". According to the news in February 2013, ARM's revenue for the fourth fiscal quarter of 2012 was US $ 262.8 million and net profit before tax was US $ 125.9 million. At the same time, Intel's Q4 financial report showed that Intel's total revenue was 13.5 billion US dollars and net profit was 2.5 billion US dollars.
However, it is such a seemingly weak opponent that poses a huge challenge to Intel. ARM ’s CFO TIm Score said, “In 2012, three-quarters of Internet-connected devices used ARM-based processors as their main chips.â€
The market has basically been occupied. Intel had to take the "PC overlord" shelf, drag it to a group of PC brothers, and then look for second-tier terminal manufacturers in emerging markets to launch multiple "Intel inside" smartphones in one go. However, as a newcomer who has only been in the business for a year, Intel's partners are not as good as ARM in terms of quantity or quality.
Being able to sell products directly and have its own manufacturing plant, in terms of capacity, Intel's advantage is unmatched by ARM. However, ARM's open mode also has its own characteristics: after improvements by manufacturers in different links, ARM can research the most suitable solution for the hardware according to different devices, so that the mobile devices under its architecture are different from each other- -This difference is more obvious in different terminal vendors.
It is through this form of open cooperation that the technical threshold for mobile chips has been greatly reduced, which has allowed almost all chip manufacturers to become ARM partners. Nowadays, mobile phone terminal manufacturers have become accustomed to ARM, and the consumer market agrees with the ARM architecture. At the same time, manufacturers such as Samsung and Apple, which have huge market shares, have chosen the ARM architecture without exception. Faced with a long list of members in the "ARM camp", Intel suddenly broke in and looked around, all enemies-it is not easy to promote X86 in this market.
Therefore, Intel took a fancy to the emerging markets at the bottom of the pyramid, and tried to increase market share by promoting low-end models in emerging markets. By entering the emerging markets, focusing on low-end models and avoiding the main battlefield of ARM, Intel is actually in the field where pressure is still low, to cultivate power, while waiting for the opportunity-Intel hopes to use advanced technology to develop as soon as possible In the process of leading the opponent's chip, in the case of comparable power consumption, to achieve "counterattack" with performance advantages.
However, Intel's current dilemma is that it has not outperformed its opponents too much, nor has it a good way to show its advantages. In the face of a market that has been completely divided, and want to become famous in one battle, Intel must make flagship products that are "much better than ARM". Although the energy consumption problem has been overcome, the "Intel Inside" mobile phone has not achieved high achievements in the user experience. When the ARM ecosystem has been formed and rules mobile devices in a cheap, high-quality and customizable way, if there is no strong enough attraction, technology companies have little chance of abandoning the old.
The more serious question is, how big is the smartphone market? According to Cisco's forecast, by 2016, the number of global mobile devices will exceed 8 billion-by then, the market may be saturated. A saturated market is definitely not a gathering place for capital. And when Otellini retires, can the new CEO complete the strategic layout and seize enough market share in less than three years? There is not much time left for the old empire.
It is foreseeable that in the next one or two years, the ARM architecture will still be the main force of mobile communication chips, and if Intel does not achieve the subversive improvement of the product on the X86 architecture, the chance of turning over is still slim.
Faced with the mobile market that has been occupied by the ARM camp, Intel is still somewhat "unacceptable."
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