I feel like this is the exact opposite of what they should be doing.
They should start producing ARM chips. They could finally get a piece of the smartphone market, which would not cannibalize their x86 sales (which I assume is the reason why they have refused to use ARM since the sale of xScale).
A lot of people don’t remember that Intel was a huge early ARM licensee. If you were building a smart mobile device 25 years ago, you were probably seriously considering the Intel StongARM SoC. They then followed up on this with the more advanced ARM XScale family of SoCs, which you’d likely use if wanted to build a ARM battery-powered smart device in the early 2000s. Background per Wikipedia:
> The StrongARM is a family of computer microprocessors developed by Digital Equipment Corporation and manufactured in the late 1990s which implemented the ARM v4 instruction set architecture. It was later acquired by Intel in 1997 from DEC's own Digital Semiconductor division as part of a settlement of a lawsuit between the two companies over patent infringement. Intel then continued to manufacture it before replacing it with the StrongARM-derived ARM-based follow-up architecture called XScale in the early 2000s.
However, after developing and manufacturing these for nine years, Intel exited this business by selling their ARM unit to Marvell. Intel was developing its own “low power” x86 chip, the Atom, and decided to put all its mobile eggs in that basket, which unfortunately was never as low power as comparable ARM designs. I suspect Intel also saw that the number of licensees in the ARM market was growing and competition along with it, their value-add wasn’t that great, and their margins were necessarily smaller due to the ARM licensing fees.
I remember they, at some point, sold their perpetual license (was it with the Marvel deal?). Before that, IIRC, they didn’t need to pay volume-based licensing to make their ARM variants.
The problem is that the barrier to entry to producing ARM processors isn't that high. ARM will allow anyone who is paying the licensing fee to become a licensee, and then you can build at TSMC or Globalfoundries or any other fab that will take you.
Intel can't compete in that market. The margins are too low: they're organized and staffed to a higher margin business. They're used to the high operating margins of x86. Now that their competition (mainly AMD) has become competent in the past ten years and x86 is decreasing in importance, they're losing their main competitive advantage.
> The margins are too low: they're organized and staffed to a higher margin business.
Intel has a massive fab capacity problem right now, in that their fabs aren't being utilized. Doing manufacturing of a high-volume product is exactly what they need, and if that high volume product is their own - all the better.
If they can’t build decent x86 chips when they only have a single competitor switching to an inferior architecture (in the sense that it would require massive investment for it to catch up with x86) with no entry barriers for new competitors would be one of the most absurd things they could ever do.
Are there any US fabricators of ARM chips? Any fabricators in any Western nation? If not, Intel could have tapped into the markets for defense and national security.
First, how does selling stock prevent them from doing that? Second, switching to Arm doesn't automatically give them a competitive microarchitecture for smartphones.
Making ARM would make very little sense. In x86 they have to differentiate against AMD. With ARM they need to differentiate and compete with the whole rest of the industry.
It’s also symbolic - Intel’s goal is to outcompete ARM (and AMD, Nvidia) in personal computers and the datacenter market. Divesting from ARM Holding sends a signal there is no upside for Intel coming from ARM’s progression up the processor chain.
Too late for that. Smartphone SoCs is a low margin business that controlled by Qualcomm (or in-house like Apple, Google and Samsung to some extent) on the high-end and it would absurd for Intel to try and compete for the low-end/budget market.
Yeah, they had the chance to dominate the ARM market with XScale but that ship has long sailed.
Also how is having a small, insignificant stake in ARM itself related to this anyway?
> But did you know there are many new core designs every year, and that very few of them are from ARM?
Really? It took years for Qualcomm to become competitive with ARM’s cores again. Besides them and Apple what else is there? (Ampere I guess, but they are still insignificant and in an entirely different segment)
They should start producing ARM chips. They could finally get a piece of the smartphone market, which would not cannibalize their x86 sales (which I assume is the reason why they have refused to use ARM since the sale of xScale).