Say you're the world's largest producer of desktop processors, you've got a ton of cash ($16.3 billion to be exact) burning a hole in your pocket, and you're watching the entire mobile industry grow into a monster before your very eyes with virtually no skin in the game. Sure, you've got
MeeGo and
Moorestown up your sleeve -- but considering that they're distant underdogs with no global domination strategy (or product, for that matter) in sight, it might be time to play some hardball, yeah? CFO Stacy Smith commented this week that the company is "looking at what [it believes] can accelerate [its] progress" in the smartphone game -- and, more broadly, the consumer electronics game -- and that it "can and will deploy capital" if it sees something it likes, just as it did with its
Wind River Systems buy last year. Intel has had shockingly little relevance in the race to dominate the pocket ever since it offloaded XScale to Marvell a few years back; is it time for these guys to embrace ARM again, or can they find a way to put x86 cores in
devices that people like?
posted April 21st 2010 12:49PM
Can't wait for some Intel goodness in our phones :)
@Skwidwerd
Intel cannot get into the smartphone or tablet game for one reason. They have zero ability in the graphics arena. They will always be 3 to 4 years behind in graphics technology. With great difficulty, they may be able to produce a CPU to rival ARM in about 4 years (by which time it may be too late) .. but they'll never ever have a GPU that performs at the levels of current smart phone GPUs made by others.
@Skwidwerd Intel NEEDS to buy Palm and license a perfected WebOS+perfectly matched mobile Intel chip to go with it. That would secure its as top dog... basically the wintel of the smartphone market. Everybody wants the iPhone+A4 chip combo, however this tailor made package would destroy that in terms of performance, and destroy all the poorly matched Qualcomm+WinMo/Andriod offerings to date. OEMs would salivate at the opportunity to buy a pre-perfected chip+OS combo that already takes advantages of every feature they each have to offer. Imagine full hardware acceleration and awesome battery life for just about everything the OS can do.
@JS So, rather than saying ever, wouldn't it be more prudent to say they need to be more cooperative with graphics chips manufacturers? It'd take a change in strategy/culture but still, it's different from saying "they can't" (unless I'm missing something, but that's part of the point of the reply).
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I would love to see intel get their chips into phones but they need to make a chip that actually is good and doesn't sucks batteries dry. I think ARM may be a better direction to go with them.
Can't wait for Intel's massively anti-competitive practices tries to push ARM out of the picture with less efficient x86 processors :)
Intel should buy Palm
@MishkaGreen
Anybody should buy Palm, but since everyone knows that it has no hope of surviving as it is, it is now clear that all the vultures are already gathering waiting for it to become a corpse.
That way they will be able to grab for cheap and share among themselves the juicy bits and leave the rest to rot.
White knights are hard to come by these days.
@Plexus Well said, Sir!
@Plexus No plexus, they NEED to buy Palm and license the OS along with a tailor made chip offering. That's an untapped market that no one offers, and that no one actually does except for Apple, who only does it for itself. OEMs wouldn't have to worry about compatibility and managing things like battery life and 3D accelleration. They'd just have to design cool cases, and stick the latest greatest storage drives, cameras, ect into the devices.
@Luxury Guy That's also a good point, too. I just want to see some more WebOS devices out there and if Intel uses their technology to whip WebOS into shape it could lead to some exciting advances in mobile tech.
@Luxury Guy
Even those who are convinced that what you're sayng makes sense and (more importantly) makes money, are gonna wait for "the right moment to buy" . In the specific case of Palm all analysts and pros have agreed (tacitly or not) that the "best moment " is gonna be just after the death of their pray.
Which makes a lot of sense on a purely monetary point of view: Palm has stuff they all covet but it pretends to be payied for it, but once it will have died (and all know it's gonna be soon) its bargaining position will be nonexistent.
Besides different voulturs crave different bits of the soon to be carrion, so all the players in the game know that the best move they can do is just sit on a nearby branch and wait for the inevitable to happen.
If one would make a move before, he knows that he will be spoiling the feast for everyone, including himself.
One of the first things I learned in Wall Street is that most (nearly all) company are worth more (to "financial investors" aka speculators) once dismembered than when they are whole functioning organisms.
If a prime company , with lots of meat still on its bones, is doing the favor of dieing on its own , to interfear with this process on the Street would be considered financial madness and socially unacceptable behaviour.
I'm so certain of what I say that I have already put my money where my mouth is, and judjing by the prices of related futures options , evryone and his dog is doing doing the same thing.
@Plexus "to interfear with this process on the Street would be considered financial madness and socially unacceptable behaviour." HAHHAAH, socially unacceptable behavior, that's more than a paradox from the street where it's dog eat dog. Yes, there is an ability to collude without like-minds having to discuss how to do it, hence not technically colluding or even unethical. But game theory comes in before this where, since the parts are more valuable than the sum of the whole, the first one to get in there gets to chop the company up how they see fit and take the profit/cut-out-the-fat.
I'd bet my money there are multiple suitors, but yes, of course they are waiting for 2 things. It to make (more) financial sense for them, and to not bid before they think they actually need to bid.
lol loving the KIRF 'n Logo Engadget!!!!!
This could get interesting.
They clearly have enormous resources and talent, and yet they aren't a big player in the market.
... so to jumpstart their mobile-push, who are they going to buy??
@Hazdaz They edon't nee dto travel very far....
Palm + Intel = Win
@tmarks11
That doesn't make much sense in my book.
Intel is a component-maker, not a gadget-maker. Say they bought Palm and investment a ton of money into them and got their marketshare to double. That would still make them only a small player... 10% of the smartphone market at best. Intel usually doesn't play that way - they would rather supply one chip to 50% of a HUGE market, than 100% of the components in a tiny niche market.
It would make much more sense for them to buy up a cellphone chip maker. Maybe not Qualcomm, but maybe Texas Instruments or partner with Motorola or someone like that.
Glad to see engadget is already bad mouthing Meego even though it's probably the most promising and feature packed mobile OS to date and will be available on more devices worldwide then iphone os and android combined.
Very typical
@osiris2600
I didn't think they were "bad mouthing" Meego -- they just said that it has no market share yet and basically isn't even ready for production devices...which is true. Yes, Meego looks pretty sick but if you have been around the consumer electronics game long enough you learn to never make a final judgment about something until there's an actual product for sale. Vaporware is extremely common, and who knows what the final build will look like.
@osiris2600
you should really take their humorous jab a little bit more personally.
@Wildman
if it was apple about to release meego their would be editorials all over the place.. but i digress.
@osiris2600
true that, but such is the way of reporting: objectivity is harder than an overdose of viagra...
x86 in a phone = fail
If Intel wants in the game but wants to remain cellphone-neutral, buying Palm doesn't get them there. They'd also have to revive a dying platform at a time when the competition is getting fierce, which doesn't seem to be a winning move.
Buying NVidia, however, gets them Tegra. :)
AMD was allowed to buy ATI, so I doubt there'd be that much of a problem with Intel buying NVidia.
They could also look into buying one or more of the companies that supply various other cellphone chips (Broadcom, etc.). The move to LTE over the next few years is going to be very profitable for several component manufacturers.
@Tumbleweed AMD is also far smaller than Intel and has way less of a competitive advantage (and less diversification.) I would be extremely surprised if the SEC ever approved an acquisition or merger of Nvidia and Intel.
AMD sucks dude, they dont even know how to make multi threading CPUs. AMD is good at graphics thanks to ATi but Intel is unmatched when it comes to home and portable computer's processors . IBM is better in super computers though
@jdm28690 Sorry, have to say it, but you're an idiot.
@Evster88 - I'm not sure why they'd disallow it. Intel and Nvidia aren't really directly competing for much anymore. It's not like Intel has any real stake in the graphics card market, and Nvidia doesn't have any real stake in the CPU markets that Intel competes in. This would be definitely more of a complimentary move than buying out a competitor, which is what the SEC normally disapproves of, isn't it? Allowing this wouldn't give Intel a monopoly on anything, but would merely be allowing them to buy into segments of the market which it's not currently in (in any measurable way).
Plus maybe they could bring over some of those engineers from Israel and put NVidia's GPUs on a power consumption diet, because DAYUM.
@Tumbleweed Intel is the number one supplier of GPU parts - not AMD or Nvidia. Thats integrated GPU of course, but market share is market share. And the number one in any given market will never be allowed to buy the (still, for now..) number two. If FTC doesnt stop it, the EU trade commision will drop its bomb on that merger for sure.
So, forget that possibility.
Intels problem is its stubborness. They think x86 is the answer for everything. Its not. Yet they still try to push Itanic, sorry Itantium, with its IA64 architecture and nobody outside Intel knows why... HP is the last one holding the Itanium candle, even Microsoft recently announced that they will drop support for IA64.
What Intel should do with these resources instead, is to make something that actually competes with the ARM architecture. Atom isnt it...
@Bahumbug - it depends on if 'GPU' is considered a market. I certainly don't.
The other easy way into the market would be to license the ARM cores they want, slap a low-power version of their latest GPU tech into it and go after a Tegra-like platform of their own. Whatever they do, if they want in that market, they're going to have to do it pretty damn quickly.
If they want to go with MeeGo I dunno how much they can go shopping.
IMHO, I think they should concentrate in what they are doing right now. Partnerships with big companies and developing MeeGo so it can be stretched form cars to netbooks.
why not just capital in themselves and startup their own?
It's only a matter of time
Buy Palm = Win
woah!....... Intel buying Palm....... That would be like giving WebOS the matrix of leadership. It would pretty much be unstopable.
Then they could hire HTC to make a bulitproof case fully loaded for it.
sounds good....
Intel buying Palm might be better than HTC buying Palm. It seems that HTC would just use Palm's patents in their fight with Apple, and throw the beautiful WebOS into the drain, as they are already doing a fine job with Android.
.
Intel, or even Cisco would be better as they would let the Palm team do the phone stuff, and just let loads of money flow in.
@Abhi9 One word: MeeGo.
@The Madman
Speaking of Meego, Nokia's rumored comeback into the tablet space would be interesting, since now they have Intel's backing. Now they also have some experience of making larger devices with the Booklet thing.
On top of that , Meego looks very promising. Nokia can try to build an ecosystem around it. Smartphones (N900 successors) and a Tablet, and they might have a chance of competing against Apple's monsters.
What I think Intel needs to do is create the “atom” of smart phone processors. Not literally put an atom processor in phones, but make a new processor that does what the atom process did for laptops, offer decent performance with low power consumption. It would only need to clock 750 MHz (although 1 GHz or higher would be nice) to run android, min mo7, or web os without much lag and if it had half the power consumption of snapdragon they would be golden. Now whether this new processor would be x86 or ARM idk, but Intel should look into building a completely new platform so they can make money from licensing or they could have a lock on the new standard for Smartphone processors, like how the atom is the standard for netbooks.
@mdesign
One word: Moorestown.
Intel buying Palm to keep on making the Pre, the Pixi, and other P products = foolish idea
Intel buying Palm to offer a WebOS software license and a tailor made chip package to go with the software to hardware manufacturers = SUPER WIN
They would be the one man WinTel of the future smartphone market, and no one would be able to stop them. They'd be able to perfectly match an OS and chip combo that would work symbiotically. The OS would take advantage of every hardware feature, and thus have both awesome hardware acceleration and awesome battery life. Apple and well matched A4+iPhone OS combo would instantaneously be the underdog, shitty Qualcomm and its lack of drivers in just about every OS would fall of the face of the earth, and ARM Cortex would have no one left to court. Finally every OEM, Samsung, Sony, HTC, Levno, LG, etc would want to license the WebOS Intel software chip combo.
i'd love to see some capital deployed into my pockets
Boycott Intel products.
Wait for a month and you would know whether X86 is capable or not
Just imagine a future where u have a core i7 phone that does crysis wirelessly on ur TV while using d phone as a controller.... now that would be wicked awesome....
buy palm!
10 years ago Intel spent billions buying Fiber and Network companies like Giga, now they have cash burning in their pocket again. Current Problem for Intel: people willing to spend more money on their new Android phone than their new laptop. Problem 2: People buying Connected gadgets like they were candy floss, and never upgrading their dusty laptop. We are seeing the divergence of the pc platform, from one-does- it- all music video sound, internet, to small dedicated connected devices for each usage. Problem for Intel: Low cost SoC running non x86 on custom linux distros. Solution 1 try to compete: Intel has the CE4100 series for connected TVs. If competition fails, buy up the competition.
I think intel should buy a cell phone case manufacturer and stay outa this game, I don't need a quadcore phone. Though the concept is rather intriguing. I love the new corporate slogan engadget put in there.