Thursday, April 25, 2013

Intel inside, arm outside!

When Intel Chief Paul Otellini announced that his company had secured the commitment of Lenovo and Motorola Mobility to put ‘Intel Inside’, it was considered as a significant development in the computing world. But the launch of Intel’s first processor in Lava’s XOLO X900 instead was a bit of a dampener. B&E looks into Intel’s strategy and attempts to dig out the chip maker’s odds of succeeding in the smartphone segment

The funny thing about most great corporations is the fact that they are great only for a limited period of time. The greatness stays around for one generation and might even extend to two generations. But the moment they begin taking market forces and technological change for granted – they lose their cutting edge and eventually their greatness. This is the very reason why Microsoft – a company once referred to as the 1000 pound gorilla of the computing industry – doesn’t quite ring that loud a bell today.

The time when powerful – and cash rich – companies could afford to ignore external forces is long over. So when the Santa Clara based semiconductor giant Intel announced that Lenovo and Motorola will have ‘Intel Inside’ their smartphones at the Consumer Electronics Show in January this year, the news made headlines but was hardly surprising. It was about time that Intel made a move into the smartphone market, dominated by chips using designs from ARM of Cambridge.

Consider a few statistics. According to data complied by research firm IDC, 491 million (almost half a billion) smartphones were activated in 2011 – a 61.3% increase over 2010. Samsung, Apple, Nokia, RIM and HTC shipped 94 million, 93.2 million, 77.3 million, 51.1 million and 43.5 million units respectively. The remaining 132.3 million smartphones were sold by players like Sony, LG, et al. How many of these carried an Intel processor? Not even one! Although Intel remains the undisputed supplier to PC manufacturers globally, this market grew by a mere 1.8% last year.

Under these circumstances, the chip major’s interest in smartphones was palpable. And then came the big dampener in the form of Lava’s XOLO X900 powered by an Intel Atom Z2460. At a time when investors and analysts were expecting an Intel equipped Motorola or Lenovo handset, Intel chose to debut in the smartphone category with a lesser known Indian brand. The Intel powered Lava smartphone is impressive no doubt. Even if the processor is not a dual core or a quad core, Intel’s 1.6 GHz CPU with Hyper Threading allows for an exceptional multitasking experience while promising a battery life comparable to competing smartphones. But here’s the catch. It’s priced at Rs.22,000. No matter how well packaged the smartphone is, Indian consumers will hesitate to invest that kind of money when they have an option to go for a Samsung, HTC or Nokia smartphone. The association with Lava therefore appears to be nothing more than a pilot test for the Atom Z2460. That the stock market did not react to the development (Intel’s share price in fact fell by a few percentage points) indicates that investors did not see this launch as a major breakthrough for the chip major.

So, despite extensive expertise in developing processors, why is Intel having such a hard time replicating it’s PC success with smartphones? The answer lies in the architecture. While you have an entire motherboard on a PC which can accommodate everything from Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) to peripherals, all these have to be put on to a single chip (SoC – System-on-a-Chip) in a smartphone. The technology to make this integration possible has been developed by ARM Holdings – a British multinational with revenues of roughly $772 million – which licences it to ecosystem partners like Qualcomm, NVIDIA, Samsung and Texas Instruments.


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2013.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
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