Famously they divested their ARM-based mobile processor division just before smartphones took off.
The new CEO, as the article mentions, seems to have a lot more of a clue. We just hope he hasn't arrived too late.
a lot that can be critiqued about that period.
Wasn't that AMD (perhaps also AMD)? Qualcomm Adreno GPUs are ATi Radeon IP, hence the anagram.
Kind of like Decca Records turning down The Beatles.
I remember very well as back then I was working in University porting Linux to an Intel XScale development platform we had gotten recently.
After I completed the effort, Android was released as a public beta and I dared to port it too to that Development Board as a side project. I thought back then Intel was making a big mistake by missing that opportunity. But Intel were firm believers in the x86 architecture, specially on their Atom Cores.
Those little Intel PXA chips were actually very capable, I had back then my own Sharp Zaurus PDA running a full Linux system on an Intel ARM chip and I loved it. Great performance and great battery life.
It's embarassing when they go to market and there's no way to say it's faster than the other guy. Currently, they need to pump 400W through the chip to get the clock high enough.
But perf at 200w or even 100w isn't that far below perf at 400w. If you limit power to something like 50w, the compute efficiency is good.
Contrast that to Apple, they don't have to compete in the same way, and they don't let their chips run hot. There's no way to get the extra 1% of perf if you need it.
The difference in performance for 95% of what I do is zero. I even run some (non-AAA) Windows games via crossover, and that's driving a 1440p 165hz display. All while it sits there consuming no more than about 35w (well, plus a bit for all my USB ssds, etc) and I've never seen the thermals much past 60c, even running nastive-accelerated LLMs or highly multithreaded chess engines and the like. Usually sits at about 40c at idle.
It's exactly what almost 40 year old me wants out of a computer. It's quiet, cool, and reliable - but at the same time I'm very picky about input devices so a-bring-your-own peripherals desktop machine with a ton of USB ports is non-negotiable.
I think Netburst mostly came from a misguided place where Intel thought that clock frequency was in fact the holy grail (and would scale far beyond what actually ended up happening), and that all the IPC issues such as costly mispredicts could be solved by e.g. improving branch prediction.