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Comment by einpoklum | Hacker News Reader

I don't know, a lot of these explanations seem more like reading astrological maps in hindsight. Example:

> Intel passed on making the System on Chip for Apple’s new iPhone, Instead Apple used an Arm designed processor in an SoC built by Samsung. Too late Intel realised the mistake.

Mistake? AMD didn't even try to build SoCs to compete with ARM / Qualcomm / etc. They seem to be doing ok.

Now, you could say "Well, throwing 10^10 USD on trying to build an SoC was the mistake" - maybe, but then it's the opposite mistake than the article claims.

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No it was a both a huge mistake and a symptom of underlying problems. Making smartphone SoCs is a huge profitable market that would have given Intel massive volumes to support R&D etc and slowed TSMC. The fact that they couldn’t manage it with every apparent advantage is very telling.

Feels like you're rewriting history, to me. Smartphone SoCs are not hugely profitable, and a big point of the past 10 years were Chinese manufacturers entirely ignoring ARM IP to increase profits. The only people that make money off ARM hardware are the export-officiated manufacturers that don't pay per-unit licenses; which is exclusively Apple. Nobody else has a more permissive ARM architecture license, not even Nvidia.

Intel at the time was fabless, would have needed to license or design a RISC architecture, and would have ended up just as squeezed as any other part of Apple's supply chain. And if Intel made a serious profit, Apple would have replaced them anyways. It's an all-risk-no-reward scenario.

> Intel at the time was fabless

????????!

Yeah, what?!

For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_si...

That's a lot of fabs for a fabless semi company.

Best take I’ve read here or anywhere. Thanks for the clarity.

> Making smartphone SoCs is a huge profitable market that would have given Intel massive volumes to support R&D etc and slowed TSMC.

Not quite, and that's the core of the "innovator" dilemma. The reason why intel passed on making SOC, is the same why nvidia decided to pass on getting into xboxss and playstations. Those market have much lower margin than server side business.

AMD, and TSMC can operate in those space because they are much more efficient companies, intel is not.

Intel got addicted to fat server CPU margin, grew inefficient...

Intel's smartphone mistake was trying to push x86 on a market that didn't particularly want it.

Android might have been nominally architecture-neutral-- I know some bottom-end products were MIPS-based for a while-- but by the time the Atom Phones came out, the ecosystem was clearly ARM-centric. It wasn't a market where x86 had natural advantages-- you're not run Microsoft Office on your phone

So you're selling a product that will come with built-in FUD of expecting teething troubles and compatibility snafus. You'd have to knock it way out of the park in performance to break through that. Conroe did that after the P4 burnt their image. The M1 did it. Atom never came close.

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