ARM chips are cheap not (only) because the R&D is excessively cheap but because the chips are produced in hundreds of millions. Were it not for the explosion of mobile phones, they'd stay in the "nice but expensive for the performance" niche.

That's about two CPUs for everyone on earth and likely two more this year.

It's not economies of scale that gives Intel its sustained advantage as much as it is huge margins that allow them to continue re-investing in their fabrication process advantage, which again protects their margins by keeping them on top in the only segments of the CPU market that are both high price, high margin (at east for the top SKUs) and high unit.

A huge part of the cost of a chip is the design. You can get custom fab jobs for under $10,000. But if the design requires you to implement hundreds of op codes, the chip will be nowhere near that cheap.

With simpler specs, a lot of this design cost is reduced. You may not be able to get 11nm chips, but you don't need that to be competitive. You just need to be close enough that your performance hit is not a deal breaker, at a price that's not a deal breaker.

s/smartphones/smarteverything/

Reportedly only 1.5B phones have been sold in 2015, compared to 15B of ARM cores.

There is apparently a huge market of small cheap ARM microcontrollers, to the point that I heard they are sometimes getting cheaper than simple 8bit micros.

> When first released in 2001, Itanium's performance was disappointing compared to better-established RISC and CISC processors. - Wikipedia

* performance per dollar

* performance per watt

* highest single threaded performance

* lowest possible power draw

Itanium AFAIK improved neither of these, or it did so only for very narrow usecases. What Intel needed was either (a) an ARM competitor and/or (b) a processor with large vectors and a SIMT-like parallelisation model (i.e. a Tesla competitor). In both of these cases they didn't think twice before just throwing x86 at the problem until the pain goes away... which it never did.

Why trying to win people over on compatibility if they have to rewrite their software anyways for other reasons, especially after ARM took the largest market share in mobile?

It took a while to Intel to accept that the mobile-app providers won't invest the same effort in porting their apps from ARM to x86 given the market penetration, but I don't believe it was a suprising outcome to them.

Intel's problem is a case of optimization I think - their design teams have been optimizing towards producing a processor with an effective power budget of whatever the cooler could dissipate, rather than optimizing for low power, and that's a very different task.

There's no one processor that will fit all workloads.

On the other hand, it's a completely useless situation for everybody who actually wants to use hardware, instead of getting rich in the hardware business.

Intel's got a lock on top-end performance, but don't think for a second they're in control of the CPU market.

You can get a custom ASIC fabricated for under $10K in low volumes using process that's a generation behind. You can get things fabbed on the current process if you're willing to pay more, but it's on the order of $1-2M or so. It's not often people make new CPUs, but look at how the Bitcoin space took advantage of low ASIC prototyping and production costs to produce high-performance hashing devices.

The cost of producing a 6502 chip in that era was basically the cost of building your own foundry. Now we have places like TSMC that will make chips for anyone who can afford the tape-out costs.

In a heartbeat!

I'd rather live here where if you wanted you could tape out some 60nm chips for less than it costs to print some posters.

https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2016/12/08/qualcomm-c...