>At the end of the day, there was a chip that they were interested in that they wanted to pay a certain price for and not a nickel more and that price was below our forecasted cost. I couldn't see it. It wasn't one of these things you can make up on volume. And in hindsight, the forecasted cost was wrong and the volume was 100x what anyone thought."
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/paul-...
If Intel managed to convince Apple to go x86, and they had low power chips competitive with ARM at the time, then that would be a different story.
You could even argue that it was a happy accident; Intel providing a high performance ARM core may have forced mobile competitors to react, producing high performance ARM chips of their own, and sped up the erosion of the x86 monopoly we're finally witnessing today by several years.
I doubt TSMC would have been able to afford to catch up to Intel without their current high volume business.
Apple pursued custom silicon very aggressively from the start, with the acquisition of PA Semi less than a year after the launch, and the first custom chip coming in the iPad in 2010.
Although with an Intel chip they wouldn't have needed to do this for performance reasons, Intel's fat gross margins would have been equally compelling.
If Intel was willing to design the chips and take TSMC sized margins on them, I guess they could have kept the iPhone business for years, but that isn't in their DNA.
I can't see Intel ARM iPhone chips as anything other than a shortly lived oddity.
By sending all that business to TSMC and Samsung, they were financing their rival's R&D.
If they were willing to do that, I totally buy in to your scenario. It would have been the right play with the benefit of hindsight.
But it would have represented the biggest shift in their business model since they dropped DRAM. Just agreeing to fab the iPhone 1 CPU wouldn't have been nearly enough.
>It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. "The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut," he said. "My gut told me to say yes."
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/paul-...
Keep in mind that they didn't quit their Xeon Phi strategy until 2017, four years after that interview. The parallels are strong.
It's an equally valuable market to mobile, but they weren't willing to get their hands dirty, build a commodity GPU, and either a CUDA bridge ala ROCm or concerted effort on bringing OpenCL up to speed.
Instead, they tried for a decade to bring x86 to GPGPU, not for any technical advantage, but because if they can make it stick they can be an (at worst) duopolistic vendor.
They started with in order cores little better than a Pentium with massive vector units, and progressively improved them to Atom cores once it became clear how much work you'd have to do to port legacy x86 code on to them, at which point why not just port to CUDA?
Now the Xeon Phi torch will be passed to... absolutely standard Xeons with HBM. And they're building that general purpose GPGPU, but it's going up against a version of CUDA that's had a decade longer to mature and a nVidia with 102% of their market cap, instead of 9.9%.
The reason for this insanity is Intel realized just how profitable monopolies are, and they're willing to make risky (almost stupid) bets in the hope that they'll yield their next one. They're searching for the home runs with little enthusiasm or staying power for anything else.
This is the Intel I know, and it's not the kind of Intel that's willing to take crappy gross margins to fab commodity ARM chips. It's the kind of Intel that's going to try to do everything in its power to cram so very out of place Atom processors in to mobiles in the vein hope they'll catch on through a combination of incentives and temporary consumer insanity.
Which is exactly what they did try instead of the ARM thing, from 2008 to 2016. RIP.
If Intel did make ARM CPU for the original iPhone and other early mobiles, it would have followed the same trajectory as Intel's original SSDs. They'd be years ahead of their competition at launch, but left to stagnate as the rest of the market catches up, once Intel realizes they're actually going to have to work for their money with no sustainable advantage.
- He's probably flat-out lying, poopooing the data driven stuff to come off more human, humble, and sympathetic to the interviewer.
- If the numbers really did say they should stick to their monopoly, huge extra revenue be damned, then this is some model the FTC and "...but consumer prices!" crowd needs to be forced to grapple with.
Given the resulting impact (Intel being far behind in the smartphone market), it might qualify as the costliest Excel error of all time.