At one point there were around 14 companies going for the mobile chip market. So it was clear there was going to be a massive casualty rate.
Re:Intel's disruption is now complete
by evancox100 on Saturday November 14, 2020 @12:58PM
(#25094077)
TI was also in the mobile AP space for a while then dropped out
From what I've heard their mobile SoCs were pretty high quality & had superb documentation, running such famous (relatively) open Linux devices such as the legendary Nokia N900. TI dropping out of the mobile game also had a profound effect on the full Maemo/MeeGo saga later on.
I guess even Sailfish OS that came after MeeGo is not really immune to SoC supplier dropping out under it as the first Jolla smartphone with Sailfish OS should have run on a SoC from Sony Ericsson only for SE dropping out of the game as well! And the (in?) famous Jolla Tablet had one of those Intel Atom x86 mobile processor.
Broadcom also tried and also failed. They came in cocky because they had succeeded in making Wifi chips with a 10-20 people team so thought that 500-ish people was more than enough for cellular even if Qualcomm had 4x that...
I would not be surprised if Intel fell into the same trap.