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Anyone who's ever used a desktop or laptop PC, and that is virtually all of you, despite what that annoying little girl in the iPad
commercial says, you've probably used an Intel processor. They are literally
everywhere. But one arena from which Intel is noticeably absent is your pants, or more specifically,
the smartphone in the pocket of your pants. And with more and more people
eschewing traditional desktops and laptops in favor of phones and low-power tablets, it raises the question,
why aren't they? Why is one of the largest chip manufacturers on Earth
missing out on such a huge opportunity to rake in even more of that paper?
Well, as it turns out, Intel tried,
but much like what often happens at a dead-end job or in a bad way,
relationship, they weren't totally committed, and they ended up failing.
So, do you remember how I was saying that Intel chips are incredibly common in desktops and laptops?
A huge part of the reason for this is that for decades,
Intel has followed a philosophy in chip making that involves consistency down to the smallest details.
Kind of like how a Big Mac is exactly the same, no matter where you buy it. So,
nothing like the picture on the menu.
Every Intel fabrication plant follows the same processes,
uses the same equipment, and even has the exact same color of their light bulbs, down to a science. And to their credit,
this uniformity has allowed them to manufacture huge numbers of chips
quickly and with consistent quality, and helped Intel capture a huge amount of the market share for desktop, not to mention
server CPUs. But there's a downside. This
rigid structure also limits Intel's ability to branch out from the desktop and laptop
x86 chips that they've traditionally been known for. They simply can't make the smaller, more power-efficient
chips that go into smartphones at a great enough scale to make it profitable, as these chips have a very different
architecture compared to whatever is sitting inside your PC.
By contrast, the companies that design the chips that you'll find
in most smartphones, like Qualcomm and Apple, they actually contract out the production of them to dedicated fabrication companies, like
TSMC, who have designed their fabs to be more versatile and to meet the needs of
many different designers that want a variety of chip architectures turned into usable parts. So, back in the mid-2000s,
when the idea of computing on mobile devices was starting to gain traction,
Intel tried to get in on the idea of a chip architecture, but it didn't work.
Intel tried to get in on it by making low-power atom chips using familiar x86 design principles,
but they didn't want to devote tons of resources and change their way of doing business to become a major player in the mobile game,
especially because, at that time, they were trying to stave off AMD in the traditional PC space.
Because remember, back then, those two companies were much closer in market share than they are today. In fact,
Intel even passed up an opportunity
to make the processors for the original iPhone around that same time, because they thought that cell phone
infrastructure wasn't good enough to become the future of the Internet.
Yeah, about that.
Anyway, it's not like all is lost for Intel, because even though they haven't had the capacity to make enough of the
systems on a chip or SOCs that lie at the heart of modern smartphones, there have been reports that Apple
may begin replacing
Qualcomm modems inside of iPhones with Intel models, and
Intel is dumping tons of money into becoming a major player in 5G,
hoping to have its own components provide communications and processing for the Internet of Things.
So if you own some Intel stock, keep your fingers crossed that next time they won't ignore the big thing in mobile tech.
Maybe, like, a device that uses excess calories that you eat to mind.
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