Why Doesn't Intel Make Smartphone CPUs?
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2019-05-06
·
905 words · ~4 min read
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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
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commercial says, you've probably used an Intel processor. They are literally
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everywhere. But one arena from which Intel is noticeably absent is your pants, or more specifically,
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the smartphone in the pocket of your pants. And with more and more people
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eschewing traditional desktops and laptops in favor of phones and low-power tablets, it raises the question,
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why aren't they? Why is one of the largest chip manufacturers on Earth
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missing out on such a huge opportunity to rake in even more of that paper?
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Well, as it turns out, Intel tried,
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but much like what often happens at a dead-end job or in a bad way,
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relationship, they weren't totally committed, and they ended up failing.
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So, do you remember how I was saying that Intel chips are incredibly common in desktops and laptops?
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A huge part of the reason for this is that for decades,
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Intel has followed a philosophy in chip making that involves consistency down to the smallest details.
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Kind of like how a Big Mac is exactly the same, no matter where you buy it. So,
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nothing like the picture on the menu.
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Every Intel fabrication plant follows the same processes,
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uses the same equipment, and even has the exact same color of their light bulbs, down to a science. And to their credit,
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this uniformity has allowed them to manufacture huge numbers of chips
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quickly and with consistent quality, and helped Intel capture a huge amount of the market share for desktop, not to mention
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server CPUs. But there's a downside. This
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rigid structure also limits Intel's ability to branch out from the desktop and laptop
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x86 chips that they've traditionally been known for. They simply can't make the smaller, more power-efficient
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chips that go into smartphones at a great enough scale to make it profitable, as these chips have a very different
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architecture compared to whatever is sitting inside your PC.
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By contrast, the companies that design the chips that you'll find
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in most smartphones, like Qualcomm and Apple, they actually contract out the production of them to dedicated fabrication companies, like
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TSMC, who have designed their fabs to be more versatile and to meet the needs of
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many different designers that want a variety of chip architectures turned into usable parts. So, back in the mid-2000s,
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when the idea of computing on mobile devices was starting to gain traction,
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Intel tried to get in on the idea of a chip architecture, but it didn't work.
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Intel tried to get in on it by making low-power atom chips using familiar x86 design principles,
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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,
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especially because, at that time, they were trying to stave off AMD in the traditional PC space.
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Because remember, back then, those two companies were much closer in market share than they are today. In fact,
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Intel even passed up an opportunity
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to make the processors for the original iPhone around that same time, because they thought that cell phone
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infrastructure wasn't good enough to become the future of the Internet.
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Yeah, about that.
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Anyway, it's not like all is lost for Intel, because even though they haven't had the capacity to make enough of the
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systems on a chip or SOCs that lie at the heart of modern smartphones, there have been reports that Apple
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may begin replacing
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Qualcomm modems inside of iPhones with Intel models, and
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Intel is dumping tons of money into becoming a major player in 5G,
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hoping to have its own components provide communications and processing for the Internet of Things.
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So if you own some Intel stock, keep your fingers crossed that next time they won't ignore the big thing in mobile tech.
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