Editorial - Intel’s Human Rights - NYTimes.com

[thugkiwi]

Editorial - Intel’s Human Rights - NYTimes.comI find it bitterly amusing that a huge company like Intel is claiming to have "human rights". However, the antitrust proceedings are basically worthless because Intel is on its way out anyway. The huge growth market right now is mobile devices, including smartphones, where Intel has very little

Comments

[subwaysex]

I don't agree that Intel is on the way out. Especially this: "very few manufacturers use Intel chipsets in mobile devices."

Laptops are mobile devices. Intel powers most of them. Intel hasn't taken much ground in the embedded market, but they are still powering most of the computers that people recognize as computers: desktops, laptops, servers, and even tablets. They also build chipsets and other integrated circuit products. They aren't seeing the kind of growth that embedded processors are, but I don't think Intel is going anywhere.

[thugkiwi]

Laptops as "mobile devices", yeah, technically you're correct, but I really meant things that fit in your pocket. Pocket-able devices aren't all embedded systems, either. Smartphones and advanced media players like the iPod Touch and Zune HD are general purpose computing devices in a pocket-friendly form factor.

The growth potential for that market is huge, especially as those devices get more powerful. Intel has made practically zero headway in that market. Atom was a good try, but it's not in anything smaller than a netbook, and those will be under pressure soon by dedicated mobile chipsets like ARM.

[subwaysex]

The word "embedded" is often misused to simply mean low resource environments. That's pretty much what I was talking about, which is why I included mobile phones.

I don't think that pocketable devices are going to take the place of traditional desktops or laptops, though. Regardless of how powerful mobile phones get, they aren't going to be as convenient for most tasks. It sucks browsing on a phone, or writing documents, etc., and that's not going to change. The small screen pretty much guarantees that pocketable devices will always be secondary.