Intel aims at mobile technology, a moving target | OregonLive.com

An Intel mobile chip director stood before an industry group in Hillsboro this month, boasting of how much faster and more efficiently Motorola's Droid Razr phone runs when it uses Intel chips instead of hardware from other companies.

At the end of Rohit Vidwans' talk, someone in the audience asked where he could buy one of those Intel phones.

Well, Vidwans conceded, you can't. Not in this country.

"The reason for that is the (cellular) carriers, they are not willing to carry Intel phones if they don't have LTE," he explained apologetically.

LTE is a fast, wireless technology that more than 100 million smartphone owners worldwide use to connect to the Internet. It's not new: Apple added it to the iPhone last fall, and other U.S. smartphones had it more than a year before that.

At Intel, though, it's still a coming attraction. Which says a lot about why the world's largest chipmaker is having such a hard time making headway in mobile technology.

Though Intel makes powerful microprocessors and dominates the PC market, cellular technology has always confounded it. Again and again, the company has invested billions of dollars in mobile initiatives that came to naught.

As Intel switches chief executives this week, the chip industry is itself in a historic transition. With the mobile industry exploding and the PC market in decline, Intel's future depends on diversifying into a business that has stubbornly eluded it for more than a decade.

"Every high-tech leader eventually makes a mistake," said Jim McGregor, a veteran Intel watcher who now runs Tirias Research in Arizona. "Usually it's arrogance. It's 'We can drive the market where we want to.'"

Intel is the world's largest chipmaker. Though its headquarters are in California, it employs 17,000 in Oregon, more than any other business.

A new CEO, veteran Intel manufacturing manager Brian Krzanich, takes over Thursday for retiring Chief Executive Paul Otellini.

Intel's history in mobile

Intel has long sought a foothold in mobile computing, but a series of bad bets and strategic miscalculations hamstrung those efforts. Here are some of those past initiatives:

XScale: Intel took a stab at integrated mobile processors beginning in the late '90s, using ARM-based chips it eventually called XScale. But handset-makers didn't bite, and Intel wrote down the value of its investments by $600 million in 2003. In 2006, Intel sold the whole group, once valued at $10 billion, to Marvell Technology Group for $600 million. Now the former Intel unit is developing ARM-based processors to compete with Intel's server chips.

Intel enjoyed record sales and profits during Otellini's eight years' running the company, but its share price stalled last year, perhaps because of concern over Intel's setbacks in mobile technology.

Wireless chip company Qualcomm makes the innards for the non-Intel version of the Droid Razr and many other smartphones. Though Qualcomm's annual sales are just 40 percent of the $53 billion Intel generated last year, the two companies are neck-and-neck in market value -- reflecting the premium investors place on mobile technology.

To understand why Intel is having so much trouble with mobile, contrast the smartphone business with the established PC industry, which Intel chips dominate.

Intel built its PC business on "reference designs." Essentially, it told PC-makers how to make the computers and sold them the chips to do so. Nearly all of them ran a single operating system: Microsoft Windows.

Pretty much the only thing that differentiated one computer from another was computing power. And since Intel's chips were the most powerful, the competition was stacked in its favor.

"They've always been of a mindset that they create the market," said Michael McConnell, who follows Intel for Pacific Crest Securities in Portland.

When smartphones emerged seven years ago, however, performance was no longer the prime consideration.

Smartphones are a complex bundle of technologies designed to connect to wireless networks and conserve battery life, running atop computer chips from ARM Holdings, a British company that, unlike Intel, crafted chip designs that were easy for handset-makers to customize.

The phones run on specialized operating systems, such as Apple's iOS and Google's Android, that were built from scratch to provide a great experience on tiny screens.

"What Apple realized is that the real value is in the software," McConnell said.

The result is a smartphone ecosystem that's much more diverse and complex than the PC market that Intel is accustomed to. And the company has struggled to keep up.

Despite years of investment in mobile technology, Intel's chips weren't adaptable or efficient enough to win Apple's business when the first iPhone emerged in 2007, running on ARM chips. Subsequent Android phones also chose ARM.

Rocked by the iPad

Then, in 2010, the company was caught flat-footed when Apple introduced the enormously popular iPad, another ARM device. Tablet computing immediately demolished the market for Netbooks, a lightweight laptop Intel had designed using its own mobile chip, called Atom.

For all its failings, you can't say Intel didn't see mobile coming. It's invested billions of dollars in the technology since the 1990s, with a few notable successes.

"This is an area where we've put a lot of focus and resources over the past many years," said Bill Calder, an Intel spokesman in Hillsboro. Indeed, Intel's Centrino technology popularized Wi-Fi and turned laptops from a niche product into the most popular class of PC. But laptops were built to duplicate the function of a desktop computer, and Intel chips easily made the transition.

Not so with smartphones, which are in an entirely different class.

Though Intel now has 13 phones shipping in 20 countries, the company has warned investors that it won't make meaningful headway in the smartphone market this year. Calder readily acknowledges that Intel hasn't embraced the right wireless technologies and hasn't done a good job of incorporating them into its chips.

"We're behind on LTE. We're racing as fast as we can to catch up," he said, noting that Intel-based LTE chips will be available by year's end.

Intel spent $1.4 billion in 2010 to buy the wireless chip group of the German company Infineon Technologies. The deal opened a door for Intel to couple mobile technology with its processors.

Improving Atom

Further, Calder noted that Intel has made enormous improvements in Atom, its mobile computing chip. That Droid Razr, the one you can't buy in the U.S., beat the rival ARM version in various performance benchmarks last year.

A new version of Atom unveiled last week, called Silvermont, makes further improvements in computing power and energy efficiency. It's now a myth, Calder said, that Intel chips are more power hungry than ARM processors.

"We've neutralized a very persistent argument that still pops up today," he said, "which is you're never going to get the power down."

One of Intel's biggest handicaps in mobile has been that Atom hasn't used the same leading-edge chip technology that Intel's PC processors do.

Intel once believed mobile processors wouldn't need the latest and greatest. The company now acknowledges that shortcoming and will have a new chip running on its forthcoming 14-nanometer technology next year, just a bit after the same technology arrives in PCs.

The complex smartphone ecosystem has been a challenge for Intel, but Calder said that fragmentation could be an advantage for the company.

"That's an opportunity for Intel," he said. "Because that's what we do. We standardize the ecosystem."

Intel is doing better in tablets than in smartphones, and it has created a version of Android that runs on Intel chips. By some observers' reckoning, Intel has more Android developers than Google does.

The company can now make a creditable claim that its mobile offering is competitive, said McGregor, the Tirias analyst. But since Intel is playing catch-up, that's not enough.

"It's not just about being competitive," McGregor said. "You have to leapfrog the competition."

Mobile computing is still in its infancy, so there's certainly time for Intel to make up its lost ground. Investors seem encouraged -- shares are riding a six-month rally, up 25 percent in that span.

?But ARM is advancing too, and with wearable computers like Google Glass and other new technologies popping up, Intel may face new hurdles.

"They're shooting at a moving target," McGregor said, "and that's the hardest thing when you're trying to break into a market."

Source: http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2013/05/intel_aims_at_mobile_technolog.html

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