[dumael]

> At the time Intel had already introduced some mobile silicon, but there was little uptake. So they were iterating; they wanted to improve for each succeeding generation. But they had a kind of design-by-committee process. One person or group wanted a certain feature, another group wanted something else, a third group though that yet another thing was important. And so on. Sorry if that sounds vague, I won't write anything more specific.

> The end result was a chipset that had a lot of features. A LOT OF FEATURES. Gold plated features. But that meant higher power consumption than the competition, higher cost, larger form factor, longer time to market.

I have some experience in this field, and this sounds utterly bizarre. Most of the customers are fairly selective in what bits they want, so provided everything (including the kitchen sink) in a product is useless.

Being able to comfortably ship any variant of your SoC without certain parts is important.