> "the company's mobile and communications group's second-quarter revenue fell 83 percent to $51 million, and the unit had an operating loss of $1.12 billion"
Revenue fell because they're paying for market share.
"Krzanich set a goal for Intel's chips to be used in 40 million tablets in 2014, up from 10 million the previous year."
They're pretty clear in the article that by "paid off" they're referring to the market share they're buying. Intel is attempting to force its way into the market, leveraging its wildly profitable traditional processor division and $17 billion in cash. With $10.2b in net income the last four quarters, it makes perfect sense to vaporize a few billion dollars if necessary to grab a piece of the mobile market and build forward.
It's not necessarily futile. If Intel can grab enough of a slice of the Android tablet market that developers of Android apps that use significant native code start caring about x86 Android... all sorts of opportunities open up for them.
What struck me as bizarre was although the billboard had the "Intel Inside" slogan repeated at least 3 times, nowhere did it mention what OS the tablet ran, and the screenshots were basically generic stock photos with no apps in sight. As it happens the tablet runs Android but I can imagine that some of the people suckered into buying it will be annoyed that it can't play many of the games on Google Play since they'd be developed with the ARM NDK.
The whole thing struck me more as an effort to extract money from Intel's marketing budget than as a sincere effort to sell the actual tablet.
Intel has a horrible horrible architecture, I really dont want to see it win over ARM Architecture which is open and superior, and wastes a lot less DIE area just for instructions that Intel Does.
I wouldn't call ARM open. Sure, you might be able to negotiate a license to one of ARM's designs. You need an architectural license to do your own implementation though.
The real issue is if Intel will be able to buy dominance through deep pockets. On a even playing field then the better arch would win.
ARMs business model might allow them to weather the initial storm while advancing their core architecture; their 2013 balance sheet was good, with low liabilities and high earnings. Not even Intel can keep buying market share indefinitely.
If Intel is buying market share by making superior products using fancy transistors, expensive fabs, and clever designs.... its not exactly bad for us consumers.
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/186367-intels-mobile-divi...
http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/intel-sel...
Their biggest success is some fly by nights nonames announcing one off $65 tablets.