Intel and AMD uncompetitive against ARM on price in mobile market

We have seen it in the latest AMD roadmap and we have been told about it very recently by Intel. Yes that’s right they are both making huge pushes to develop ultra low power chips for mobile devices like smartphones, tablets and netbooks. However, Intel and AMD are being reported as highly uncompetitive by many across the industry due to the fact ARM can produce chips for a substantially lower cost in larger quantities. The reason for the lower costs in the ARM industry has been put down to the comparatively high number of companies producing ARM processors which is driving costs down as companies fight to undercut each other in price and become more efficient. While as usual Intel and AMD have no competition but each other which has led to them struggling to innovate and push prices down.

Intel’s variant of the ultra low power processors we are referring to here is the 32nm Medfield Atom based processors which feature TDPs of 11W and the ones coming out later this year will feature a TDP of 10W. Intel has said that these chips are aimed at smartphones. Whilst AMD, as we have seen from the 2012-2013 roadmap, will unveil Hondo later on this year which will likely contain 2 x86 cores and Radeon class IGP graphics on a TDP of just 5W. The plan from AMD is to take this even further in 2013 and release the Temash APU which will feature the 28nm manufacturing process and a target of just 2W power consumption. But again as innovative as these designs are, AMD and Intel need to work harder on bringing these prices down if they want smartphone manufacturers to start using their chips.

Source: DigiTimes