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Apple strategically targeted mobile Application Processors as a technology it wanted to own back around 2007, when the iPhone was barely a year old. It was effectively a reversal of a previous strategy that intended to simplify Apple's hardware operations by leveraging its 2005 partnership with Intel. The initial development of the original iPhone made Apple realize that abandoning its history of custom chip development and delegating all silicon design to Intel had been a mistake. Prior to 2005, Apple had maintained a fluctuating but significant in-house custom chip design team. In the move from PowerPC to Intel, Steve Jobs eliminated that team. However, while Intel was interested in selling its new Core x86 chips to Apple for use in Macs (and developing the supporting chipsets for them), it wasn't interested in building mobile chips for Apple's iPhone, at least not at the price Apple wanted to pay and in the quantity Intel expected Apple to buy.
How Intel lost the mobile chip business to Apple's Ax ARM Application Processors
Intel at the time actually owned XScale, an ARM chip producer, but it announced plans to sell off the group to Marvell in the summer of 2006 after any hope of a deal with Apple was lost. Intel's inability to foresee the potential of Apple's new iPhone may have been colored by its disappointing experiences with XScale, the rebranded StrongARM group it announced plans to acquire from Digital Equipment Corporation in 1997 as part of a patent infringement settlement.
How Intel lost the mobile chip business to Apple's Ax ARM Application Processors
Nobody expected Apple to develop a tablet powered by a wimpy ARM chip intended for cell phones, in part because of the nonstop x86 propaganda radiating from Intel through the media via press releases, and in part because of Apple's fairly fresh partnership with Intel in Macs, which was then barely four years old. Apple had even developed its Apple TV set top box using a similar, low power Intel Pentium M processor.
How Intel lost the mobile chip business to Apple's Ax ARM Application Processors
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However, one area that’s growing quickly is the data center space, which is dominated by Intel (INTC) with more than a 99% market share. Deutsche Bank analyst Ross Seymore expects the data center space to be the fastest growing semiconductor segment in 2017, reporting a rise of 10%. IBS (International Business Strategies) predicts that the data center space will grow between 12% and 14% in 2017.
Will Intel Maintain Its Data Center Dominance in 2017? - Market Realist
Companies such as Qualcomm (QCOM), IBM (IBM), and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) are challenging Intel’s dominance with new products. In 2017, AMD will launch its Zen processors, Qualcomm will launch its ARM-based server processors, and IBM will launch its Power9 platform, equipped with Xilinx’s (XLNX) FPGAs (field-programmable gate array).
Will Intel Maintain Its Data Center Dominance in 2017? - Market Realist
As for the multibillion-dollar question – why should anyone consider moving their compute workloads from x86 to ARMv8 – Anand Chandrasekher, Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies' boss, said server makers will be able to do interesting things things with Centriq, which we guess could mean tightly pairing the SoCs with accelerators, such as FPGAs and GPUs. You can, of course, hook these additional engines to x86 CPUs today, and big businesses doing machine-learning and other number-crunching are doing so right now.
What can we use to hit Intel between the eyes, thinks Qualcomm – a 10nm ARM server chip • The Register
Qualcomm says it has started shipping to customers samples of the Centriq 2400, its 10nm 64-bit ARMv8-A general-purpose server-grade system-on-chip. The mobile chip designer, based in San Diego, California, has recruited engineers from AMD, Intel and Broadcom, as well as tapped its internal pool of techies, to work on the processor family. Qualcomm believes that by going straight to 10nm, it will motor ahead of Intel, which is right now shipping 14nm server CPUs.
What can we use to hit Intel between the eyes, thinks Qualcomm – a 10nm ARM server chip • The Register
The Centriq has three ingredients that were previously unavailable when all the ARM data center fuss kicked off more than five years ago. It has a 64-bit ARMv8-A architecture, whereas when the hype started, there was just 32-bit. It has a 10nm process node, which may be crucial in bringing the performance and power needed for a viable server-grade ARM CPU. It can also ride on the shoulders of cloud giants, which are gradually taking more and more IT spend from traditional on-premises suppliers. When you spin up a node in the cloud to run some software-as-a-service, you probably don't really care if it's x86 or ARM, as long as it performs and provides the APIs and system environment you need. And even if it's marginally cheaper to run an ARM-powered server compared to an Intel-based box, without compromising on performance, that'll be enough for cloud giants, who buy thousands upon thousands of processors a quarter, to consider a switch. It becomes an economic problem, not a CPU architecture one.
What can we use to hit Intel between the eyes, thinks Qualcomm – a 10nm ARM server chip • The Register
Intel's followed up on its acquisition of Altera by baking a microprocessor into a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The Stratix 10 family is part of the company's push beyond its stagnating PC-and-servers homeland into emerging markets like high-performance computing and software-defined networking. Intel says the quad-core 64-bit ARM Cortex-A53 processor helps position the device for “high-end compute and data-intensive applications ranging from data centres, network infrastructure, cloud computing, and radar and imaging systems.”
Intel is shipping an ARM-based FPGA. Repeat, Intel is shipping an ARM-based FPGA • The Register
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