Atomic dilemma
Industry sources have told HEXUS that Intel is facing a "really awful predicament" over the firm's tiny Atom chips, as ARM and its band of low-powered brothers ramp up the mobile competition, forcing Intel to either raise the stakes and cannibalise its core business, or fall behind in the MID game.
The difficulties have been exacerbated of late as Broadcom, a leading IC supplier for PC communications, recently announced it had entered into a license agreement with ARM enabling the firm to use the Cortex-A9 processor in its products.
Intel will be using an additional Broadcom chip in its reference Pine Trail design for MIDs and netbooks, helping the next-generation Atom chip, which can natively run 480p, in encoding and decoding proper high-resolution video - 720p and above. Netbooks makers will have to fork out for the chip if their products are to have Atom and full-HD support.
To HD or not to HD?
This puts Intel into an unenviable position, because if the paired-up BCM70015 chip makes upcoming Atom powerful enough to run HD and everything else punters want from upcoming MIDs, it would effectively be cannibalising its $70 chips with $30 chips. If it doesn't, however, the big chip firm is in danger of losing out to ARM-based devices and even rival Nvidia's Tegra.
"In reality, by next year, Broadcom and Freescale, they'll all be doing 1080p HD," our insider source told us, adding "it's only a matter of time." He went on to say that Atom currently doesn't have that capability and if the firm decides it should, "they pretty much screw their own pooch."
Our source told us Broadcom was frustrated with Intel because the firm was dragging its feet over boosting Atom's capabilities and making proper use of Broadcom's chip for a full-HD experience on a MID. "They were saying ‘you've got to fix this, you've got to fix this!', but how can Intel fix it?!" voiced the source..
Meanwhile, Intel's competition seems to be rubbing their collective hands with glee. "It's a really sweet situation for Intel's competition," our source concluded.
