http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/01/27/a-tale-of-intels-cherry-trai...

As usual, the financial press does better tech reviews than the typical computer magazine, as they couch all items in terms of dollars and cents, competitive position and potential moves and counter moves by competitors.

What does the Fool have to say about Bay Trail, Cherry Trail and Broxton coming up from Intel?

Simply this, Bay Trail was a temporary crude and expedient way to get into the marketplace that was fueled from the beginning by deficit loss leader pricing.

Cherry Trail is simply the first off of a new 14nm lithography process and it shares EVERY known failure point that exists in Bay Trail, with it simply being a lithography downsize of the same design errors.  

Cherry Trail will still require loss leader pricing just like Bay Trail did because it still requires just as many extra components on the motherboard just as Bay Trail did.

Cherry Trail will have better graphics than Bay Trail did, but that is not enough to make it anything other than just another 1 year place holder.

Broxton, to come out from Intel very late in 2015 will be the first attempt by Intel to actually really integrate a phone style total system on a chip.    

We will have by then suffered through 3 generations of place holders before the real deal even arrives.

Before Intel's Broxton makes it out of the gate at 14nm in late 2015 the ARM world will have turned 2 more generations of 64 bit ARM designs with mature and fully developed system on a chip integration and the TSCM and Global Foundaries 14-16nm lithography processes will be fully operational by then as well.

In other words, Intel will be loss leader pricing ongoing just to stay in the game for nearly two more years before actually fielding a naturally priced  potentially competitive chipset product.


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The Fool and several other financial publications have pointedly suggested to Intel that they take all that lost leader funding that they are wasting right now and GO BUY MEDIATEK RIGHT NOW and by doing so go buy somebody who knows how to make a fully integrated mobile chipset at a profit RIGHT NOW.    

They estimate the money spent to support Bay Trail/Cherry Trail could buy MEDIATEK outright one and a half times over .....

But Intel is too too stupid/proud to do that.

             

VAPOR WARE HOPE FOR INTEL STILL EXISTS ....

http://liliputing.com/2014/02/intel-launches-atom-merrifield-chips-phones-tab...

  this is a shot of an old full sized chipset -- it isn't a mobile chipset at all

"Intel’s next-gen chips for Android phones and tablets will be 22nm, 64-bit chips with clock speeds up to 2.13 GHz. The Intel Atom Z3460 and Atom Z3480 “Merrifield” processors offer better performance and potentially longer battery life than the “Clover Trail+” chips they’ll replace.

Intel is also showing a series of benchmarks suggesting that the new chips compare favorably to the latest Qualcomm and Apple mobile processors. And if that’s not good enough for you, Intel is also looking ahead to the launch of its next-next gen “Moorfield” chips which are due out later in 2014."  pure vapor -- they haven't prototyped anything yet and the reporter knows this is pure pot smoke (check his oh-so-careful wording)

    Bad news is this is a place holder required by the 14mn bog up that is going on right now and these placeholders won't be in place for the best part of a year yet.


  And at 22nm here comes Merrifield, the very first android combined component INTEGRATED chipset from Intel, swinging on-chip radios and VR graphics and location services from all the very best existing "external" phone world vendors.

Intel claims that the mix will be "as good as" the current Android pack, and this could might be very likely true as it is also "the exact same as"  the current Android pack is now in most respects.

But for Intel, this is a real mental break-through in vapor planning  -- in their heads they got past their own miserable internal design groups and hired it out to people who know what they are doing.

  ...... now -- having vapor planned out the future,  they should now go lay off all these superfluous old school Intel type design group people and go buy/hire some really competent chip designers away from Qualcomm or Media Tek so they can really execute this plan.

I wonder if this much more integrated chipset is still going to get the 20% loss leader pricing still?


    if so it will be just an out and out bribe to to OEMs to use Intel's chipsets .... you are not paying for "extra component costs" for no integration on this one.

GOING BELOW 20mn


Truth vs Vapor  (time to tell the ugly truth about it)


Intel always seems to want to sell vapor for at least a year before designing and prototyping anything -- which is why their chip names change so many times before something actually ships.  

Vapor pushing is how Intel does their product planning after all .... only every third one actually makes it to reality.

The ARM world has been prototyping FinFeet 16nm traces for a while now trying to come up with a production capable decent yielding process.   Both TSMC and Global Foundaries can do it, but they are being honest about what they propose to do in order to make it really workable for processing cost and scrap wise.

Global Foundaries is the less capable of the pair of ARM foundaries and this is what GF says they can do for 16nm using double pass (or perhaps triple pass) EUV lithography which will cost like 2-3 times as much processing time to do a wafer.   The scrap rate will be 3-4 times higher than simple 20nm flat lithography which is where they are today.

Here is the GF ARM tricks laid out in all its glory -- first off all the flat straight traces are simple flat 20nm wide traces to provide for decent current carrying ability without making the layer too thick -- then changing over to 14-16nm FinFeet fins on the curves and transistors to provide more area/current capacity and cut down on the electrical losses that takes place in every curve/transistor.

Why just paste in tighter FinFeet corners and transistor bridges on to a standard 20mn 5 volt design and pay for all that extra processing time and scrap rate?   You'd only get like a 10-15% boost in speed and practically no extra energy savings for all the extra passes and doping and effort.   It would still be a 5 volt chip.

So why do it?  

Answer is they really aren't going to -- this is why the ARM world shows a flat section between 20nm and 16nm because there isn't really real overall die shrink there to be had.  

(20nm flat traces take up the same room in both processes and the die size stays the same).

The ARM world will stay unchanged on the die size between 20nm and 16nm.  So, they will actually most likely make the hop from 20mn all the way down to 14nm/10mn as the next step down.  

Why?  With  simple long straight 14nm flat traces and 10nm FinFeet curves/transistors that make some processing sense this is the downsize that actually yields enough improvement to make the trip worth while.

14nm/10mn will yield a 40-50% speed increase and a solid 25-30% efficiency boost for doing it.   The chip's guts will run at 2.5 volts instead of 5 volts, so a lot of other stuff needs to be redesigned at this same point in time (lots of vendor involvement in batteries, screens, etc. etc.)

Intel is still caught up in all their last 3 years of vapor pushing and outright lying -- so they will delay and fiddle and most likely make the same larger leap down, but still only to 14nm/10nm when they do go.  

They might do it a year (or part of a year) before ARM actually does it, assuming they can disperse their own fumes well enough to see that far out (and assuming all the 2.5 volt vendor bits and pieces are ready to go that early).

Now that ARM is saying 14nm flats and 10nm FinFeets make some pretty good processing sense to them, likely Intel will do something very similar whenever their vapor fog bank lifts and they actually go do it.



Now, am I really saying that Intel is really starting just to copy the ARM world's ideas and really are just trying to do it a little quicker to maintain their corporate image as the great inventor?

Yep.   Look at their Merrifield chipset (which will really actually happen long long before Broxton ever becomes real) -- it ACTUALLY IS an ARM standard design (using ARM standard vendors) except Intel is plugging in some Intel customized CPU cores in place of the stock ARM CPU cores.

Intel's cost will likely be still be significantly higher because they are carrying WAY too much USA overhead (lots of people, really big salaries).

So they will still likely have to loss leader the new chip in order to make it "price competitive".

 

 .... and since it actually is the similar same, is it really going to run any better?