We have major movement in Intel’s future market strategy, and it looks like it’s not going to include smartphones and tablets. It seems that the chipmaker’s poor performance in the chip markets have led to weak sales results in the past couple of quarters, and that has caused the company to call it quits with mobile chipsets. The move has resulted in the immediate cancellation of the manufacture of Intel’s SoFIA and Broxton Atom chips.
The big news from Intel was announced in a report making public the company’s new strategy. The report revealed that Intel would be canceling their forthcoming Broxton and SoFIA products and actually leaving the smartphone market for at least the time being. The SoFIA product line of Atom chips were supposed to compete with the lower-end Chinese brands like Rockchip, while the Broxton products were supposed to be part of the next flagship line, manufactured under a 14nm process.
With this announcement, Intel is set to change their direction in the markets, focusing instead on what they see as more lucrative, higher growth opportunity ventures in data center/server processors and 5G cellular connectivity.
Intel had seemingly gotten a good grip on the midrange markets when they partnered with ASUS and their highly popular Zenfone line. Almost all of those recent products were powered by Intel Atom chips. But it seems that the growth here is not seen as sustainable, even as Qualcomm and Samsung (Exynos) still get the monster share of the high-end and midrange markets.
SOURCE: Anandtech
Does Intel intend to make a dent in the IoT market with this move?