Intel lost out on the mobile revolution because the mobile revolution was about radio technology and not processor technology. Outside of buying Qualcomm for patents and radio designs, anything Intel could have tried was doomed to fail.
When the first test chips came back from the lab on the 26 April 1985, Furber plugged one into a development board, and was happy to see it working perfectly first time.
Deeply puzzling, though, was the reading on the multimeter connected in series with the power supply. The needle was at zero: the processor seemed to be consuming no power whatsoever.
As Wilson tells it: “The development board plugged the chip into had a fault: there was no current being sent down the power supply lines at all. The processor was actually running on leakage from the logic circuits. So the low-power big thing that the ARM is most valued for today, the reason that it's on all your mobile phones, was a complete accident."
Wilson had, it turned out, designed a powerful 32-bit processor that consumed no more than a tenth of a Watt.
Just take a look at a product page of qualcomm [1]. The CPU gets 3 bullet points, meanwhile the cellular modem has 1/3 of the entire page. Also here is a nice picture that shows the irrelevance of the CPU compared to the rest of the SoC [2]. If intel wants to compete they not only need the best cpu, they also have to be a champion at everything else.
chasil|7 years ago
https://www.theregister.co.uk/Print/2012/05/03/unsung_heroes...
When the first test chips came back from the lab on the 26 April 1985, Furber plugged one into a development board, and was happy to see it working perfectly first time.
Deeply puzzling, though, was the reading on the multimeter connected in series with the power supply. The needle was at zero: the processor seemed to be consuming no power whatsoever.
As Wilson tells it: “The development board plugged the chip into had a fault: there was no current being sent down the power supply lines at all. The processor was actually running on leakage from the logic circuits. So the low-power big thing that the ARM is most valued for today, the reason that it's on all your mobile phones, was a complete accident."
Wilson had, it turned out, designed a powerful 32-bit processor that consumed no more than a tenth of a Watt.
imtringued|7 years ago
[1] https://www.qualcomm.com/products/sdm845
[2] https://www.qualcomm.com/sites/ember/files/styles/optimize/p...