David Flynn31 October 2008, 6:00 PM
The chipmaking colossus apologises to Apple for saying nasty things about the iPhone’s performance, but won't get any make-up sex until at least 2010
Intel’s rocky relationship with Apple hit another hurdle last week when senior company spokesmen slammed the iPhone’s performance as a fatal flaw of its ARM processor, before an even more senior spokesperson stepped in to do damage control and apologise to Apple.
The company has been steadily wooing Apple in order to win its sought-after iPhone business by displacing the original ARM chip with a pint-sized piece of x86 silicon from its forthcoming
Moorestown platform, which is the second generation of the Atom.
But while Core 2 Duo processors sit inside all Apple desktops and notebooks, Intel failed to win Apple across to the broader Centrino notebook platform (Apple’s laptop wireless chips are supplied by Broadcom) and most recently saw Nvidia graphics cards woven into all notebooks bar the entry-level MacBook as a step away from integrated graphics.
The iPhone spat started when Intel’s ultra-mobile chief Pankaj Kedia sledged Apple’s choice of the ARM processor as the iPhone’s engine during the company’s IDF in Taipei. “The shortcomings of the iPhone are not because of Apple” Kedia said. “The shortcomings of the iPhone have come from ARM.”
Kedia’s line was in keeping with Intel’s anti-ARM mantra, which is based on the notion that (a) people want the full Internet experience on mobile devices; and (b), a full rich internet experience means “you're going to have to run an Intel-based architecture” in the words of Shane Wall, Intel’s mobility veep.
The first premise may hold up but the second one is way off base, as the iPhone itself has proven. Well, not quite so, Wall continued. “Any sort of application that requires any horse power at all, and the iPhone struggles.” Wall then broadened his comments beyond the iPhone, saying “The smartphone of today is not very smart. The problem they have today is they use ARM.”
This may have held water if Intel had a better-than-ARM alternative. But it doesn’t, at least not today. While the first Moorestown silicon has just been plucked fresh-baked from Intel’s CPU fabrication plant in Oregon it’s not slated to ramp into mass production until late 2009, with manufacturer adoption in 2010. That gives Apple a good year to play things cool.
So, barely two days after the comments by Kedia and Wall, Intel’s GM of all things ultra-mobile, Anand Chandrasekher, stepped in to say sorry.
“The statements made in Taiwan were inappropriate, and Intel representatives should not have been commenting on specific customer designs” Chandrasekher said. He also “acknowledged that Intel's low-power Atom processor does not yet match the battery life characteristics of the ARM processor in a phone form factor; and, that while Intel does have plans on the books to get us to be competitive in the ultra low power domain, we are not there as yet.”
Chandrasekher ended by praising the iPhone as “an extremely innovative product that enables new and exciting market opportunities.” Intel obviously hopes one of those opportunities – to put an x86 processor inside the iPhone – remains open to them.
David Flynn attended IDF Taipei 2008 as a guest of Intel.