Intel x3 Sofia platform with ARM Mali400/450/720 GPU

Posted by – April 7, 2015

After spending Billions of dollars in the past year to buy market share in the tablet market, Intel’s mobile division reported an operating loss of $4.21 billion for 2014, Intel subsidized Shenzhen tablet design houses and factories, they probably want to stop that very expensive subsidy by trying to convince the design houses and factories to use Intel’s next generation x86 platform which Intel may claim to not be requiring subsidies to buy market share anymore. Previously code-named Sofia, Intel’s x3 platform is a two chip 3G solution using ARM Mali-400MP4 GPU in the Intel x3 C3130 dual-core, ARM Mali-450MP4 GPU in the quad-core Intel x3-C3230RK (marketed/designed with Rockchip) and 4G LTE with the ARM Mali-760MP2 GPU in the quad-core Intel x3 C3440. Will Intel manage to price their next generation x86 at MediaTek-like levels and will they really be able to keep design houses and factories interested if they stop subsidizing them, if they stop dumping the price and giving away their CPUs for free, giving factories PCB designs for free (reference design based), PCB and tablet productions subsidized, marketing subsidized, software development subsidized and etc? What is Intel’s real potential market share in tablets and smartphones when they stop this subsidy? And why doesn’t Intel just make more ARM devices in and out of their Fab like they did the Intel/Rockchip XMM6321 dual-core ARM Cortex-A5 that I filmed here: http://138.2.152.197/?s=XMM6321