“Intel issued a ‘correction’ Thursday regarding comments one of its executives made earlier this week slamming the iPhone as incapable of working correctly with the Internet,” Tom Krazit reports for CNET.
“It’s hard to see this as anything other than an formal apology to Apple and ARM for comments made by Intel’s Shane Wall and Pankaj Kedia at the company’s Intel Developer Forum in Taipei, as reported by our sister site ZDNet Australia. Among other things, the executives resurrected Intel’s lame “ARM chips can’t handle the Internet” argument and singled out the iPhone as an example of a smartphone that could be really awesome if it only used one of Intel’s low-power x86 architecture processors, known as Atom,” Krazit reports.
“But in a posting to Intel’s Chip Shots blog Thursday afternoon, Anand Chandrasekher, the head of Intel’s low-power efforts, threw his fellow executives under the bus in admitting that Intel’s current low-power x86 processors don’t even come close to matching the power consumption numbers–a vital design parameter in smartphones–of those made by ARM’s partners, which are used in smartphones like the iPhone and over 90 percent of all the mobile phones in the world,” Krazit reports. “The post follows in its entirety.”
Anand Chandrasekher issued a correction on comments made by members of his team yesterday at Intel’s Developer Forum in Taiwan. As general manager of the Group responsible for Intel’s ultra-mobility products, he 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. Secondly, Apple’s iPhone offering is an extremely innovative product that enables new and exciting market opportunities. The statements made in Taiwan were inappropriate, and Intel representatives should not have been commenting on specific customer designs.
“Whoops,” Krazit writes. “Apple has made it pretty clear that it doesn’t buy Intel’s argument that since the PC-based Internet experience runs on x86-architecture processors, the best way to bring that experience to the mobile world is to adopt x86 processors. Apple purchased the engineers of P.A. Semi earlier this year to start working on processors based on ARM’s cores for future iPhones and iPod Touches, rather than waiting for Intel’s Moorestown product–the chip Chandrasekher was referring to in his post–to arrive.”
Krazit reports, “Intel has been making this argument for over a year, but it had avoided slamming high-profile ARM-based smartphones such as the iPhone during extremely public events like IDF. And now we know why; a certain Apple executive [Jobs] said to be close friends with a certain Intel executive [Otellini] was unlikely to be pleased by Intel’s comments just as Apple was reporting blowout iPhone sales.”
In the full article, Krazit covers much more, including how and why Apple doesn’t toe Intel’s line the way the rest of the PC industry does, — highly recommended — here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “pogo” for the heads up.]
Here’s what we wrote yesterday; “Obviously smarting from not being able to get into iPhone and also from being dumped for NVIDIA’s much more powerful graphic chips in Apple’s new MacBook, Intel sounds like they’re due for an attitude adjustment right about now. And Apple has just the guy to deliver it.”
Speedy delivery!
