I think he meant "Intel paid off a lot of Chinese manufacturer to make them start using Atoms", and it only cost them $2B so far.<p><a href="http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/186367-intels-mobile-division-has-lost-an-astonishing-2-billion-dollars-so-far-this-year" rel="nofollow">http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/186367-intels-mobile-divi...</a><p><a href="http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/intel-sells-quad-core-atom-for-tablets-for-5-per-chip-report/" rel="nofollow">http://www.kitguru.net/components/cpu/anton-shilov/intel-sel...</a><p>Their biggest success is some fly by nights nonames announcing one off $65 tablets.
"its costly tablet chip strategy paid off" ...<p>> "the company's mobile and communications group's second-quarter revenue fell 83 percent to $51 million, and the unit had an operating loss of $1.12 billion"
You think Shenzhen Cheapo Tablet Co., Ltd. will keep using them when they start charging them the full price? Hahaha!<p>I think Intel underestimates the level of churn and ruthlessness of the market. This ain't no Wintel meal ticket.
I recently saw a billboard here in Melbourne for an Asus tablet with an Intel CPU: <a href="https://twitter.com/john_e_barham/status/492146297416077312" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/john_e_barham/status/492146297416077312</a>.<p>What struck me as bizarre was although the billboard had the "Intel Inside" slogan repeated at least 3 times, nowhere did it mention what OS the tablet ran, and the screenshots were basically generic stock photos with no apps in sight. As it happens the tablet runs Android but I can imagine that some of the people suckered into buying it will be annoyed that it can't play many of the games on Google Play since they'd be developed with the ARM NDK.<p>The whole thing struck me more as an effort to extract money from Intel's marketing budget than as a sincere effort to sell the actual tablet.
Intel has a horrible horrible architecture, I really dont want to see it win over ARM Architecture which is open and superior, and wastes a lot less DIE area just for instructions that Intel Does.