Pheilman, re: INCT v QCOM ...$/sq mm silicon........magnitudes higher ..............
Snip from a post earlier this month
Of the two sides, Intel probably has more to lose and less to gain, Amir said. Grabbing 10 percent of the market for mobile-phone chips wouldn’t be enough to add significant growth to Intel’s sales. Conversely, stronger competition in PCs, where it has more than 80 percent of the market, would hurt Intel’s high average selling prices, he said.
Intel’s processors can cost more than $4,000 each, with an average selling price of about $107, according to Mercury Research in Cave Creek, Arizona. That compares with an average selling price of less than $20 for the typical applications processor in a mobile phone.
Lazard’s Amir estimates that ARM-based processors will grab as much as a third of the market for mobile computers by 2015, up from 8 percent last year. The total market will grow to 340 million units in 2015 from 275 million in 2010, he predicts.
Faster Growth The smartphone market has even bigger growth prospects. It will reach 1.1 billion units by 2015, up from 300 million last year, Amir said. In that period, Intel will increase its share from zero to 13 percent, he estimates.
While phones and PCs are currently separate markets, new software and hardware may blur those distinctions. In the future, consumers and companies will have a wider variety of choices that don’t fit the traditional definitions, In-Stat’s McGregor said. It’s up to the chip companies to evolve.
The winners will most probably be companies that produce packages of chips that deliver Internet connections, graphics and processing, he said. For now, Qualcomm is in the lead.
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