Tag: Bay Trail

PC market stays in the doldrums

Posted on February 12, 2014 by - News

A not so mobile X86 PCHopes that the mobile PC market would show some spunk in the fourth quarter of 2013 were dashed by insipid sales.

According to market research company IHS, although the quarter showed the strongest global sequential growth in four years,  the results were still disappointing.

Shipments of mobile PCs worldwide amounted to 52.6 million units and that’s a rise of 9.4 percent compared to the third quarter of 2013.  But the industry, said IHS, wanted to sell 55.3 million units in the quarter. Compared to the fourth quarter of 2012, sales showed a five percent decline – the sixth year on year decline.

So what’s the problem?  According to Craig Stice, director of computers at IHS, Bay Trail and other platforms were expected to bring cheaperPs to the world.  But the vendors wanted to keep stock levels lean and entry level PCs failed to show high volume.

IHS counts its mobile PC sector as including laptops and PC tablets but as the world+dog knows, people think smartphones and non PC tablets are more appealing.

The industry is hoping against hope that when Windows XP shuffles off its mortal coil, people will buy more PC kit.

Intel refuses to give up on tablets

Posted on December 9, 2013 by - News

Intel-logoNever one to give up even when the battle’s already lost, chip behemoth Intel is apparently preparing a big notebook push.

According to Taiwanese wire Digitimes, which claims to have information frm the supply chain, Intel will unveil a plethora of chips that support entry level and high end tablets.

And, in bitter news for its long time “friend” Microsoft, Intel will introduce CPUs that support Android operating systems at the end of this year.

Bay Trail Android CPUs aimed at seven inch tablets will cost between $99 and $129 while it will also introduce other chips in the first quarter of next year costing between $149 to $199.

Bay Trail and Cherry Trail CPUs will look to target eight to 10 inch tablets and cost a staggering $199 to $249.

And in September next year, Cherry Trail will emerge from the factories using 14 nanometre “Airmont” manufactures – Another Trail blazer wll be Willow Trail at the same time, using 14 nanometre Goldmont, according to Digitimes.

And it seems Chipzilla hasn’t given up the ghost on smartphones and will intro 22 nanometre chips.

It’s hard to see how Intel can possibly catch up this late in the game, but it sure looks like it’s going to give it a stab.

Intel promises more cheap tablets and hybrids. Again

Posted on October 17, 2013 by - News

Intel-logoIntel’s new CEO Brian Krzanich is at it again. He is promising $99 tablets, along with $299 Haswell laptops, $349 2-in-1 hybrids and $299 Bay Trail clamshells. The prices aren’t exactly new – Krzanich talked about $99 tablets back at IDF 2013.

In the meantime the first Bay Trail products have started to appear, although they are not widely available yet. Early benchmarks found that Bay Trail tablets were roughly on a par with the latest ARM SoCs from Nvidia and Qualcomm. The bad news is that Intel’s chips are manufactured using a superior process (22nm vs. 28nm) and that they cost a bit more than ARM chips. Intel’s official prices for Bay Trail-T SoCs are $32 to $37, while high-end ARM chips are estimated to cost $20 to $28.

With that in mind, it is obvious that Intel doesn’t stand to make much cash on $99 tablets, which don’t exactly have much room for Intel’s traditionally high margins. The price points for hybrids and laptops are more realistic, but demand for Windows hybrids has yet to materialise.

That is a bigger problem than actual hardware. Intel’s new x86 SoCs have what it takes both in terms of performance and efficiency, but they are going after a limited market that simply isn’t there, at least not yet. Aggressive pricing should help, but Krzanich stated that the price cuts should also involve OEMs and ODMs.

This will be a bitter pill to swallow for many of them, as they are already struggling to make ends meet in a slow PC market. They would effectively have to give up some of their margins to hit Intel’s price points and at the same time they could cannibalize their own product lines.

This is where the failure of Windows RT and the lacklustre market performance of Windows 8 tablets could back come to haunt Intel. While PC makers were waiting for competitive x86 parts to stick in their hybrids and tablets, most of them decided to roll out ARM-based products with Android, dropping RT in the process and limiting Redmond’s footprint on the tablet market. For example, Asus, Lenovo and HP are already selling Android hybrids. Lenovo even introduced its first Android IdeaPad laptop a few days ago and it should sell for less than 200 pounds.

The only thing Intel has going for it in this segment is x86 support, i.e. the ability to run Windows 8 and offer hybrids that can use the wide range of Windows productivity apps. However, vendors appear to be focusing on higher performance Haswell tablets for Windows 8, which can’t come close to the $299 mark for a variety of reasons.

 

Intel promises sub-$100 tablets, has some convincing to do

Posted on September 11, 2013 by - News

Intel-logoIntel hasn’t had much luck with tablets. Very few devices have Intel innards and most of the ones that do are low-volume Windows 8 tablets, accompanied by a nasty price tag. However, there have been some moves towards cheaper Intel tablets in recent months. A number of vendors has rolled out Windows 8 products powered by Atom parts with relatively decent prices.

Now Intel is taking it a step further by promising sub-$100 tablets by the end of the year. It sounds a bit like a general saying his troops will be home for Christmas and here is why. Intel just has a terrible track record when it comes to making any promises involving pricing. This is a relatively new thing for Intel, usually it tried not to make any predictions at all, but over the past couple of years it made a few, and they were all dead wrong.

It started a few months after the fist Ultrabooks were announced. The press pounced on Intel, demanding to know how it plans get a lot of traction on skinny, overpriced notebooks with prices starting at $999. Intel’s response was pretty clumsy. It promised to do its best to bring the prices down to $699 by the end of 2012, then $599, depending on who was on stage. Then it started making similar promises about hybrids and x86 tablets. All the promises had one thing in common – for all intents and purposes none of them came true. To be fair to Intel, some of them were quite vague. Saying $599 Ultrabooks will appear sooner or later isn’t much of a promise, put pinning down a date is.

Speaking at IDF, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich said the company’s new Hallway tablet platform will “go below $100 by Q4 2013” and to be honest we are not sure we believe in Intel election promises anymore. There are practically no big brand Android tablets with anything close to that pricing at the moment.

There are however plenty of white-box tablets priced at $99 or less, but most of them are rubbish, as they feature antiquated chipsets, low resolution screens and simply don’t have a lot going for them. It is relatively easy to come up with interesting products in the $130 to $180 range, but going down to sub-$100 isn’t as easy. A quick glance at the BOM of low end tablets reveals that there’s really not much room to cut corners and pinch pennies without seriously compromising the product, but let’s leave the geeky details out of this. Even if it practically gives away Bay Trail parts at cost, it is highly unlikely that hardware makers can come up with compelling designs at $99 or less.

The other problem with Intel’s promise is that it sounds pointless on another level. Chasing others to the bottom doesn’t really sound like something the world’s leading chipmaker should be doing, unless it considers MediaTek, Rockchip, Allwinner and other low-cost SoC makers as direct competitors. It just looks bad and if some partners really come up with dirt cheap Intel based tablets they will just hurt Intel’s brand, because they are bound to be terrible. With today’s component prices, the only way Intel could come up with truly good sub-$100 tablets by the end of the year is if it subsidizes them, quite heavily. However, that would cost plenty of money and it would not address the primary concern – what on earth is Intel doing in that market segment to begin with?

Haswell tablets might show up this year

Posted on July 24, 2013 by - News

Intel-logoAlthough Intel has failed to cash in on the tablet craze so far, things may be about to change later this year. In addition to Silvermont-based Atoms, the chip maker plans to roll out the first Haswell chips with extremely low TDPs, perfectly suited for high-performance Windows 8 tablets.

Of course, the most obvious challenge facing Intel is the lack of market opportunities for Windows 8 tablets, but that might change.

Intel in Atomic damage control mode

Posted on July 18, 2013 by - News, Opinions

Intel-logoIntel reported its second-quarter earnings on Wednesday and the general consensus is that the numbers were weaker than expected. Net income was down 29 percent, while sales of PC chips, which make up about two thirds of Chipzilla’s revenue, were down 7.5 percent. Sales fell five percent to $12.8 billion, missing analysts’ forecasts by $100 million. 

Mobile PC market in the doldrums

Posted on July 11, 2013 by - News, Opinions

pc-sales-slumpThe mobile PC market has suffered its worst performance in 11 years, according to an IHS report.

Mobile PC shipments worldwide sank 6.9 percent compared to the first three months of the year, marking the first sequential decline since Q2 2002. Traditionally there has been growth in the second quarter, with the exception of 2002 and now, including last year where mobile PCs grabbed a 3.9 percent boost.

But analyst group IHS believes the poor results will spread beyond the second quarter. Taking the first half of 2013 overall, mobile PCs have had the worst performance since 2003 – with a 11.2 percent contraction compared to the same time last year.  This can be compared to a 41.7 percent surge as recently as 2010 to understand where the industry has found itself.

Ultrabooks have failed to woo consumers and, in the midst of global economic crisis, potential buyers are holding off on upgrading, even with price cuts and special offers from manufacturers.

“The mobile PC industry on the whole is struggling to find any momentum for growth as upheavals rock the market,” IHS compute analyst Craig Stice said. “In particular, more nimble devices like media tablets have taken over among consumers given their ease of use and unique form factor”.

IHS noted that innovation in mobile PCs has stagnated and low cost tablets have taken away further market share.

This all fits in nicely with the dominating narrative that the PC is dead, but this will not be the case. Although tablets are a far nicer experience for computing on the go or lazing around at home, it’s rather hard to get an essay done or other work finished on those devices. Instead PC makers will have to adapt and understand that the world is simply too out of pocket to justify upgrading to a new machine every couple of years. PCs have gone from being all in one devices to finding their niche in useful work or serious gaming. The rest can be done with a tablet or smartphone.

As IHS says, Intel’s Bay Trail and AMD’s Temash processors could inject some life into the market as PCs become lower cost, but higher performance and lower power. PC makers, IHS says, are “contemplating a new class of  performance PCs that would incorporate the new processors at affordable prices”.

There is still a current of hope for ultrathin devices, too, but Intel really put all its eggs in one basket when it arrogantly thought high cost Macbook Air knock-offs would fly off the shelf as the whole world got seriously more out of pocket.

“If a new low-cost PC offering strong performance can become available on the market and meet consumer expectations, then PCs could be set for more growth,” Stice said. “Not like the glory days of the 2000s, but growth nonetheless.”