AMD has denied that report and the article now reflects this info. FTA: Updated 11/19/2012@10:15am: AMD contacted us with an official denial of the story and stated that Kaveri and the big cores are still on track.

Which is the game Intel should have been playing for the last N years.

Reports are that the Razr i based on an Intel processor is competitive -- similar performance & power usage to an S4 with twice the number of cores. The pre-game warmup is complete. Now the game starts.

Right, they're playing the game and have competetive parts. What the ARM-is-the-future people fail to recognize is that the x86 world isn't remotely dead. Relative to consumer SoCs, Intel makes shockingly high margins on its desktop and server silicon. It simply doesn't make sense for them to be making high volume embedded chips unless they have excess fab capacity (which they don't).

The Medfield chips are performance-competetive with existing parts, though they aren't stand-outs. But even if, say, they had a mythical chip that would get lets-just-say-for-argument 2x the performance of Tegra 3 or A6 at 50% of the power draw, they would still not be manufacturing it in volume, for the simple reason that Ivy Bridge cores make a whole lot more money for them than a Tegra-killer would.

So from an investor's perspective, Intel is doing exactly the right thing. Stay in the game, don't cede the market. Make sure your products are competetive, but don't walk away from easy cash either.

Long term, their success will be driven by the value of their SoC products as the desktop world dissolves. But current market penetration isn't a good indicator of what the likelihood of that value will be.

> It simply doesn't make sense for them to be making high volume embedded chips unless they have excess fab capacity (which they don't).

Well they desperately want to do it anyway. Anyway by your very reasoning, they won't do high volume chips (you added embedded but it does not matter, you just can't reach the same volume as embedded chips with such higher prices). Whether they not reach that for a reason or another does not matter much; but the consequences of that fail could be hard. The desktop and server world is not going away, the x86 world also is here to stay, but there is no hard limit to the changes of market repartition that can happen even there. IBM is still very powerful with their mainframes, and Intel could follow that path for (a part of) desktops and servers, but the more they allow the ARM world to develop, the more their share is at risk on their own land in the long term.

The problem is that SoC offering not only matters now, but it even has mattered for several years, and Intel had no offering, sill has no serious one, and is probably not even going to have no serious one for several other years. For a company with such resources, this is crazy. And when you take a look at the press communicate to try to understand what they think that matter, you do not expect big changes: "operations and the cost structure" i don't know enough to judge so i give it the benefit of the doubt, "breakthrough innovations" are real important stuff, so good point here; but: - "Reinvented the PC with Ultrabook™ devices" <- is this a joke??? - "Greatly expanded business partnerships and made strategic acquisitions that expanded Intel’s presence in security, software and mobile communications" <- ok they are talking about Intel's McAfee and other stuffs that makes no sense here - "Delivered the first smartphones and tablets for sale with Intel inside" <- okkkkk, so? huge fail here, and they do not even try to pretend they matter in this field, just that they exist, because they know they won't be forgiven if they don't. That's what we are talking about. - "Grew the vast network of cloud-based computing built on Intel products" <- not driven by them. They could as well have talked about the internet and we servers, but the fashion word of the day is cloud, so they talked about that.

Intel, desktops and servers, are here to stay, we agree on that. But their market share is at risk, because these markets are not isolated island. Intel won't be able to increase their prices too much, so if their market decrease too much, do the maths.

The new Intel phones didn't build themselves overnight.

We can all argue that N should be higher than it actually was, but Intel's still present and accounted for.

>Otellini's successor will be playing a different game, fighting ARM rather than AMD.

Contra the ARM fans who seem to be dominant on HN, I think Intel is well positioned to win that battle. Cutting-edge fab capacity is a pretty big advantage, even if they're using it mostly for high-power CPUs at the moment.