This is missing the point. The third party chipset market died off for exactly the same reason that you posit: all the features that were in the "chipset" are now in the SoC.
So what you seem to be saying is that ARM only makes CPU cores (and now a GPU, I guess), so there's a wide market available for NVIDIA and Qualcomm to enter to provide a complete SoC.
Intel, on the other hand, makes CPU cores, and GPUs, and display controllers, and DRAM controllers, and USB controllers, and PCI bridges, and audio hardware. And they put all that stuff on a single chip for their customers.
... and somehow you're spinning this as an advantage for ARM Ltd.?
No, the third party chip chipset market died because Intel killed it. NVIDIA had a superior chipset with a better GPU and Intel stopped them. Intel wants commodity production of a very limited number of designs.
Intel doesn't want customizations that can be offered by other companies. Intel wants Intel's GPU not a choice of NVIDIA, S3, ARM, and soon AMD/ATI. Intel wants to ship "Phone Motherboard 1", etc.
Its an advantage because ARM lets other companies play and Intel won't.
This is still spinning. What you're saying is still isomorphic to: ARM has an "advantage" because it's a smaller company with fewer product offerings and no ability to fab its own chips. That's just insane. ARM Ltd. (the company) is successful in spite of these facts, not because of them.
Maybe what you're really trying to talk about is the "ARM ecosystem", where the big mix of players has a market incentive to try new stuff. And there you might have a point. But it's certainly no disadvantage to Intel specifically -- every one of those players wants to be doing what Intel already is (Apple is very close already, with their own CPU core and SoC design).
'ARM has an "advantage" because it's a smaller company with fewer product offerings and no ability to fab its own chips.'
I think what he's saying is Intel is at a disadvantage because it's the only company with the ability to fab its designs. Therefore, any new designs will have to compete for production capacity and catalog space with whatever the currently most-profitable product is.
Large companies have great difficulty managing multiple product lines that diverge widely in their natural profit margin.
I was saying Intel doesn't want any customization because it needs volume and price to maintain profits. Customization subtracts from volume. They have PC mentality not a Mobile mentality. Power consumption isn't the problem, but business model is.
The point of the article is that intel has been disrupted by ARM. You can disagree with this or not, but all these points are kind of irrelevant. People making mobile devices care about power efficiency, and Intel is behind for another year or two. Worse, even if it catches up it needs to compete with ARM's business model which cannot support Intel's revenue model. The point is that ARM allows — as you say — anyone make their own SoC and drain the profits from Intel's pool — they're not going to give that up unless Intel offers some incredibly compelling advantage, and it's not clear what that might be.
>The point of the article is that intel has been disrupted by ARM.
Has it?
Intel is a much smaller part of all CPU's sold, that's true, but it's also true that the market for CPU's has increased exponentially in the last few years. The places where Intel is losing is places where they have never actually competed in.
A decade ago, if you were looking for a low-power CPU for a mobile device, you sure as hell weren't looking at X86. You were going with an ARM solution. That hasn't changed, but the market for those CPU's has grown incredibly.
Intel actually did license ARM tech at one point with their XScale chips. It also wouldn't matter if they never competed in the phone market before, because the phone and tablet market is eating away at the desktop/laptop market already. People are probably more likely to want a flashy new phone or tablet, than upgrade their desktop or notebook.
I'm not spinning, and no ARM's size isn't an advantage (I didn't say it was).
Intel wants to build everything in volume. Intel's current business model does not benefit from specialization or customization. Intel needs to make a large profit on each CPU sold. Intel drove out of the market anyone who could build a chipset since it interfered with volume and profits. Intel would be happiest with their current business model if they built one laptop motherboard, one server motherboard, and one desktop motherboard.
This is a strategy built for the PC market. It does not have anything to do with the current mobile market (non-laptop).
Samsung and Apple want to build the best end product. They want to put things in and leave things out. They cannot do that with Intel, but can do that with ARM. Intel doesn't allow or want customized SoC. Apple and Samsung do. Other vendors also make their own SoC from ARM cores. These SoCs provide different benefits. Having a common instruction set allows switching to another SoC when needed.
> Intel wants Intel's GPU not a choice of NVIDIA, S3, ARM, and soon AMD/ATI.
I haven't seen any sings of Intel trying to push their GPU's into ATI/NVidia's niche market (gamers).
NVidia and ATI (now AMD) GPU's have always had their strongest consumer base among gamers [1]. Intel GPU's have never been in the same class as their contemporary NVidia/ATI cards on any measure -- triangles per second, texture bandwidth, gigaflops. Intel also generally uses shared-memory architecture, which means their memory bandwidth is limited and contends with the CPU.
Intel's GPU's are focused on being a low-cost, low-power, on-board graphics solution. As long as they can run a 3D UI and play HD video, they're not going to push the performance envelope any more, for the good and simple reason that they don't want to incur additional manufacturing cost, chip area, design complexity and power consumption for features that are irrelevant to non-gamers.
[1] By "gamers," I really mean anyone who's running applications that require a powerful GPU.
So what you seem to be saying is that ARM only makes CPU cores (and now a GPU, I guess), so there's a wide market available for NVIDIA and Qualcomm to enter to provide a complete SoC.
Intel, on the other hand, makes CPU cores, and GPUs, and display controllers, and DRAM controllers, and USB controllers, and PCI bridges, and audio hardware. And they put all that stuff on a single chip for their customers.
... and somehow you're spinning this as an advantage for ARM Ltd.?