Ok, that made me chuckle. Intel absolutely understands multi-core, what they don't yet 'get' is third party access to the inner works. Its interesting to watch nVidia because they have been on the receiving end of that sort of squeeze (front side bus patents and all that) and so they tend to lean toward that as a strategy, whereas other ARM processor houses don't seem quite so focused on locking down all of the silicon around them.
The really smart bit here though is the LTE capability. If nVidia goes 'all in' on building integrated CPU/GPU/Wireless cores then that puts even more pressure on Intel to integrate or leave the market. Intel has not had a stellar track record with regard to wireless unfortunately.
I'm not sure LTE is much more than a no-brainer for anything handheld going forward from Q3. Somehow it seems the Nexus 4 ended up with two (or possibly even three LTE) implementations on the circuit board and it's not even an advertised feature.
If US carriers insist on locking down 4G LTE onto expensive multi-year contract subsidized devces, Intel may not have to worry for another generation. So the real wildcard here is, I think, T-Mobile.
That's an excellent point. Makes me wonder if there is an AMD ARM part with a Radeon GPU and some wireless implementation in our future. Seems like all the cool kids are building this particular kind of chip. It almost feels like the old 8080 days where everyone had a kinda-sorta the same 8 bit MCU to throw at the emerging PC market.
It is certainly going to be an interesting decade.
If Intel doesn't get multi-core I wonder how well a design firm that makes chips designed for the rendering pipline fair? What kind of load balancing does CUDA offer? Didn't they implement recursion a few weeks back? Scalar stream processor smacks of the Cray 1.
Intel's lack of understanding has enabled it to catch 75% of market share. 2 years ago Intel demonstrated their understanding by increasing clock-speed when AMD dumped more cores onto their CPUs creating the underwhelming Interlagos.
Intel gets multi-core for desktop and server just fine. It's mobile devices and graphics where they have been consistently behind.
There are some (specialized) types of computation for which parts made by AMD/ATI and Nvidia are greatly superior. That Nvidia and other ARM licensees have completely taken over the fast growing mobile device market with efficient multicore CPUs with integrated GPUs is really significant to Intel.
