If we get past the “it’s what’s inside that counts” motto from the image above, next to superficially hot girls at the Intel booth shown below, we learned some interesting things from Intel’s latest showcasing. They were part of the Hong Kong International Consumer Electronics Show and talked bout this year’s sales, but also about next year’s expectations.
The event took place over the past week and we learned that Intel expects for this year to reach a total of 40 million Intel Core series CPUs for tablets shipped. Considering that the number in 2013 was 10 million, I’d say the performance is impressive. Intel’s increase comes after a few years of ARM dominance in the tablet field. Intel woke up just in time to start delivering solid 64 bit CPUs on affordable tablets and make a (small) dent in ARM’s leadership.
Firms like Ramos rely heavily on Intel chips and also many more Shenzhen area tablet makers have decided to go with the American company’s CPUs. That’s one area where’s there’s not exactly much choice or competition coming from China, in spite of the authorities efforts to try and make device makers use local resources. Next year’s focus for Intel are the SoFIA system chips for low cost smartphones and tablets.
SoFIA models haven’t been released yet, but reference designs were shown at the conference. It’s important to mention that while Intel may sound impressive, they’re losing huge amounts of money in the Mobile Communications segment, in recent quarters, as much as $1 billion at some point.
