Intel set to become the biggest supplier of tablet processors

[HEXUS]

And prepare yourself for a flood of cheap 2-in-1s by summer.

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[DanceswithUnix]

So a big fish in a small and shrinking pond. They need to get into phone processors to matter in mobile, and that means selling to Samsung and Apple to make a significant dent. Good luck with that...

[zaph0d]

They should be careful they're not seen as "stifiling competition" and "unfair business practices" with the subsidies and negative profit parts. They've both been hit with them in the past and had to pay the massive fines for doing so.

[DanceswithUnix]

They should be careful they're not seen as "stifiling competition" and "unfair business practices" with the subsidies and negative profit parts. They've both been hit with them in the past and had to pay the massive fines for doing so.

As a price for maintaining a strangle hold on the market, any fines they have paid have been I think a shrewd investment on their part.

[Brewster0101]

I've been massively impressed with my Asus T100TA hybrid. Looking forward to getting the new 2015 T300 - although would be nice if it had a little more GPU grunt to get away with some older games such as Battlefield Bad Company 2. Half Life 2 though works really well. Minecraft is ok once all the settings are set to low or off.

[abaxas]

Intel, the boat has long since sailed off into the distance. You can put as much money in as you like, but when your competitors products cost sub $10 and you have to subsidize yours to the tune of $30-50 per part, you simply cant win.

Intel simply doesn't or will never have enough money to be able to buy a monopoly in this market.

[anubis44]

They should be careful they're not seen as "stifiling competition" and "unfair business practices" with the subsidies and negative profit parts. They've both been hit with them in the past and had to pay the massive fines for doing so.

As a price for maintaining a strangle hold on the market, any fines they have paid have been I think a shrewd investment on their part.

But as a repeat offender, the fines might become exponentially larger. Even Intel can't afford to pay billions in fines plus lose billions on subsidies just to flood the market. They will lose eventually.

[Spreadie]

I'm not surprised - their Baytrail Atom quads make for fantastic budget tablets.

[DanceswithUnix]

But as a repeat offender, the fines might become exponentially larger. Even Intel can't afford to pay billions in fines plus lose billions on subsidies just to flood the market. They will lose eventually.

if it cost them $30B over a few years to cripple the major competitors and gain a majority share in the market, then they will get that back soon enough if they re-establish monopoly status. Litigation takes something like a decade to come to a conclusion by which time the damage is well and truly done.

The thing that is different here from before is that the likes of Apple and Samsung can now design their own CPUs (and in the case of Samsung even fabricate them) so they are only reliant on Intel for the still large but stagnant PC market. That probably isn't that big a part of Samsung's very varied business, and if Intel try strong arming Apple then I can see the fruity company switching all their products over to ARM very rapidly. So the only thing Intel can do is dump free processors on the market, but when an octo-core ARM SOC only costs $10 even free isn't much of a value these days.