At last, Intel has mobile chips to reckon with

It’s easy to dismiss the launch of a new Intel CPU as a ho-hum event. On one level, this week’s belated launch of the “Broadwell” chip — the successor to the “Haswell” chips used in PCs’ and Macs’ Core i3, i5, and i7 CPUs — isn’t that interesting. After all, Intel yields a new generation of chips for PC makers every year or two.

But “Broadwell” is about more than faster processors: The technology inside “Broadwell” puts it at the leading edge of a new generation of processors that will make Intel more competitive in the critical battle for mobile device dominance — an area where Intel has struggled through years despite several waves of “mobile-optimized” Atom chips that didn’t deliver the performance or power efficiency needed, handing the smartphone and tablet markets almost entirely to ARM-based chips.

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But “Broadwell” should break that cycle, says Dean McCarron, a principal analyst at Mercury Research. And it’s not just “Broadwell” — there’s also “Cherry Trail,” “Braxton,” and “Moorefield.” These four chips are targeted at skinny tablets and smartphones — not laptops only — using the new, more power-efficient 14-nanometer manufacturing process and the 3D transistor architecture known as FinFET.

What’s more, the new mobile chips will be cheaper to make than the current “Bay Trail” family of Atom CPUs, which means Intel will no longer have to subsidize them to stay competitive with ARM chips, says McCarron. Cheaper to make means better margins for Intel and, before long, cheaper prices for device and makers, an obvious competitive advantage.

Intel isn’t going to displace the makers of ARM chips anytime soon, but “Broadwell” and its brethren will make Intel more competitive than ever. These chips should also help dampen renewed speculation that an exasperated Apple will dump the currently pricey and power-hungry Intel CPU for an ARM A10-based chip in future Macs, letting Apple standardize on ARM across all its products and have greater control over its chip destiny. If Intel’s chips perform as promised, Apple has less reason to go its own way, which is an expensive undertaking.

“Broadwell”: Better late than never That exasperation is real, delaying Apple’s revamped Mac lineup from this past spring to this fall or perhaps even later. Depending on whose story you believe, “Broadwell” was either six months late or 12 months late — and the probable cause was Intel’s inability to get production yields (which equal profits) from the new 14nm process as high as possible.

But “Broadwell” is out now, and it has significant advantages. The first chip based on the new 14nm process, called the Intel Core M, is targeted at tablets and other devices that operate without a cooling fan but are as thin as 8mm — the thickness of an iPad Air.

Intel claims that the new CPUs will offer seven times the performance of earlier chips for graphics tasks and twice the speed for conventional computing tasks. Because the chips use much less power, hardware designers could offer twice the battery life as for current Intel CPUs while using batteries that are half the size of today’s versions, Intel claims. That finally puts Intel’s chips in the same energy-usage category as the ARM chips in iPads, iPhones, and most Android devices, and perhaps ahead of ARM for processing power.

The two significant advances in the chips are the size of their circuitry, 14nm instead of the previous generation’s 22nm, and FinFETS, the 3D design of the transistors that provides more performance per watt. Smaller circuits mean more transistors in less space, which equals more performance — the heart of the well-known Moore’s Law. Rival chipmakers won’t offer FinFETS in volume until 2016, a serious competitive disadvantage, says Nathan Brookwood, a principal analyst at Insight 64.

Although the initial chips based on the new process will be targeted at portable devices, Intel executives say the technology will gradually be introduced in all kinds of products, including large server systems and desktop PCs.

“Broadwell” isn’t a slam-dunk, but it’s the closest Intel has come Despite the advantages of “Broadwell,” Intel needs every bit of advantage it can garner in the mobile space. “Intel is still fighting for every design win in mobile,” says Brookwood. The new chips will certainly be helpful in those fights, but “we’re looking at the end of the beginning” of the battle, not its conclusion, he says.

After all, ARM has five years of domination in tablets, and Apple has demonstrated several times it can revamp its operating system for a new chip, so the threat of a Mac/Intel separation remains if “Broadwell” ends up following in Atom’s footsteps of delivering less than promised (an unlikely fate).

But an Apple/Intel divorce would be a costly undertaking for Apple and its developers, which Microsoft and the Windows community could exploit. Plus, a new wrinkle today is that many Apple customers, particularly in the enterprise, run Windows software in virtual machines on Macs — which has been possible since 2004 only because Macs use the same Intel chips as PCs, says Brookwood.

When all is said and done, “Broadwell” puts Intel in a great position: Still unchallenged in PCs, coming on stronger in mobile, and secure in Apple.

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