Nokia and Intel hosted a joint press conference at World Mobile Congress in Barcelona, Spain. During the conference, they were mostly talking about services and the new operating system. From the feedback gathered, majority of journalists and analysts were dismayed at the lack of any hardware announcement.
However, that is in the works. According to information we acquired from trusted sources, Nokia is much more than Intel’s customer. The company wants to develop custom silicon based on x86 architecture and drive the x86 instruction set across the board, from tablets and netbooks to it’s bread and butter, smartphones and phones. Intel is certainly satisfied with this development, given that Nokia manufactures just bit below half a billion phones a year and well, sells more phones in a week than Apple and Palm sell combined in a year [smartphone ratio would be one month of Nokia sales for whole year of Apple and Palm combined].
We were aware of negotiations Nokia had with ARM vendors such as Texas Instruments [Nokia is one of – if not the largest TI customer], Qualcomm and nVidia, but not a single company didn’t want the level of partnership and design influence Nokia wanted, yet this phonezilla wanted to have much more interactive relationship than it has with its current silicon vendors. Intel agreed on many interesting requirements from Nokia. We got some highlights from the Nokia-Intel cooperation and they’re quite interesting – for instance, Intel views Nokia in the same way as a Microsoft-Intel axis resulted in "Wintel" agreement. This time around, the new battleground are phones and Intel sees a large opportunity.
Given that our sources at Nokia disclosed some of their plans [veeeeery ambitious 2014 and 2018 visions], it could turn into Intel shipping more chips to Nokia than to all of its other chips combined. Time will tell if this could actually happen.
Unlike backstabbing companies such as Apple and Intel [to a point], Nokia does not plan to repeat the same strategy Apple used, by going in bed with Intel and acquiring a smaller semiconductor company and launching own IP a few years later.
Nokia rather plans to keep a similar business structure as it had in the past, but with much larger influence in design process of the chips. Our sources reiterated that the golden era of silicon manufacturing has ended and that every new manufacturing process is radically more expensive than the last, with markets requiring more affordable devices – thus, the company aligned itself with a company with a proven track record, and in world of semiconductor manufacturing the undisputable leader is – Intel Corporation.
When talking about this custom silicon, the first one was started even before Nokia and Intel officially committed and we should expect custom silicon to arrive on markets within the next 18 months. Is this the beginning of end of the road for Texas Instruments and OMAP inside Nokia? Our sources don’t believe this will happen in the next 3-4 years, but TI is definitely on the exit doors, as Finns weren’t satisfied with level of progress offered by TI.
Yes, the company expects to be able to manufacture something similar to this concept by 2018. Maybe not as transparent.
