Intel has been dominating the Windows-compatible desktop computer space and recently made significant progress in the server space but if you lump together mobile and embedded processors and units sold, you'll see is nowhere near a leadership position in overall processor sales.
Latest production ARM in Nexus 5, 7 has 4 cores, integrate GPU, VPU (video processing unit.) Run from battery power. IMO, Intel is losing CPU war to ARM.
We are also seeing Qualcomm's 64 bits 8 cores going into the next gen phone soon.
Intel's position in CPUs is analogous to Apple's position in phones: Less than 15% of the units, but over 50% of the profit.
ARM is a commodity market. Nvidia makes its money on GPUs and runs Tegra at a loss. ARM has a huge market cap but barely makes any profit. Samsung makes its money on the phone and other chips. TI found ARM so cutthroat that they've given up and quit. Qualcomm has an enormous market cap (larger than Intel's), but they make almost all of their money on the wireless side.
This is why ARM is so dangerous to Intel. While ARM moves upmarket and Intel moves downmarket, Intel is unable to compete on price because the competitors are operating so close to breakeven.
Last time I checked, and I can see it changing since then, TI decided play the wireless phone game wasn't worth it, but it was still pursuing other mobile markets, e.g. WiFi SoCs, which at the time were really popular.
As TI phrased it in their press release back in 2012, they were focusing on "embedded" instead of "mobile." The way I understood it was that this covered everything mobile: not just phones, but also tablets.
In any case, TI makes almost all of its money on analog chips. "Embedded processing" was less than 8% of profits in Q1 2014. And that division includes microcontrollers.
Please don't say "market cap" when you mean revenue or market share. (Market capitalization of a stock is the number of shares of the stock multiplied by the price per share.)
> Please don't say "market cap" when you mean revenue or market share. (Market capitalization of a stock is the number of shares of the stock multiplied by the price per share.)
And please don't downvote without fist spending ten seconds to look up the companies' financials.
I meant exactly what I wrote: "market cap." Qualcomm had a larger market cap that Intel (at least it did yesterday). It did not and does not have greater revenue than Intel, especially when you strip out the wireless side and only look at CPUs.
The point of bringing up market cap is to show how huge these companies are that Intel is competing with. Everyone knows Samsung is enormous, so I didn't bother pointing it out. A lot of people don't realize how huge Qualcomm has gotten. But it's not because of Snapdragon.
You are only looking at a tiny subsection of CPUs, which happen to be the niche intel dominates. CPUs are in a lot more devices than just PCs and laptops.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel#Market_share
In all honesty, beyond the cheap CPU market, most people have gone with Intel for a decade(s).