The question then becomes

The question then becomes
Welcome to a Medical Battery specialist of the Anritsu Battery
Focusing last year on getting 46 million tablets was pretty aggressive. I don’t know many companies on earth that can do that. There are strategies involved, and strategy involves execution. Some people rolled their eyes when we said we would do that, but we did and it was extremely important to us. Secondly, the Atom x3 line and the comms investment are pretty aggressive. If you look at where we were four years ago, we basically had Wi-Fi and WiMAX in total. Even I, who works in this space, am walking around the wireless zone and I’m seeing NFC, GNSS and presentations about Wi-Fi+LTE and I’m glad we now have all of that as well as LTE+WiGig too! If you look at the Atom x3 line where, if you remember me talking about the pressure at the time about something that doesn’t even exit and 15 with battery like Anritsu MT9081 Battery, Anritsu MT9081D Battery, Anritsu MT9082 Battery, Anritsu 9081D Battery, Anritsu Z0921A Battery, Anritsu MT9083 Battery, Anritsu MT9083B Battery, Anritsu MT9083A8 Battery, Anritsu CMA-4500 Battery, Tektronix NI2020 Battery, Tektronix YBT250 Battery, Tektronix TFS3031 Batterymonths later it’s starting to ship and there is 5 or 6 more of it.
Taking the entire portfolio and moving it to 14nm is also pretty aggressive. The question then becomes ‘at what point do you start being part of the folks that are setting the pace?’. I think it is coming. We’re not sleeping – every one of those engineers that is working on 5G right now, I could go apply them to another SoC, but no, we are going to behave like leaders and people who have the broad assets to set the pace. We are setting space for innovation and for what is coming, considering the anchor points and what we are good at, so I think it is just a few years away now. But having volume is key – without volume you are nobody. It doesn’t matter how good your technology is, and that is why this is the focus. Then when you have volume you have to be responsible about how you serve that volume. I told you about the Intel XMM 7160, when the press was beating on us about volume, but if I had an order for 100 million units, I will fill it. The problem back then was a question of sustaining that level as we didn’t have the infrastructure and we didn’t know how to deal with, for example, Telefónica, or Telstra for LTE. I know how to do that in 3G, so there is a certain amount of learning, delivering, getting volume, and learning how to be a player that sustains that volume and then building on that to be profitable too.
In terms of barriers to volume, is it a case of building the right product or is there something missing from the portfolio?
It’s all to do with incumbents. I was talking to someone the other day and I started the meeting with something along the lines of ‘I understand you, you have two great incumbents – why would you want to deal with me?’. But I also ask people and operators to look at chipset diversity and a vibrant ecosystem as well as trusting what we will be able to do. Once the wireless portfolio is inside Intel manufacturing we will be able to do things that others cannot easily do, and I trust the team behind it. The most difficult part is that there are very very good entrenched incumbents – our solutions are good, but they not also delivery anything extraordinary or disruptive, so therefore how do you get a chance in that ecosystem? I’ll give the example in terms of 3G – why would someone take SoFIA 3G? For the ecosystem there is cost but also companies can start to think about their future LTE partners – do you want to wait until LTE to learn how to deal with us, because you know engineers need to talk to each other, build tools, debug, optimize and all that stuff. I think Intel can be trusted to be in this space long term and frankly it is now something that is now core to what we do.
What comes next for the Atom x3 line?