It's interesting to see how many Intel slide decks have surfaced e.g. leaked on the web this week. Here's another one,  Intel slides show  that the company's 22nm smartphone chip are delayed to ... Intel 22nm smartphone SoC delayed to 2014
This might actually give ARM a bit of breathing space which may hurt Intel by the time they release this in 2014... If Intel wants to stay competitive, they need the chip out by end of 2013. deltatux
With the traditional PC market shrinking it's not a matter of branching out, it's a matter of surviving in the mobile world. Without mobile products which bring tangible benefits x86 will become irrelevant. The future of Intel rests on delivering tangibly better chips (with better margins Intel is accustomed to) then ARM competitors.
They would still survive with traditional PC. I'd rather say it is profitability that makes them enter the promising smartphone market.
Not really, ARM may sell more chips but device manufacturers have crappy margins since a typical SoC will sell for 20$ while Intel has huge margins on desktop parts which run into hundreds of dollars. Intel would be very happy if the traditional PC market wasn't shrinking and that they could ignore smartphones. The reality is different and technology is moving towards device integration, this means Intel needs to figure out how to make money in the soc market.
