This is interesting news:

Intel’s cellular phone effort a huge failure

Darrell Dunn, InformationWeek
EE Times
(06/27/2006 6:05 PM EDT)

DALLAS — Intel, the world’s largest semiconductor company, on Tuesday finally owned up to one of the most colossal failures in that industry’s history when it unloaded its communications and applications processor business to Marvell for $600 million.

It’s not surprising that Intel tried to slip that announcement in under the cover of its much splashier Woodcrest server processor extravaganza on Monday. There undoubtedly was a lot of anguish in Santa Clara when Intel finally bit the bullet and dropped its long battle to gain a position as a provider of processors for cellphones.

Intel plowed multi-billions of dollars of investment into the market with a covetous eye towards what is one of the largest volume markets available to processor manufacturers. Research firm Forward Concepts estimates that 830 million cellphones shipped in 2005, and that within two years, more than 1 billion cellphones will ship per year.

Why is it interesting?

I can recall my trepidation when Intel entered the commincations and applications processor business. While TI is the leader in many segments of this diverse market, my company (Freescale Semiconductor) is a major player, and it is never fun to compete with a company that has a lot of cash to plow into R&D.

Apparently, money can’t always buy success, thankfully. An object lesson that end results often do not resemble the initial predictions.