A brief history lesson relating to Intel and ARM… Intel made ARM processors. They were not great. Of course, this was many many years ago, but even compared to others of the same from the same generation and year range, they were kind of poo.

The product was Intel Xscale. Manufactured starting in 2002, and only lasted about 3-4 years before being dropped. Right before there was a big smartphone boom. The processors found their way into the smartphone predecessor, the PDA. Notably, I purchased one device with this type of processor right before the whole thing collapsed… A Dell Axiom x51v. It ran Windows Mobile, which later turned into Microsoft’s attempt to compete with the likes of Google and Apple in the smartphone space, and it’s obvious how that worked out for them.

Intel is saying this because they have to believe it’s true. They’ve abandoned all ARM development and seem to have no intention of picking it up again. They failed in the ARM space, creating fairly poor versions of the chips that they did produce, and they seem to have no intention of repeating that failure.

Mark my words, Intel will likely go all in on RISC-V if anything. They’ll continue to build x86, they have way too much invested in that space and it’s one of few that they’ve actually had significant success in, but when it comes to mobile/RISC, ARM isn’t something that they will be picking up again.

So bluntly, this is true… For Intel. They must believe it because they have given themselves no alternative.