I asked an Intel chip designer more than 10 years ago why they were not prioritizing mobile chips. He didn't have a good answer. It has been obvious for so long that everything was moving to phones, tablets, etc. The fact that Intel has no foot at all in that door is astonishing to me.
It happens. Data center computing is profitable, and Intel mastered the sales motion long ago. IBM never really got off mainframes for similar reasons. It's a variation of the Innovator's Dilemma.
I think IBMs case is a bit different -- after all, other companies may have innovated in the space, but they are the ones who actually came up with the PC standard we still use today (and then quickly lost control of it). By comparison, Intel has nothing to show on the mobile space, just a few half hearted attempts at mobile CPUs that fizzled out.
IBM made the PC but others monetized it, most notably Microsoft followed by Compaq and Dell. [0] The PC architecture was not proprietary, and IBM didn't control the operating system.
By contrast IBM made boatloads of money off mainframes and their advantage was durable. That business line is still quite profitable even today. (Just not very big in comparison to the IT market.)
10 years ago, phones, tablets were the big thing. But smart management realized that no one was making money without a full vertical stack. The choices were iOS or Android. Besides Apple and Samsung no one was making money from phone and tablet. On the other hand - high performance computing and data center was a growing market. So smart money put the bet on high performance chips where you could have >50% margins. That's why AMD cancelled all their low power tablet chips (both X86 and ARM) and focused on Zen and the datacenter.
It's almost funny that Intel did have a foot in that market in the 2000s. They sold off XScale right before the original iPhone was released. A lot of PDAs used XScale CPUs.
I think Intel just bought into their own Wintel uber alles bullshit and couldn't even conceptualize devices with TDPs under a watt. No one could possibly do anything worthwhile without Wintel so shed everything that's not Wintel!
