They had a bad product that they had to sell at below cost to get market share. The x86 tax is pretty small for a big out of order desktop core but it's much more real at Atom's scale.

I think radio tech is an issue in the mobile space. It is heavily patented and the big players who can integrate this technology into their chips can offer much more energy efficient solutions.

Intel had that in-house too... it just also kinda sucked too...

That is the thing with a lot of these side projects Intel is always working on. It would be great if they actually delivered good products, but they often spend billions acquiring these companies and developing these products only to turn out one or two broken products and then dump the whole project.

I think this time is different with Xe, but I can't blame anyone for looking at the past history and being dubious that Intel is in it for the long haul.

I had one model from Asus, battery life was terrible and if you were doing anything remotely intensive it doubled up as a nice hand warmer...

I know that these probably are solvable problems, but they left a pretty bad taste...

The first TAG Heuer android wear device ran an atom chip. Fun times with the power optimization, that was.

Not enough profit for their liking was the reason.