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Businesses Intel The Almighty Buck Hardware

Is Intel Selling Bay Trail Chips Below Cost? 156

edxwelch writes "An analyst at Bernstein Research has found that Intel is selling their tablet Bay Trail chips to OEMs below cost, concluding that after end rebates, Intel's tablet revenues are likely to be "close to zero," while profits will be negative. Intel has responded that the 'special costs' Intel is incurring are not pushing down gross margin. Intel needs to offer the subsidies to OEMs building $199-$299 devices to bring the bill of materials down and make them competive with cheaper chips from the likes of MediaTek and Rockchip."
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Is Intel Selling Bay Trail Chips Below Cost?

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  • by east coast ( 590680 ) on Thursday February 06, 2014 @12:37PM (#46175571)
    So what's the real difference here? The difference is that Intel is selling something of real world value. Dice is destroying something of real world value.
    • slashdot has been dead for a while.

    • YUP (Score:5, Interesting)

      by TheNastyInThePasty ( 2382648 ) on Thursday February 06, 2014 @12:40PM (#46175601)

      Slashdot is officially being actively destroyed because it doesn't make enough advertising revenue anymore [twst.com]

      From the report:

      Slashdot Media was acquired to provide content and services that are important to technology professionals in their everyday work lives and to leverage that reach into the global technology community benefiting user engagement on the Dice.com site. The expected benefits have started to be realized at Dice.com. However, advertising revenue has declined over the past year and there is no improvement expected in the future financial performance of Slashdot Media's underlying advertising business. Therefore, $7.2 million of intangible assets and $6.3 million of goodwill related to Slashdot Media were reduced to zero.

      • One of us needs to buy it from dice and keep it running right. I'm younger than most of you, so I'm not a millionaire yet.

        If I've learned anything from the community here, it's that everyone has their shit figured out and runs their own small business which has at least a million dollars of liquid assets.

        So a few of slashdot's smart asses need to get said asses in gear and preserve this place for the greater good; maybe even make it profitable.
        • Just wait until after the beta goes permanent live. Slashdot will be available for pennies on the dollar.
        • by afidel ( 530433 )

          No need to be a millionaire, you should be able to buy it for a couple bucks since they already wrote down the value to zero.

        • by unitron ( 5733 )

          ...

          If I've learned anything from the community here, it's that everyone has their shit figured out and runs their own small business which has at least a million dollars of liquid assets. ...

          Such excellent snark, I had to friend you.

      • What kind of company couldn't make money off Slashdot? It requires very low effort to post 7 stories a day and run a text based site. Only difference is if you count SlashBi and the occasional video (all things we ACTUAL users hate).
        • by imidan ( 559239 )

          It's even easier to post 7 stories a day when 2 of them are dupes!

          I kid.

          Fuck Beta, though.

      • Well the beta of Slashdot is a sure way to drive the value down further.

        As it looks like I, and many others, will not be visiting Slashdot after it changes to the new layout.

      • by dmbrun ( 907271 )
        >> Therefore, $7.2 million of intangible assets and $6.3 million of goodwill related to Slashdot Media were reduced to zero.

        And Slashdot Beta reduces the goodwill left in Slashdot Media to below zero, a phenomenon last seen with Stephen Elop and Nokia.
    • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

      by 2phar ( 137027 )
      The actual press release [diceholdingsinc.com] is clear "Slashdot Media was acquired to provide content and services that are important to technology professionals in their everyday work lives and to leverage that reach into the global technology community benefiting user engagement on the Dice.com site. The expected benefits have started to be realized at Dice.com. However, advertising revenue has declined over the past year and there is no improvement expected in the future financial performance of Slashdot Media's underlyi
    • Dice will come back with their quad core, out of order execution beta.

    • by dmomo ( 256005 ) on Thursday February 06, 2014 @01:02PM (#46175853)

      More posts like this. Protest beta with on-topic posts. (bonus points if title is on topic too).

  • Editors are scared (Score:3, Interesting)

    by TWiTfan ( 2887093 ) on Thursday February 06, 2014 @12:40PM (#46175605)

    Looks like they're using their unlimited mod points to try to downmod everyone who posts on the beta.

    • Re: (Score:2, Offtopic)

      by TWiTfan ( 2887093 )

      Look at the Amazon double-helix comments. Mass downmods everywhere.

      • Yep, I noticed that. In a technology oriented site they could at least try to hide the blatantly obvious statistical anomaly. A small script with some randomness and delays would be enough.

      • by dmomo ( 256005 ) on Thursday February 06, 2014 @01:05PM (#46175901)

        That's OK. What made slashdot great is the people who love it, leaving insightful comments. Since they are currently only leaving comments related to beta... if you mod those down, there won't be much of a discussion left.

        If they do manage to suppress the beta "noise", just bring it to their facebook page.

    • Very well. I won't post on the beta. If they don't want to hear about it, that's okay. It's their site, not the users'. But I might mention how fascinating comments on interesting topics like [this article's topic] will one day be discussed on this website [altslashdot.org].
    • It's funny; if this happened on any other site the Slashdot editors would be all over posting stories about "censorship."

      Whichever editor is doing this: how about you at least have the balls to admit it? Just put up a notification on the front page that you're downmodding all complaints about the beta site.

      And yes, since you probably think you can do it without people realizing -- it's pretty damn obvious that it's an editor doing it, not normal users. Huge numbers of posts are getting hit with "offtopic"

    • Yeah, keep modding down timothy. Shutting the door after the horses have already gotten out. Might be better off spending that time updating your resume.

    • Good, then it means they are at least SEEING the feedback. Doesn't mean they'll act on it though...

  • by grommit ( 97148 )
    Intel has been doing this for a long time. They know how to make money off of it. Dice Holdings on the other hand only seems to know how to ignore their readers and create a "BETA" website that is flat out painful to read.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    FUCK BETA!! You are changing a formula for success that you obviously don't understand. Change can be good, but change is not good for the sake of change. Software and websites developed by people who do not understand their users will always be a catastrophe.

  • Only beta will reveal.

  • Let's face it. Intel is desperate for their chips to still be used in things.

    As people are moving to different forms of computers and different kinds of chips, Intel is getting squeezed -- the sales of desktops are down, and increasingly it's stuff like ARM processors which are running things.

    I'm betting Intel is doing this to try to ensure they still have a market share, otherwise things are going to start looking pretty bleak for them in the consumer market.

    Of course, I worry this is just going to have t

    • Re: Desperation ... (Score:4, Informative)

      by kenh ( 9056 ) on Thursday February 06, 2014 @02:45PM (#46177103) Homepage Journal

      The chips in question, quad-core Atoms (AKA Bay Trail), are actually quite good - I have a Dell Venue 8 Pro tablet with that CPU and it runs Windows 8.1 quite well, with very useful battery life (IMHO)...

      I think their strategy is to get the products in user's hands to overcome negative impressions from earlier Netbook/mobile offerings from Intel.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Is anyone writing to the advertisers to let them know what a massive fuckup is Slashdot beta? Perhaps that's the better way to communicate this idea to Dice

  • Boycott (Score:5, Informative)

    by chebucto ( 992517 ) on Thursday February 06, 2014 @01:02PM (#46175851) Homepage

    Please post this to new articles if it hasn't been posted yet.

    On February 5, 2014, Slashdot announced through a javascript popup that they are starting to "move in to" the new Slashdot Beta design.

    Slashdot Beta is a trend-following attempt to give Slashdot a fresh look, an approach that has led to less space for text and an abandonment of the traditional Slashdot look. Much worse than that, Slashdot Beta fundamentally breaks the classic Slashdot discussion and moderation system.

    If you haven't seen Slashdot Beta already, open this [slashdot.org] in a new tab. After seeing that, click here [slashdot.org] to return to classic Slashdot.

    We should boycott stories and only discuss the abomination that is Slashdot Beta until Dice abandons the project.
    We should boycott slashdot entirely during the week of Feb 10 to Feb 17 as part of the wider slashcott [slashdot.org]

    Moderators - only spend mod points on comments that discuss Beta
    Commentors - only discuss Beta http://slashdot.org/recent [slashdot.org] [slashdot.org] - Vote up the Fuck Beta stories

    Keep this up for a few days and we may finally get the PHBs attention.

    Discussion of Beta: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=56395415 [slashdot.org]
    Discussion of where to go if Beta goes live: http://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&type=submission&id=3321441 [slashdot.org]
    Alternative Slashdot: altslashdot.org [altslashdot.org]

  • It is a sad day that Intel's big news is having to slash prices to compete with the likes of MediaTek. I'm surprised no one has complained to the ITC yet if they are effectively "dumping" these chip. While I recognize mobile's importance, the nerd in me yearns for the good ol' days when AMD and Intel were fighting it out in the x86 space. Kinda like Slashdot...

    fuckbeta

    • I'm surprised no one has complained to the ITC yet if they are effectively "dumping" these chip.

      I thought about that too, but I don't think it applies in this case. I think it's allowable to sell things below cost if you're not a dominant player. In fact, temporarily losing money on a product when entering a market is a common tactic to gain market share. This is distinct from predatory pricing [wikipedia.org], which is intended to force competitors out of the market. You would need to be a dominant player to do that, which Intel clearly isn't in the mobile space.

    • Intel and AMD were never fighting. Intel allows AMD to exist, flat out. Intel isn't just Goliath to AMDs David, its 10 Goliaths on steroids. Intel DWARFS AMD.
      • I still remember when the original Athlon came out. That was the first time in quite awhile that AMD gave Intel a serious challenge. It is just too bad that they rested on their laurels for too long and let Intel power on ahead. The day Intel gave prerelease samples of Core 2 to be benchmarked by the tech sites was the day I knew AMD was pretty much never again going to seriously contend in the x86 CPU space.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Dice holding, you are looking at this revolt and I hope you all feel like a bunch of dicks.

    FUCK SLASHBETA

  • /. comments section to be replaced by disqus.
  • Fuck Beta (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sexconker ( 1179573 ) on Thursday February 06, 2014 @01:13PM (#46175975)

    The day I lose access to the classic version of Slashdot is the day I block slashdot.org at the border.
    Your move, Dice.

  • by coastal984 ( 847795 ) on Thursday February 06, 2014 @01:16PM (#46176005) Journal
    I say, Fuck Beta! Holy hell this is terrible.
  • by gman003 ( 1693318 ) on Thursday February 06, 2014 @01:17PM (#46176017)

    I'm not a guy who blindly follows what he's used to. When I got Windows 8, I gave Metro a try. It has some good parts, and I don't even dislike the look of it. I could have adapted to the inconsistencies, and the weird tabletness of it all. But after trying dozens of apps, I found that none of them worked as well as the desktop applications.

    I like to think I'm a guy who does what works. Metro didn't work, so I no longer use it. I got a program that gives me a start menu back, and it lets me configure it to be even better-fitted to my needs than the stock W7 menu.

    I gave Slashdot Beta a try, because I thought it deserved a chance. Perhaps all the hate for it was just small-minded traditionalists clinging on to the familiar. But no. Slashdot Beta breaks all the important functionality, and it makes it look worse. If it goes live as it currently is, not only am I quitting Slashdot for good, but I'll be throwing a proposal to my bosses about making a competitor, because the market for an audience-focused tech site will be wide open (I'm currently contemplating "Alpha" as a name).

    Slashdot Classic has problems, certainly. Unicode is broken, HTML comments are stupid, the design isn't that great, and since the thing is still running on Perl I'm sure there's some hindrances to continued development. Slashdot needs a rewrite, a clean new technical foundation powering a new front-end design.

    But Beta isn't it. With all the problems Classic has, Beta is a million times worse. I can't think of even one way in which Beta is superior - it is a step down on all fronts, obviously designed by people who never used Slashdot and only copied from other news sites and comment forums.

    • by afidel ( 530433 )

      Agreed, I went to beta on day one after being a mobile beta participant and what I saw horrified me. I wrote a very detailed writeup about what was wrong with the design and even gave them the tweaks I had made to their CSS using Tampermonkey to make the site less annoying, and yet absolutely nothing of substance changed between when I wrote them and when they foisted it on the larger population. Why the hell am I being asked to give feedback if you're not going to take any of it seriously?

    • by sribe ( 304414 )

      I gave Slashdot Beta a try, because I thought it deserved a chance. Perhaps all the hate for it was just small-minded traditionalists clinging on to the familiar.

      Yeah, same here. I figured it was just some brittle whiners exaggerating things they didn't like. Then I tried it. Holy fuck, what a pile of shit!

    • by MTEK ( 2826397 )

      I'll be throwing a proposal to my bosses about making a competitor, because the market for an audience-focused tech site will be wide open

      Good news everyone, the domain seecolonbackslash.org is available!

    • Slashdot needs a rewrite, a clean new technical foundation powering a new front-end design.

      Let's rewrite it in Ruby On Rails, yay !

  • by rodrigoandrade ( 713371 ) on Thursday February 06, 2014 @01:17PM (#46176039)
    Fuck Slashdot Beta Fuck Dice

    Fuck Slashdot Beta Fuck Dice

    Fuck Slashdot Beta Fuck Dice
  • For the first time (Score:5, Interesting)

    by LookIntoTheFuture ( 3480731 ) on Thursday February 06, 2014 @01:22PM (#46176097)
    in Slashdot history, comments about the story are the ones that are offtopic. They may not be modded that way, but I find myself skipping them. Is it really that difficult to keep classic in addition to beta? You have a lot of loyal, intelligent people here. Why give them the finger?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Just set that for your page, and stick to the topic of whether Intel underpricing Bay Trail is good for the market, and whether it creates new opportunities for laptop or all-in-one vendors as well.
  • Better listen Dice.
  • Dice, I am protesting the beta site. I will not follow any links from a beta redirect and I will not participate in any meaningful discussion.

    Your new Slashdot design is hideous. The comment layout is an abomination which has always been /.'s strong point. The comments are why we come here. This isn't twitter, Digg or Facebook, we come here to get away from that. You will lose more members than you will ever hope to attract with your new and unimproved design. Please abandon your attempts to cash in on /.

    Fe

  • i shoved a greased up yoda doll in my slashdot beta. Is it good or is it whack?
  • FUCK BETA (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vivek7006 ( 585218 ) on Thursday February 06, 2014 @02:10PM (#46176727) Homepage
    FUCK BETA. I want my classic back. And one more thing, FUCK BETA!
  • HI. I posted this to see what it would look like on the beta website.. If they call it beta isn't it supposed to be working? maybe they will fix Slashdot Beta and everyone will be happy again. Can you see this? I can't. What is wrong? Is this why they call it beta? I hope someone will be able to fix this because I am not happy it is not working. Maybe after the beta test is over it will work. It sure doesn't work now. I am getting even sadder. It seems to work on the old site but the beta site is not very g
  • Why is it that some companies sell their hardware way below costs and it isn't a problem (like gaming consoles) but when Intel does it, it is a big problem...
  • I browse ./ on Lynx pretty often at work. Beta breaks the comment viewing functionality in Lynx. Don't serve beta to browsers that don't support JS!

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