The partnership between Intel Corp. and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company under which the latter would produce system-on-chips (SoCs) based on Atom processing cores is currently on hiatus for the short term due to lack of demand from potential customers. However, Intel still has hopes.

“I think we had a lot of key learnings from the partnership so far. We haven’t given up. These things never happen superfast,” said Robert Crooke, Intel’s Atom chief, in an interview with the New York Times.

Intel and TSMC agreed to jointly create custom SoCs powered by Atom processing cores because Intel felt need to compete against custom SoCs based on ARM cores that dominate the market of consumer electronics. However, Intel failed to make potential customers interested in x86 in general and Atom in particular due to a number of reasons. If the actual performance between modern ARM and Atom cores is comparable and it is easier to integrate the ARM one, why migrate to Intel, especially if the whole product stack is ARM-based?

“Intel faces challenges with the SoC model that dominates consumer electronics. They have to be able to spin custom designs quickly and tweak their manufacturing process for each device,” said Jim McGregor, the chief technology strategist at the research firm In-Stat.

By contrast, Intel is used to produce millions of similar devices. Going forward Intel will try to adopt the same model with SoCs: code-named Moorestown and Medfield devices are due out in 2010 and 2011, respectively. Perhaps, this will help?

Tags: Intel, TSMC, Business