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Fair; it's definitely not that they were trying to be the next desktop infrastructure, and it's not like what they're doing instead is easy. It makes sense for them to focus where they've focused. If I ever have the free time, I'd love to get some experience working with the IMX8 stuff as an embedded linux tool.
But even compared to where Freescale was in 2002 versus the market segment NXP is aiming for in 2025, the difference seems bigger. Some of that's just the top of the market has gotten much higher -- Razr mattered, but it mattered pre-smartphone; some of the network equipment goes in a similar boat -- but it's something that separates the business from being meaningful competition for most of Intel's most important stuff.
They're in different industries and have been for decades. The last time Motorola had notions of competing with Intel was 30 years ago. By the time Freescale was spun out in 2004, they had no commonalities (ignoring Intel's doomed to fail attempt at pushing into embedded / mobile processor market with Atom & Galileo). Freescale and then NXP have always been purely in "deep" embedded market where computing performance just isn't that important and is behind many other considerations. You use an iMX8 because you need a large set of integrated peripherals in a small form factor and at low cost. It might run Linux because that simplifies the software development and allows better networking and simpler multimedia display (think map or spotify album art) but you really don't care about how it performs in benchmarks (as long as it passes some minimum bar). Using a larger manufacturing process is an outright positive thing as it allows lower idle power consumption.
Intel OTOH has always been about legacy software support and how many GHz you get in a package / per $$$, considerations that simply don't exist in NXP's market. You'd never put an Intel cpu in an embedded device because it'd be a nightmare to integrate, eat too much power and cost too much compared to an MCU that does that job much better.
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