How is Intel supposed to compete with this hardware specs
for $99
6.0" Screen
1920x1080 IPS
Corning's Gorilla Glass 3
4x Cortex A53 @1.5 ghz+4x Cortex A53 @1.0 ghz
2 GB of Ram
32GB Storage+Micro SD up to 256 GB
13.0" Megapixel Camera+LED Flash
Android 6
LTE+HSPA, with LTE Bands 2, 4, 12 (T-Mobile Bands not a suprise since its for MetroPCS a prepaid MVNO that T-Mobile Owns)
Fingerprint Scanner
3400 Mah Battery
USB-C
http://www.gsmarena.com/zte_zmax_pro-8096.php
That is the specs for the ZTE Zmax Pro that will be coming out in two weeks. All of this for $99
Images if you care
http://www.gsmarena.com/zte_zmax_pro-review-1466p2.php
Pretty much the only downside for that phone is that it uses a qualcomm snapdragon 617, but the future versions will probably use a qualcomm snapdragon 650 which trade 4x53+4x53 for 2x72+4x53 cortex arm cpus. Or the qualcomm snapdragon 652 which boots it to 4x72+4x53. This is because the die size of 2x72 is about the same as 4x53, and both the 617 and the 650 and 652 are on 28nm process so they are damn cheap to make.
Now the cortex A53s at 1.5 ghz are not slow, they are not just blazing fast, they are far faster than the Nexus 7 2013. They will be faster than atom x3s, and will compete well with the baytrail cpus. And cortex A72 will blow current baytrail / cherrytrail out of the water. And these are now the type of cpus you will see on $99 android devices. Oh these devices also have 1080p ips screens, 2gbs of ram, and a 6" phablet is close enough in size to compete with the 7" and 8" tablet space.
Intel by contrast wants to keep the 10" and larger devices away from the pure tablets and move those to window convertible devices.
Pretty much ARM is innovating too quickly at too cheap of prices for Intel to compete without doing rock bottom / contrarevenue margins and Intel does not want to do that anymore for they were not making money doing so. The whole goal of contra revenue was a couple things. 1) Deny money to your competitors while at the same time breaking even or losing a little money. 2) Keep fab utilization at near 100%. 3) (Long term goal) Get yourself into the market at rock bottom prices but then offer higher end offerings that people could eventually upsale too. In other words get the OEMs willing to deal with Intel instead of doing ARM and custom ARM socs. 4) Make your real money off server sales for the more devices that use the internet the more internet backbone you will need. In other words use cheap atom as a loss leader where you break even or make a small profit on the devices long term, but sell several thousand dollar cpus to people like google, facebook, etc to support these devices.
Atom goal during the last few years (not the early 2007 atom, but the recent atom) was not to be an insane profit generator all by itself, it was only meant to enable future sells of the profit generators while keeping the really low end cpus in house to deny our competition. Well ARM is the zombie that will not stay down so Intel decided not to waste more bullets trying to kill it, and instead focus more of its effort on a defensive strategy with the goal of wasting less money try to put ARM down.
Put simply that tablet sells are dropping for cheap low end phablets and 5 to 5.5" smart phones are getting so good, and so cheap there is a less need for a tablet.