This is very different than digital technology, which becomes cheaper and faster as it shrinks, until the limits of Moore's Law are reached. Digital's innovation curve has given us devices that have increased in performance massively while at the same time dropping in price sharply. The analog limit, on the other hand, has us bottlenecked on bandwidth at the moment. It's the reason we are seeing throttling and other problems associated with network capacity limits.

By going back to scratch and basically reinventing the analog radio around digital technology, Intel can demonstrate an analog radio that scales according to digital rules. While it performs in line with its analog counterpart, it can now scale and improve with the rest of the system. Critically, it can also be built into the same chip with other digital components, which paves the way for the same dramatic improvements in performance and cost reductions. This is Intel's key weapon as it moves into smartphones-and it significantly increases the probability that .