Posts Tagged ‘ARM’

Intel will try to prove its claims that it can be a powerful manufacturer of processors for smartphones and tablets when its Medfield platform emerges in commercial products in H2 this year. In the same time frame, ARM vendors will release their first notebooks that challenge, conceivably, Intel’s most important and profitable business today. Both Intel and ARM are staging aggressive launches and prepare for a fight that will be much more bloody than the historic processor battles between AMD and Intel. Does Intel have what it takes to dent ARM’s segmentation-driven application processor market? Can ARM deliver processors that are compelling enough to face Intel’s prestigious and performance-driven CPUs?

The market seems to think that the folks at ARM and its licensees (TI, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Marvel, Apple, et. al.) are on the verge of attacking Intel where it is most susceptible – the PC and server space. Indeed, ARM is making inroads with low power designs, and has a virtual monopoly on mobile devices. But the path to PCs and Servers is a very different path than smartphones and tablets. And clearly, Intel doesn’t think it can afford to concede any territory, which is why it is pushing back hard on the mobile heartland of ARM. So let’s step back and see what Intel has going for it vs. the ARM ecosystem.

If ARM has its way, then it will hold 40% of the notebook market by 2015.

Intel is slowly but surely positioning its artillery in what will be an inevitable CPU war with ARM in the tablet and smartphone space.

Intel is banking on its manufacturing process to catch up with its ARM rivals. ARM is not impressed yet.

Intel is accelerating its roadmap to get a slice of the smartphone and tablet pie. By 2014, the company plans to be shipping 14 nm Atom processors.

CPU market share data has always been focused on x86 mainly because of the dominance of Windows, but it appears that there is now reason enough for analysts to be considering ARM as well.

Could AMD be designing ARM-based processors and outmaneuver Intel? It appears that AMD and ARM are getting rather close, especially since ARM will be keynoting at an AMD developer conference in June.

Just as we are anticipating the release of the first commercial Chrome OS notebooks, there is an interesting note from processor IP developer ARM that its hardware will be fine-tuned to perform much better with Google’s V8 JavaScript engine.

Analysis – The battle is underway. Companies that supply processors for mobile devices are waging a campaign to convince users that the more cores they have in their devices, the better. The PC market has been in a “core wars” state for several years now, as Intel and AMD have added more cores to their processors. And, for the most part, this has raised performance (and the expectations of users). But does a user who primarily surfs the web and does email on a mobile device really need a multi-core processor?

At CES this week, Microsoft dropped a bomb when it announced that the next generation of Windows would work on both x86 and ARM processor architectures. The effect? Microsoft started a race between a bunch of new vendors initially including Nvidia, Qualcomm, and TI to become the Next Intel. Clearly, AMD is going to want a big piece of the action and Intel isn’t going to surrender what the own without a fight.

ARM has the mobile devices leverage Intel wants: The company announced that 900 million processors based on its architecture were shipped in the third quarter of 2010.