Back in 1990, I remember being in a posh hotel on the shores of a Swiss lake listening to a floppy-haired Englishman in a crumpled grey suit tell an audience of distinguished technologists that his 20-person start-up was going to be as big as Intel.
The foreigners wondered if this was an example of the English sense of humour. It wasn't.
By one metric, Sir Robin Saxby has already achieved his ambition. Last year three billion ARM processors were shipped, about ten times more processors than Intel shipped.
By the revenue metric, ARM's revenues at half a billion a year are somewhat shy of Intel's $33 billion revenues.
But, up to now, ARM hasn't really taken a crack at Intel's core market, computers.
Now, with computers merging with Smartphones to make very small portable computer called MIDs, the processor kings for computer, Intel, are going to go head-to-head with the processor kings for cellphones, ARM.
Who will win this David and Goliath battle?
In life, usually the big guy wins, but in the technology world, nothing is simple. In this case it's because ARM has formidable licensees like
What's more, the physics is on the side of ARM. ARM processors use one tenth the power of Intel processors and Intel concede they can't match that for two years.
"We are one or two orders of magnitude better on passive power than Intel", says Ian Drew, vice president marketing at ARM, "we expect an ARM processor to last multiple weeks in standby mode, not days or hours. If you leave a laptop on standby overnight it will drain the battery; but if you leave a Smartphone on you expect it to last days."
At Computex in Taiwan, earlier this month, Nvidia demo-ed an ARM-based device giving 26 hours of video playback on one charge, while Intel showed machines with four to six hours battery life.
So, on the face of it, Intel is on a hiding to nothing in the MID market. Analysts Strategy Analytics reckon ARM processors will comprise the majority of MID sales for the next six years.
If ARM does that, then the laptop market generally may well follow suit.
Already the server manufacturers are already talking to ARM about the possibility of using ARM cores as a way to cut some of the humungeous power usage of server farms.
We live in a Green-ing world. Equipment manufacturers may some day feel they have to justify why they don't use ARM cores to save power.
If MIDs, laptops, servers then, maybe, even desktops, go the ARM route, then a route to ARM rivalling Intel even for revenues looks less impossible.
What a turn up for the books that would be.
TOMORROW: TOP TEN SEMICONDUCTOR SHARE TIPS
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Comments (2)
Revenue of $33 billion per year would currently require ARM to ship somewhere around half a trillion devices annually. I suspect that's still a fair way off...
Jim
Posted by Jim | July 5, 2008 12:31 PM
Posted on July 5, 2008 12:31
History is not totally on ARMs side. When IBM started their PC process, the Motorola processors available were much smarter than the Intel 8088 (itself a reduced 8-bit version of the 8086), which had 32 address bits in two ranks, but overlapped so much that only 20 bits of resultant address were usable. The last motherboard schematic I looked at still had a special line to handle the A20 mess this caused, even worse since the operating system offered by Microsoft (then an applications program company, not an operating system company) used the overflow past A19 as a "Feature" of the DOS. And IBM did not use the premier operating system candidate because he was not home when they called, according to the stories... So, sadly, technological best does not always win. We can only hope...
Posted by Peter B | July 9, 2008 10:22 PM
Posted on July 9, 2008 22:22