According to the Commercial Times of Taiwan, both TSMC and UMC will be at 100% capacity utilisation for 65nm and 55nm processes by November, because of a flood of orders placed on them for ARM-based Netbook chips.
The orders are coming from
Freescale says it has three Netbook design-ins expected to go into production before the end of this year, while Qualcomm says it has half a dozen design-ins. If TI, Via and Nvidia have three or four each, then there could be 20 ARM-based Netbooks on sale before Christmas.
Both Paul Jacobs, CEO of Qualcomm and Rich Beyer, CEO of Freescale, point out that the new metric for measuring computing performance is going to be power efficiency rather than CPU speed. This massively favours ARM which has always designed for power efficiency as against Intel which has always designed for speed.
According to Jacobs: "They (Intel) are trying to come down from above to reduce power consumption and build a low-power processor, while bringing along the whole Wintel application developer community. We are trying to come up from the phone and focus on Linux, Android and these kind of operating systems and get our software good.''
With Adobe flash ported to ARM-based devices, and with Linux 'getting rapidly better', according to ARM CEO Warren East, the expectation for ARM-based Netbooks is that they will give an equivalent experience to x86 in Internet access, while having several times the battery life of x86-based chips.
East reckons the Netbook market will be a 30 million unit market next year with ARM-based chips in 6 million of them.
The original expectation that ARM-based Netbooks would be on the market in the second half of 2009, seems to have been modified to: 'On the market by Christmas'.
But if a surge of orders for ARM-based chip-sets is going to fill the lines at TSMC and UMC, the sales expectations of the Netbook manufacturers must be high.
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So non-Intel Linux netbooks ARE coming after all! Great to hear. I DO wonder why TSMC et al are not doing ARM chips at the 45nm feature size, like TSMC is doing for Intel's Atom chip. 65nm seems SO yesterday.
It almost seems like there's a conspiracy to keep the latest fab processes away from anything that threatens Intel's dominance
So ARM-based fanless Linux netbooks are FINALLY getting out the door after all. Great news!
But wasn't TSMC the fab that Intel is contracting to build their 45nm Atom processors? If so, then how is it that non-Intel processors receive the years-old 65nm feature size? Makes you wonder if a deal has been struck to keep Atom ahead of ARM processors in system performance!
Yes, I know the Cortex-A8 won't quite match the Atom at the same feature size -- that won't come until the -A9 in 2010. But Intel seems to be strong-arming (no pun intended) certain parties so that serious ARM-vs-Atom competition is restrained until Atom or its Intel successor becomes dominant in all areas of the MID, Smartbook, and Netbook market.
dbs, by no means all Netbook chip-sets are on 65nm and 55nm. Qualcomm's Snapdragon 2 is kicking off on 45nm this year but moves to an expected tape-out on 28nm in 'mid-2010'. Although i don't know for sure, I think Freescale and TI are the same.
You're right, Anonymous, if they'd said that 45nm was going to be at full capacity in November as a result of orders for Netbook chip-sets, it would have been more lin tune with the understanding that Intel, Qualcomm, TI and Freescale will all have Netbook chip-sets on 45nm. Could Intel's deal with TSMC be a lever to bring pressure on TSMC to keep the Netbook IC guys away from the 45nm process? I hope that's paranoia. But it seems Intel is pretty sharp elbowed these days.
Don't forget that 40/45nm may be faster and have lower dynamic power than 65nm, but it's also more leaky so has more static power.
Depending on how much time these ARM netbooks spend in standby ("always-on" mode), 65nm could be lower overall power than 45nm -- and the big driver for many is battery life not GHz, which is exactly where ARM wins over Atom.
Thanks Ian, that's a good point