Billions And Billions Sold
ARM’s ecosystem has spoken. What it’s saying isn’t always quite so clear, but there’s a lot of talk about low power and some mumbling about performance.
At this week’s TechCon3, aka the ARM Developer Conference, there was plenty of talk about ecosystems and industry support for ARM. What most of the supporters danced around, however, was the war between ARM and Intel. No matter how you slice it, some of the tools made by ARM’s most ardent supporters are also used by ARM’s biggest competitor. This is marketing diplomacy at its best.
But the message on ARM’s side, at least for the moment, is that low power rules. The company is working on boosting the performance of its multicore processors, but it hasn’t slacked off one iota on power issues. In fact, even if Intel cuts the power consumption of its Atom processor in half it won’t keep up with the active power utilization of an ARM processor.
In some applications, power is more important than performance. In others, no matter how much ARM improves its performance it won’t be able to displace Intel. But there is also that developing netherworld, somewhere between the computer and the mobile phone, where sales are likely to explode because it’s cheaper, the battery lasts longer and it provides decent functionality. It’s the market where you don’t need a full computer but a smart phone isn’t quite enough, but where you also can type like a normal person instead of some chicken-fingered mutant.
This is fertile ground for both companies, and given the growth of these devices in business applications as well as in price-sensitive emerging markets, there may be room for both. In fact, there may be billions of opportunities that so far have never been tapped—just in case you’re wondering what all the fuss is about.
–Ed Sperling
October 23rd, 2009 at 9:52 am
Imagine what ARM would do to Intel if it leveraged its dis-aggregated business model – with some choice high performance cores – on Intel’s server business…..