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Intel says it competes with Qualcomm not ARM
CHIPMAKER Intel said that thanks to ARM it has more competitors than before as it tries to move into the smartphone and tablet market.
Intel, trying hard to push its Atom processor into smartphones and tablets, told The INQUIRER that the firm's presence "in the smartphone space is very small". However, Bill Leszinske, general manager for Intel Atom said that Intel doesn't really compete with ARM, saying, "There is no 'ARM', Intel is competing with Qualcomm, Broadcom - just pick your favourite SoC [system-on-chip] vendor."
Leszinske said Intel faces "more competitors than we have had in recent memory", adding that "there is a huge risk with a lot more competitors but we think we have a lot of capabilities that will allow us to be successful".
Intel is promoting not only its process node technology, which Leszinske said will be producing SoCs within a year of 22nm tri-gate desktop Core chips coming out, but the work it does with the software community to ensure interoperability among its chip lines. Apparently there will be "tens of millions" of desktop and laptop 22nm chips before Intel will unleash its tri-gate process onto SoCs, with Leszinske claiming it will be mature enough at that stage. He also claimed that Intel will have chips based on a yet-to-be-announced 14nm processor within three years, resulting in "ongoing performance improvements".
There's no doubt that Intel is moving Atom beyond its well known tick-tock model in order to get power draw down to a point where it is better than ARM based chips. The key point is that Intel can't be just as good as ARM, it has to be better in order to persuade hardware manufacturers not to go with the tried and tested ARM architecture.
And it's important not to understate the level of competition that Intel now faces. Broadcom, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments rake in close to $31bn a year combined, and have patent portfolios that stand up well to Intel's own considerable bank of knowledge. AMD on the other hand looks small compared to these giants of the embedded world and the ARM-based vendors might put up the toughest fight Intel has ever had.
As Leszinske admitted, Intel makes a relatively small percentage of the total number of chips sold in devices around the world. Its fight to increase its global market share will be anything but simple, and Intel knows it. µ
Tags: Intel
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Jim,
That comment was pointing out the fact that it's Qualcomm, TI, Samsung, etc who are designing, manufacturing and selling the ARM SoCs which dominate the phone & tablet space.
The ARM ISA is definitely at the heart of those designs but ARM is not the company designing the SoCs which end up in customer's hands. It's TI, Qualcomm, Samsung, etc.
The first step for Intel is to begin beating those companies for customer design wins.
Only Microsoft has the upper edge on Intel on making such idiotic statements. Of course there's ARM. ARM is the main entity in tablet computing. And, if Atom was so good how come NO ONE IS USING IT?
Intel is confusing cell phone chips with those in the tablet arena, probably to mislead.
No wonder they are utterly non-existant in either arena.
Intel must be in a very uncomfortable position.
It doesn't need to build the fastest little chip, but rather the smallest energy sipper, it needs to build the "litle big chip".
And it needs Nokia and Microsoft to sell it.
And it needs a graphics core soon to make it competitive. Becasue right now the only graphics player in the ARM ecosystem is nVidia. While ARM is trying very hard to get Mali to the market, it is hard to argue with GeForce. Rather than trying to compete in the phoine market maybe Intel and AMD need to adopt a military strategy.
Area Denial.
Tablets and Netbooks should be where the line gets drawn. The focus should be on hardware and software compatibility looking upstream. It seems AMD and Intel are on the same side in this conflict.
Personally I don't want ANDROID on my desktop in 5 years.