Netbook counter-attack
As a further riposte, Coombs was keen to highlight ARM's ambitions in larger form-factors, which would see it competing directly with Intel's Atom offerings.
"Our heritage is in squeezing performance out of low power devices," said Coombs. "As we get our Cortex family of processors into smartphones, you'll also see them in other consumer electronics devices and larger smart devices."
We alerted Coombs to Intel's recent disclosure of its Pine Trail platform, which is expected to offer better performance than Atom in a smaller, lower power package, but he was no less dismissive. "Intel is playing catch-up with Pine Trail," he said. "Our partners are already putting all the CPU, graphics, connectivity, etc into one system on a chip (SoC)."
The jewel in ARM's crown regarding its looming fight with Intel is its Cortex A9 family, which is scalable up to four cores. "Next year there will be a lot of Cortex A9 designs, which offer symmetric multi processing (SMP) - multiple cores," said Coombs.
