ARM not impressed by Intel’s smartphone plans

by Scott Bicheno on 29 May 2009, 15:23

Tags: Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), ARM

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The dawn of the smartbook?

While the Corex A9 scales all the way up to netbook uses, Coombs also mentioned the ‘Sparrow' design, which also scales up to four cores and which Coombes hopes will be ubiquitous in mainstream mobile phones.

"The Cortex A9 should be common in smartphones by 2011, but we want to see the Cortex A family in lower price-point products too - not just in millions but billions of devices," said Coombs.

 

 

Back to the larger form-factor battle, Coombs likes what ARM partner Qualcomm is doing. "Qualcomm is promoting the smartbook as opposed to the netbook. Smartbooks are the evolution of the smartphone into a larger form factor, which offers things like automatic syncing with a PC, great games, etc."

 

 

It looks like the main distinction between a smartbook and a netbook is constant connectivity. Using lower power processors allows it to be powered up all the time, just as we expect of a mobile phone. "The smartbook is a great consumer concept," said Coombs. "It's always on, offers multiple connectivity, syncing in the background and form-factor flexibility."

We concluded by asking Coombs if he had anything else he wanted to share with HEXUS readers. "I think June's going to be a hot month for product launches," he said. "There are a large number of OEMs making ARM products this year and going forward. We're the market leaders."

 



HEXUS Forums :: 4 Comments

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Intel would be wise not to underestimate ARM. They're a clever bunch, and the x86 is a terrible instruction set in my humble opinion. The momentum of x86 won't last forever.

It's almost a shame Intel's Itanium hasn't taken off. Granted it's the other end of the spectrum, but it'd get us away from x86.
The old Win-Tel alliance is still going strong as far as the public face of computers is concerned. WinCE is well named and ARM and/or its partners could really do with pushing their products with Linux as standard.
However, does ARM really care about the family computer when the vast majority of its processors are used in everything else but ?
For me, netbooks (TM Psion) and nettops are the ideal platform for an ARM-Linux co-operation. You could quite easily have a mobile computer with the same form factor as an Intel machine yet have over twice the battery life. Machines that run for 12 hours, more than sufficient for the vast majority of users, could quite easily be produced for less cost than the Intel equivalent. The main problem, as I see it, is that ARM-Linux just doesn't have the financial muscle to push out the Wintel incumbent. Instead it has to rely on entities outside its scope of control to do the majority of the work (ARM's chip manufacturers and Linux's distributions.)
Doesn't look like they're doing the sort of licencing model that ARM do which is a major attraction to hardware manufacturers - it means even if you don't licence a core and produce custom silicon there enough licencees selling their variants you can usually find something fitting your requirements. The business model has been key to their success - to a point now where everything from mobile phones, RAID cards, NAS devices and even hard disks will commonly have an ARM variant at the heart of them.

At netbook level of course the one-size-fits-all approach is fine, but when you get down to really tiny appliances the requirement for even more integration increases dramatically.
Arm is still far cheapest of all, and will continue to be.

Intel has nothing interesting..

Nvidia Ion, if they can remove the atom, and scale down to a mobile battery powered device, they have won. DX11 on my phone, satnav and everything else, please :D
Nvidia also has the Tegra..