When it comes to processors, the real battle is fought between ARM and Intel. However, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, one of ARM's co-founders told reporters that he doesn't believe that the battle will rage on for much longer.
Dr Hermann Hauser - who no longer works at the company, but is still a shareholder - explained that "if you look at the history of computing there was mainframe, which was dominated by IBM, then came the mini computer dominated by DEC, then came the third wave with workstations dominated by Sun and Apollo, then the PC, and now it's the mobile architecture that is going to be the main computing platform at least on the terminal side".
He continued, "there is no case in the history of computing where a company that has dominated one wave has dominated the next wave and there is no case where a new wave did not kill the previous wave - as in obliterate them...the people that dominate the PC market are Intel and Microsoft".
These are certainly bold words, especially as shares in ARM continue to wobble and while Intel makes further steps into the low-power market with the purchase of Infineon. Just this week the chip-giant released a new Atom CPU for embedded solutions - as seen at IDF - that will specifically compete with some of the British company's designs.
However, Hauser doesn't believe that ARM's superior products are what will lead it to victory. "The reason why ARM is going to kill the microprocessor is not because Intel will not eventually produce an Atom that might be as good as an ARM, but because Intel has the wrong business model...If you sell microprocessors you have the wrong model".
According to the story, ARM-based chips are used in a quarter of all electronic devices. It also states that the value of the chips that the company collects royalties on has recently overtaken Intel's microprocessor revenue for the first time.
