Arm flexes its muscle
If you like to keep an eye on the processor market, then this year is going to be fascinating. Intel, for so long the dominant CPU player, is going to come under considerable pressure from the lesser known ARM processor family.
ARM Holdings is a British company which has long been known in the mobile phone sector but not so much so in the PC market. Now the Cambridge-based processor maker is well positioned to become a major, if not the pre-eminent chip maker in the world.
Ironically, ARM processors were originally developed with the desktop PC market in mind. At the time they were known as Advanced RISC Machines and were founded as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple and VLSI Technology. Over time their use in low-power devices became their forte rather than high-end desktop PCs. Over the next few years they were mostly used in mobile phones and dominated that market for most of the time.
Now, as mobile devices such as netbooks and tablet PCs grow in popularity, ARM is perfectly placed to expand into new markets. The proven ability of ARM processors to power mobile devices means that ARM is one of the main candidates for any company designing a new mobile device.
ARM devices
ARM’s primary competitor in this new mobile space is Intel’s Atom range of processors and the Atom family will increasingly find itself under threat from ARM. Already most manufacturers are shipping ARM-based devices.
Leading the charge is Nvidia whose ARM-based Tegra chips are fast becoming a popular choice for powering tablets, smartbooks and netbooks.
Alongside Nvidia is Qualcomm, whose Snapdragon processors are also ARM-based, which have largely dominated the smartphone market in recent years. HTC has embraced Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processor including it in the Evo 4G and Desire phones. Samsung too has put the Snapdragon to work, basing its forthcoming Galaxy S2 on the processor.
In the tablet PC market Samsung’s Galaxy Tab tablet PC uses the ARM Coretex A8 processor, while Apple’s ARM A4 processor is based on the Coretex A8 chip. Asus’s EEE Pad MeMo will be powered by an Nvidia Tegra processor.
Software
On the software side it has been only the Android and iOS powered devices that have put the ARM chip to use, leaving Windows-based devices to use Intel’s Atom chip because Windows doesn’t yet support ARM architectures.
That is likely to change in the very near future, putting additional stress on Intel. Microsoft has now confirmed that Windows 8 will include support for ARM processors. This will be a significant move in the processor market and give ARM makers a huge boost.
On the open source side of the fence, the next release of Ubuntu Linux will include support for ARM devices. Ubuntu’s Mark Shuttleworth has also thrown the weight of Ubuntu behind Linaro, a group working on improving support for Linux on mobile devices – a group that includes both ARM and Freescale, an ARM maker.
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