Has ARM won the processor wars? Hardly!

7/4/2012 4:34 PM EDT

The numbers tell the real story. Yes the ARM processor is used in a lot of devices, but as far as overall market share for all devices, it is a small player in the real world.
Besides, if it were a real threat, Intel would have bought them long ago.

7/4/2012 11:03 PM EDT

Software developers are the judges for who is winning or won. I do not count intel out but iOS and android and the vast app ecosystem are saying arm is winning.

Even MS is putting enormous resources behind Windows 8/RT and Surface will be introduced on armh SOC 3 months ahead of x86... Just a shocking development!!

7/5/2012 1:42 AM EDT

Over the years, ARM and x86 learned from each other and tried to adopt best of each others. Currently both of them are entering into each others territories. ARM into server and complex computing and x86 into mobile domain. Over the period, the differntiating factor of these architures will be more blurred.

7/5/2012 7:58 AM EDT

MIPS is history from Lexra days and their bogus patent suites for unaligned instruction access. Also, HP is not a serious contender for tablets after their last hiccup on exiting the PC space and abandoning their tablet. PowerPC is not doing that well either, so why not adopt ARM? ARM is only the core, and that is licenced for 5 cents. TI, Freescale and others add significant peripherals, and around 1GHz, they are a better bet than Atom for programming at the bare-metal level (ie, not Windows legacy). ARM's annual turnover is chicken feed compared to Intel, and if Intel wanted to snuff the ISA, it would be easy to move to something else. Look at how people moved away from MIPS with a 64-bit solution, and how easy it would be to buy them.

7/5/2012 2:00 PM EDT

I don't get why the article says ARM is just a 12 years old kid of Intel's block, at the real facts ARM1 was like 1984 project, so in facts it's 12 years younger Intel mate, but their story related because the older has not been licensed to Acorn to manufacture its (circa 1985) new line of computer workstations. In fact the first application run on it was ARX (a Unix-like OS for it), but never released due time to market issues.

7/5/2012 2:08 PM EDT

The CPU architecture wars died in the late 90's when MOT drifted away from the 68K which forced Apple to create Rosetta that performed dynamic recoding to move users from 68K to PowerPC. Then Apple did it again to move from PowerPC to x86. And while you all may not realize it, they did it again in iOS move to ARM because the roots of iOS are in OS X. So, if the CPU ISA is no longer handcuffs to a developer, then you have to ask the question why did Apple choose ARM? It's not because of architecture but for some other reason such as flexibility of customization, or some such motivator.

7/5/2012 2:09 PM EDT

Wow, guys. I don't think I've ever seen an article so full of incorrect historical information. I mean, it's normal for the suits at Gartner to not have any clue about technology, but I'd expect the editors here to at least check it out. Not the sort of thing I'm accustomed to seeing in this publication!

7/5/2012 2:24 PM EDT

Much of the article and commends is based on a high-performance 32 bit world view. In terms of CPU revenue that is probably "the majority view". However in terms of number of design wins, and probably number of sockets, that isn't. There are a lot of products out there (besides smart phones and PCs) that work just fine on 16 bit processors--many on 8 bit processors. Neither Arm nor Intel is positioned to address those.

I design a lot of products using the DSTni series of 186 derivitives. I looked at Arm and MIPs among others when I made that decision. Part of it comes down to RISC versus CISC. What I learned was that RISC was capable of very high performance, but that CISC took less memory and a lower clock speed for the same effort. Since both of those relate to battery life and clock speed to EMI issues, I opted to go with CISC.

In my early days RISC was all the rage because it could get more MIPS out of less silicon. That feature should be reconsidered now that transistor (or gate) count isn't as constrained as it was 30 years ago.

We have so much CPU power now that developers don't take runtime efficiency as seriously as we used to. In some ways that is a mistake, because we are migrating ever more towards battery power. While a 2:1 performance hit on a desktop with CPU cycles (an watts) to burn seem of little concequence, a 2:1 performance hit on my cell phone means the battery will last only half as long doing the same thing. That IS a big deal.

7/5/2012 2:24 PM EDT

Reads like a piece of Intel-sponsored FUD. ARM a 12 year-old ? Gimme a break, please.

7/5/2012 2:29 PM EDT

ARM market cap: $7.03B
Intel market cap: $134B

ARM Q1 revenue $0.2B
Intel Q1 revenue $12.9B

Who won what?

7/5/2012 2:40 PM EDT

It's interesting you should compare the ARM to the Atom. A little birdy from inside told me that Intel STARTED with an ARM core, ripped out the guts and built the X86 compatible machine inside. So Atom is a distant relative of an ARM implementation!

7/5/2012 2:52 PM EDT

Colin certainly has an interesting spin on this. Let's look at the different markets:

Servers: That the software and ecosystem has been stable for x86 based systems is certainly true BUT most of this matters less in the new and widely accepted and growing portion of the server space - cloud and warehouse computing. Here most software is being written using higher level descriptions over Java virtual machines e.g. The hooks into the underlying hardware matter less which allows these applications to be ported easily. The fact that Microsoft is now supporting ARM is a HUGE validation of where ARM is heading. So far there hasn't been competitive silicon to challenge Intel but now with HP,Dell announcing ARM servers and Si vendors like Calxeda, Marvell, AppliedMicro, Samsung, nVidia coming out with silicon here it will not be easy for Intel to do an AMD on them. With ARMs new 64b architecture and silicon expected from the likes of AppliedMicro, this will level the playing field even more.

Mobile: In the mobile space ARM has been the de-facto leader. The interesing battle is now for the notebook market which is up for grabs. ARM has the wind of the newer/slicker OSs on its back to drive that into the notebook space.

Embedded: Here it is true that ARM is eating PowerPC and MIP's lunch. In the end the winner here will not be the ISA but the companies out-doing each other in delivering solutions. There are more companies moving to ARM including exisitng MIPS and PowerPC licensees so this this is an indication of which ISA will take the lead.

Intel does have one advantage over others and that is its manufacturing muscle. With FinFets it will maintain its lead for now. I expect the others to catch up though. The future of Intels lead here will also be questionable. FinFets are an example of the exotic direction silicon manufacturing will have to take to maintain moores law. If Intel stumbles here then the war might indeed be over.

7/5/2012 3:18 PM EDT

Let me repeat the words of a Soviet General from the Cold War referring to the huge numbers of tanks the Soviet army possessed, "Quantity has a quality all its own...". ARM does have quantity of rising proportions as the author said.

7/5/2012 3:32 PM EDT

I really, really don't care that ARM doesn't own the workstation market---or that Intel does. For the other 90% of CPU unit sales per year, ARM is clearly a dominant player by any measure except raw cash income ONLY because the margins for non-workstation chips are much lower.

This article is a hybrid of fanboi and FUD, which an organization resorts to only when they sense that a competitor is starting to eat their lunch. The mere existence of this article is pretty strong evidence that Intel itself thinks ARM is a serious threat.

7/5/2012 3:36 PM EDT

There are three metrics in IT: performance, energy efficiency and price. x86 has a diminishing advantage in the first, but has hard time catching up with ARM's dominance in the two remaining ones.

7/5/2012 4:24 PM EDT

"Intel's ecosystem of support chips, subsystems and software is unparalleled in the industry and addresses many more real-world issues than the low-power and small die size that makes ARM a no-brainer for many new designs."

ARM doesn't produce chips, its licensees produce chips. This is the value added the folks that license an ARM core bring. This statement leads me to believe the author doesn't understand this business.

"From the mobile space where Atom offers x86 compatibility that even ARM's most sophisticated cores cannot match..."

The author doesn't seem to understand that the ARM is derived from a RISC architecture as opposed to an x86. This is what differentiates the ARM from Intel. This is why ARM dominates in mobile applications. Please do your homework.

"However, standardizing on ARM cores may eventually hurt margins at TI, Freesale, LSI Logic and elsewhere, as they compete for the same sockets since one of ARM's advantages – interchangeable software – will also enable processor vendors to become interchangeable..."

Again, the primary differentiator among these companies are the peripherals and capabilities they add onto the ARM core. This is why nVidia is coming out with an ARM based chip with integrated graphics. This is why Freescale makes communication processors with strong anti-tamper capabilities.

I stopped reading at this point. I felt like the author was being paid to spread FUD for Intel. Please do your homework.

7/5/2012 4:37 PM EDT

ARM is a brand, not a single core.
Smaller uC parts are chosen on the P's : Peripherals and Price, not the core.
Too many ARM uC repeat the silliness of 16 bit timers, in a 32 bit Micro, and many are narrow Vcc, tho some vendors are catching on that Wide Vcc matters in the small controller space.
Such miss-steps can be expected if you fell for the hype, that a three letter brand, is all designers look at.
The recent Renesas RX200 series covers 1.8v-5.5v, and the Microchip PIC32 MIPs core, easily wins a Pin-IO speed contest against Same-MHz-ARM.
Indeed, as more designs use High level Languages, the core itself matters less and less.

7/5/2012 6:31 PM EDT

Underlying core matters less when it comes to cost, performance and efficiency in the embedded space given that peripherals as a whole take up more of the device area and energy budgets - it's not a simple 'black/white' argument. There are many nuances, which is why there are several 'sub markets' in the embedded space - there's a huge 8bit market still for uC, even though you can get a 32bit uC for well under $1!

7/5/2012 7:55 PM EDT

I guess I should have clarified the embedded category as really being multiple - the 32/64b embedded markets which includes network processors e.(Caviums/Broadcoms/Freescales) and the 8b/16b deeply embedded markets (Renesas/Microchip/Atmel) micros. In the latter, but these micros have a lot of other analog integrated circuits which may be more relevant and the impact of the CPU maybe less important compared to the other markets but the CPU does matter here but for a different reason - here code density, energy efficiency, being able to connect to embedded flash etc are more important and the CPU choice does make a difference.

7/5/2012 11:49 PM EDT

The author is not aware of ARM's genealogy as is obvious from some of his statements:
"the company still has a long way to go to challenge the perennial microprocessor kings"
"Intel in particular has a 20-year head start over ARM, resulting in a maturity, sophistication and veneration that will be hard to displace by a 12-year-old. Intel's ecosystem of support chips, subsystems and software is unparalleled in the industry and addresses many more real-world issues than the low-power and small die size that makes ARM a no-brainer for many new designs"
"ARM is now threatening the ecosystem of MIPS – going into basestations, going into networking, and gaining mainstream licensees like Texas Instruments, Freescale and LSI"

I agree with the perspectives calling this article an FUD effort. This opinion is utter rubbish!!!

The author sounds more like an Intel PR person (No, I'm not an ARM evangelist) desperately trying to pull down ARM.

First, ARM is at least as old and mature as Intel is. More features/instructions does NOT mean greater maturity. Secondly, ARM's market segments have traditionally been different from Intel's.

We're now seeing ARM move into the segments that have been dominated by the Intels of this world and vice versa, which is why the clash. How the clash will play out is not very clear at this point as both bring unique strengths to the table.

7/6/2012 7:36 AM EDT

"and Atmel's AVR all serve specific market segments that will not be going away any time soon."

I recently visited a seminar devoted to the STM32F0 Series, which has a Cortex-M0 core. The ST microcontroller will sell for less than €1.50 when purchased in anything larger than a 1000 pieces (go to mouser.com and search for STM32F050K6U6A) . This 32 bit little marvel outperforms any AVR with ease, beats it in terms of power consumption and is compatible with all the larger M3/M4 processors in ST's STM32 family. A "comparable" (in terms of memory) AVR would cost you (ATmega64-16MU) €5.81 for 500 pieces, so presumably around €5.00 for 1k pieces. I don't really see how there remains a market for Atmel AVRs, apart from supporting legacy products.

7/6/2012 9:33 AM EDT

Linux for ARM, Next W# for ARM. In Embedded TI going fast in ARM though they have their 16-bit Stellaris, NXP promoting ARM.

X86 and X51 are 1980 products and no one will want one Vendor to rule.

7/6/2012 10:58 AM EDT

Ewout206... Six or seven years ago, I sat in on an analysis that said 8 bit micros were going away, to be replaced by 16 bit micros. It turns out the more likely scenario is that high end 8 bit micros will gobble up low end 16 bit micro market and low end 32 bit micros will gobble up the high end 16 bit market. I think the real driver when you get down into the low end of the market is a combination of peripherals, package, and cost. It is possible that someone will come out with an ARM based product that will kill certain segments of the 8 bit market, but I don't see folks like TI or Atmel or uChip giving up their 8 bit business without a fight. It should be interesting.

7/6/2012 11:18 AM EDT

There are also a lot of non-ARM low end MCUs floating around as well. The "eventual move to 32 bit" is still in contention be the 8-bit MCU vendors. ARM has certainly done a spectacular job of providing a very wide range of offerings, but it's far from won or lost in either case.

7/6/2012 12:13 PM EDT

I am glad that I did my latest design using an ARM based architecture. The Stellaris Cortex M3 part I originally designed with was plagued with multiple bugs and delayed the project over eighteen months (note to self, do not use TI again). I was able to salvage the project by moving over to a ST Micro ARM based part and tumbling the I/O pins. If not for the compatibility, we would have been out hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of tens of thousands.

7/6/2012 4:49 PM EDT

ARM a 12-year-old? That's mendacious. Maybe ARM as a corporate entity might be, but the ARM architecture is nearly thirty years old.

It's worth comparing and contrasting ARM and Intel architectures. What Intel was producing when the ARM was being taped out for the first time bears precious little resemblance to the current Intel chips. Those current chips are onion-layered instruction sets on instruction sets on instruction sets, all driven by the need for backward compatibility to chips no-one cares about any more. The fact that they're having to maintain those layers speaks volumes about the original designs.

By contrast, the ARM instruction set now, even on the Cortex-A15 MPCore, looks remarkably similar to the set I was programming at Acorn, at ARM's starting point, when I did the first port of the Berkeley Unix+GNU toolkit to the first standalone ARM hardware.

Basically, Acorn (and then ARM) got it right - and they still are.

7/6/2012 9:58 PM EDT

PCs and even Notebooks are way too expensive for most new users in the Emerging economies and a sub $ 100 Tablet is what they want. Profit from selling billions of SoCs to this market will give new ARM licensees like MediaTek of Taiwan ( already sells Dual Core processors to Lenovo etc. ) become major players with $$$ and ARM will keep them supplied with the latest design A__ cores to attack even the high end market in the US or Europe.

The growing club of ARM based Processors will first destroy Intel's PC franchise but eventually they themselves will turn into standard commodity like DRAM and gradually disappear like the DRAM vendors.

Intel's strategy to survive will probably have to be like that of IBM 20 years ago when Intel inside PCs ate into IBM minis and even mainframes. Intel will now have to focus on Server chipsets ( every 70 SmartPhone / Tablet sold creates the need for one more Server ). In that niche Intel lead in Fab technology will still count. But of course they will need the funds to keep R&D going ( IBM does n't and has to shill its lame versions of Intel's leading edge technologies to oriental Foundries ).

7/6/2012 10:30 PM EDT

HP tablet choice of proprietary architecture instead of ARM hardly makes by sense. I feel the peripherals do make more difference rather than the core. But for tablets who care about which processor anyway.

7/7/2012 10:49 PM EDT

Wow. Bad info all around. Starts with the 12 years comment. Try early 1980's. VLSI Technology. But the article dateline is Portland - not far from an Intel stronghold. Hmmm.

No doubt: Intel makes big bucks designing, building, and selling screaming microprocessors. But don't underestimate the significance of ARM cores. Intel doesn't.

We need both of these architectures (and a few more). ARM is a very different kind of company than Intel. Again, we need both (and many more).

Lots of issues in this article that are twisted badly.

7/15/2012 6:31 PM EDT

Warren East, CEO of ARM, told me recently that ARM does not want to design cores that compete with Intel's, since ARM cores would then have to add memory-managemnt units and other on-chip resources that consume a lot of silicon. ARM is instead concentrating on lean, ultra-low power cores whose software is consistent across all models, making their choice a "no brainer" for embedded designers. In that sense, ARM has won the processor war it has chosen to fight, by virtue of its numerous design wins, but according to ARM's own CEO it is not even trying to take on Intel ( yet :)

9/16/2012 9:29 PM EDT

ARM certainly seems to be winning the press wars lately, but I don't see a huge risk to Intel. I agree that ARM seems to be cleaning up in the 32 bit low-power world, but again, I don't see that as a huge risk.

PC and laptop product lines will lose some customers to tables because there are some people for whom any kind of full PC or laptop is overkill. Those people will use tablets and smart phones to do their computing. However, tablets and smart phones will be incremental sales over PCs more than replacements.

A decade from now, I'm not so sure. As phones get more and more powerful, they will become more and more capable of replacing a full PC. You don't need to worry about syncing applications and data if it's all in your pocket.

At that point, wireless docking stations will abound and conventional PCs will become more and more, specialized niche products.

9/17/2012 11:48 AM EDT

Guys
author is an esteemed tehnologist cum journalist.
He has won the Japan v of Nobel prize

http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4209016/EE-Times-tech-writer-wins-Japan-fellowship

9/18/2012 8:59 AM EDT

Regarding an earlier revenue comment, I tend to agree that comparing ARM revenue to Intel revenue is no useful comparison. What woukd seem to be closer comparison would be comparing intel revenue to ARM revenue PLUS all of revenue from ARM licensees like Qualcom and ARM-specific revenue from chip foundry like TSMC, Samsung. Anyone have an estimate on that? I can guess the number is almost impossible to get accurately from public data