Intel Says it Will Out-Wrestle ARM in Power Usage

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Got to love competition. Intel's seems confident and I'm confident that they can and will succeed with thier battle with ARM. Or at least I hope so. Im tired of shelling out so much legal tender for these phones, maybe the competition can bring better products at lower costs, like it does in the desktop box world:)
 
Intel sold their Xscale/StrongArm tech. They knew they had the Atom coming out. At the time I could not believe they would sell off ARM unit. They sold it to Marvell Technology Group in June 2006.
 
Interesting to see ARM reply to this. Intel is very confident in wining this competition. ARM is already dominant in the mobile and embedded electronics market such as PDAs, mobile phones, digital media and music players, hand-held game consoles, calculators and computer peripherals such as hard drives and routers. I guess intel is just aiming for the mobile market. Like rcreed stated, "Competition will bring better products at lower cost". which is true.
 
Wasn't there an article on Toms a while go about the moorestown chips that explained that they will attain the majority of the power savings by switching off parts of the chip when it is not in use? Kind of like segmenting the chip. All ARM needs to do is copy this design feature and they are ahead again.
 
Competition is good for the consumer, and the advancement of technology in general. However, ARM processors are very inexpensive to make, which Intel has not commented on. Intel will have to negotiate some deals to get these chips into the most frequently bought phones. They will also need to tip-toe to avoid another anti-competitive (AMD/Intel) faux pas.

I have no doubt they have wonderful technology, and they know how to market their products. But with the already widely accepted ARM chips, Intel will have an uphill battle. In any case, the consumers will be the winners.
 
...and then here comes AMD with Bobcat, rated for 1-10w. If only they'd expand their customer base like Intel has, they could gain a lot of market share.

Back on topic, though, I do honestly expect Intel to come out ontop. ARM just doesn't have the sheer power that Intel is holding right now. I don't expect them to butcher ARM by a wide margin, but maybe I'll be wrong on the whole thing and maybe ARM will pick up the pace.

Just my $0.02.
 
ARM in the Main is a Fabless IP company, that is they dont care about trying to figure out how to make the thing and debug fabbing issues, they just concentrate on R&D for chip design and then license the tech to other companies, it means nearly 100% of their R&D is dedicated to chip design (Intel still has to budget for Fab R&D to figure out how to shrink die sizes)

On top of that ARM has serious links into top tier universities (albeit it mostly in the UK) and can pool from some of the most talented and innovative graduates as well as research programs

Forget smartphones, nearly anything that might have a chip in it most probably has some IP or other license from ARM in it, Intel is not the kinda of company thats going to ignore that kind of dollar incentive, fact remains it took them this long just to figure out how to crack it (by utilizing low performing chips in parallel and die shrinkage), truth is for low intensity computing platform ARM's RISC based chips are far more efficient then Intel's x86 offering, and the current strategy Intel is employing ARM can simply employ too (multi-core and die shrinkage), to really make an impact Intel needs to pump in some radical new tech (like Fermi or Fusion) otherwise i dont think Intel is going make any kind of dent in this market at all
 
If intel succeeds i'd be more than a little surprised, not only do they have the issue of competing with arm's low power/good performance ratio, they have to actually get a smartphone os to agree to support x86 at all since every smartphone is using some revision of arm it's only going to fragment the market if intel wants to play game
 
So instead of crappy tablets it will make crappy phones. But people wont mind because it's not the size of a tablet and doesn't have a full os like a tablet it will be called great performance!

Either way it should lower prices unless everyone is like apple and takes the price as 30-50% is profit.
 
I think that its great Intel is trying a little bit of everything... compition drives innovation, a win win for consumers. but as in the past the last thing they need is the FTC or another company going after them.
 
[citation][nom]DjEaZy[/nom]... ARM and upcoming AMD's bobcat is making intel $#it in tha pants...[/citation]

Ha-ha... Intel what? we will see Intel prices dropping to half before they actually "$#it in tha pants..." too much cash in the bank to get scared off.
 
[citation][nom]digiex[/nom]Competition = Lower prices = good[/citation]
Yes, right.

I hope Intel's real long term intention is not going Wintel on smartphones. Microsoft is trying to enter market now and what would be the best partner to work with, which will probably have potential to eliminate competition? I hope this idea will prove false for the sake of all of us, mobile users.
 
[citation][nom]rantoc[/nom]Tricks like forcing the phoone manfacturers to use only use their chips or loose huge discounts, guess time will tell![/citation]
That is what they did with AMD in x86 processors. That is loathsome.
 
I would wish Intel the best of luck but it's going to be an up-hill battle for them as ARMs RISC technology (ARM stands for Advanced RISC Machines) is a far better optimized for low power and embedded solutions than Intel/AMDs x86 technology.

A single ARM core in the upcoming Cortex A9 version is (without cache and other external circuits) still only about 40K transitors and takes up less than 1 mm2 of chip real-estate on the current 40 um process. And each core uses less than 200 mW at 1.2GHz running flat out, not in idle. The ARM will also see a faster node shrink as TMSC expects to move to a 28 um process in mid-2011 giving further power savings and size reduction. It's even hinted that ARM is working on a fully JAVA optimized core for future versions.

It might be that Intel can possibly match the current ARM technology in speed and power consumption giving a 3-4 year window. But as Intel should know the world doesn't revolve around them and other companies R&D doesn't sit around on their laurels. In the embedded market Intel is a tiny player, up against real technology giants and I don't see that change any time soon.

 
On the one hand, competition is great for all of us consumers. On the other hand though, Intel chips in all of my technology makes me afraid of a Skynet future.
 
[citation][nom]digiex[/nom]Competition = Lower prices = good[/citation]

That's the standard reply everyone likes to use, but you're ignoring the fact that massive companies like Intel don't join a new market to compete. They join the new market actively trying to monopolize it even if they have to use illegal methods to do so. I would rather see ARM dominate this segment than letting Intel join in. Better wait for some smaller company which doesn't have billions of dollars to throw at retailers as an "incentive" to buy they're products.
 
IIRC, x86 has more instruction optimization points than ARM does (think mmx, sse2, ssse3, vmx, etc). This means that there are more areas for compilers to optimize on and Intel has lots of resources to throw at compiler optimizing for GCC, and the like. This is one of the reasons atoms run stuff faster at the same clock than ARM. Also, Intel has very evolved manufacturing techniques. ARM Holdings has zero manufacturing facilities. They just design the chips and they are a not a very large company. Furthermore, TI, Qualcomm and the like don't even come close to Intel when it comes to these techniques.

Also, with regard to the AMD Bobcat... I hadn't heard that AMD was even targeting the smartphone/ultra-mobile sphere. Bobcat sounds like a netbook/tablet product. They need sub 1W Active power usage to come close to current ARM and soon Medfield product lines. However, the integrated GPU in the bobcat does sound as appealing as the Tegra lineup. Could be really interesting. But along with the Desktop lineup, AMD is playing catchup on a very large scale.
 
How very convenient now that Android 3.0 will require one of the faster phones, perfect time for yet another CPU performance war.

*Pops popcorn*
 
[citation][nom]kancaras[/nom]ofc they can reduce size and power. atom cpus are way too powerfull for smartphones. power, size, speed - all can decrease if needed. but the main question is: wheres amd?[/citation]

AMD is stuck until GloFlo can get 32nm working properly. Guess GloFlo is having troubles with 32nm and HK/MG.

Some people thought HK/MG was easy, but they forget that Intel started research on it during Prescott.

As for the article, I don't find it hard to believe that Intel can beat ARM in power. Intel has the most advanced process and will be at 22nm soon.
 
I figure AMD would have been more on top of mobile technology by now. Intel has been dominating laptops, while AMD keeps them on a low priority. Sadly this will be repeated here, but ARM should hold for awhile before Intel out muscles them.
 
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