Stefan Mileschin

ARM is adopting the same strategy against Intel that Captain Edward John Smith used to defeat icebergs on the Titanic's maiden voyage.

According to Mercury News, the British company is pretending that Chipzilla is no threat at all, despite it making a credible sudden entry into the mobile market.

Warren East, chief executive of Cambridge-based ARM, said Intel's phones were still a couple of generations behind the latest ARM-based smartphones which were still unsinkable.

He also claimed that the size of Intel's mobile partner network was too small to match ARM's Titanic network.

All this means that ARM will remain the king in what is probably the world's hottest technology sector.

In some ways he is right. Nearly all smartphones and tablet use processors based on ARM's energy-efficient architecture.

Intel chips have failed to make inroads in mobile where battery life is critical.

East admitted that Intel's new Indian phone was very good and was comparable with the Apple 3G in terms of browsing speed, and ease of user interface.

But that phone was launched many years ago and design wise is a bit smelly. East did say that he thought Intel will gain some share in the smartphone space, but nothing vast.

Intel will be one of 20 companies supplying into that space, the others have the advantage of using the ARM architecture, and the last 10-15 years has been spent developing a very strong ecosystem around that architecture, East added.

While Chipzilla was catching up in making microprocessors more efficient, but the ARM world continued to move ahead.

East has budgeted on the factthat Intel would gain just 10 percent of the smartphone apps processor market in two to four years.

Meanwhile ARM is moving in the other direction into Intel's territory, thanks to its deals with Microsoft to configure its Windows operating system for ARM's architecture for the first time.

ARM should be able to take about ten per cent of the PC market and possibly 20 per cent in a few years.

While he is probably right, more than a few careers have gone down by underestimating Intel. What East and Captain Edward John Smith fail to understand is that it is best to go around such a monster rather than charge through it and hope your unsinkable technology will push you through.

http://news.techeye.net/chips/arm-cl...ntel-no-threat