Stefan Mileschin

The handbags at dawn PR war between ARM and Chipzilla appears to have been stepped up with the British outfit claiming it will take more of Intel's share in the notebook personal-computer market than Intel can take from it in the smartphone market.

With ARM as the mobile king and Intel the ruler of PCs and both invading each other's territory a war of words was inevitable.

Warren East, ARM's CEO, told Dow Jones he expects companies making processors based on ARM cores will take between 10 and 20 percent of the notebook PC market by 2014 or 2015.

This would be more of a share than Intel is likely to capture in the smartphone market.

East said it is going to be hard for Intel to be much more than just one of several players.

He thinks that consumers' usage habits are starting to change, and that they do not require much more additional processing power.

The great unwashed just want to run an internet browser, an email package, some Office applications, and Adobe Photoshop or something like that, and not much else, he claimed.

Clearly he has not seen how much processing power you need for Photoshop, but he thinks that putting ARM processors into the heart of PCs will target a lot of the use requirements.

ARM-based chips will be priced much less than traditional Intel chips, making them attractive for some computer manufacturers.

Smartphone chips cost about $20, East said, compared to the approximately $80 to $200 charged for Intel's Core line of PC processors.

http://news.techeye.net/chips/arm-st...rds-with-intel