How to fill the software short board

ARM's strength is enough to make Intel tremble. The PC and server market monopolized by Intel for many years is likely to be broken by this spoiler.

The biggest killer behind the scenes of this mobile chip industry is actually a low-power processor architecture. However, maintaining low power consumption in the era of constantly updating clock speed and performance is indeed a challenge. Competitors, including Intel, are watching this challenge happily.

Graham Budd, chief operating officer of ARM, is very calm about this, because ARM's solutions are likely to be available next year. At that time, there will undoubtedly be another blow to Intel, which has just entered the mobile terminal.

Challenge Low Power Consumption

"Next year, our big. LITTLE (large-core) technology is expected to appear in smartphones ." Graham Budd told the first financial daily reporter at ARM's annual technical conference that ARM will put the high-performance A15 architecture and the low-power A7 architecture in one chip, automatic Switch Based on load requirements.

For example, when a large amount of computation is required, A15 core is used, and A7 core is used if only simple functions such as reading e-books, listening to music, and sending text messages are used. This is suitable for resolving conflicts between performance and power consumption.

It is understood that if it is a "quad-core A7 quad-core A15" with a total of 8 cores, it can save more than 70% of the energy. At present, Samsung has begun to try this good idea, which will be detailed at the International Solid State circuit Conference ISSCC next February in 2013.

The reason why ARM is constantly developing new technologies in a strong field is that, in the PC market, its rival intel has extended its reach to the mobile chip field, we are eager to make a quick start in the smartphone and tablet markets.

Recently, Intel and Motorola launched the TD version of the smartphone MT788. This is the second release of Intel chip smartphones in the Chinese market after intel and Lenovo launched the K800. Intel and Motorola say they are enough to compete with quad-core mobile products on the market.

Although K800's final market response was not optimistic, it gave ARM an alarm: Intel wants to become another part of the mobile industry.

However, according to a report from Strategy Analytics, Intel's share in the smartphone chip field is only 0.2%, while many chip manufacturers based on ARM architecture occupy more than 90% of the market share.

"Intel's PC-based model is hard to replicate to the mobile field ." Graham Budd told reporters that "the business model determines that ARM is more dominant. We designed a processor architecture to enable our partners to develop differentiated chips that better adapt to market competition, which intel cannot do ."

Short Board to be supplemented

Interestingly, while Intel is squeezing into the Mobile End, ARM is also in a rush to join Intel's advantageous fields.

When Intel and Microsoft broke the "Win-tel" camp which had been hard to crack for several years by ARM, they declared that ARM had entered Intel's dead PC end.

According to media reports, Ian Drew, executive vice president of ARM marketing and business development, said last week that, the British chip design company's share in the traditional PC and tablet markets will reach "double-digit" in 2013. By 2015, its share in the traditional PC market alone will exceed 10%.

However, the economic slowdown is putting the entire PC industry into the most severe recession in the past decade. Graham Budd told reporters that ARM has its own optimization solutions for different products, and the line between PC and mobile is becoming increasingly blurred.

When people think that ARM's "Ambition" is only a step into PC, another ARM action makes Intel more powerful.

In October 31, ARM released the first 64-bit processor Cortex A50 series, with the intention to further expand its leading position in the mobile field against Intel, while also entering Intel's dominant server market.

At present, six chip manufacturers, including Samsung, IFA semiconductor, and Hais semiconductor, have become the first publicly authorized partners. The A50 series of chips are also expected to be released in 2014.

ARM is not only supported by Qualcomm, Samsung, and other vendors that have been committed to the mobile market. Even AMD, which has been entangled with Intel, announced in early November this year that it plans to develop server processors based on the ARM architecture. In November this year, Intel's market value was surpassed by Qualcomm in the ARM camp.

An industry observer told reporters that the reason why ARM has the confidence to face intel is mainly based on two points: first, ARM power consumption is far lower than the latter, second, the price of ARM processors is much lower than that of Intel processors.

Arm ceo Warren East said in an interview with the media in May this year that the price of PC chips using the ARM architecture may be slightly higher than the price of about $20 for smartphone chips, but it is still far lower than the price of Intel core chips between $80 and $200.

ARM's high growth makes Intel, which is currently somewhat exhausting, feel like a needle in the teeth. However, as the leader in the PC and server processor market for many years, Intel's profound background is beyond reach at half past one.

For example, Intel's hardware support has been gradually improved. The ARM server system manufacturer must design the motherboard by hand, which increases production costs.

In addition, Dell once stressed that ARM's software system is weak, the applicable software is hard to find and expensive, which causes enterprise users to maintain two independent software systems: one is based on the x86 architecture and the other is based on ARM, And the maintenance costs will increase.