Reverse March server arm to the Intel Lair

October 31, the mobile chip field of the behind-the-scenes giant arm company in Beijing officially released two 64-bit processor products Cortex A50 series. This is the first 64-bit processor released by ARM, with the intention of further expanding its lead relative to Intel in the mobile arena while moving into Intel's dominant server market.

The chief business officer of ARM, Mike Inglis, described this as "the most important release since the company was founded 25". According to the reporter understand, including Samsung, Italy and France Semiconductor, as well as China chip manufacturers Heiss Semiconductor, including 6 chip manufacturers become the first batch of publicly authorized partners.

According to Mike Inglis, the partner's 64-bit processor based on the ARM architecture will be officially marketed in 2014. "The PC market has taken eight years to transition from 32 to 64, and I believe the mobile or mobile market will change much faster, but it will not happen overnight," he said. Mike Inglis said.

Mobile Leadership Semiconductor transformation?

In the PC era, the Win-tel (Microsoft + Intel) alliance led the development of the industry. The step-by-step upgrades of computer chips are largely driven by Intel. But with the rise of mobile intelligent terminals, the rules change gradually.

"In the past, the PC industry has a very important role in shaping semiconductor companies, but we believe that the future of semiconductor enterprises should be shaped by the mobile industry, which is a major change." Mike Inglis said.

His judgment was based mainly on two points. The first is from the point of view of scale, "the PC's annual sales to maintain a very long time, and mobile terminal sales are 1 billion levels." Mike Inglis that the scale gap is so great that all chip makers are aware of it. In the third quarter of 2012 alone, Samsung's handset shipments reached 105.4 million, up 21% from a year earlier, according to the latest data from IDC.

The second is from the profit angle. The PC market's chip profits are high, and the Win-tel Alliance took most of the industry's profits, which indirectly caused the PC industry not to change much over the past few years. And in the mobile market profits are more dispersed, a lot of products themselves only dozens of U.S. dollars, "This is the semiconductor industry to make a different request." ”

Of course, the current mobile domain is mainly based on 32-bit products, whether it's a processor, an operating system, or even an application. In Mike Inglis's view, the ecosystem still needs time to refine. The PC market took 8 years to transition from 32 to 64, and Mike Inglis that "moving may take 3 or 4 years, or even 5 years, but certainly faster." ”

So why is arm rushing to launch 64-bit products? From the PC industry's example, the most intuitive impression of a 64-bit system is that it supports more than 4G of memory (traditional 32-bit systems can only support 3.25G of memory).

In the view of Mike Inglis, "the tradition of network devices or network applications is developed in 64-bit." In addition, as the memory of our smartphone or super phone is expanding, it will also make more demands on 64 bits in the future. ”

Another reason is the demand from OEM manufacturers. "The products they offer may cover

To flat to ordinary computers such products, they hope that in these products can achieve consistency and uniformity of software, so there will be a large demand for 64. ”

Arm and Intel enter each other

Intel has recently been a frequent mover in the mobile chip sector and is keen to open the door to smartphones and tablet markets. Lenovo, for instance, launched a High-profile smartphone K800 on Intel chips this May, but the final market response was not rosy.

"I don't think Intel is a threat to the mobile end market," he said. "Mike Inglis says we can see that Intel has been trying very hard to get into the market over the past few years, but Arm is also working with chip partners to push for product innovation."

ARM China's president Wu Xionghang that the biggest difference between arm and Intel lies in the business model. ARM itself does not produce products, but authorized to such as Qualcomm and other Chip partners, which charge a small amount of IP licensing fees, so the ecological chain can be bigger.

Mike Inglis quoted a report from Strategy Analytics that according to the latest statistics Intel's share of the smartphone chip sector is only 0.2%, while many chip makers based on the ARM architecture account for more than 90% per cent of the market.

In addition, in addition to defending against Intel's attack, arm itself began to seek access to Intel's dominant server areas. In fact, the first area where 64-bit processor products can be used is the server market. Mike Inglis admits that in the 32-bit shift to 64-bit, "the transition in the server and the network will be faster, and the shift in the mobile market may be a little slower." ”

The recent change of AMD attitude has also boosted the confidence of arm in the server field. October 30, AMD announced that in addition to the original x86 processor, the company will also design a number of market-oriented 64-bit ARM architecture processor, the new product will first supply the cloud server and Data Center server market.

"AMD has a certain advantage in the server sector, which is a strategic decision for it." Mike Inglis that this trend also means that data center device vendors will face more choices as ARM processors enter the server market.