Editor’s Note: This article is an excerpt from RCR Wireless News’ May Special Edition, “Enabling the Mobile Revolution: Mobile Chips, Devices and Accessories.” The 80-page special edition is available here.
Good things come in small packages, especially when it comes to the tiny processors designed for mobile devices like smartphones, tablets and netbooks. While the chips may be small, the companies behind contemporary mobile chip design are veritable giants, slogging it out to become masters of the space.
Ever heard about the CPU maker that has shipped several billion processors – 10 times more than in Intel? No? Frankly, we’re not surprised. Possibly the fiercest chip battle being waged is that between a small British firm, ARM Holdings – which owns the rights to the core chip design used in most smartphones – and Intel, the world’s premiere maker of PC chips.
Santa Clara, Calif.-based Intel with its 80,000 employees worldwide has a long, prosperous and solid history of not only designing its own chips, but also making them, in-house, at any of its plethora of super-efficient manufacturing facilities. Even the general public is familiar with the term “Intel Inside” when referring to PCs, a rather amazing marketing feat for a firm selling processors.
Very few members of that same general public are aware of what chips nestle deep within their mobile devices and handsets, although ARM and its 2,000 employees – whose processors are in more than 90% of handsets – plans to change that.
Breaking it down, ARM actually owns 95% of the mobile-phone market and 85% of the smartphone market in unit shipments. The company was recently valued at around $8 billion.
ARM’s comprehensive product offering includes 16/32-bit RISC microprocessors, data engines, 3D processors, digital libraries, embedded memories, peripherals, software and development tools. Now ARM is stepping up its rivalry with Intel, not only by moving up into the smartbook and netbook market, but also by vociferously fending off Intel’s invasion into the mobile space, a market segment in which the American chip giant seems desperate to increase its tiny presence.
Just as a point of comparison, tiny ARM has managed to ship almost a billion volumes vs. goliath Intel’s approximately 120 million CPUs.
Also, with its base of more than 200 semiconductor licensees – including colossuses like Alcatel-Lucent, Atmel, Broadcom,Cirrus Logic, Marvell Technology Group, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and others that produce their own processor variants on the firm’s technology – ARM’s gang is capable of giving Intel a run for its money.
ARM argues Intel simply doesn’t have what it takes to build the tiny, ultra-low power chips still capable of packing enough of a performance punch.
Add to that the increasing demand for the “always on,” “ull-day use” model mobile computing is trending toward and battery life becomes a real issue for chip makers like Intel, whose Atom processor still consumes about four times more power than ARM’s offerings.
Intel has the disadvantage of having to scale its chips and power down, while, for fabless ARM, the only way is up, and that includes prices and all important margins.
Price comparisons
A quick price comparison reveals that while ARM sells its SoCs for between $10 and $20, Intel’s Atom starts at a heftier $35.
The licensee system does, however, put ARM at a slight disadvantage because designing a chip, licensing it out, adapting it and then sending it out to various contract manufacturers to build can be a long and convoluted process, compared with Intel’s simpler in-house manufacturing.
Also, contract foundries have lagged behind Intel’s manufacturing prowess, stumbling when it comes to more complex chip designs. Intel’s process technology is a lot better than what is available to most ARM licensees.
Not easily discouraged, however, ARM boasts it can also match Atom’s performance “clock for clock” while still delivering a full day’s battery life compared with to Atom’s paltry few hours. “Faster and faster really hasn’t paid any real dividends,” said Bob Morris, ARM’s director of Mobile Computing.
What does pay dividends for Intel, though, is the fact that ARM chips cannot run Windows, which only works on an X86 processor. This gives Intel an advantage as a majority of users are still unhappy with the idea of having to use a Linux-based operating system, although offerings like Google’s Android seem poised to bridge the gap.
ARM is not sitting back on its laurels, actively looking to exploit the multitude of new operating systems and user interfaces (UI) cropping up for mobile devices of late, including Android and Xandros Linux.
The combination of ARM with Linux is almost an impossible one for Intel to beat, price wise, but Intel, despite its Windows advantage, hasn’t neglected open source either, chipping away at its own Open Source Moblin Linux project which it recently partnered on with Nokia to create new mobile OS, MeeGo.
Intel also recently managed to port Android to Atom, which while some believe is good thing, others believe is something of an oxymoron. Critics note that the two are incompatible, seeing as Android was developed to be a mobile platform, while Atom is clearly a PC product.
Software does indeed matter to the mobile world – whether that helps or hurts Intel, however, remains to be seen.
The role of the cloud
Intel executives argue relentlessly that consumers will not be satisfied with the type of computing experience ARM can offer, and that people will demand more robust mobile computing experiences, requiring chips with more power and PC-friendly software, both of which are traditional Intel strengths.
ARM disagrees. People don’t necessarily need MIDs or cheap netbooks to be PC replacements, although, with the onslaught of cloud computing and the world becoming “more browser based,” software compatibility is becoming less of the big deal Intel would have us all believe.
“What we’re really seeing,” said Morris, “is that we’re waiving this PC era and going into the next stage of computing.”
More than anything, mobile apps are changing the dynamics of computing. Innovative apps replace the browser, the Web site and the tools or application from the Web site in an easy point-and-click manner.
One could even go a step further and say that in many ways the app store replaces the search engine.
This makes using the Internet easy and practical on mobile devices, shifting almost everything to the Internet. When you combine this with handheld mobile devices, the smartphone (or at least something similar) becomes the ultimate platform.
This in no way means the PC is about to become defunct, but much in the same way the world transitioned from mainframes to PCs two decades ago without rendering the mainframe completely obsolete, ARM believes we’re moving into an era where more and more devices are connected to the Internet and are able to perform different tasks, many of which are performed in the cloud.
The tablet craze kicked off by Apple’s iPad will also likely profoundly change people’s attitudes towards mobile computing and what they expect from it. Tablets, like handsets, are a lot more suited to quick browsing and a more fast-food type content consumption model, suited to people’s shorter attention spans and social media addictions.
As tweeting, blogging and Facebook become the prevalent from mobile devices, it becomes all the more critical that these platforms can be up and running in an instant, rather than booting up in the time it takes a PC. People want to open up their device and have it ready to go, not wait to acquire a signal, authenticate, download, and see where things are.
Incidentally, Apple’s iPad used a variant of ARM’s processor, rather than Intel’s, something which
has given non-X86 architecture a massive boost.
At Mobile World
Congress in Barcelona, Spain, back in February, a host of manufacturers showed off a veritable smorgasbord of devices based on ARM chips, including phones, tablets and small laptops. Analysts and press alike were wowed by devices like the HTC Desire, built on a Qualcomm ARM chip called Snapdragon and sporting a rather large touch-screen display.
Meanwhile, Intel recently announced a new version of its Atom processor platform – the 45nm Z6xx, previously codenamed Moorestown – which purportedly delivers a 50x platform idle power reduction with high performance and a smaller size than the previous Atom generation. These power savings, says the firm, translate into about 10 days of standby, up to two days of audio playback and four to five hours of browsing and video battery life.
The Z6xx manufactured on Intel’s 45nm low-power process is highly integrated, boasts 140 million transistors, includes a controller hub (MP20) and a dedicated mixed signal IC. As one would expect, the chips also bring support for Wi-Fi, 3G/HSPA, and WiMAX.
Critics say Intel is simply reacting to a market, rather than shaping it, and that Moorestown has simply been stuck in development for far too long, especially bearing in mind that smartphone design is a process which takes anything from a year to 18 months. Even now that Moorestown is out in the open, it might only be 2011 before designs based on it appear on shelves.
Realistically, Intel’s Medfield (the next generation) built on a single chip could potentially close the power gap with ARM, something the dual chip Z6xx still has not done.
As Intel enters the phone fray, however, the question is whether ARM has what it takes to dethrone X86 and become the world’s dominant chip player.
Analysts seem to believe there will be room for both architectures.
“I don’t see ARM replacing the x86 architecture in more traditional computing devices, especially those that look and feel like computing devices, but I don’t see x86 displacing ARM in mobile devices, including tablets,” said In-Stat analyst Jim McGregor.
The real question, he said, was how the market was changing, with increasing numbers of people turning to mobile platforms for what they once did with computing devices. This leaves the PC searching for new value propositions and plays to ARM’s strengths of integration, customized solutions, low-power consumption and strong ecosystem.
What Intel can still offer the industry, however, is the promise of producing hot new chips on improved manufacturing processes every 18 months using its now notorious “Tick-Tock” system. The bigger chip firm also has more experience than some newer chip manufacturers, meaning production is less likely to be held up.
Ultimately, though, the chip wars will all boil down to power consumption and at the moment, for mobile devices with small batteries, ARM has Intel well and truly beaten.
Intel can’t yet match ARM’s power-efficient chips without a radical redesign, major investment in R&D and die shrinks.
Currently the only real advantage Intel has is its market position brand name, outstanding manufacturing capabilities and x86 platform, which comes with software compatibility benefits. If Windows could run on ARM, rather than being x86 exclusive, Intel would be in real trouble in the mobile space, and as users grow ever more comfortable with open source operating systems, the firm may only have a very small window of time left to get its foot in the mobile door.
Intel could eventually design chips as power efficient as ARM’s offerings for the mobile space, but it’s not an overnight process. There are a lot of changes that have to take place, both in terms of design and also manufacturing.
Still, the firm can reassure itself with the fact X86 chips will still be key in desktops and full size laptops for a long while to come. Also, for consumers, the battle of the chip giants for the ultra-mobile space should provide not just great innovation, but also increased competition, which is a healthy way to digest all the chip fat.
