Microprocessors: Intel vs. ARM
Looking at an average McGill classroom, it seems that we are living in an age of paper cup coffee and shiny logo laptops.
Mobility is key for our generation, and big semiconductor companies such as Intel and ARM know that. We are at a point where there is a conflict between two ideologies of productivity and efficiency, and analysts struggle to make a confident bet on either due to the variety of factors involved. The market used to be dominated by desktops on both home and corporate level, however in the last year desktop sales fell and notebooks took over at 69%. We also see an explosion in smartphone sales that surpass PC sales since last year. The industries on the rise are all powered by ARM architectures. Using it’s success, ARM is now trying to get into the server business, boasting ideal solutions for social networking websites and similar clients that require energy efficient rather than performance heavy computations. At the same time Intel is not ready to give up the crown as the king of semiconductor business and is working hard to optimize its solutions and penetrate the mobile market.
Intel chips power most of our servers, desktops and laptops. ARM designs power most of our smartphones, microwaves, e-book readers, and now tablets. Tablets we see today came as an evolution of a smartphone and if they were to grow a keyboard that would pose a threat to netbooks. The simplicity of the ARM architecture allows it to add more cores to improve performance, while Intel needs to employ much more tricky designs such as 3D semiconductor manufacturing, a technology that can benefit ARM in the future too. ARM is taking a top up approach that allows a lot of room for improvement and makes it easier, unlike Intel and the top down approach it has to take which means taking out and simplifying their excellent designs to a point of crippling them. As we have seen with Atom, people don’t like investing into products they see as hobbled.
To fight this, Intel is creating a new category of products called the Ultraportables and is planning to invest around one billion dollars in advertising to create an image of ultra thin and ultra cool Intel based notebooks. However there was a recent internet scandal that shook consumer confidence. During the demonstration, a pre-recorded video was used with a clear intent to misguide the users about the performance. The machines are in fact capable of the claimed performance, and the reason for the lie was simply their fear of something going wrong. Intel is clearly more vulnerable than it looks, but it is still strong with the cash it can use to invest into research and their bold claims of being two years in front of the competition.
ARM is a British design company headquartered in Cambridge that deals with designing and licensing semiconductor technologies. Operating with 1700 employees and a revenue of $622.2 million, the company appears small compared to Intel with its $43.6 billion revenue. Nevertheless it poses a serious threat as it gains momentum. The next iteration of Windows is going to be available for both platforms, and there are also rumors of an ARM based MacBook Air. Windows has done a platform shift before, but at that time the new platform allowed a significant jump in performance making emulation of old programs feasible. ARM has equal performance at best. This makes emulation unfeasible and leaves Windows on ARM without its biggest strength – application portfolio. This might mean that we are going to see a rise of mobile operating systems capable of desktop applications and a phasing out of conventional computer technologies.
As an engineering student I require high performance machines for CAD, but in my day to day life I do not need anything more than a Minerva-and-Facebook machine, and this is what defines the market today, the lack of a requirement for high performance machines, and a need for a long lasting battery. Either way the competition is fierce and it can only be good for the consumer, and I hope to see more innovations come to pass and hopefully some software to go along with it
