Intel could not have signaled its target for the next five years any more clearly than it did at last week's Intel Developer Forum.
The world's largest chipmaker didn't make a whole lot of news at the latest edition of IDF, but it did send a message to the legion of chipmakers that build chips based on the ARM architecture: We're coming for you.
That didn't exactly send shivers down the spine of executives at Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Samsung, STMicroelectronics and others that build chips for mobile phones. They've seen this coming for a long time, an inevitable consequence of Intel finding itself with reams of chipmaking capacity and a maturing PC market. And Intel has already tried this once, spending billions trying to develop a combination of chips for the cell phone market but failing miserably.
Following Intel's show in San Francisco last week, ARM developers will be meeting next week in Santa Clara, Calif.--Intel's hometown--for its annual developers' conference to discuss new applications and techniques for extracting more performance out of ARM's processor cores. The collective effort of both camps should do wonders to jump-start a market for mobile devices built for real people, not just coffee-toting executives rushing through O'Hare trying to get the 7:42 flight to San Francisco.
Intel's definitely the challenger, not the favorite, when handicapping the looming showdown between the two companies. ARM is very well-known inside the tech industry, although its lack of an "ARM Inside" marketing campaign means that few mobile phone owners know much about the 1,700-employee design company based in Cambridge, England.
But there's an ARM core chip of some type or another inside almost every mobile phone on the planet, and in many cases, there are a couple. Chip companies like TI and Samsung license cores from ARM, and then build the processor and assemble the rest of the chips needed for modern mobile phones and their more powerful cousins, smart phones.
Despite its earlier struggles, Intel thinks it can be the company that vastly improves the mobile Internet experience by creating chips for a whole new category of devices. We're talking about mobile devices that are more powerful and nimble than current smart phones, and sleeker and with better battery life than today's mobile minitablets.
This is where the next battleground will be fought in the chip industry. ARM and its partners have a long history of working in environments where battery life is often the most important consideration. They also have the benefit of having gotten there first. Intel, however, brings a ton of experience developing products for advanced computing, and has challenged itself to redouble its efforts to harness power consumption.
A few years ago, Intel tried to get into mobile phones with a product called Manitoba. That project was an attempt to waltz into the mobile phone industry by integrating one of its XScale applications processor (based on ARM's instruction set, coincidentally) a communications processor, and some flash memory into a single package. It was a flop. Intel was never able to convince phone makers to take a risk on its products, and it sold the business to Marvell last year for US$600 million.
However, the trends that made Intel take interest in the mobile market aren't going away. PC sales growth is slowing in the U.S. and Western Europe (PC vendors shipped 239 million units during 2006, according to Gartner, up 9.5 percent from 2005), and while PCs are still hot in emerging markets, it's only a matter of time before growth there settles in at a respectable 10 percent clip.
Smart phones, on the other hand, are taking off. Mobile phones as a whole already sell more than a billion units a year, and Gartner thinks smart-phone shipments (defined as phones that can run sophisticated operating systems and access the Internet) are set to grow 52 percent from 2007 to 2008, from 102 million units in 2007 to 156 million by the end of next year.
So after failing to dial into the phone market, Intel now wants to invent an entirely new product in anticipation of a mobile computing world. The concept--for now--is called the MID (mobile Internet device), and was once known as the UMPC (ultramobile PC).
Next year, Intel plans to introduce a chip called Silverthorne that uses the x86 instruction set found in every PC chip from Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. The design goal for Silverthorne is to consume 10 times less power than the first Banias Pentium M chip Intel introduced in 2003.
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