The Fight Between ARM and Intel Gets Real :ARM servers and Intel smartphones are coming soon

The Battle Between ARM and Intel Gets Real

ARM servers and Intel smartphones are coming soon

There are two giants in the computer processor industry. One is Intel, which builds most of the processors in today's PCs and servers. The other is ARM Holdings, in Cambridge, England, which thanks to its vast ecosystem of partners has established near-complete dominance of the market for the core logic inside smartphones and tablets.


But the demand for energy-efficient chips is reshaping the industry. As the PC market flattens, Intel aims to capture a sizable chunk of the rapidly growing mobile market, which rose to nearly half a billion smartphones in 2011. And chip designers in ARM's camp are eyeing a US $50 billion server market, fueled by the rise of social networking and cloud computing.


The coming months will see a number of volleys exchanged across the line that has traditionally divided the high-performance and low-power chip markets. One of the first will come from a small start-up in Austin, Texas, called Calxeda (pronounced cal-ZAY-dah). The fabless firm will begin shipping chips for servers based on 32-bit ARM mobile processor designs. They'll soon be joined by AppliedMicro, in Sunnyvale, Calif., which is working on an even speedier, 64-bit ARM-based chip. At the same time, Intel will leap into the mobile game; two big companies—Lenovo and Motorola—plan to release phones based on Intel's low-power Atom processor by the end of this year.
(The very first Intel-based smartphone was launched in April by the India-based firm Lava International.)

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