ARM wants to wrestle with Intel

tech.fortune.cnn.com

2 points·barredo··3 comments

Those predictions about ARM's notebook market share keep rising and rising. They went from none, to 13%, and now 23%. I don't think I've seen a more "classic" disruption than ARM vs Intel/x86 in recent years. To me, it's by far the most obvious disruption from all the tech paradigm shifts going on right now.

Too bad Intel can't see it, too, and they'll waste years on it fighting with their "old" technology against the disruption, which is pretty much always a mistake. Or maybe they do see it, but they just really don't want to believe it, and the conflict of interest is too great.

Make chips with tens or hundreds of dollars in profit? Or make chips with several dollars in profit? Tough choice indeed. But they're choosing the wrong option right now.

Intel can see it. The development of the Atom was partially a reaction to ARM. Intel is in a classic innovator's dilemma and unwilling, apparently, to pursue the most successful strategy to counteract it - create a standalone business entity that can and will compete at the smaller scale.

Many of these articles then extrapolate the ARM X86 battle into the server space - which does not follow. The mobile disruption is that smaller devices will replace laptops and potentially desktops with newer simplified usage models and not that X86 will be wholesale swapped for ARM in every case. Cloud computing does present though a separate potential to disrupt server X86 that companies like Tilera are pursuing.

Research firm IHS iSuppli recently said it projects that by 2015, 22.9% of notebook shipments worldwide will be ARM-based systems.

22.9% for an estimate four years away? Not 23%? Impressive accuracy :P

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