- The ARM vs Intel battle and well understood but has become somewhat quiet in recent months as benchmarks have shown that Intel has closed a good portion of the gap on ARM with its Medfield processor.
- A number of handset companies have been convinced to have a crack at making Android phones based on Medfield but with very little success to date.
- Its one thing to show a chip consuming equivalent power on a development board and quite another when it comes to power consumption in a battery powered device out there in the wild.
- What really counts is the speed at which the power bars disappear during the day as the user uses his phone and on that basis it seems that Intel still has a pretty long way to go.
- Recent results from some of the Intel devices in both the high end and the low end are not encouraging and only Lenovo and ZTE have seen meaningful volumes and that is from multiple products. (Digitimes).
- I suspect that the real issue remains power consumption.
- With a full instruction set and an architecture that was designed before it was even thought possible that computers would have batteries, Intel is very likely to continue walking with this monkey on its back.
- As a result it will be forced to migrate faster through the geometries and innovate around manufacturing in order to keep up with the much more power efficient ARM design.
- Intel may catch up one day, but its not yet and ARM will always have the opportunity to level the playing field and surpass Intel once again when it comes to power consumption.
- Don’t bet on Intel making a dent in Qualcomm, Nvidia or MediaTek yet.
Huawei – Slow Slippage
22 April 2024