ARM Stealthily Rising As a Low-End Contender

snydeq writes "InfoWorld's Neil McAllister examines how the ongoing rise of netbooks, decline of desktops, and the smartphone explosion are reconfiguring the processor market, putting Intel's Atom processor on a clear collision course with ARM. And here, on the low end of computing, Intel may have finally met its match. Thanks to a unique licensing model, ARM will ship an estimated 90 chips per second this year, and the catalog of OSes and apps available for ARM has been growing for decades, including several complete Linux distributions such as Google's Android OS and Chrome OS when it ships. 'One thing ARM doesn't have, however, is Windows,' McAllister writes, something that could ultimately stymie ARM's plans to compete on the low end of the netbook market. And yet Intel's bet on Windows and its x86 compatibility appeal among developers could backfire, McAllister writes. In the end, it's all about performance. Thus far, Intel has yet to demonstrate a model with power characteristics comparable to those of the current generation of ARM chips, which are fast proving their ability to handle high-performance applications."

Comments

Gadgets not laptops

[Darkness404]

The problem with ARM is that it will perpetually be in the "gadget" category until it can run some "real" OSes. Yes, there is Linux but on popular Linux distros aimed for the general public (such as Ubuntu) ARM is only slightly supported and is still very much a "second class" port compared to the x86 and x86-64 versions. But really what will kill it is more "innovative" UIs for lower-end laptops don't look like "real" computers in the eyes of the consumer. If it looks like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ubuntu_netbook_remix_9.04.png it is a gadget, compared to if it looks likehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Windows_XP_SP3.png , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Snow_Leopard_Desktop.png or even http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gnome-2.28.png

That's a lot of chips

[iliketrash]

"ARM will ship an estimated 90 chips per second this year"

Really? Is this some kind of government math? That's 2.84 billion chips shipped in 2009.