Qualcomm Wants a Piece of the PC Market

jfruhlinger writes "Much of Intel's story of the past few years has involved its so far fruitless attempts to break into the smartphone and tablet market. But as it keeps trying, it may find competition on its home turf: Qualcomm, which makes many of the ARM-based chips in those smartphones and tablets, wants to make PCs, too. The advent of Windows 8 for ARM and Android will make this possible."

Comments

Hmmm...

[msauve]

What goes around, comes around.

At one time, Apple pitched RISC (ala PowerPC) as the logical successor to CISC (x86). They were also an early investor in ARM (along with Acorn and VLSI). Intel, though, had the development resouces ($$$) to stave that off.

Sounds like it might finally be happening.

(Opinion: Too bad Apple has turned evil in the interim.)

Re:Hmmm...

[Nutria]

but that's all because the x86 chips just havn't been small enough to be efficient and use little power to keep devices going for a long while.

I wonder why Intel doesn't rip out the x86 decoder from it chips and then write compiler back-ends that directly generate micro-ops.

Since the decoder stage is large and power-hungry, the resulting chips would be faster than any ARM variant while also being much smaller are low-power than Atoms.

Re:Not going to work...

[c0lo]

If Linux hasn't been able to succeed on the desktop, then I see no reason why ARM would succeed

Depends on the price, I guess.

Replace Linux with Android, get a price under $50 (even if display-less) and you have a desktop good for browsing, social networking and communication (Skype). As for the price: if Raspberry PI can, I think it is possible put a bit more RAM for the price.

The ARMy of fanboys is getting repetitive.

[CajunArson]

Before I being, bear in mind, the whole annoying mantra that x86 will NEVER compete with ARM in low-power applications has just been shot out of the water: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5365/intels-medfield-atom-z2460-arrive-for-smartphones

I've been hearing ad-nauseum about how all ARM has to do to destroy x86 in the desktop market is to flip a couple of bits and they'll have "good enough" performance while using zero-point energy that produces free power and unicorns since about 2006. In the meantime, the exact same people who say that ARM is "good enough" rip dual-core Atoms for being too slow (while the single-core Medefield I just linked to is faster than dual--core A9's in the Iphone 4S and Galaxy Nexus, while using less power).

I've also heard about how the A15 will completely blow Intel away when it finally shows up blah blah blah (I heard the exact same story about the A9 cores btw, and Intel is still in business).

What I have yet to see is ARM *really* ratchet up performance... and no, I'm not saying that they need to beat Ivy Bridge... I'm saying they need to *approximate* a mobile 1.8Ghz Core 2 from about 2006 to get that "good enough" performance. I have yet to see that chip, and for all you fanboys out there, the A15 is *not* that chip (it'll likely finally beat a single-core Atom from 2008... but remember the single-core Atom was never good enough to begin with!). Intel has closed the gap for x86... it's a done deal, and no amount of "ARM is magical" will change the laws of physics.

ARM has *NOT* closed the performance gap with x86, and when you add in all the cache, real memory controllers (not those jokes used in current ARM designs) and I/O controllers needed to do real work, your ARM chip will end up using just as much power as a competitive x86, no matter how many forums you go on to brag about the superioirity of the ARM instruction set that doesn't even do 64 bit, and which you never even write assembler for anyway.

Re:The ARMy of fanboys is getting repetitive.

[Required Snark]

Starting your argument by referring to the opposing opinion as "fanboys" does not help your position, it weakens it.

There are market and structural forces that are driving x86 and ARM into competition. First, because of smart phones, ARM has a huge installed base. No matter what Anandtech says, I don't see a lot of x86 pushback in that area. Ignoring technical considerations, ARM has won that battle, just the same way that x86 won the desktop/laptop battle. (Note the use of past tense.)

Another important component is the number of players in the x86 vs. ARM competition. For x86 there is Intel, AMD and VIA. Any others are truly niche players. Even though ARM manufacturers all are licensed, the range of products and room for innovation is far greater in the ARM world because of the shear number of vendors. To succeed with an ARM product you have to stand out from the crowd, so innovation and price/performance are required to just stay in business. Even if a big player fails that will not change the dynamic.

So x86 "fanboys" should be happy about the ARM, because without the competition Intel would do what all other monopolies do: build products that are overly expensive, poorly performing, have built in obsolesce, and insure lock in, i.e. Microsoft. If it were not for ARM, it is very unlikely that the Intel ATOM would even exist. AMD is having trouble eve breathing, and VIA is small change. Without competition from ARM the x86 will die a slow death.

So smart phone and tablet manufacturers want to expand their market. One way is to expand the low end, and the other way is to invade the high end. It is inevitable that both will happen. Therefor ARM based products will end up competing with x86 products, and they will have success. The only question is when it will happen and how much market share they will take.

Microsoft has figured this out, because Windows 8 will do both. In this case I think they know what they are doing, even if they usually have their head in the sand. As long as ARM Windows 8 supports the core Microsoft apps, for a huge fraction of the customer base it makes no different what CPU they have. And there will be Windows 8 ARM hardware that says "Intel Inside". They can't afford to give up on that part of the market.

It's not about "fanboys". At some level, it is not even about technology. It is about market forces.