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Ashlee Vance
The Register ARM’s big reveal today of its latest processor design came with the clear message that the company will use its market weight and mobile heritage to fend off challenges from Intel. Speaking here at the ARM Developers Conference, CEO Warren East began the hyping exercise around the Cortex-A9 processors. ARM plans to provide both multi- and single-core versions of the new product, which should arrive in some early devices by 2010. The new chip is aimed at powerful, portable products and should show up to eight times the performance of the ARM chip in the iPhone, according to East.
Read the full story at The Register: ARM has spent years building up partnerships across a broad set of markets. To that end, the company announced that NEC, Nvidia, TI, Samsung and STMicroelectronics have all committed to using the Cortex-A9 design. ARM hopes to leverage partners like these against Intel, which is re-entering the mobile device market after trying and failing at the effort once already. Next year, Intel should release a product code-named Silverthorne that relies on the x86 instruction set and consumes about one-tenth the power of Intel’s mobile chips. Another chip called Moorestown should appear in 2010 and consume well under a watt, putting the product more in line with ARM’s processors. But where Intel looks to push on its own, ARM relies on a host of friends. |
