ARM's East unimpressed with Medfield, design wins
Peter Clarke, EE Times -- EDN, January 17, 2012
LONDON—Warren East, CEO of processor technology licensor ARM Holdings plc (Cambridge, England), is unimpressed by the announcements made by chip giant Intel about the low-power Medfield system-chip and its design wins, according to a Reuters report.
"It's inevitable Intel will get a few smartphone design wins—we regard Intel as a serious competitor. Are they ever going to be the leaders in power efficiency? No, of course not. But they have a lot more to offer," Reuters quoted East as saying in an interview conducted at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.
East said that Intel's design wins were the result of forcing designs that were not originally intended as mobile phone designs into a power and performance that was "roughly good enough for mobile phones," according to the report.
Intel (Santa Clara, CA) used the Las Vegas CES event to launch its Medfield smartphone and tablet computer platform. The 32-nm Penwell system-chip at its heart is more power efficient than previous Intel offerings and consumes less than 800-mW when working flat out, Intel said. Intel also announced a design win with Lenovo and a partnership with Motorola Mobility Inc.
Medfield is set to appear in the K800 Android smartphone for the China market in the first half of 2012 and in Motorola Android products, possibly including both a smartphone and a tablet computer in 2H12.
Qualcomm Inc (San Diego, CA), a telecommunications technology and fabless chip company, is one of the ARM licensees and was also prominent at CES. Qualcomm's leading processors for smartphones and tablet computers are a family known as Snapdragon S4 for which Qualcomm claims to have 70 non-phone design wins from about 20 companies, most of which are likely to be Android systems.
East said that ARM was happy to wait for Windows 8 operating system running on ARM-powered tablet computers. "Google's Android is flavor of the month, flavor of the year, and we certainly want to be part of the Google success. But there is a space for Microsoft, and we very much want to be a part of that success too," the report quoted East as saying.
This story was originally posted by EE Times.
