Challenges For ARM to Gain High Market Share in Netbooks

Implications
ARM Ecosystem partners, such as Texas Instruments, Qualcomm and Freescale's market share in netbooks.
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Analysis
ARM processors are leader in embedded platforms, such as cellphones. ARM processor architecture, which is RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) offers better efficiency compared to X86 architecture, such as power consumption per instruction executed and the size of the chip implementation. ARM is a processor provides processor core license and the licensees develop silicon by integrating specific IPs required by the embedded platforms, such as graphics and memory subsystem. The processor core provided by ARM is synthesizable, i.e., a system on chip provider can synthesize this processor core with peripheral IPs. Synthesizable processor cores are synthesized automatically by synthesis tools, such as Synopsis. It is extremely difficult to efficiently synthesize large IP cores. A few system on chi providers have licensed ARM architecture to provide better cost/performance of their implementation, where they can customize implementations. Intel's X86 architecture, which is CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computers) is fine tuned and custom implementation, where the tuning of the silicon is done at transistor level. ARM can be implemented in the same way, but the costs associated with doing transistor level design is very high. Intel can afford to do custom implementation since they amortize the high design cost due to high volumes.

In terms of software availability, ARM provides large number of drivers and several embedded operating systems, such as Linux has been ported.

PC space has been dominated by Microsft and Intel X86 architecture due to large number of PC applications, drivers, devices, hardware and chipsets. In addition, there is a large number of application software available on PC that is not available on other devices. X86 being a very complex architecture, very few companies around the world have been succesful in development of X86 compatible processors, such as AMD and Via technologies. To run an X86 application on a non-x86 platforms, there are software emulation providers, but the efficiency is lower compared to execution on X86 processors. Several companies have tried and failed in an attempt to emulate X86, one example is Transmeta. Though Transmeta claimed that they had lowest power consumption and smaller comapred to X86, were not able to survive the implementation and fab prowess of Intel. Currently, Intel has integrated multiple cores in their processors and enables multi-threading. Also, Apple has tried using PowerPC processor, another RISC architecture, but they switched to Intel's X86. The current implementation of Atom processor has 25mm2 of die area and with Intel's process technology dominance, they can further shrink this processor and optimize the processor through transistor level implementation to do better than similarly implemented ARM based devices.

Hence, I do not see any reason that Intel will lose the dominance in netbooks, which are low cost PCs. Most of the netbooks announced and sold in volumes are based on Microsoft's Windows operating system.

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BY GLG Expert Contributor
Source：Gerson Lehrman Group

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