ARM Doesn't See Intel as a Competitive Threat

Following Intel's announcement of its Medfield smartphone processor for 2012 commercial products, ARM played down the potential impact of Intel's debut product and Intel's competitive strength. In an article posted by Digitimes, Jeff Chu, ARM's director of consumer, client computing, implied that Intel cannot succeed because it does not offer different products for different purposes. As a result, Intel cannot support the needs of market segmentation, ARM said.

Intel has mainly been beating the drums of performance as an advantage of Medfield over ARM products, and is using its social channels to aggressively convey the message. ARM does not seem to be very concerned, at least not publicly, which is somewhat reminiscent of AMD's communication strategy just prior to the introduction of Intel's Core 2 processors in 2006, which was a turning point for the consumer CPU market. It is difficult to say how ARM and Intel really view each other, but the current PR strategy appears to be showing confidence while virtually ignoring obvious strengths of the rival. Market position, credibility, available platforms and vendor support are on ARM's side, while manufacturing as well as engineering prowess are on Intel's side.

2012 will reveal more of those core strengths and their values when ARM enters the subnotebook race with Windows 8 support and Intel enters the smartphone arena.