Intel Says it Will Out-Wrestle ARM in Power Usage

By Marcus Yam
published

The Intel Atom to soon be the smartphone processor of choice?

(Image credit: Slashgear)

The fastest growing segment in processors right now is in the smartphone space, and this segment is dominated by ARM at the present moment. Intel, never to leave the CPU space up for grabs, is gunning for ARM using its Atom-based technologies.

Intel CTO Justin Rattner told Reuters that the chip giant will make a chip that will be more miserly on power than what ARM can offer right now.

"With (our) Moorestown processor we equal them on standby power, in the next generation Medfield we will equal them on active power," Rattner told Reuters in an interview.

Not only that, but Intel said that it has tricks up its sleeve that will give it the upper hand.

"I expect us to just pull away after that because we have a fundamental technology advantage, which they don't have," he said.

Rattner didn’t seem to share what the advantage might be, but we are guessing that it might have something to do with the company's massive R&D budget.

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
57 Comments Comment from the forums
  • joytech22
    Damn.. intel's back to destroy the competition. oh well somebody's gotta do it..

    Cmon Qualcomm, you've been great thus far!
    Reply
  • rantoc
    Tricks like forcing the phoone manfacturers to use only use their chips or loose huge discounts, guess time will tell!
    Reply
  • kancaras
    ofc they can reduce size and power. atom cpus are way too powerfull for smartphones. power, size, speed - all can decrease if needed. but the main question is: wheres amd?
    Reply
  • M_with_one_M
    Wasn't there an article about nvidia gunning for this market as well?
    Reply
  • feeddagoat
    Can't see ARM being totally wiped. They produce processors for different instructions sets where as Atom runs the x86 instruction set which is supposedly heavier and harder to implement. Also the graph doesn't take into account ARM won't stand still and not improve themselves. I can also assume that the last "trump" will be some sort of fusion with GPU and CPU in one package. With phones playing more games and HD content I guess its only time before bigger dedicated GPU's are needed. One package saves power and to my knowledge ARM doesn't have a GPU solution to integrate into processors
    Reply
  • amster
    intel intel everywhere

    poor man to go nowhere
    Reply
  • kikireeki
    Better late than never.
    Reply
  • dude846
    Im sure most of their budget goes into R&D, because marketing is definitely not one of their strongest suits. Not that they really need to. They seem to have their fingers in just about everything - like Foxconn.
    Reply
  • mosu
    Android doesn't need x86 instruction set, so Snapdragon and Hummingbird should go multicore with advanced power saving and they will compete with success against Intel.Increasing multitasking capabilities and complementing with something like ION platform will be a winning combination in the growing tablet-PC market.
    Reply
  • alikum
    Intel vs Rest of the World!
    Reply