Just ahead of the opening of the Fall Intel Developer Forum, ARM popped up in the news with a note that Intel still has work to do to improve the power consumption of its smartphone processors. It is a rather short note, but it is a reiteration of ARM's message that Intel cannot quite match ARM's architecture as far as power consumption is concerned.
This time, it is ARM's vice president of marketing and strategy, Noel Hurley, quoted by Digitimes as saying Intel's only advantage at this time is its huge monetary backing, while ARM has to rely on an armada of ARM chip makers to compete with Intel, including Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Texas Instruments.
Intel has its first smartphone processor out, the Z2460, but it would be an exaggeration to describe the processor as a chip that got Intel's foot into the door to the smartphone market. So far, it may not be much more than a beachhead that, however, showed that Intel can crank out capable silicon in relatively short time. In the past, Intel has always been most successful when it was under pressure and the 22 nm product generation of the Atom SoC will be the first serious indicator how competitive Intel will be in the smartphone processor market.
