The fascinating thing about the ARM partnership and ecosystem is the “unholy alliance” of competitors within it, according to the firm’s founder and president Tudor Brown who believes ARM licencees will give Intel a run for its money in both the computing and mobile space.
Speaking to RCR at the firm’s ecosystem partners’ party at Computex Taipei, Brown marveled at the fact so many tech rivals were rubbing shoulders, noting “they’re all in that room together, jostling away and talking to each other.”
Indeed, everyone from Qualcomm, to Nvidia, to Freescale, Microsoft, Opera, AT&T, Broadcomm, Marvell and a plethora of others filled the reception space in Taipei’s fashionable W hotel. A whole range of competitors both direct and indirect, running the gamut from software to hardware, to tools folks.
This, he said, proved that ARM was “all about partnership,” adding “That’s what makes it all fun.”
“We don’t have a booth [at Computex] because we don’t have a product, as such, to sell,” explained Brown, but said the firm felt it essential to come to Taipei for the show and host an event “as all the key suppliers and users in the computer ecosystem are here and therefore a lot of our ecosystem partners are here.”
Remaining friendly with the Taiwanese OEM industry is certainly important for a firm which hopes to see its chip designs climb the tree from mobile handsets and tablets to notebooks, Intel’s historic domain.
Brown himself told RCR he was excitedly anticipating the day he could carry around a notebook that “doesn’t weigh anything, has a battery that lasts forever and has a keyboard and a touchscreen.”
“I think that’s what’s going to come, and thanks to Microsoft it will be here at some point, and I really look forward to having one of those,” he told us. The vote of confidence is important to Microsoft amidst talk that Windows OS may not run as smoothly as hoped for on all versions of ARM based chips, nor have backward compatibility. Intel is doing its best to promote those rumors, but Brown was having none of it.
“ARM is going to get into notebooks, which is the traditional role for Intel,” he said, adding “we’re going to see lower power notebooks based on ARM which will be lighter, which will be cheaper, which will be fully functional and run the full gamut of the Windows operating system with office and so on.”
“The implementations of the ARM architecture are much more competitive technically than the [Intel] Atom products,” Brown went on. Couple that with the ARM business model which allows multiple suppliers of the product into the market, he said, and “there’s actually real price competition which means inevitably, ARM based solutions are bound to be cheaper than an Intel based solution.”
Throwing the gauntlet back at the rival x86 chip designer, Brown commented, “Will Intel get into portables with an appreciable market share? We’ll have to see.”
