KitGuru KitGuru.net – Tech News | Hardware News | Hardware Reviews | IOS | Mobile | Gaming | Graphics Cards
ARM are one of the UK's most exciting companies and they have just announced a deal with IBM to help with the 14nm production process.
ARM are dominating the low power market right now with a high percentage of their designs being used in smartphone, tablet and embedded sectors. They aren't resting here however as they want into the server sector, introducing support for large quantities of memory and virtualisation extensions. They have also made their intentions clear that they want to expand into the notebook and desktop market, although this will be much tougher as they will have to go head to head against cutting edge designs from Intel.
ARM designs are based around the RISC architecture and are considered to be the best on the market for low powered devices, however they are facing a tough road ahead as they try to shrink the process size to create smaller, faster and even more power efficient designs.
IBM are stepping in to help and the recent deal will help ARM move beyond the 28nm process size right down to 14nm. This means chips will be produced which are cheaper, faster and cooler.
Michael Cadigan the general manager of the IBM microelectronics arm said “We plan to continue working closely with ARM and our foundry customers to speed the momentum of ARM technology by delivering highly advanced, low-power semiconductor technology for a variety of new communications and computing devices.”
KitGuru says: ARM will go from strength to strength, especially with IBM behind them.
Excellent news, we need another player in the desktop market, just to keep prices down. Intel are dominating and AMD arent stepping up to the plate.
This is all cool & all but for them to make it big in the desktop market they will need to come up with a far better chip than what they have now with so much more speed. Their current chips & future chips that we know about can not come close to what Intel or even AMD have now. Also without having x86 instructions they will have to fight not having much of any software support & lets face it Intel probably won’t let them use x86 even if it is just emulated by Arm. Without x86 they will have a very long hard battle on the desktop market sure MS said they would make Windows 8 support the Arm CPU but just having Windows alone is not going to be enough if there is very little software to run unless every user that gets one of these configs just wants to surf the net or do basic tasks. Intel has nothing to worry about in the near future but maybe in about 6 to 8 years Arm will have a fairly big foot hold in the desktop market with a product that most likely will compete with what Intel has out there today but by then Intel & AMD will have moved on as well with even more powerful tech.
The gamers will look at the Arm chips & laugh & say that is so 90’s for performance only the grannies will not know they are getting performance that was basically what we had back in 1998 from Intel & AMD. I hate to sound negative but Arm should stick to what they know & that is mobile but they are getting greedy & this greed is going to bite them in the butt in the end. They are going to spread themselves out to thin then end up in chapter 11 like so many other over eager companies of the past.
just my 2 cents.