Netbook Boom Just Beginning?
February 5, 2010
By Andy Patrizio
ARM Holdings, the UK company that makes a core CPU design that licensees can modify into their own designs for handheld devices, plans to launch three more Cortex processor cores during 2010 as it pursues new markets.
Unlike Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) and AMD (NYSE: AMD), ARM does not make a chip. It designs a core, which it calls macros, and licenses it to a wide variety of firms, from end-user product vendors like Research in Motion to chip makers like Marvell (NASDAQ: MRVL) and Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA). Some licensees have greater freedom and flexibility to modify the core than others, and often make significant changes.
The main use for ARM processors is mobile phones and handheld devices. They are found in Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) iPod and iPhone, Nvidia’s Tegra chip, Marvell’s Armada processor, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, RIM Blackberry phones, the Nintendo DS, Nokia’s N-Gage, Sony Ericsson phones, and Canon digital phones, among others.
In a conference call earlier this week to discuss its quarterly earnings, ARM CEO Warren East outlined three new processor core designs coming in the next 12 to 18 months and their target markets. The cores are codenamed Eagle, Heron, and Merlin.
“We’ve been signing up lead licenses for each one of those processors,” East said on the call.
“Eagle” is a high-end applications processor targeted at the top-end handheld market and is part of the Cortex-A class.
“Heron” is an upgrade to the embedded and real-time Cortex R-class of processors, and “Merlin” is a new core for ARM’s Cortex-M grouping, which serves the machinery and industrial equipment market.
“In all three cases they will sit alongside the existing products for some time to come,” East said. “Eagle takes us onto yet another level in terms of performance. Eagle is aimed at the very high end.” The current top of the line for ARM is the Cortex-A9, which is used in a dual-core configuration in nVidia’s Tegra 2 processor and a four-core version from Marvell.
Netbook Dominance?
East also made quite a claim to the UK publication PCPro on the potential for netbook dominance by ARM processors.
“Although netbooks are small today — maybe 10 percent of the PC market at most — we believe over the next several years that could completely change around and that could be 90 percent of the PC market. We see those products as an area for a lot of innovation and we want that innovation to be happening around the ARM architecture,” he told the publication.
East went on to say, “What’s holding it back is people’s love of the Microsoft operating system and that fact that it’s familiar and so on. But actually the trajectory of progress in the Linux world is very, very impressive. I think it’s only a matter of time for ARM to gain market share with or without Microsoft.”
Will Strauss, principal analyst with Forward Concepts, said that’s “a little braggadocious, I’m afraid. If we look out over a five-year timeframe, netbooks will grow nicely, but the fact is our forecasts are a little more, shall I say, realistic,” he told InternetNews.com. IDC and Gartner have estimated netbooks will account for about 20 percent of the market.
However, Strauss does think that ARM will do very well in the netbook and smartbook markets and agrees with East’s view on Windows, even though early netbooks with Linux were abject failures.
“Now we’ve got Android which is based on Linux and other variants of Linux that do seem to be taking off,” he said. “We know there are more people accessing the Internet wirelessly than they are over land lines now. So he could very well be right to say ARM will be the dominant means of access to the Internet in the future.”