"Between them they shifted perhaps 8 billion ARM-based semiconductors in 2011, half of them in mobile phones and mobile computers, the other half embedded in consumer items and elsewhere."
"According to IDC, a research firm, the market for PC-powering chips that use Intel’s x86 processor architecture, which Intel dominates, was about 400m last year."
8 billion ARM chips to 400 million x86. I hadn't realized that the disparity was that big. No wonder Intel is desperate to get some mobile wins.
It's a terribly apples-to-oranges number. Starting with the basics, there's simply no such thing as an "ARM chip". Essentially all of those 8G units are SoC chips where the ARM core(s) make up a comparatively small fraction of the die area. Most of those SoCs actually have multiple ARMs actually, using smaller cores as asymmetric multiprocessing (c.f. the "baseband" CPU on most android phones), but they're mixed in with a bunch of DSP units, memory controllers, I/O and of course a giant GPU. The fraction of the product represented by ARM Ltd. IP is probably less than half.
Likewise, when you compare the numbers when represented as total silicon die area (Intel CPUs are much larger) or in terms of computation capacity (they're a ton faster too) it's much closer.
Don't forget the high-end FPGA's, too - that's where ARM's licensing gives them a decisive advantage (not least because if you're using one of them to prototype something, you will end up producing your ASIC with licensed components from ARM anyway.)
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Interesting factoid:
"Between them they shifted perhaps 8 billion ARM-based semiconductors in 2011, half of them in mobile phones and mobile computers, the other half embedded in consumer items and elsewhere."
"According to IDC, a research firm, the market for PC-powering chips that use Intel’s x86 processor architecture, which Intel dominates, was about 400m last year."
8 billion ARM chips to 400 million x86. I hadn't realized that the disparity was that big. No wonder Intel is desperate to get some mobile wins.
It's a terribly apples-to-oranges number. Starting with the basics, there's simply no such thing as an "ARM chip". Essentially all of those 8G units are SoC chips where the ARM core(s) make up a comparatively small fraction of the die area. Most of those SoCs actually have multiple ARMs actually, using smaller cores as asymmetric multiprocessing (c.f. the "baseband" CPU on most android phones), but they're mixed in with a bunch of DSP units, memory controllers, I/O and of course a giant GPU. The fraction of the product represented by ARM Ltd. IP is probably less than half.
Likewise, when you compare the numbers when represented as total silicon die area (Intel CPUs are much larger) or in terms of computation capacity (they're a ton faster too) it's much closer.
Also there are an awful lot of ARM7, ARM9, Cortex-M, etc. cores in microcontrollers and that market is very different from where Intel is competing.
Don't forget the high-end FPGA's, too - that's where ARM's licensing gives them a decisive advantage (not least because if you're using one of them to prototype something, you will end up producing your ASIC with licensed components from ARM anyway.)
But the profit on those x86 chips is probably larger and it all goes to Intel, while little of the profit on ARM chips goes to ARM.