ARM Looking to Capture 20% of Mobile PC Market by 2015

With Intel entering the smartphone and tablet markets, ARM is still making progress trying to plant microprocessors based on their own architectures into personal computer and servers.  ARM is optimistic and believes that it will have a higher share of the PC market than Intel than Intel will have of the smartphone market.

Warren East said he expects companies making ARM based chips to capture around 10 – 20% of the notebook market by 2014 – 2015, but that he expects Intel to control around 5 – 10 % of the smartphone market within just a few years he said speaking in an interview with Dow Jones news-agency.

Apparently, Warren East believes that typical PC users use a very limited number of computer programs and functionality.

“If you look at a lot of consumer PCs, people just want to run an Internet browser, an email package, some Office applications and Adobe Photoshop or something like that, and not much else. Therefore, we can put ARM processors into the heart of PCs to target a lot of the use requirements,” said Warren East.

East said the ARM-based chips used in PCs will be significantly more affordable that systems running x86 architecture chips, which, theoretically, make computers more affordable.

One thing that Mr. East forgets is that cheap PCs, such as netbooks, never make it to a significant market share. The latter is usually based on universal computers that do cost more than netbooks, but have very high functionality and performance. At the end, central processing units only represent a fraction of a PC’s cost. Moreover, without compatibility with programs that specifically use x86 processors and their extensions will either not run, or will run slowly on ARM-based devices featuring Windows 8 RT. All-in-all, ARM will hardly become a significant player on the corporate PC market, at least not yet.

Source: Xbitlabs