ARM wrestle
To be honest, we thought Intel might have made a bit more of an impression in the mobile device market than it has by now. While things like Nokia bailing out on MeeGo certainly don't help, Intel's relative silence on the mobile chip front this year has been deafening.
In contrast, the ARM ecosystem is going from strength to strength. Many of the big launches at the show run on chips - like Tegra 2 or OMAP 4430 - with a fair bit of ARM IP in them, including the Cortex A9 CPU design.
While ARM hasn't had any major product announcements so far at the show, it has stepped up its presence from last year with the principal aim of talking-up its ecosystem.
We spoke to Bob Morris, director of mobile computing at ARM, and he pointed us to a couple of reports he had selected to illustrate the trajectory of the ARM-based mobile devices. Right now ARM devices only constitute a small proportion of the mobile computing market, if you leave out smartphones. But Morris pointed us to a Goldman Sachs report that anticipated ARM devices would constitute 45 percent of the total mobile computing market by 2015.
We asked Morris if he agreed with the findings and whether he things growth will continue at that trajectory. He replied in the affirmative, which means he, and ARM, expect to have the majority of the mobile computing market by 2016.
The way ARM chips are going they already have the horsepower to run a full notebook. Add to that the announcement that Microsoft will be supporting ARM with the next version of full Windows and you can see why Morris is so optimistic. "We're excited about the potential of what next-generation Windows will bring," said Morris.
