ARM is better than Intel – says ARM

At a press conference here at Computex 2013 this morning, a senior ARM executive claimed his company’s designs outperformed Intel designs.

And, he added, as ARM moved to 20nm and 16nm/14nm sizes, it would continue to outwit the chip giant.

Noel Hurley, VP of ARM’s Processor Division, said: “Our leadership will increase in the future. ARM platforms are more than a generation ahead [of Intel]. Eighty four percent of the top 25 free games use ARM native code,” he said.  Intel will have difficulties because as it turns to emulation, it will dicover that emulation burns power.

He said that ARM A15 28nm “outstrips” Intel Silvermont using a 22nm Finfet process. “When we move to 22nm, ARM’s leadership will grow,” he said.

ARM is aiming at the mid-range market and expects half a billion units to ship in 2015.

But ex-Intel employee Ian Drew, chief marketing officer at ARM, was cautious about the rapid demise of the X86 platform.  “X86 is a long way from being dead,” he said. “X86 will continue to ship long into the future. ARM now dominates the middle range market and we’ll move into servers in the next few years.”

Intel could not be commented at press time for comment.  It no doubt is keeping its powder dry for its Haswell announcement tomorrow.

Drew said that five years ago ARM saw growth in the midrange market and it has seen 250 percent growth since 2012.  “This market will be significantly larger than the PC industry,” he said. “You need price, power, software and grahics.”  ARM made four announcements today which it claims will give it an even bigger edge in the future. He said the ARM Cortex A12 CPU will be the flagship product and will arrive at the end of next year, coupled with Mali-T622, and Open GL ES3.0.