ARM 'will beat Intel on power drain and price'

ARM-based netbooks will beat those using Intel's next-generation Moorestown platform on price, match it on performance, and enable a new class of device costing as little as $150 (£100), the UK chip designer has predicted.

Both companies were at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week showing sample mobile internet devices (MIDs) and netbooks based on their architectures.

Netbooks, with elements of both notebooks and handsets, have pitched companies steeped in mobile-phone design against those coming from the PC world. The rivalry will come to a head next year when Intel, which admits it has yet to match ARM on battery drain, releases its Moorestown platform with the promise of a tenfold decrease in idle power.

Moorestown borrows from the ARM world the fact that it uses a system-on-a-chip (SoC) rather than a standalone CPU. The SoC, codenamed Lincroft, packs a 45nm Atom core, graphics, video and a memory controller. An Intel statement said the platform includes an input/output (I/O) hub, codenamed Langwell, with a "range of I/O blocks" and support for wireless solutions. It is unclear whether Langwell is a separate chip.

ARM core designs are used in SoCs made by licensee companies, and it can point to an impressive line-up. Texas Instruments unveiled a new OMAP 4 SoC at MWC capable of full 1080p playback and with a dual ARM Cortex A9 MP core. Qualcomm is to produce a dual-core version of its Snapdragon SoC. ST-Ericsson is said to have developed a dual-core design. In addition nVidia offers the Tegra SoC and Freescale has the iMC.515.

How will these compare with Moorestown on power consumption? The promised reduction in idle power targets a big advantage of ARM SoCs, which were designed from scratch for devices that have to be left on all day. Intel has only recently had to pay much attention to idle power.

James Bruce, wireless segment manager at ARM, says he cannot see Moorestown bringing current drain to ARM levels while Intel chip consumption is measured in watts rather than milliwatts.

He said Intel had just released a chipset support HD playback and drawing around 12w to 14w (the GN40, and the new Atom N280 processor launched with it, draw 16.5w between them, according to an Intel slide).

"That does not make it look likely that Intel will be able to bring its Moorestown power level down very much. NVidia's Tegra supports HD on a mobile phone. If you showed a mobile phone manufacturer anything that drew as much as a watt you would be laughed out of the door."

Both nVidia and Freescale have said their designs could enable netbooks with a $100 bill of materials, with products likely to sell in the shops for $200 or less.

Intel's trump card is the wealth of applications written for the platform. But both the Ubuntu and Xandros flavours of Linux have been optimised for ARM, and Open Office is a fair replacement for Microsoft Office.

ARM showed a Pegatron netbook using a Freescale iMC.515 running Ubuntu at MWC. Bruce said the performance was good but, like many device manufacturers, he believes netbooks will be used for browsing, email, networking and media playing rather than office tasks. "Windows laptops are not going to go away," he said.

It is possible that ARM may beat Intel to 32nm scale in the netbook class, bringing new power and cost savings. Moorestown is scheduled to have a 45nm Atom core, and ARM has already sampled 32nm designs made by IBM.

All ARM licensees have access to this 32nm process technology and Bruce says it gives them an added advantage. "Intel has just one process to cover the whole range of processors from low-power to servers clocking 3GHz to 4GHz. Our process is optimised for low power."

There is much more at stake in this battle than the netbook market. If Intel succeeds in cracking ultra-low-drain computing it could make inroads into the ARM-dominated mobile phone market; and if ARM succeeds, and takes Linux finally to the mainstream, it could crack the Wintel hegemony for good. Alternatively, there are whispers that Microsoft may port Windows 7 to ARM.