Qualcomm to Lead ARM in War Against Intel With New Laptop Chips

From DailyTech: The war between Intel Corp. (INTC) and the alliance of chipmakers using ARM Holdings, Plc.'s (LON:ARM) titular core designs is heating up. Intel is the world's largest personal computer CPU maker, while ARM Holdings is the largest core licenser on the general CPU market, which includes everything from the chip in your dishwasher to automotive CPUs. The stage is set for the pair to duke it out at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show.

For ARM chipmakers like NVIDIA Corp. (NVDA) and Qualcomm, Inc. (QCOM), there isn't the luxury of coasting on a process lead. For them it's all about the architecture. While much of the architecture's baseline performance is dependent on the designs produced by ARM, a fair amount of the performance also falls on the partner's ability to tweak and maximize its finished die.

The ARM alliance isn't exactly resting on their laurels. According to a report by Bloomberg, Qualcomm earlier on Jan. 10 will show off its counterstrike against Intel -- high-end ARM CPUs aimed at laptops.

Even analysts who are mildly optimistic about Intel's mobile prospects are concerned about this fresh blood in the laptop space. Daniel Amir, an analyst at San Francisco, Calif.-based Lazard Capital Markets estimates that Intel will reach around 13 percent share in the smartphone market by 2015, of an estimated total market of 1.1 billion devices that year (2011's market was 300 million devices).

But he also estimates than ARM's purpose-driven designs will steal a third of the mobile computer (laptop/netbook) market by 2015, up from 8 percent in 2011. That market is expected to also see growth, expanding from 275 million units in 2011 to 340 million units in 2015.

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