ARM co-founder: Wintel faces obliteration

“Austrian-born Dr. Hermann Hauser, a co-founder of ARM, a rival chip designer, also said the value of chips which ARM collects a royalty on has overtaken Intel’s microprocessor revenue this year for the first time,” Ben Rooney reports for The Wall Street Journal. “Dr. Hauser remains a share holder in ARM, but is not on the board of directors.”

“Approximately 95% of the world’s mobile handsets and more than one-quarter of all electronic devices use an ARM chip,” Rooney reports. “‘The reason why ARM is going to kill the microprocessor is not because Intel will not eventually produce an Atom [Intel’s low-power microprocessor] that might be as good as an ARM, but because Intel has the wrong business model,’ said Dr. Hauser. ‘People in the mobile phone architecture do not buy microprocessors. So if you sell microprocessors you have the wrong model. They license them. So it’s not Intel vs. ARM, it is Intel vs. every single semiconductor company in the world.'”

If you look at the history of computing there was mainframe, which was dominated by IBM, then came the mini computer dominated by DEC, then came the third wave with workstations dominated by Sun and Apollo, then the PC, and now it’s the mobile architecture that is going to be the main computing platform at least on the terminal side. There is no case in the history of computing where a company that has dominated one wave has dominated the next wave and there is no case where a new wave did not kill the previous wave — as in obliterate them…the people that dominate the PC market are Intel and Microsoft. – Dr. Hermann Hauser, a co-founder of ARM

Rooney reports, “Christian Heidarson, a principal analyst with Gartner’s semiconductor industry team agree[s] that Intel faces a serious threat to its position. That threat is not ARM per se, ‘but the threat comes from vertically integrated manufacturers like Apple — they do everything from product design right down to processor design. If a company like HP decided to follow suit, e.g. by buying Palm for its OS and licensing ARM, well that might be a nightmare scenario for Intel.’ He suggested that Intel needs to take a leaf from Apple’s book and help their customers: ‘They can do more vertical integration themselves so they can provide a more integrated solution to the likes of HP or Dell to better compete with Apple.'”

Read more in the full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: We lived through The Dark Ages of Personal Computing without ever resorting to having to rely on a Windows PC. The blight, pestilence, despair, and utter idiocy surrounded us at all times, but, thanks to our Macs’ protection, we were never enveloped by The Soul-Crushing Death and emerged unscathed with, not only our Macs, but our Mac’s progeny, iPods, iPhones, and iPads, too! We hope you were also able to do so. Now, long live the renaissance!

[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “James W.” for the heads up.]