ARM: Heretic in the church of Intel, Moore's Law

April 3, 2009 (Computerworld) For 30 years, the PC industry has treated Moore's Law with religious reverence. Its immutable commandment -- thou shalt double the transistors on circuits every 18 months -- created an enviable business model with consumers spurred to buy new, more powerful PCs every few years.

The gospel according to Moore also drove Intel Corp.'s engineers to perform miracles of miniaturization over the years. Its latest achievement, the 2-billion transistor, quad-core Itanium Tukwila CPU, is due for release in the second half of this year.

Coincidentally, that's when the greatest blasphemy to Moore's Law -- and the biggest threat to Intel's dominance -- is expected to make its entrance into the PC market.

Britain-based ARM Holdings Ltd. had modest financial statistics in 2007, with $518 million revenue and a $2.1 billion market cap. However, the chip maker is wildly successful in the mobile device market. ARM's chips are used in everything from Apple's iPhone, RIM's BlackBerry, and virtually every other cell phone, to Lego's Mindstorm robots and Japanese toilet seats that talk and squirt.

Its partners -- ARM only designs the chips, preferring to license them to partners to make -- have shipped more than 10 billion processors in the last 23 years. By comparison, Intel has shipped somewhere between 1 and 2 billion CPUs.

ARM aims to extend its mobile device success into the red-hot netbook space.

Ian Drew, senior vice president at ARM, told Computerworld recently he expects to see "six to 10 ARM-based netbooks this year, starting in Q3." The devices will run Linux or a Linux derivative, such as the Google Inc.-backed Android smartphone operating system, boast eight to 12 hours of battery life and cost about $200, Drew said.

Drew's price estimates for upcoming ARM-based netbooks represent savings of up to half off compared with today's cheapest Intel Atom-based netbooks, which range from $300 to $400.

Bob Castellano, an analyst with The Information Network, predicts that ARM netbooks will grab 55% of the market by 2012.

Are laws meant to be broken?

By Moore's Law, ARM would have no chance of success, bringing to bear chip technology that is underpowered in both senses of the word.

Its ARM7TDMI chip, released in 2006 and used in Apple's iPod music player and Nintendo's DS game device, has a mere 100,000 transistors -- fewer than a 12 MHz Intel 286 processor from 1982 (PDF document).

Some of its most popular CPUs have as few as between 15,000-20,000 transistors, said Drew. That number represents less than half that of Intel's 8088 chip in 1979, which powered the original IBM PC.

While not impressive on processing power, such modest chips also draw less than quarter of a watt of electricity -- a huge benefit for companies looking to design ever smaller devices with long battery life. Before green computing was hip, ARM was walking the walk out of necessity to meet the requirements of its device-building customers.