ARM Doesn't See Intel's Tri-Gate Technology as a Threat

An ARM Holdings official has recently stated that the company doesn't see Intel's recently announced 22nm Tri-Gate technology as a threat to its own chips. Tri-Gate enables Intel to build more energy efficient processors that could take by storm the mobile CPU market.

ARM Holdings has become one of the major forces in the mobile market thanks to its ARM processor architecture that is used in most of the SoC (system on-a-chip) solutions employed by the current smartphones and tablets.

The main advantage that ARM holds over Intel in this market is the low-power consumption of this chips.

These need only a fraction of the power of an Atom-based SoC and are also compatible with all the major mobile operating systems, such as the Google Android OS.

The Tri-Gate transistor design, however, could help Intel bridge the energy efficiency gap existent between the x86 and ARM architecture as the technology lowers both the idle and load power consumption of chips built using it.

“For us, this announcement has come as no surprise as we know that Intel, and the industry as a whole, has been working on this technology for a number of years,” said Ian Drew, ARM’s executive vice president for marketing, in an interview with the UK Telegraph.

“You always have to watch the competition, but we are confident that the strength of the ARM ecosystem is robust enough to compete,” concluded the company's rep.

Intel's Tri-Gate technology is expected to make its debut in the company's upcoming Ivy Bridge CPUs that will enter mass production in the second half of the year.

From that point forward, all Intel's chips built using the 22nm fabrication process will use Tri-Gate transistors.

We can only speculate at this point when Intel transitions its Atom chips to 22nm, but when that happens, ARM could see its position in the mobile market seriously threatened. (via KitGuru)