Can Intel's Moorestown take on ARM's town of processors?

Intel for long time was going in a direction planned by one of its genius founder Gordon Moore. It successfully increased the number of transistors with in square micrometer as per the estimate thought by Gordon Moore. The benefits of low power and speed were inherent when the size of the transistor goes down. All these benefits were so significant, Intel has not given priority to improve the processor architecture like the way it has improved semiconductor chip integration abilities. In fact Intel has also achieved super successes in identifying dielectric materials and improving silicon properties to perform at higher speeds reliably.

All this achievements clearly need Einstein type of thinking, but at the core, they are more about physics and optics rather than digital electronics. It's not just Intel many other semiconductor vendors followed this trend. One company quietly and successfully worked on connecting transistors and logic gates differently to achieve optimum use of transistors and logic gates to perform a logic or arithmetic function. That company is ARM, whose processor cores can be found more or less in every house having some digital portable gadget.

It's not that Intel has not worked in reducing power-consumption, it has not worked the electronics way much but has worked in the material physics. In fact it is tough to achieve low power consumption through materials, The strategy of Intel looks to be give the competitors tough time in emulating the material research what Intel has achieved.

But the market don't care for whether its smart processor or smart material. It cares for what good for the customer. The smartphones giving performance close to earlier version of Intel's Pentium chips but with the battery of less than 5 Watt Hour capacity need smart processors. ARM processor based chips delivered that without a fan over its head.

But there is still enough opportunity for Intel to gain market share in portable electronic devices. It takes less time for Intel to build smart processors. It can combine its manufacturing expertise with its processor design architecture abilites to deliver new chips for portables. That's the newly launched Atom processor-based SoC chip with on-chip analog and mixed-signal. Earlier Intel has named this as Moorestown. Click here to know more on this Intel's new chip.

Here the differentiators for Intel are software partners. If Microsoft can deliver windows7 type mobile OS for smartphones which only works on Intel chips. That's huge advantage for Intel. But this partnership has a threat from Android and Google's OS.

Its no different for ARM, ARM can only strengthen it's competitiveness by partnering with companies like Apple, GlobalFoundries, Google, SoC chip vendors and any such companies.

Between these two, does MIPS or any such processor expert has opportunity? To little extent, the answer is 'yes' provided MIPS chips deliver multicore performance and also supported by OEM and Software partners.

Finally, it's all about partnership.