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Embedded processor wars
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By
Steve
Bitton
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Industrial Control Designline
(06/09/2009 11:29 AM EDT)
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As embedded processors become a bigger focus for Intel, especially with
the recent acquisition of Wind River, they
aim to do battle with other processor architectures (ARM, Power PC,
SuperH, ColdFire, etc.) in that particular market.. With the
desktop PC market slowing down, Intel is eyeing the dual
consumer biggies of smart phones and netbooks. And
of course, nobody can say that ARM is not without their own ambitions,
as they look up the processor food chain to those same
consumer markets. (Windows vs. Linux is another subplot of
the consumer market--I won't get into that here.)
Where does that leave the less glamorous world of industrial
control? Well neither Intel nor ARM has forgotten about this
area. Intel is seen in all sorts of embedded
computing platforms, and is actively pushing into that area with the
Atom. While ARM's approach seems to be a little different,
creating cores of all shapes and sizes for their industry partners to
address every possible processor scenario. With their Cortex-M
series of microcontroller cores, they are focusing on
competition that Intel would never touch, the 8 and
16-bit microcontroller market. In this particular
battle, ARM and their partners face microcontroller companies
such as Microchip, Renesas, Freescale, among many others.
One would have to look at this situation and note that ARM seems to be
pushing on two opposite ends of the processor spectrum in order to
achieve overall processor dominance. A very daunting task,
indeed. Is ARM too ambitious in trying to fight battles on
two (or more) fronts? Or will their strategy of partnering
with silicon manufacturers to take some of the
sales/marketing/manufacturing burden off (so they can concentrate on
creating good cores for all applications), pay off?
Brings up some more questions for the audience... Will there
be a dominant processor architecture? Will there always be
many different processor architectures for the many applications out
there? Let me know what you think by commenting on this
article or emailing me at sbitton@techinsights.com.
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