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ARM wades into Intel

by on25 October 2012



No advantage in processing tech


ARM CEO Warren East claims that his rival Intel has no actual advantage when it comes to process technology.

Accrording to Electronics Weekly East mocked Intel for claiming it had  manufacturing superiority. While the ARM ecosystem was shipping on 28nm, Intel was shipping on 32nm. So East could not see where Chipzilla was ahead. With the foundries accelerating their process development timescales, it looks increasingly unlikely that Intel will be able to find any advantage on mobile process technology in the future, he claimed.

ARM was supporting all the independent foundries, which includes 20nm planar bulk CMOS and 16nm finfet at TSMC; 20nm planar bulk CMOS and 14nm finfet at Samsung and 20nm planar bulk CMOS, 20nm FD-SOI and 14nm finfet at Globalfoundries. He said that this gives the ARM ecosystem lots of processes to choose from. East said that he was no better equipped to judge which of these processes will be more successful than anyone else, but it means that ARM is hedging its bets. He thinks that the foundries' process roadmap is on track to intersect Intel's at 14nm.

Intel intends to put 14nm into mobile SOCs and make them the first ICs to be made on a new process. East said there is nothing new in this and his foundry partners were planning the same thing. Globalfoundries intends to have 14nm finfet in volume manufacturing in 2014, the same timescale as Intel has for introducing 14nm finfet manufacturing, he said.

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