#CHIPS: "ARM dominating consumer apps"

Intel processors are still the king of consumer applications, but here at the Freescale Technology Forum (FTF 2012) ARM appears to be riding a tidal wave of mobile, industrial and even datacenter design wins. In fact, the motto I kept hearing here was that "ARM has already won the processor war" and its only a matter of time before its more widely recognized: R. Colin Johnson



From left: Freescale senior vice president Henri Richard leads panelists Warren East (ARM), Tony Belkin (Hospira), Greg Couch (National Instruments) and Jeremy Hammer (Ceton).

Vendors defended the mass migration to ARM cores for their low-power, broad spectrum of performance levels and more economical software here at the Freescale Technology Forum (FTF) Tuesday (June 19). Freescale Senior Vice President Henri Richard's annual FTF panel discussion included ARM CEO Warren East, Tony Belkin, a director at medical-device maker director at Hospira Inc. (Lake Forest, Ill.), Greg Crouch, embedded systems business director at National Instruments Corp. (Austin, Texas) and Jeremy Hammer, chief technology officer at consumer electronics firm Ceton Corp. (Kirkland, Wash.) According to the panelists, consumerization favors ARM cores for next-generation applications, since they are lower power than traditional PC- and server-style processors, plus they are already running the software, in industrial and professional settings, that is currently being ported to the consumer setting.
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