Taipei Times: Intel Corp announced last week that it will work with Chinese chipmaker Rockchip Electronics Co (瑞芯微) to produce chips for low-cost tablets in the first half of next year. Does ARM expect any market share loss due to the Intel-Rockchip tie-up over the long term? Or will ARM adjust business strategies to cope with the competitive landscape change? [Rockchip is a major chip supplier for white-box tablet vendors in China.]
Ian Drew: I don’t know the details of the deal. We cannot comment on that. But we always have to be worried about [actions taken by] competitors.
But we should continue to do what is right. We are competing with Intel. Rockchip is a major partner of ARM and Rockchip will continue to be one of our major partners.
Intel has a problem.
Looking at MediaTek Inc (聯發科), MediaTek has tens of hundreds of different processors going into smartphones and tablets.
Intel maybe outcompetes MediaTek. But there are more semiconductor companies out there. There are Broadcom, Samsung and Rockchip, with hundreds of different semiconductor combinations.
There is a lot of differentiation out there. Intel is one of them. But six or seven years ago, Intel was the one [who supplied chips for PCs]. Now, Intel has become one of them.
We are not going to change our strategies [because of the Intel-Rockchip partnership]. We will continue to work on low-power, high-performance [processors] and enable differentiation, strengthen ecosystem partnership and focus on software.
We believe we have a winning combination, which is our low-power and high-performance processors, differentiation in the SOC and our partnership model.
If you look at Android and applictions, a lot of applications are working on ARM. It’s not just one SOC that you have to change, you have to change the whole ecosystem [to challenge ARM].
TT: How much of a share does ARM have of the world’s white-box tablet markets?
Drew: We have great presence in that market. The vast majority of the players are making ARM-based products. I don’t see many competitive solutions in this space. So we have a really high market share there. We have a more than 80 percent share worldwide.
TT: Can you give us some updates about ARM’s program for laptops? We have not seen any new ARM-based notebooks from Microsoft Corp lately.
Drew: Laptops is still a big market.
We are working closely with [Google Inc’s] Chrome [system] and Chromebooks. We think we are going to be a strong player. Chromebook vendors are very active.
With some PC brands to go with Chromebooks, I think Chromebooks will be the first [growth area in the ARM-based laptops.]
TT: Speculation surfaced lately that Apple Inc is working on new PCs based on ARM-based chips. Can you comment on that?
Drew: I don’t know anything about Apple.
TT: How much of a share does ARM have in the global tablet market?
Drew: ARM had more than a 50 percent share of global mobile computing devices, including laptops, tablets and smartphones, in 2013. We do not break them down [as boundaries between different factors blur].
We expect the tablet industry to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 15 percent through 2013 to 2018. We do not have our market share forecast for the tablet market. [ARM has a 95 percent smartphone market share.]
TT: Can you give us a rough idea about the wearable device market? What kind of product will be the most eye-catching and fastest-growing among the sea of wearable devices?
Drew: You began to see a few tens of millions of wearable devices this year. Again, it depends on what you classify as wearables. I’ve seen jewelry. I’ve seen clothes. I’ve seen wristbands and medical wearables. There are different types of wearables.
My Fitbit, which is a semi-health thing. That’s the wearable which will reach a large volume. You will see watches coming out now. You will see medical devices like stick-on patches for health tracking. You can see earrings and even a T-shirt with lots of utilities on it.
In the short term, things like watches will be interesting. Stick-on medical devices are very interesting. Those are two the most interesting ones. Besides those, I think those for elder people will also be interesting.
TT: What are the main growth drivers for the semiconductor industry this year?
Drew: I think phones, or smartphones, will still have lots of growth. Shipments worldwide will go from 1 billion units last year to 1.3 billion units this year.
The main growth will come firstly from Asia and from US and Europe.
I think embedded processors for the Internet of Things and chips used in server infrastructure [will be growth drivers as well].
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