War of Words Between Intel and ARM Heats Up

It’s no secret that ARM on mobile devices using Windows 8 RT is going to provide competition for Intel. Therefore, it’s not surprising to see Intel trying to point to problems with the competition and rubbish their products with a war of words.

The latest comments from Intel come from their investor meeting 2012, where CEO Paul Otellini pointed out weaknesses in an ARM PC. He said that ARM faces a “big uphill fight” since they don’t support the countless thousands of legacy apps, which is a big drawback for corporate buyers who have stacks of legacy apps that they need to keep running. Note that private users have just the same problem on a smaller scale, so will also get put off by this. He also pointed out that ARM has no existing Windows hardware support. Both of these things are a big challenge for the ARM platform, for sure.

Despite all this though, Intel also has a lot to prove, since ARM have been making power efficient processors since the late 1980s when they were part of UK-based Acorn Computers, that really sip battery power while delivering a lot of performance, hence virtually all mobile phones nowadays use some version of the ARM CPU. Intel’s efforts to squash the bloated and inefficient x86 architecture into this electrical power and processing performance envelope hasn’t been exactly too successful, so they have their work cut out, too.