ARM "Ecosystem" Heath

[Exophase]

There is no bleeding edge chinese ARM designer or manufacturer, they all use vanilla or semi-custom ARM SoCs manufactured in n-1, n-2 or even n-3 node. If they want to bring bleeding edge, they have to tap someone outside China, and if Intel comes with a good business proposition, why not?

China doesn't need bleeding edge, they need cheap as possible. There's some market for bleeding edge in China, but it doesn't characterize the majority.

That said, they've narrowed the gap tremendously over the last few years. It used to be they were using 300MHz ARM9s when we were using > 1GHz Cortex-A9s. Now they're using quad core 1.2GHz A7s or 1.5+GHz A9s. GPUs are getting better too, with first Mali and Vivante and now PowerVR gaining a lot of license traction there. Most Chinese SoCs are made on 40nm now (and Taiwan's MediaTek is using TSMC 28nm now; not Chinese but sells in similar markets), so not really n-2 or n-3 nodes anymore. Rockchip is actually using GF's 28nm SoC process, and while that constitutes going outside of China it's still less of a job than buying the entire SoC from Intel. Not like Intel is offering their fabs up.

 

[ElFenix]

arm used to face competition in particular from mips. both used to be in tons of embedded stuff. mips also had high performance designs as well, something arm never had. so it was found in high end workstations, supercomputers, game consoles, etc.

mips still has some embedded stuff where power isn't absolutely crucial but they've almost completely missed out on the phone/tablet market. but, mips was bought last year by imagination tech, which is a big player in that market. it'll be interesting to see what imagination does with mips.