ARM handsets seen disrupting x86 PC scene

SAN JOSE, USA: According to Nvidia CEO, ARM will triumph over Intel as smartphones and tablets and will disrupt the x86 PC industry. Pointing out that the computer of the future will be the size of a mobile phone, Jen-Hsun Huang  said that by adding wireless HDMI to it, it could function as a set top box. According to EE Times he made this comment in the recent annual conference of the company.

“It's a foregone conclusion that the personal computer of the future is this size," said Huang, holding up his smartphone. "You could add wireless HDMI to it someday, and it could also be your set-top box,” the report said.

Huang's conversation also covered the opinion that the PCs of the future will be made by new OEMs, sold through new distributors and would use a new instruction-set architecture. It was also said that ARM would be the most important CPU architecture of the future, and is already the fastest growing processor architecture.

The Tegra, which is an ARM-based chip, is being sold by Nvidia for mobile consumer devices. It has received design wins in the Microsoft Zune, but is yet to appear in any tablet or tier-one smartphones to date. With its core PC business being threatened by the upcoming hybrid chips, Nvidia is trying to develop markets for its Tegra chips in mobile systems.

It is also using its conference primarily to develop the so-called GPU computing markets for its Tesla processors across a wide variety of high performance vertical markets. The Nvidia chief did say that Motorola, Samsung and LG were very important to the company and would represent long term some of their biggest customers if they were successful.

Nvidia and x86 giant Intel have been locked in legal disputes over technology licensing for a while now. Nvidia’s first Tesla chip, called Fermi, came out to mixed reviews, at its inaugural conference last year. The company says it will release in the second half of 2011 a next generation, called Kepler, made in a 28nm process and that work was going on for a follow-on chip called Maxwell.

Analysts say that even for companies like Nvidia, it would be hard to track which of its chips would wind up in high-end graphics computing applications.