ARM: chips shipped in 1.2bn mobile devices in Q4 alone

Record growth for chip makerMobile phones News By John McCann Tuesday at 09:55 UTC | Tell us what you think [ 0 comments ]

Tweet ARM flexes its muscle, but Intel is on the march

Chip maker ARM has announced its processors were used in 1.2 billion mobile devices in Q4 2011.

The impressive stat marks a 10% year-on-year increase for UK-based ARM and shows its dominance in the mobile and tablet markets.

The figure was released along with ARM's financial report for 2011, which saw its profits sky rocket to £229.7 million for the year – up 37% on 2010.

Weapon of choice

ARM will be looking to maintain its dominance in 2012, promising the arrival of "true superphones" as LTE and 4G begin to make their way round the world.

Companies such as Intel are looking to crash the ARM party this year, after the American outfit launched its Atom Z2460 at CES 2012.

However Intel's offering is a single core chip and with dual-core now the norm and quad-core phones on the horizon of a MWC 2012 launch, will manufactures take any notice of the Atom chip?

Yes – and for one reason, power consumption. Intel has managed to tune its Atom chip to deliver extended battery life without compromising performance. This efficiency is something Intel believes its rivals can't match.

One thing is for sure, we're in for an interesting battle in 2012. We are going to see super powered phones and that long-awaited extended battery life we have been waiting for.

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Intel's shows its smartphone hand - the Atom Z2460

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1bn ARM chips shipped in mobile devices in Q3

ARM shipped a whopping one billion chips in mobile devices in the last quarter, with profit before tax up 44 per cent year on year.

The British chip giant announced its A7 processor last week, but its older technology is still doing the business, and the Q3 figures paint a healthy picture.

On top of 1 billion chips in mobile devices, ARM declared that 900 million chips were shipped in consumer and embedded devices – a 40 per cent increase.

Driving Licenses

CEO Warren East said: "In the third quarter of 2011, we saw a continued high level of design activity with many new customers licensing ARM technology for the first time, driven by end market requirements for smarter, low-power chips.

"Demand for our technology has come from a broad range of applications, from sensors to computers.

"Over the last year we have seen strong growth in shipments of ARM technology-based chips, with a 50% increase of shipments into non-mobile markets such as digital TVs, microcontrollers and networking applications.

"Royalty revenues in Q3 have been impacted by the below seasonal growth in the semiconductor industry, but we continue to gain share.

"With customers looking to design ARM technology into a widening product portfolio, ARM is continuing to invest in the development of new products to drive long-term growth in our revenues, profits and cash."

With products sporting the Cortex A15 processor expected in 2012, and 2013 likely to see a raft of lower cost smartphones with ARM's A7 processor, it's certainly a positive time for ARM.

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Intel's Sandy Bridge E chips are finally here

This morning Intel launched its all-singing, all-number crunching Sandy Bridge E processors and brand-spanking new X79 motherboard chipset.

It's not messing around; these are the fastest desktop CPUs that have ever passed across our test benches.

The flagship CPU, the Intel Core i7 3960X, is right up there at the very top-end of processors, and all six-cores of its updated Sandy Bridge E architecture can be yours for nigh-on £750.

So it's no value proposition then.

There is not a little controversy surrounding it though as despite being sold as a straight six-core CPU the literature Intel has given reviewers clearly shows two dormant or dead CPU cores unused on the die.

We've gone into more depth about this in our full Intel Core i7 3960X review.

Still, it is a lightening-fast processor capable of the sort of raw computational prowess you wont see outside of the server environment. It's also no slouch in the overclocking department either, our review chip managed 4.8GHz in Asus's Sabertooth X79 motherboard.

It's not just the top chip that is an overclocking beast, and to demonstrate that we've been gleefully playing with YOYOTech's XDNA Platinum PC.

That's running the cheaper, mid-range Intel Core i7 3930K Sandy Bridge E running at 4.4GHz out of the box.

The other stand out feature of the new Sandy Bridge E processors and X79 chipset is the support for the next generation of memory; quad-channel DDR3.

Quite what improvements this gives, in real-world terms, over triple-channel DDR3 is rather intangible, and to be honest more indicative of the platform's server roots than any importance on the desktop.

If you want the full low-down on Intel's latest offerings, then look no further.

Check out our Sandy Bridge E reviews:

Intel Core i7 3960X:

If you want the fastest processor on the planet, look no further. Most impressive is the additional overclocking headroom Intel has delivered over the old six-core chip. Platform upgrades including more PCI-E lanes and SATA 6Gbps are welcome, too.

Asus Sabertooth X79:

Asus's RoG boards are all very well if money's no object. Back in the real world, the Sabertooth series offers a much more realistic compromise between performance, features and price. The chipset cooling and overclocking support look very solid. We certainly squeezed some great numbers out of the new Core i7-3960X.

YOYOTech XDNA Platinum:

With the XDNA Platinum sat on your desktop, purring away quietly as it does, with its cold-cathode tubes illuminating the clean lines of the immaculate interior, even £2,500 worth of buyer's remorse will have a hard job up against such an impressive machine.

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