...to speed up the processing of video and games. Those are new features on mobile phones, but strike at the heart of the consumer electronics market that ARM has in mind.
ARM believes that content companies are looking for ways to get their movies and television programs onto both mobile devices and home digital entertainment systems, said Ian Drew, vice-president of segment marketing. Given the company's position in the mobile phone market, Drew argues that content companies are intrigued by ARM's drive into the living room because they want to take advantage of the same set of digital rights management technologies across mobile phones and set-top boxes.
ARM licensed 1.6 billion cores last year, and about one billion of those went into mobile phones, Drew said. The remaining 600 million cores represent the fastest-growing segment of the company's business in markets such as set-top boxes, printers, networking gear, and automotive applications. Companies such as Analog Devices, Freescale, and LSI Logic count themselves among ARM's customers in those markets.
Not everyone is convinced ARM will be able to replicate its dominant share of the mobile phone market now that it's looking at the living room. Chip companies have invested a great deal of time and money in building applications for the respective chip architectures and don't really want to switch unless there is a very compelling reason, said Will Strauss, principal analyst with Forward Concepts.
Chips based on the PowerPC architecture are also popular with chipmakers for consumer electronics devices, Gwennap said. And other companies, like MIPS Technologies, Tensilica and Arc International are also gunning for this market, he said.
ARM acknowledges the challenge of convincing companies to change their software, but many customers have to upgrade their software on a regular basis to deal with changing requirements, Drew said. And if they are going to have to make significant changes to their software to accommodate digital rights management or other content-related technologies, they might as well start fresh with ARM, he said.
Also, ARM is building support for virtualisation technologies inside its Cortex cores that will allow device manufacturers to blend the functions currently done by multiple chips into a single chip, Drew said. This will cut down on the cost of developing a powerful set-top box or digital camera.
"If it was a standard industry that didn't change very much, we'd have a real tough time," convincing chip companies to abandon their investment in a different architecture, Drew said.
The fickle nature of the technology industry also dictates that ARM must fully embrace the consumer electronics market, or risk losing its position in phones because another company has cornered the market for set-top boxes, or cars or whatever becomes the next must-have gadget.
"If product convergence means that mobile phones and consumer products really become indistinguishable, and other architectures are established, there is a risk that we will lose our position in mobile," East said. Without that stranglehold on the market, ARM would become just another chip designer.
