Intel is making a bid to become a force in smartphones. This will test its ability to compete in arguably the most important chip market outside of PCs.
The deal struck this week with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. will put the Intel architecture into the same factories that churn out chips for companies like Qualcomm and Texas Instruments, which use an alternative architecture called ARM--the choice for many small devices, cell phones, and most smartphones, including the Apple iPhone, BlackBerry Storm, and Google-based Android phones.
ARM has always been a thorn in Intel's side. So much so that Intel acquired the StrongARM architecture in 1997, turned into Intel XScale, and aimed it at handhelds (most prominently iPaq handhelds sold by Compaq and then Hewlett-Packard). Before that, StrongARM had been used in the Apple Newton (a primitive precursor to the iPhone) and other small devices.
But Intel sold the money-losing XScale business to Marvell in 2006. And so ended Intel's attempt to compete ARM to ARM in the small device space.
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