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Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Your analysis in #5 isn't strictly comparable. Intel fabricates semiconductors, ARM does not. Intel designs whole chips, ARM designs cores. To get good numbers here, you would need to separate out only the CPU design groups accounting information from Intel, or somehow isolate the integration and fab contributions of companies like Qualcomm/TI/Samsung/TSMC/etc... and add it to the "ARM" total.

But your broader point, that the desktop CPU market is at or near its peak, is I think spot on.

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Good point on the whole chips versus the cores. Does anyone have any rough estimates on this? As a company, if I licensed the latest generation ARM processor (e.g., Cortex-A15) and then factored in any additional design and manufacturing costs (e.g., via a foundry), what would be the total cost advantage of using a Cortex-A15 versus a comparable Intel Atom chip?

I cannot tell you about cost advantage, but I can tell you about risks related to building your own system from ground up.

One of the advantages of Atom-based systems is that you can use Atom today and A15 is due to next year. And ARM will not be available in silicon, only as a licensable IP core.

If you have some domain-specific IP to get an advantage for your system-on-chip, it would be wise to license A15 as a CPU. Otherwise, you better go with ready-to-use chips, be they Atom or another ARM.

By deciding that you need to create your own system-on-chip and your own PCB, you introduce substantial risks into your product. Even PCB alone involves quite burdensome process of testing which can cost you time to market.

Unless you're designing and manufacturing the CPU's yourself, a custom Cortex implementation would probably cost you quite a bit more than just buying Atom or someone else's Cortex implementation would. You'd have to pay for the custom design, fabrication, and validation yourself, but if you buy someone else's chip whether its Atom, Bobcat, or a Cortex, you'd be sharing the manufacturing, design, and validation costs with all of their customers.

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