ARM Chief Executive Not Worried About Intel Entering Tablets

The chief executive of British chip design firm ARM Holdings on Friday dismissed the notion of a challenge from Intel in the burgeoning tablet market.

According to the Financial Times, Warren East said he expects ARM to continue to dominate the tablet market.

ARM licenses mobile processor architecture to Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Samsung as well as Apple's popular iPad device, which constitutes 95 percent of the 4.4 million tablets sold in the third quarter, according to research firm Strategy Analytics. However, leading chip maker Intel, whose processors power 90 percent of desktops worldwide, is poised to bring its Oak Trail family of Atom processors for tablets to market next year to compete with ARM's design.

During the company's third quarter earnings call last month Intel CEO Paul Otellini said that Intel is going to "utilize all of the assets at our disposal to win this segment: the world's best silicon technology, the world's best architecture, and our global scale." He added that Intel was developing solutions for a variety of embedded devices running Windows, Android and MeeGo operating systems set to appear in products in "the coming months and quarters."

However, East did not express any concern over Intel's strategy, saying ’Atom designs are just not good enough in terms of power consumption [right now]. Intel knows this"

East said that tablet sales, "will be what they will be. They could be anywhere from 30m to 60m [but] probably at the higher end of that range."

With companies including Asus, Dell, HP, and others preparing new tablets scheduled for release next year, research analyst firm Gartner expects tablet sales to jump from 19.5 million this year to 54 million in 2011.

According to the Financial Times report, several new tablets will be displayed at the Consumer Electronics Show in January.